undertakingyou

I have written quite recently how I have been using Mac OS X as my primary OS over the last month or so. In the times past I have failed at this in large part because I have not given Mac OS a chance. I found myself making quick judgements about the nuances that existed and then hated everything. This go around I am affording more of a chance here. Although I have been uncomfortable to a certain degree because I am used to all the FOSS tools that I have come to love and rely on. But there are a few things that have really been able to help me keep it together as I make this transition.

My Tomboy Notes replacement. I love Tomboy notes, and having something close to take a quick note. Mac OS stickies doesn’t even come close to it. After some searching I found Evernote, which really is awesome. I like it enough that I upgraded to the premium account. I think Evernote will replace my default note taking app permanently.

For chatting I have had to replace Irssi with bitlbee. I chose to use two things here, even though I could use one. The first is Adium, which is a great multi-protocol chat client akin to Pidgin. It even has a bird as its icon, a duck, that can be the color of your choosing. I use that for google talk, and a jabber account I have for school. The second chatting replacement is Macirrsi. I used port to install Irssi, but the terminal in Mac is still … not the best. Macirssi gives the power of Irssi but without the headaches of mac terminal.

For a text editor I like to use vim. Vim is available in Mac OS, but I have found in Linux that sometimes that it is very nice to have the extra features of a GTK application with the menu’s and what not. In comes MacVim  which provides basically the same functions as gvim. I still have vim in the terminal, which we all know is awesome.

OpenVPN is a great open source VPN solution that we use at work. With ubuntu I just go to the terminal and as root run openvpn with my .conf file or I would set up a VPN connection with NetworkManager and just connect. In Mac OS there is a very eligant solution with the use of Tunnelblick. Seems to be more fickle with configuration file options, and there are some more steps in setting up a connection. Otherwise there is a simple connect on demand option that keeps things going smoothly.

On ubuntu I really liked using gnome do for quick startup of applications. Gnome do is based on the native Mac OS Quicksilver, which is actually quite awesome. Gnome Do has done a great job in replicating it. Because Mac OS didn’t have any kind of menu until recently, Quicksilver is a must so you can access things easily.

There are some apps that I have not found yet a suitable replacement.

• Revelation, password keeper. I have keepassx but it isn’t as good.
• Banshee, a great music player. The current Mac OS version won’t run for me, and iTunes just can’t hold a candle to it.
• A decent terminal. The default terminal is still the best that I have used out of iTerm and Terminator. But there are some drawbacks still with the default terminal.

Recently I have been just using Mac OS instead of some flavor of Linux for my computing needs. With the announcement of the latest edition of the Mac OS X series I eagerly watched for the release of Lion. I followed all the predictions of it being released on the 14th, then when that didn’t happen it was to be the 15th, because the last 3 releases where on a Friday, then it was to be on the 19th because Apple was releasing their financials. It was like waiting for Harold Camping’s rapture. On the 20th when it was released I waited for it to be a hoax, and so I didn’t upgrade till the 21st.

I did appreciate not having to go down to the Apple store to buy the product. The Apple store is always like a zoo with no cages, and no help. Just a gaggle of people standing around waiting for those with the all powerful blue shirt to pay attention to you. I just don’t have the time. The download is big, but it is a new version of the OS. I would have waited just as long to download the ISO DVD of Fedora or Ubuntu. So no harm lost there. The install was smooth and I didn’t loose any of my settings, well not a lot of my settings, but we will get to that.

Two things that I have read in other reviews that are very true. It is slower. My MacBook Pro lags on things that before where no problem. Sometimes on what seems to be the simplest task. Mind you I do have an older laptop, but still, this thing should be able to powerhouse through the occasional typing lag that I am now getting. The other piece of review fodder: there is noticeable change to be like the iPad interface.

For instance, there is no more Spaces or Expose (which constitutes my largest settings change), these have been replaced with Mission Control. Which acts like a hybrid version of the two. You do not have a preset number of desktops (or spaces) but you can create as many as you need. You must have these desktops arranged in a line. I used to keep my spaces in a square with two rows and two columns, but no more. Also the dashboard is by default the leftmost space, with your default space being the second, exactly like the iPad. While at first I had a hard time with the Mission Control change, I now find a certain amount of finesse with it.

Launchpad is another new addition to Lion. It’s icon looks like the MacBook Pro power button but with a rocket ship on it, and rightly so. Using that shows you all the apps that you have, exactly like the iPad does. Complete with first screen showing all the default installed apps, and the second (and subsequent screens) showing apps that you have downloaded yourself. While it is easier and prettier than the default dock Applications folder, I don’t see a lot of added value in having it.

Another iPad like change is the scroll direction with the trackpad. It has been changed by default to have the screen follow the direction of your finger. So if you drag down, you will actually scroll up. I read a lot of complaints about this, and when first using it I was thrown for a loop. But then I looked in the System Preferences, low and behold you can change it with the un-checking of a box. World is back to normal. I don’t know why people complained so much.

Otherwise, while overall Mac OS 10.7 is more ascetically pleasant, I am not finding a lot of other things improved. I was looking forward to a better terminal, which I didn’t really notice a change on. I was also looking forward to better SMB performance, which seems to have only a minimal change. It does however handle crashes much better. Banshee would just hang in 10.6.* but with Lion it actually kills the program, and gives me a very convenient stack trace to solve the problem.

While looking forward to the new multi-touch gestures I can’t seem to get them to work. I attribute this to my MacBook Pro being a 3,1 model, and maybe not capable but I am not sure.

All in all the upgrade is ok. If you are struggling financially to feed yourself don’t upgrade. If you have the $30 bucks you won’t loose out to much. I would not look to this to be a revolutionary change, but I will say that not a lot has broken with the upgrade, and I really like that.

So to give a back story here, in March my wife and I got a Netflix account after some family members lead us on to it. I was excited to have both one DVD at a time and unlimited streaming but you can’t stream on linux. Like so many before me I tried and failed to get it to run without having a virtual windows machine. We had my wife’s iPad, which allowed us to stream. But who wants to gather the entire family around an 8 inch diagonal screen? So after much discussion we got a Network Media Player to sit atop the television and give us unlimited entertainment.

I had a few requirements. One it had to be able to hook to my old TV through regular RCA cables. I also wanted it to be unusable for when I someday get a nicer TV, so I needed HDMI and/or Component video also. I have a good amount of my personal collection ripped onto the computer. I wanted to be able to play this collection either over a SMB share or DLNA server. Lastly, I had to be able to hook up wireless internet, as I didn’t feel like dragging cords all over the place. So off I looked to see about a player that could do this.

In my search I looked at Roku, Seagate, Western Digital, Sony, and others to try and find something that would do all that I wanted. In the end I actually settled on the Sony SMP-N100. The reason being that it was wireless, had all the connection options that I needed. Could play media off of a USB drive, and could act as a DLNA client. It seemed perfect. Once the box arrived I was of course very excited. I plugged it in, hooked it up, and then the disappointment happened. Here is my list of things that went absolutely wrong:

• Wireless is finicky. I have a Linksys WRT54GL V1.1 running DD-WRT and it would connect, but then not reliably transfer data and I could not watch Netflix. In the end I finally used a Linksys WRT54G v5 hooked just as a wireless switch to my DD-WRT router and then I could get wireless.
• DLNA sucked. On the advertisements etc it gives a long list of supported video formats it can play, and then says it is a DLNA client. What it doesn’t say is that not all supported types are supported over DLNA. So I can’t play 90% of my personal collection to it.
• Interface sucks. They use the Sony media cross. While logically this should work great, because you can narrow by catagory, the problem (or suckiness) comes because you can’t rearrange anything. So my most used features (Pandora, Slacker and Netflix) I had to scroll through a ton of options to get to and it became very cumbersome.
• Sony Proprietary Crap. This one has some subpoints.
• All services must be routed through Sony. So to use Pandora, I had to link it to my Sony account. Because I had a store return player I could not do that until I called and talked to Sony to reset my device. Sony is very interested in locking you in. I reset my player to factory defaults and removed all personal data. I still had to call Sony.
• All Netflix traffic is first routed through Sony servers. Now we all know the problems that Sony has with their servers. I can not say how many times I got a ‘Netflix unavailable: error 300′ message. Netflix doesn’t have an error 300. This is a Sony server error number.
• It seemed to have a memory leak. Not 100% sure on this, but while having the SMP-N100 I changed from 1.5 Mbps DSL to 15 Mbps Cable. This increased quality and speed should have been a good thing. However, after watching one show with no interruption, all subsequent shows would be choppy and have dozens of spooling pauses.

Now aside from not working, the sony media player did have some good things. The remote could also control the TV. So I didn’t need to have multiple remotes. Also … Nope, that was it.

I finally got tired of having a player that wouldn’t play, and so I switched gears and bought a Roku XD|S player. Now the Roku has some things against it. The remote that is supplied with it is simple, so simple it won’t control the TV volume too, so I must have two remotes. Also no option for DLNA client or playing over a SMB share. With that said there are some things that are really good:

• Wireless works. It connects and transfers data over my DD-WRT router. No problems.
• It can play various media off a USB stick. So I could play some of my collection, just one more step.
• Interface is better. Not amazing. It is linear. So you have to just scroll through everything. But you get to pick your ‘channels’ and so you only see what you want. Right now I have just Amazon, Netflix, and Pandora. There are other channels you can add.
• So far I have not run into any connection problems because the Roku servers are down.
• I have watched for hours without any spooling pauses or apparent memory leaks.

In all, Roku, all the way. I have not tried Seagates or Western Digitals players although I looked at them in my research. But at this point I am super pleased with the Roku.

My coworker took this one on the way to work. I thought it was fun enough to be on fail blog. You can see if you agree. This was taken on Victory Road in Salt Lake.

Normally I don’t do posts on anything windows because, well, I don’t like to use windows. But this one was just frustrating enough that I thought a quick writeup would be good.

I am helping a coworker with their personal laptop. It is a Toshiba something or other and at boot it was saying “Error in reading the disk” (or whatever the message is, you get the point). Knoppix quickly showed that not only is the disk readable and everything there but also the rest of the system works fine. Using knoppix I fixed the windows MBR but to no avail! The silly thing still wouldn’t boot. I popped in the Windows XP CD with the intention of doing a CHKDSK but to my great aggravation, the Toshiba laptop uses a sata controller that doesn’t have a driver in the Windows XP disk. Couldn’t do CHKDSK because it didn’t see a drive. Crap.

After some searches I ran into nLite. A tool to spin up your own XP disk. You can add drivers, files, windows updates, remove windows features and even have pre-installed software. To my great joy I got the driver needed for the intel 82801 SATA controller, spun up my own disk, and now this laptop is merrily performing the CHKDSK /P which HOPEFULLY fixes this problem.

Some things to note with nLite: Won’t work under wine worth a crap. Had to fire up my Windows VM to make it work. Otherwise it is pretty straight forward. Tell it where your windows disk is and where you want to store stuff on your hard drive. It will copy the windows files over and then give you a nice list of options to customize things. Seems as though sky is the limit, although I didn’t try it past adding some drivers. At the end it will make for you an .ISO which you can burn at your leisure. From there you are on your way to getting stuff done … even though it is windows.

The use of PDF documents to insure formatting to the end is almost universally understood. With the recent application that I have recently written and deployed for Larkin Mortuary there are some forms that already are PDF I just need to write info to the PDF and spit it out. For this application is not using Zend Framework completely. Just certain components. I use the Zend_PDF component here. Below is the php that opens, writes, and outputs the PDF document.

<?
//get our Zend stuff. Once we have gotten the Autoloader we can call Zend functions at will.
require_once ‘Zend/Loader/Autoloader.php’;
$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();

//Perform query and get information
$db = new PDO(‘mysql:host=localhost;dbname=dbname;’, ‘username’, ‘password’);
$db->setAttribute( PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_WARNING );
$case_number = $_REQUEST['case_number'];
$stmt = $db->prepare(“SELECT * FROM tables WHERE case_number=?”);
$stmt->execute(array($case_number));
$f = $stmt->fetch();

//Load our PDF and start the manipulation
$document = ‘./forms/ssa-721.pdf’;
$pdf = Zend_Pdf::load($document); //<- this creates a new instance of the Zend_Pdf class and loads the existing document.
$page1 = $pdf->pages['0']; //<- with Zend_Pdf you must specify the page that we are working with
$width = $page1->getWidth();
$height = $page1->getHeight();

//set Document Meta Data
$pdf->properties['Title'] = “SSA721 of {$f['decedents_given_names']} {$f['decedents_last_name']} {$f['decedents_suffix']}”;
$pdf->properties['Author'] = “Larkin Mortuary”;

//We must specify the Font and its size that we will be writing with.
$font = Zend_Pdf_Font::fontWithName(Zend_Pdf_Font::FONT_TIMES);
$page1->setFont($font, 12);

//Draw our text, we have a bunch of things to draw
$DecedentInfo1 = “{$f['decedents_given_names']} {$f['decedents_last_name']} {$f['decedents_suffix']}”;
$page1->drawText($DecedentInfo1, 54, 705, ‘UTF-8′); // All drawn text requires three options. The actual text, the left starting place, measured in points from the left, and the bottom starting place, measured in points from the bottom.
$pdfData = $pdf->render();
header(“Content-Disposition: inline; filename={$f['decedents_last_name']}ssa-721.pdf”);
header(“Content-type: application/x-pdf”);
echo $pdfData;
?>

There are some things that are kind of annoying with this. Each life must be put out one at a time. Further, text does not wrap but is put out as one long line. You must use another function to break wrapped text up and feed that to Zend_Pdf. Also, it would be really nice to be able to feed Zend_Pdf an html page, and have that parsed and output as PDF. In the meantime this is a pretty easy way to manipulate, save, and create pdf’s.

If anyone has any hints or tips with Zend_PDF I would love to hear it.

I think we all come across times where we need to have custom php.ini settings for a web-application. One such instance has come up with an application that I have written and recently deployed for Larkin Mortuary. We needed Zend Framework components and I needed session times to be longer. Now the second need is something that is very specific to just this application. There are other applications on this server that we would not want a longer session time.

So I decided to use the apache config file to get custom settings per application. I got a bunch of info from this php page http://php.net/manual/en/configuration.changes.php.

Now my apache config file contains the following:
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_value include_path “.:/usr/local/lib/php:/opt/ZendFramework-1.10.8/library”
php_value session.gc_maxlifetime “28800″
php_value session.cookie_lifetime “28800″
</IfModule>

We can see these changes taken place if we look at the output from phpinfo():
Directive                                   Local Value    Master Value
session.cookie_lifetime         28800              0
session.gc_maxlifetime         28800              1440

I also understand that you can have custom php.ini files for each application. But why when you are going to have a VirtualHost section for each application anyways?

I was meeting with some friends today from UTOS. After talking for a little while I realized that  I have been so absorbed in work both at my job and at home doing renovations in my basement that I had never told them that my wife is pregnant. Further I realized that I have not told a large group of people that my wife and I are expecting our second child.

So, to all that read this and the smaller number that actually care, my wife and I are expecting. Due May 12 (although I am sure the birth will happen on May 13). We know that we are having a girl, and we have chosen the name Alana Lyn.

While my brother-in-law was in town for Christmas he had brought his Amazon Kindle 3. I was instantly taken with it. So it comes as no surprise that a few nights later while I couldn’t sleep I got on ebay and bought myself a new Amazon Kindle 3g. Of course, my wife was asleep and was not able to tell me no. Thankfully she is extremely forgiving, quite understanding, and still let me come to bed the following night.

The packaging of the Kindle is actually awesome. The box says something about being no fuss and it is true. I like that it was so easy to open and start using. When you do open the box you have the Kindle on top, a quick start guide, a usb cable and plug adapter for it.

Putting books on the Kindle is of course a cinch. I like to use Calibre for my local PDF books and more books can be bought directly from the Kindle Store on the device. Also many of the classics are available for free. Once books are on the device I found it cumbersome to just have all the books out on the home screen. Scrolling through 7 or 8 screens to find your book was a pain. Thankfully there are categories to organize this. I think that categories for the books are a must and yet, it is somewhat cumbersome to place a book into a category. I would love a bulk add feature. I realize that one you have your device kind of set up just adding one new book and then add just the one book to a category is easy, but still. To start with 35 ‘computer books’ which must be added one at a time to the category was painful.

As far as reading, the Kindle holds true to all that you have ever heard about it. It is very easy to read. No screen fatigue. It doesn’t matter how bring the sun or lighting is it looks amazing, clear and glare free, all the time. It is a truly spectacular machine for this. I have read one book the whole way through, very comfortable.

If I had to do it again I would save the money and not get the 3g version, but get the wifi only model. This is for two reasons. I find that I am not downloading books at every point that I pull out the Kindle. The second I feel there is a conveniently left out caveat with the ‘free’ 3g service. Yes, anything that I download from the Kindle Store, or magazine or newspaper subscriptions through the Kindle Store are automatically sent to the device. But you can also email your own documents to the Kindle directly,(for instance, I have Cablibre download wired magazine and send it to my Kindle) and you must pay $0.15 per meg that is delivered via 3g. That is a little detail left out of the brochure. One other reason, call it reason 2b if you will, is that while there is a browser on the Kindle, it is not exactly what you will use to browse the web. There is a reason that it is in the ‘experimental’ section of the menu.

All in all, very worth the $139 bucks. I want to buy another one for my wife. She has been resistant but at some point I am going to.

I have upgraded my Droid to the latest CyanogenMod. It is awesome. One wonderful thing with this latest edition of the best ROM ever is the latest source build of google apps. The one I have noticed the most change with is the newest Gmail app, version 2.3.2

Just a bullet list of what I notice:

• Quick button to labels
• ‘Send As’ options pulled from your google account and now available on your phone.
• Smoother composer interface including the following:
  • Drop down to change between reply, reply-to-all, forward
  • Send and Save buttons on top ‘dock’ (or locked header, whatever you want to call it)
• When replying, the option to ‘Respond Inline’ (possibly made just for Aaron Toponce? )
• Option to Mark Important/Not Important (If you use the priority inbox this could be good)

I have really enjoyed some of these new features. I would love to see better select options when looking at the inbox, or any message list anyways. Ideally this would be a select drop down with all, unread, read, starred, unstarred, important, unimportant, none. This would be a great improvement.