Chris’s Blog

This was a much busier week than I thought it was going to be when I embarked upon it! The clear evidence of that is that I haven’t posted all week. So, without further ado, here is January 19-25th…in bullet list form.

• Saturday night - InternetSafety.com holiday party. We have a tradition of having it well after the actual holidays it is designed to celebrate. Great time. We had a “Casino Night” and as one of the top 3 winners, I received a Visa Gift Card prize! It also snowed a good bit and the temperature proceeded to drop into the 20s (shut up, Northerners).
• Sunday - Due to the fear of ice, church had been canceled. I hurried out first thing in the AM to pick up a few bags of firewood (since I procrastinated at getting some real stuff delivered and am too lazy to chop the logs we have here). We kept the fire going all day and stayed pretty much in our pajamas. It was one of the best days in recent history just hanging out as a family and having a restful time!
• Monday night - band practice. We still don’t have a name, but I got to try out my new pedal a bit and play my acoustic (since Steven, our acoustic guitar player and leader wasn’t there). I think I did a fair job of leading the practice and even sang a bit.
• Monday night into Tuesday morning - After practice, we had a little impromptu HVAC class. The thermostat in the youth room had been relocated to the uninsulated attic where it was making the electric heat run constantly. Shane found it and cut it off, John and I fished the thermostat wire through the wall (including some contortionism on both our parts), and we reattached it and mounted it inside the room it is meant to control.
• Tuesday - Other than work, I don’t remember what happened. It was a blur. I know I spent a good portion of it building the first “Retail” disc master with the new Mac version of Safe Eyes. It’s an ordeal, but I scripted a lot of it, so it should be easier next time.
• Wednesday - Work. Then Sold Out (youth group) at church. Good worship time (despite the lack of our drummer), good message, good Beef O’ Brady’s afterwards.
• Thursday - Busy day at work. I was “in the zone” and ended up staying until about 7pm coding up some new and fancy disable options for Safe Eyes. I got home and began playing Burnout Paradise. Great multiplayer experience!
• Thursday night into Friday morning - Kayla woke up at about 3am having puked in her bed. Change the bed clothes and an hour later, she was back up sick again. Valerie pulled an all-nighter sleeping on the floor up in Kayla’s room and helped her get to the bathroom the remaining times she was sick. She’s feeling much better now after drinking her Pedialyte and resting all day Friday.
• Friday - More coding at work. It’s good to be straight-coding again for a bit after quite a time managing the Mac project and just general non-programming tasks.

Well, the evening’s entertainment, the Doodlebops (Kayla loves them), is nearing the end, so I should go play with Kayla a bit before it’s off to bed with her and on to more Burnout Paradise for me!

That’s right, you read that correctly. Our lawn burned down.

The other night, Valerie called just after I left work and couldn’t manage to tell me quite what was going on. Finally, I asked her straight up: What are you trying to say? “The yard is on fire,” she said.

Apparently, she had smelled a little smoke, but figured it was someone using their fireplace. About then, two neighborhood kids rang the doorbell and said, “Uhh, did you know your yard is on fire?” No. We didn’t, actually. Thanks, guys.

So, she and the two boys put out the fires (there were now multiple ones spreading across the yard) with the hose. I asked her if she needed to call the fire department, but she said she was pretty sure it was out.

I got home finally, and decided to call the fire department out anyway just to make sure everything was ok. Now, in their defense, I did say that I was pretty sure it was out, but they still just sent one guy in street clothes on the engine. He said, “I would just keep an eye on it every so often tonight.” Thanks. My voluteer firefighter dad was much more helpful and suggested I rake out any thick piles to make sure the fire hadn’t burned down into the brush (since our yard is wooded and covered with leaves in parts).

All I can guess is that one of the many kids that use our yard as a cut-through was smoking and decided just to flick his cigarette butt on the ground. With as dry as it has been here in Georgia and with the fertilizer that was on the grass from just the day before, it doesn’t take much to get a fire going.

It’s sad because I’ve spent a lot of money getting our grass into shape so we can potentially sell the house this year or next. Hopefully, it will come back. It was just a quick surface burn and in some climates they deliberately burn the bermuda grass so it comes back lusher and thicker, but it’s way earlier in the season than when they would normally burn the grass. We’ll see what happens over the next few months.

If you really don’t like seeing profanity written out (subtitle-style), don’t view this. It was just too funny to pass up posting, though.

UPDATE: Someone pulled the initial video I linked to. If this one gets pulled, too, just go to YouTube and search for Hitler HD-DVD–you’ll find it.

So, by now the news of Apple’s announcements is all over the interwebs.  I’m not going to give details here, you can find that on all sorts of other great sites (Engadget and MacRumors, to name a few).  I just want to give my quick impressions of the four primary announcements they made.

1. Time Capsule/Airport Extreme HDD - I think this one has potential.  I recently bought the Airport Extreme and it has been nothing but impressive.  It’s the best home router I’ve owned (not that I’ve owned a lot) and it shares my Canon MP500 printer nicely between my always wireless MacBook and the PC.  I’d pay $299 for that great functionality bundled with a 500GB server-grade internal HDD for storage.  I think this has potential to compete with Windows Home Server and be a nice all-around solution for Time Machine backups and syncing multiple computers (Windows and Mac).
2. iPhone/iPod Touch Software Update - I updated the InternetSafety.com iPhone to 1.1.3 minutes after Steve got off the stage.  Even with the potential for many thousands of people updating at once, it downloaded and installed quickly and cleanly.  1.1.3 offers a few new features, but nothing earth-shattering (in my opinion).  Still, it’s nice to see an update that adds features rather than just stopping people from applying the latest hacks, cracks, and custom ringtone apps.  The real shocker was that iPod Touch users are going to have to pay $20 for the update that enables Mail and Notes and the Stock and Weather widgets.  Way to reward your loyal, early adopters, Apple, by making them pay for stuff that should’ve been there day one.
3. iTunes Store Movie Rentals/AppleTV Refresh - This is probably the only announcement that would make me consider spending money ASAP.  The AppleTV just dropped to $229 (sucks to be that guy who bought it over the weekend for $299).  It’s a nice device, but at $300, I felt it didn’t really give you much.  Now, with the ability to purchase content directly on the AppleTV, it seems a lot more worthwhile, and I could see myself buying one eventually.  I doubt I’ll rent many movies from iTS as the prices are a little high for my tastes, but that’s not going to stop a lot of people and Apple will make a killing on it.  I think the content is also slightly less expensive than similar Microsoft Marketplace content.
4. MacBook Air - This was probably the highest octane announcement.  I’m sure it’s something a lot of people are looking for.  Personally, it’s not for me.  The size of my MacBook doesn’t bother me.  The size of the MacBook Pro doesn’t bother me.  If I were going to drop $2000 on a laptop (because, let’s face it, you can’t buy it without at least a few extra pieces that will bring the total up), I’d go for the more powerful Pro with a 15.4″ screen.  That’s me, though.  Additionally, the internet is aflutter with the fact that it has a non-user-replaceable battery.  Personally, I think they’re blowing it out of proportion as by the time the battery starts to die out, most of these same people will have upgraded through at least 2 iterations.  It is one sexy-looking laptop, but it’s not for me.  Oh, and for the record, that’s one of the dumbest names since the Lisa.

So, that’s it.  That’s my summary of my feelings about it.  Overall, it was a pretty good time following it.  I have to give props to MacRumorsLive.com and their coverage.  Engadget went down a few times, but the MacRumorsLive stream kept coming and didn’t even require refreshing.  That was a great experience, guys!  (Not to mention, it was sponsored by MacHeist which I have purchased both years now–great products in that bundle.)

Once a year, Santa Steve emerges from Cupertino and announces Mac goodies for all the good little boys and girls. Today, January 15, 2008, is that day! That’s right, folks. If you didn’t know, this week is the annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This year, there is “Something in the air” but so far other than rumors, that’s all we know.

In preparation, I have worn my black “I (Apple) Code” shirt and jeans. I will be following several live-blog pages during the Stevenote address which begins at 9am PT/12pm ET. Engadget, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), and MacRumors usually have good ones.

I will post my impressions and thoughts sometime after I have fully digested the event.

I am not sure where the ultimate problem lay, but if you read my blog using Firefox and happened to check it over the past couple days, you probably noticed it was all screwed up.  I decided to try embedding a couple YouTube videos and, while Safari handled the embed code in stride and theme, Firefox really got lost in there somewhere and just messed everything up.  IE put little red X’s where the YouTube video should have been but even it didn’t screw up the CSS–come on, Firefox!

Fortunately, there was a solution readily available.  Jens Törnell has a great Wordpress plugin for embedding YouTube with a simple, customizable tag without screwing up your chosen theme’s CSS.

Check it out if you need something similar and I apologize for the horror that was my blog’s front page over the past couple days!  Special thanks to XBL buddy Shadrick for pointing it out.

It’s not very often I post simple, funny stuff, but this was worth it. Thank you to my mom and sister, Katy Sue, for introducing me Achmed the Dead Terrorist:

Make sure you check out his Holiday special, too!

He kills me (so to speak).

I admit it–I’m not big on backing things up. This may be the result of never really having experienced catastrophic hard drive failure (knock on wood). Or, it may just be my lazy, gen-x attitude.

At work, I typically save all important documents directly to a “My Documents” share on the file server (IT takes care of backing that up–thanks, Ron). However, I recently started started using a little ToDo list app that really needed its file stored locally (connecting and disconnecting to the server would just be too much for its “every 5 second” autosave). So, how do I back that up on a regular basis? Combine that with the time I’ve spent this week getting my Subversion repositories properly backing up and I decided it was time for a solution.

I had always heard about how cool Automator is on the Mac, but had never really given it much thought. Is it ever (cool)! I was able to graphically set up a simple workflow to make an archive of my local “Documents” folder. Problem was, my 18GB Parallels VM file is in there. With a bit more Googling and some creativity, I was able to exclude that folder (and a few others). More on that later.

So, now, how do I run this bad-boy without physically opening Automator and running it? This article on MacOSXHints.com came to the rescue. You save your Automator workflow as an Application (or, if you read the comments, an iCal Plug-in) and use the iCal alarming capability to schedule it.

I now have automatic backups running every morning at 2am for my iMac at work. Now, I just need to break down and buy that really big external drive for home so I can use Time Machine to back up my personal Macbook.

If you are a casual reader, you can feel free to stop reading here. The rest is pretty technical details on setting up the Automator workflow.

Now, on to the tricky part. If you are trying to use Automator to specify folders, but want to exclude some sub-folders, you are in luck! It’s not terribly intuitive, but what I discovered is that you needed to include a “Get Folder Contents” before you could filter by name. Note that this example only excludes one level deep. It will not drill into subfolders and exclude those. I suppose you could make it do that, but for me, I didn’t need that functionality and this was much simpler and faster. Here is what I ended up with:

• Get Specified Finder Items - Add your “Documents” folder (and any others you want backed up)
• Get Folder Contents - Apparently, this turns Folders into “items” that can then be filtered. Don’t check the “Repeat for subfolders” unless you really really want to drill into every subfolder and create a giant list–it may take a long time to run and exclude items you didn’t expect to be excluded
• Filter Finder Items - Use the “Name” “Does not contain” filter and just add a filter for each item you want to exclude (in my case I created one for “Parallels” and one for “Microsoft User Data”)
• Create Archive - Creates the zip archive and saves it in a specified location
• Rename Finder Items - I used this to append a date-stamp to the filename
• Copy Finder Items - Last step, copy it to a location accessible by Finder. Fortunately, if it needs to mount a network share (even smbfs), it will!

That is my workflow. Hopefully that will help someone that gets stuck on the excluding named folders step. Automator is really pretty neat and who knows, maybe I’ll find some other great uses for it in the near future!

I wanted to post about this days ago, but I’ve just broken free from the clutches of UNIX shell script while trying to get my rapidly multiplying Subversion repositories backed up. As much as it pains me to say it, I believe the death knell has sounded for HD-DVD.

The Sony hype-machine has been in full swing these last 2(ish) years. They were determined not to lose this one. They lost Betamax. They lost MultiMedia Compact Disc (albeit, without a fight). They lost MiniDisc. UMD still hasn’t caught on. They were not going to lose the Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle.

Friday, Warner (a.k.a. AOL Time Warner) announced that they were dumping their dual-format support (which never favored HD-DVD as all their BD releases came out months before the HD-DVDs) and had chosen Blu-ray Disc to standardize on. They claim that “Consumers have clearly chosen Blu-ray…” Of course, on the opposite side is Toshiba (who heavily backs HD-DVD and is one of the inventors), who says, “HD DVD players and PCs have outsold Blu-ray in the US market in 2007.” Well, who are you going to believe?

I have always said that the battle would rage on as long as studios supported both formats, but it looks like HD-DVD’s studio support has drawn to an end. Universal and Paramount/Dreamworks remain in the HD-DVD camp (along with a few small studios), but Warner’s defection serves to put the lion’s share of studio support behind BD. Personally, I blame the PS3. Sony claimed EVERY PS3 as a “Blu-ray Player Sold” even though repeated surveys showed that most people were buying them to play games and didn’t even care (or, in some cases know) that they played Blu-ray discs.

I still hold to the hope that the dual-format players will come down very quickly in price (as both single-format players have), but if HD-DVD doesn’t hold out for the coming year and stay alive, the incentive for the manufacturers to build a dual-format player will just not be there. HD-DVD had everything going for it. It was cheaper to make the players, cheaper to make the discs, and cheaper to re-tool the factories (as it uses the same pressing technology as standard def DVDs).

It’s really too bad. Sony is not a company known for being good to its customers/consumers (remember the Sony/BMG rootkit scandal anyone?) and this much power in their hands is going to be nothing but bad for consumers. Perhaps the worst part of it, though, is that New Line is a Warner subsidiary and now we will never see how awesome an HD-DVD box-set of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy would be. I would’ve been there Day One and paid anything they asked for a piece of that!

So, HD-DVD is dead. Long live HD-DVD!