Archive for the ‘tools’ Category.
18th November 2005, 02:30 pm
I found a place for AJAX at work! It’s so rad! :D It’s not in a customer-facing application, but where I was able to use it, it’s increased the speed of the app by about 300% or so. I’d love to show you! but, I probably shouldn’t. You can ask me about it in general terms, though!
The application feels more like a desktop app now.. and a lot less like a web app. This is very exciting stuff, I just needed to find a place for it. Now I can see lots of other places for it. 
Technorati Tags: ajax
8th November 2005, 09:46 pm
wanted: a program to mount a 512k memory card to the desktop on mac os x using the following device:
Full Speed device @ 2 (0x1B100000): ............................................. Composite device: "USB-WRITER"
Device Descriptor
Descriptor Version Number: 0x0100
Device Class: 0 (Composite)
Device Subclass: 0
Device Protocol: 0
Device MaxPacketSize: 8
Device VendorID/ProductID: 0x04F9/0x2100 (Brother International Corporation)
Device Version Number: 0x0100
Number of Configurations: 1
Manufacturer String: 1 "BROTHER"
Product String: 2 "USB-WRITER"
Serial Number String: 3 "E5G111616"
Configuration Descriptor
Length (and contents): 32
Raw Descriptor (hex) 0000: 09 02 00 20 01 01 00 80 32 09 04 00 00 02 00 00
Raw Descriptor (hex) 0010: 00 00 07 05 01 02 10 00 00 07 05 82 02 40 00 00
Unknown Descriptor 0020:
Number of Interfaces: 1
Configuration Value: 1
Attributes: 0x80 (bus-powered)
MaxPower: 100 ma
Interface #0 - Unknown
Alternate Setting 0
Number of Endpoints 2
Interface Class: 0 (Unknown)
Interface Subclass; 0
Interface Protocol: 0
Endpoint 0x01 - Bulk Output
Address: 0x01 (OUT)
Attributes: 0x02 (Bulk no synchronization data endpoint)
Max Packet Size: 16
Polling Interval: 0 ms
Endpoint 0x82 - Bulk Input
Address: 0x82 (IN)
Attributes: 0x02 (Bulk no synchronization data endpoint)
Max Packet Size: 64
Polling Interval: 0 ms
16th October 2005, 08:40 pm
FRESH…
Technorati Tags: cat, embroidery
11th October 2005, 12:31 pm
This is very cool. You can change the site the BBEdit uses to “find in reference”, as helpfully noted by Peter Rukavina… thank you Peter!
If you use TextWrangler BBEdit to edit PHP files, you may find the following shell command useful (pointer from here):
defaults write com.barebones.bbedit Services:ADCReferenceSearchTemplate "http://www.php.net/%@"
This will set the TextWrangler “Find in Reference” contextual menu item to look up the selected text on the PHP website (rather than on the Apple Developer Connection site, which is the default).
Technorati Tags: php, programming, bbedit, Mac
6th October 2005, 01:10 am
Day 2, I’m loving this machine! check out the video I did today of the first run of embroidery with a stabilizer.
I ran this cool jacket my brother in law Justin gave me as a gift through the machine… it had this big blank white outline box on the front.. screaming out for a slogan… so I put one in:
Ahhhhh, this is way cool!!
Technorati Tags: brother se270, diy, embroidery, wtf
5th October 2005, 02:01 pm
Our Brother SE-270D sewing/embroidery machine arrived yesterday, woot!
Here’s what was in the box, woot indeed!
Hey, look, it even embroiders into the wrong fabric, without stabilizer! Crapily! AMAZING!!
This is the backside of the cloth in the previous photo. Yuck.
Lots to like in this machine!! I’ll take some video and post it later tonight if I get a chance.
27th September 2005, 04:54 pm
I can tell you right now that the new Treo just jumped the shark. Palm just jumped the shark. My treo 650 was the last great thing they ever did. As long as I can still get batteries for the next 3 years or so, that’ll be fine, all will be well in the world. But… putting a microsoft OS on your phone… what a horrible idea. The next phone I get ain’t gonna be a M$ device… count on it.
18th August 2005, 11:40 am
In the new(er) versions of BBEdit, you can get really specific about what files to multi-file search through. I love this, check it out, you can include/exclude grep patterns.
I take advantage (?) of BBEdit’s auto-backup feature where it iterates a file name on the date with a version number so that you’re never overwriting your only copy. It saves the previous version as index-20050818-01.php or whatever. This is good. However, when you’re searching a directory for a criteria in the contents of your folder, this can _really_ bog down your time to completed search results.
If you create a criteria when you do a multi-file search with the following set up:
then it will skip over all of your backup files and only search the “live” or “non-backup” files. Extremely cool.
Technorati Tags: bbedit, grep, programming
16th August 2005, 11:18 am
If you’re looking for a way to get php to return the next 5 working or business days, here’s one way to try:
[php]
$how_many_business_days_ahead = 0;
$how_many_business_days_to_count = 7;
for ($i=0;$i<$how_many_business_days_to_count;$i++)
{
$jump=$i+$how_many_business_days_ahead;
$evalday = mktime(strftime ("%d/%m/%Y", strtotime("+$jump days")));
$theday = strftime("%A", strtotime("+$jump days"));
if($theday != "Saturday" and $theday != "Sunday")
{
$days = $how_many_business_days_ahead+$i;
$the_days[$j] = strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y", strtotime("+$jump days"));
$j++;
}
}
$k = $how_many_business_days_ahead;
foreach($the_days as $eachday)
{
echo "$k business days from now = $eachday
“;
$k++;
}
?>
[/php]
this will give you:
0 business days from now = Tuesday, August 16, 2005
1 business days from now = Wednesday, August 17, 2005
2 business days from now = Thursday, August 18, 2005
3 business days from now = Friday, August 19, 2005
4 business days from now = Monday, August 22, 2005
yay, included in the php docs
27th July 2005, 06:20 pm
Welp, I did my first useful thing with applescript today. I’m marking my calendar as a big day. It was "Connect to a remote server and specify a remote folder location", in addition to a script I located today to save email attachments from mail.app. Mail comes in with attachments, I have the script connect to the remote box, and save the files to a specific location. From there, I have other processes that tear the file apart, load it into a database, and do all kinds of other painfully band-aid-like-things that I probably wouldn’t need to do if we had any kind of common architecture, or… open systems. 
in case you’re curious:
mount volume "afp://my.server.com/Users" as user name "user" with password "pass"
And assume that everything’s case sensitive…
Technorati Tags: applescript
25th July 2005, 09:46 pm
Hey, I got the second podcast up, check it out over on the music blog: Some Sounds We Like 002 - Derek Scott of DoBox Recordings
20th July 2005, 12:23 pm
here’s some of the 3800 au files that are looking back at me, like tiny little pieces of a confettifized bearer bond or something. This was some sounds we like episode 2, now it’s a cautionary tale for you. Using audacity for a big project? Save often, yes, BACKUP often, too. Saving will hardly preserve your project in a crash. The time it would take me to try to piece this back together would easily equate to the same time it would take to reengineer the audio.
Technorati Tags: audacity
22nd June 2005, 10:54 am
Ta-Da Lists!:
Ta-Da Lists are fantastic! I’ve been singing praises of 37signals for months, but their products, ideas, and mission continue to blow me away!
More web application developers, and application developers in general, need to concentrate on design and simplicity. They’ve taken something that we all love and need and made it infinitely better: the To-Do list.
Ta-da lists are web-based, free, fantastically designed, use RSS, are shareable, and brilliantly designed. I’m addicted! You must check it out now!.
Viral marketing, eh Dave?
My brother sent this my way a while back, and I didn’t get it. Well, I get it now. We’re having a very small family and friends get together soon, and R and I made a giant list of things to do. I got to thinking to myself… self, why isn’t there some web tool that lets you set up a todo list, assign resources to get things done, and have an RSS feed for the organizers to keep track of progress. Ha. Well, that almost exactly describes tadalists.com
Technorati Tags: free, tools
20th June 2005, 04:21 pm
ok, it’s not quartz or coreimage, but if you’re looking for a command line image manipulation tool for mac os x, you’re probably looking for “SIPS” - scriptable image processing system.
Ok, so, why? my favorite lazy gallery software PHPix3 is really just killing me with the PHP internal GD thumbnail generation time. I’m thinking it’s about time to take advantage of the internal tool available to me since I’m rockin’ tiger server. So, I’m thinking all I need to do is go locate the code the determines whether the image tool the scripts use is “int” or “ext” and maybe add another piece of logic to act on “sips” as the value. Hopefully it will run faster than GD. If not, I guess I can go back to ImageMagick. Although it would be nicer if apple’s command line tool were fastest… we shall seeeee…
