Chris' Ramblings

When Patents Attack! | This American Life

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 06:40:22 -0700

When Patents Attack! | This American Life:

If you work in the tech industry, you must listen to this … if you don’t, you should still listen. This is a fantastic overview of why our patent system is screwed up when it comes to software. Any lawyers or lawmakers out there that want to start a movement to eliminate software patents???

iPad 2 Head Tracking: Glasses-free 3D

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 06:10:41 -0700

iPad 2 Head Tracking: Glasses-free 3D:

Very impressive work.

Japan Before/After Photos

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:50:45 -0700

Japan Before/After Photos:

Arial side by side photos showing before and after the quake. Terrible.

Is 'box' not a word?

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:50:15 -0800

Somebody please tell me what I am missing??? I can’t find the word ‘box’ in any of the dictionary files on my Mac.

chris@The-Book dict $ pwd
/usr/share/dict
chris@The-Book dict $ ls -l
total 2176
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel      516 Jun 22  2009 README
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel      706 Jun 22  2009 connectives
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel     8640 Jun 22  2009 propernames
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel  2486813 Jun 22  2009 web2
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel  1012730 Jun 22  2009 web2a
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel        4 Aug 28  2009 words -> web2
chris@The-Book dict $ grep ^box$ *
chris@The-Book dict $

Umm … 300k+ words … and no ‘box’?

Possessions.

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:00:50 -0800

Possessions.:

What a wonderful way of looking at ‘things’.

8pen

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 08:05:57 -0700

8pen:

Fantastic. I can’t imagine it catching on, but it looks pretty cool.

Beautiful artistry.

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 06:11:51 -0700

Beautiful artistry.

The Importance of Giving a Damn | Danilo Campos.blog

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 18:39:13 -0700

The Importance of Giving a Damn | Danilo Campos.blog:

Give a damn, dammit.

RCA student radically improves the UK plug | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:22:13 -0700

RCA student radically improves the UK plug | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE:

Brilliant.

App Shopper: Moonlit Mirror (Utilities)

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 09:24:53 -0700

App Shopper: Moonlit Mirror (Utilities):

My Lucy is a celebrity now!

Oh, and you should download this app and click on the ads.

A clever way to fight IE6 « Igor Partola

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:07:47 -0700

A clever way to fight IE6 « Igor Partola:

Good advice.

Googlies

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 21:28:01 -0700

Googlies:

So, I wanted to learn a little bit about HTML5 and how the canvas element worked. I ended up making googly eyes! Check them out. They are all the rage. So far, there is already one page on the internet using them. Tomorrow, there may still be one…but they will still be all of the rage. If you want to help make them better, I posted the code here:

http://github.com/hitsvilleusa/googlies

They likely won’t work in Windows, because, well … my goal was to learn to draw on the canvas, not make googly eyes.

What do you think?

I am happy to clean up the code if people will actually use them on their web pages.

The first step is to start - (37signals)

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:05:38 -0700

The first step is to start - (37signals):

Appropriate.

"Get Info" from the command line

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:16:26 -0700

I have been trying to figure out how to get at the metadata for a PDF file from the command line. I just want the basic information that is present when you run “Get Info” on the file. It seems to be accessible via applescript and automater, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Alas, our friend mdls to the rescue:

@Desktop $ mdls ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS.pdf 
kMDItemAuthors                 = (
    "Apple Inc."
)
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2010-08-13 17:10:55 -0700
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2010-08-13 17:10:55 -0700
kMDItemContentType             = "com.adobe.pdf"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (
    "com.adobe.pdf",
    "public.data",
    "public.item",
    "public.composite-content",
    "public.content"
)
kMDItemCreator                 = "Unknown"
kMDItemDisplayName             = "ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS.pdf"
kMDItemEncodingApplications    = (
    "XEP 4.9 build 20070115"
)
...

Along the way, I was reminded about some ls and xattr fun. Use ‘ls -l@’ to see the extended attributes. If you want info on the attributes, use ‘xattr’

@Desktop $ ls -l@
total 17304
-rw-r--r--@ 1 chris  staff  8856417 Aug 13 17:10 ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS.pdf
	com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms	    165 
@Desktop $ xattr -l ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS.pdf 
com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms:
00000000  62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 A1 01 5F 10 76 68 74 74  |bplist00.._.vhtt|
00000010  70 3A 2F 2F 64 65 76 65 6C 6F 70 65 72 2E 61 70  |p://developer.ap|
00000020  70 6C 65 2E 63 6F 6D 2F 69 70 68 6F 6E 65 2F 6C  |ple.com/iphone/l|
00000030  69 62 72 61 72 79 2F 66 65 61 74 75 72 65 64 61  |ibrary/featureda|
00000040  72 74 69 63 6C 65 73 2F 56 69 65 77 43 6F 6E 74  |rticles/ViewCont|
00000050  72 6F 6C 6C 65 72 50 47 66 6F 72 69 50 68 6F 6E  |rollerPGforiPhon|
00000060  65 4F 53 2F 56 69 65 77 43 6F 6E 74 72 6F 6C 6C  |eOS/ViewControll|
00000070  65 72 50 47 66 6F 72 69 50 68 6F 6E 65 4F 53 2E  |erPGforiPhoneOS.|
00000080  70 64 66 08 0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00  |pdf.............|
00000090  00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
000000A0  00 00 00 00 83                                   |.....|
000000a5

Next Steps

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:29:44 -0700

If anyone knows of a great opportunity for which you think I may be a good match, I would love to know. I am not looking for just a job, but for a great fit. I am not sure exactly what this looks like, but I know it will present some combination of the following:

a consistent challenge
a top notch team
an opportunity to mentor
an opportunity to be mentored
a focus on sound design
a team that appreciates the details
a product or service that I can believe in

I love what I do, and I care about every line of code that I write—not only in what it does, but how it looks.

Spose - I’m Awesome (via SposeVEVO) Awesome!

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:22:49 -0700

Spose - I’m Awesome (via SposeVEVO)

Awesome!

COTM - Dad Life (via Slickus26) Way too funny!

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:28:27 -0700

COTM - Dad Life (via Slickus26)

Way too funny!

Documentation - Facebook Developers

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:14:46 -0700

Documentation - Facebook Developers:

Is it just me, or does the Facebook documentation suck? Not just a little inconvenient, but very inconsistent and lacking any detail. This is completely unacceptable for a multi-billion dollar company. I would love to see some high level architectural diagrams of integration points, comments on older APIs and what you should use instead. I particularly like that the wiki which seems to have more depth is deprecated — http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Main_Page

WTF? Their roadmap and “new features” are in the wiki.

Am I nuts, or has anyone else found the documentation for Facebook poor and confusing? I remember having the same frustrations when they first came out with their APIs years ago, but I had hoped it would have improved. And if crappy documentation wasn’t enough, their developers.facebook.com servers were down yesterday for about 2 hours in the middle of the day. Makes it tough to read even the crappy stuff.

Hmmm. 704 pages. Ironic?

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:38:25 -0700

Hmmm. 704 pages. Ironic?

Replacement iPad

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:37:30 -0700

So I have had nothing but issues with my iPad since I got it. So much for being an early adopter. Nearly all of the issues were wifi related, and I just assumed that since I read others were having wifi issues that a fix would come. Finally I got fed up and called apple care. Turns out that ipads with serial numbers beginning with GB011 and earlier were prone to these errors. Of course mine was in range. Anyhow, swapped it out and was able to watch a whole movie on netflix last night from it without interruption (previously i wouldn’t get through 5 mins). I only wish I had known I had a lemon earlier.