robotic thoughts...

A good app launcher makes all the difference in the world to me. It is really painful when there isn't one available, "How the hell do I open an application?!?!". On OS X there is always the Spotlight functionality, but that has never satisfied my needs. I need to be able to manipulate the item from the launcher, not just open it. I guess "launcher" is a really bad term for it, in reality it's a "do a bunch of awesome stuff thingamajig", but that's not easy to say.

Quicksilver has been my "launcher" of choice for quite some time now and before that I was using Butler, which I originally tried out because of its clipboard implementation. Quicksilver was recently open sourced, since the lead developer now works for Google and their launcher product called Google Quick Search Box. This was pretty much the beginning of the end for QS. While there are still some folks working on the open source version, it has been a slow process.

I recently overheard Andi Zeidler talking about LaunchBar on Twitter, so I decided to give it a try. That has turned out to be an excellent choice. Quicksilver has been plagued with some really strange issues for quite some time. Most of them are bearable, but sometimes it can be really annoying when you are trying to get something done fast. In the week and a half that I've been using it, the program has really exceeded all my expectations. So what makes it better?

LaunchBar Pros

There are a lot of really nice features in LaunchBar. Here is a rundown of some of the features that make it one of the best I've used.

• Web searches are quoted properly, you can search for "Bob Marley & the Wailers" and get the proper results
• Setup of LaunchBar is orders of magnitude easier than Quicksilver. If you've ever set up the clipboard and shelf in Quicksilver then you know what I'm talking about.
• The default setup of LaunchBar makes much more sense, which is helpful for n00bs
• The clipboard in LaunchBar is really nice
• It doesn't assume that everything with a dot in it is a URL
• You can access each line of a copied item from a sub menu
• The clipboard menu tells you where the item was copied, and how many characters and lines it contains
• You can merge multiple clippings into one by using the ClipMerge functionality
• Using the OS X services menu items in LaunchBar actually works. This makes things like WordService useful again!
• LaunchBar is really fast compared to Quicksilver
• LaunchBar doesn't randomly forget its settings like Quicksilver would with the actions sometimes

LaunchBar Cons

While it has been an overall positive experience, there are still some things LaunchBar could learn from Quicksilver.

• No custom triggers. This was one of my favorite things about Quicksilver. You could assign a keyboard shortcut to any "subject, verb" action. LaunchBar does not have this concept. It has "abbreviations", but it's not the same. I liked to be able to type "ctrl + option + cmd + l" and go to the login window. You can still do this in LaunchBar, but it takes more keystrokes.
• No social bookmarking support. Quicksilver has a nice delicious integration that allows for the indexing of all your bookmarks and their corresponding tags. I used this feature A LOT. My brain is on the web, Quicksilver helped me query it very quickly.
• LaunchBar doesn't have the concept of plugins like Quicksilver does. If it isn't there, then your only option is Applescript. Applescript sucks.
• LaunchBar doesn't have the concept of a persistent clipboard or shelf. This is another feature from Quicksilver that I use A LOT.
• Running unix executables from LaunchBar requires an open terminal window. Quicksilver can do these tasks in the background. LaunchBar has the ability for these scripts to be placed in the "Actions" folder. However, you have to have a property list file next to it that tells LaunchBar to run it in the background. This is less than optimal, especially for pre-existing executables.
• LaunchBar doesn't have the same "comma trick" as Quicksilver does. I rarely use this feature, so it's not a big deal for me. You might be able to exchange some of the behavior by using the ClipMerge facility in LaunchBar.
• With LaunchBar, you really need to read the docs to get the most out of it. There are a a lot of hidden gems in the form of keyboard combos. With Quicksilver it was usually pretty self-explanatory how to do things. Luckily the LaunchBar docs are very informative.
• You can't start entering text like you could with Quicksilver by presssing "." and typing some text. LaunchBar has an "Enter Text" action that allows you to do something similar. Someone in the forums suggested that you assign "," to the "Enter Text" action. This works out well.
• Performing "actions" on the "subject" are not as easy in LaunchBar. For instance, there are usually some actions hidden in the context menu of the item, you can right click or use a keyboard combo to open it up, but that's kind of a pain

Conclusion

In my humble opinion, LaunchBar is the best launcher out there right now. It could still stand to learn a few things from Quicksilver. But overall LaunchBar is the superior application. Hopefully there are devs watching the LaunchBar forums that will implement my requests :) While I wait for them to be implemented, I'm using a stripped down Quicksilver that just contains the delicious and shelf plugins to fill in for that missing functionality of LaunchBar.

If you haven't given a try yet, I strongly recommend you download a trial of LaunchBar 5 and take it for a spin.

There are days when you just have to say, "I fuckin' love the internets!!", more on that in a minute. I bought a LaCie 1TB Big Disk a couple of years ago and it slowly became my "everything disk". The only problem with this external drive is that it is setup in a RAID 0. This means that the data is 'striped' across two 500GB drives for performance. But, if one drive fails then you lose all your data!

Very recently the drive decided to start making some strange noises while struggling to start up. The drive would also emit a loud hissing noise while running. This started to freak me out since I had nowhere to back up 1TB. I debated a while and then bought a Drobo last week! Now I have 4TB usable on the local network :)

After playing around with the Drobo I decided it was time to fire up the LaCie and back it up. Sure enough the LaCie drive failed to mount. It sounded like it really wanted to but it just couldn't. Sadness!

My first google on the subject was "lacie big disk extreme sucks" (realizing later mine was not 'extreme'). The third hit was a blog post entitled LaCie Big Disk Extreme Failure. Now this is where the love of the internet comes into play. The post had around 100 comments on it. Two of them described what was happening to my drive perfectly. The first describing the startup woes:

problems included; bad booting up, clicking noises, freezes and a complete failure to mount (link)

And the second:

The power supply adapter a made high pitch sound (not very noticeable unless up close) and upon opening the board had burnt brown areas and the capacitors where bulging out the tops. (link)

I had not noticed this noise coming from the power adapter, but low and behold mine was making the same sound. So what was the solution in the end? A new power adapter. WTF! Internets FTW! I decided that I'd shell out the $30 on the chance that it might work. Power supply arrived yesterday, and now my drive is fully functional and backed up to my Drobo!!! Happiness!

If you're a geek of any sort then you have probably run across the wonderful comic xkcd. It's one of the few comics that I read on a regular basis. There was a comic that ran a while back about compiling code that doesn't quite relate to us Plone developers. Since the comic is released under a Creative Commons license, here is the re-mixed buildout version :)

Now there's no reason to be ashamed of surfing the net or sword fighting in the halls while your buildout is running!

I've been using the command line in various ways for a long time. Back in the DOS days it was the only way. Then windows came along, but there was still the need for a little 'cmd' action every once in a while. It wasn't until I started working at Six Feet Up that I re-kindled my love affair with the command line. This time around it was with unix and primarily ZSH.

I started out at Six Feet Up doing customer support and systems administration. This required learning a new skill set, the command line. As I made the transition from sysadmin to web developer this skill set transferred over quite nicely. It took me a little while to realize that all the things I was doing on the command line could be turned into shortcuts. My first run in with aliases involved the 'ls' command. Normal 'ls' output leaves a lot to be desired (especially for a n00b).

$ cd
$ ls
Applications Desktop Documents foo.txt Library runme

Ok, so foo.txt must be a file, but what the hell are all those other things? This is easily solved with some extra options that denote the type of item and color code things.

$ ls -GF
Applications/ Desktop/ Documents/ foo.txt Library/ runme*

Now it's clear that foo.txt is a file, runme is an executable and everything else is a directory. But who wants to type that every time? Not me. So what do we do? The solution is to modify your shell's startup files. In my case I would just add an alias to my .zshrc.

alias ls="ls -GF"

Now when I type 'ls', it automatically adds the options in for me. This is old hat for a lot of command line hackers out there. For n00bs like I once was, this was a gold mine. I just recently published all my configuration files on github for mass consumption. This is the culmination of years of tweaking and prodding.

Once you get used to the comforts of a well defined set of user conf files you can never go back. This became a problem for me when Six Feet Up's hosting business started to really take off. Suddenly instead of five machines, we had ten, then twenty and more on the way. The obvious problem here is keeping all your shell customizations in sync. Luckily we have subversion configured on most of the machines.

At some point I had the bright idea to put all my confs into subversion. This made it really easy to get set up on a new machine.

$ ssh some-machine

Welcome to Some Machine!
$ svn co https://svn.example.com/svn/claytron/dotfiles .dotfiles
$ ln -s .dotfiles/.zshrc .

Now I could have the same .zshrc file on all the servers fairly easily. With this setup, if I modified the conf on one server, then I could get the updates on the others. This worked well for a while. Then I started adding all my other confs into the mix. Settings for vim, screen and readline got added in. Now I had to go to each machine, update the checkout and symlink any new confs into my home directory. The solution for this slowly evolved into a shell script.
The current version has advanced in many ways since the original and has taught me a lot about shell scripting. This has solved the symlinking issue for me.

The only other problem is keeping up to date. I would log into a machine and never even think about updating the .dotfiles dir to get the latest settings until something was missing. Then another lightbulb went off. Why not update them automagically? This is when I decided to put some code in to run an svn up on the .dotfiles dir each time I logged in. Here is what the current code looks like. It works like a charm for me in our environment.

The confs that are up on github now reflect all these trials and tribulations. They also blend bash and zsh together for me. I figure at a minimum most machines will have bash installed. So I went through and put all the 'common' elements into common files and put all the zsh or bash specific stuff into the respective startup files. Github also allows for an easy way to download my files in a tarball if I don't have access to svn or git. Github has continually impressed me since I started using it.

Now I'm ready to take over the world on almost any machine I log into :)

We're back for another round of AppleScript and Party Shuffle. Last month I wrote about adding missing party shuffle features using AppleScript. I noticed that there was one issue with the scripts. If you selected an album that had multiple discs then it would add all the discs to the party shuffle ordered by track number. So for example, you have an album that has two discs with three tracks a piece. Then you would get this:

Disc One Track 1
Disc Two Track 1
Disc One Track 2
Disc Two Track 2
Disc One Track 3
Disc Two Track 3

This is obviously not what we wanted. I spent a little time today updating the scripts so that they behave correctly. Now if you select the same album as our example above this is what you will get:

Disc One Track 1
Disc One Track 2
Disc One Track 3
Disc Two Track 1
Disc Two Track 2
Disc Two Track 3

This of course assumes that you have properly set up the disc number and disc count for your tracks. I'm pretty anal about this kind of stuff, so my library has them all set (even Disc 1 of 1). If the disc count is not set then the script will assume that there is only one disc and won't go through the disc sorting routine. You can get the latest scripts here:

• Play Album(s) Next In Party Shuffle.scpt
• Add Album(s) to Party Shuffle.scpt

It's finally here!!!! The third season has started for the Naptown Roller Girls. Last Saturday our Tornado Sirens hit the track and faced off against the Steel City Derby Demons. I've been trying to do my part in promoting the team through all my social networks, upcoming and eventful. I don't think they really needed my help since the home opener's online tickets sold out a day or two before the bout. On game day there were only paper tickets left at the box office, which also eventually sold out. Luckily my wife and I bought season tickets this year! None of our friends bought tickets before hand, so we showed up when tickets went on sale at five to make sure they could get in. We were probably some of the first fans to show up. The crowd really started to gather around quarter to six. We grabbed a spot in line so that we could get first pick of suicide seats. In three seasons of derby action, this was my first time in the suicide seats. We ended up getting a nice spot in the third turn. But alas, no roller girls ended up in our laps.

As we settled into our seats the first order of business was to get some beers. I was surprised to find that there was a nice selection of imports and micro brews on tap! Roller derby just got that much sweeter. In addition to the usual Bud and Bud Light they had Stella Artois, Red Hook ESB, Goose Island Winter Warmer and something else that escapes me at the moment. While waiting for the bout to start I noticed there was a new scoreboard set up. At first glance it seemed to be an improvement. But once the bout started, it was hard to read the time remaining. This season brings some other changes with it as well. The bout is now divided into halves instead of periods. There are also a few other changes to the rules. But by far the biggest change this year for the Sirens is their uniforms. They've switched to a sportier red and black jersey and ditched the Jerry Lee western style shirts. I'll miss the old uniforms, they were so freakin' cool!

The Sirens jumped out to an early lead at the beginning of the first half and the crowd was at fever pitch. You could feel the excitement brewing in the air. They went back and forth a bit and then the Derby Demons hit their stride. They grabbed the lead and never looked back. Just before halftime, the Derby Demons put up a twenty point jam that the Sirens couldn't overcome. They went into the half down thirty points with the score 55-25. Despite our team getting crushed the crowd was still energized most of the second half. The final score ended up being 99-44 in favor of Steel City. Just as you could feel the excitement in the first half, you could sense the disappointment at the end of the bout. Luckily we have lot's more derby action coming up! This year the Sirens are joined by their junior varsity team the Warning Belles. The next bout will be the debut of the new JV team. There will also be two double headers this year featuring the Warning Belles and the Tornado Sirens!! It's going to be a fun season, get your tickets and join us!

Last night I bravely decided to upgrade claytron.com to the latest Plone release. Luckily I already converted it over to a buildout based install a couple months back. This was pivotol in my speedy migration effort since it allowed me to switch products in and out so effortlessly.

This site is fairly simple since I'm only using a couple add-on products. Quills is the primary product I use. The old site was running Plone 2.1.4 and Quills 1.5 RC3. I tried to go directly to 3.1.7, but the portal_migration failed. Rather than try and debug that nasty error, I decided to migrate to the latest 2.5 release first. This was a complete success!

Next, I updated the buildout with all the Plone 3 compatible versions of the products. Then changed the plone recipe to point to the latest 3.1.x release. After that, I ran the buildout and started the site back up. Now it was time to try the portal_migration again. It blew up again, but with a less painful error. Quills 1.6 and above no longer uses a custom workflow and therefore made something unhappy. All I had to do was set the weblog types back to the default Plone workflow and try again. This was a success!

Next up was the Quills migration. This is automatically run while quickinstalling Products.Quills in the portal_quickinstaller. No issues here either. There are some Quills artifacts that have to be removed by hand including the quills_tool, RPCAuth, blog archive folder and blog drafts folder. Also, I didn't like the way the beta of quills.app handled the addition of the portlets to the weblog. It's currently creating a new 'category' of portlets by interface that has no way of managing them through the Plone interface. I posted a hint on the Quills dev list on how to remove them via a debug session.

Lastly I needed to update my custom theme. I moved all my main_template customizations into custom viewlets. Any template overrides were re-integrated using z3c.jbot. Then I removed my Install.py in favor of a GenericSetup profile. That was it! Now I'm ready to upgrade to Plone 3.2 when it gets released in the not too distant future :)

Now that I'm on the Plone 3 series I was able to quickly install CacheFu via an egg. That should help my site's performance quite a bit out of the gate. I also installed the python markdown package and added the transform so I can write in plain text anywhere in Markdown, then copy paste into the site. Thanks to tomster for evangelizing it, I was sold after reading the philosophy and synopsis. This post was written in Markdown, and hopefully many more... :)

My name is claytron and I'm a party shuffle addict.  There, I said it.  In my opinion the iTunes party shuffle feature is pure awesomeness.  I have been using it like mad since it was introduced.  I'm still amazed when I talk to iTunes users that haven't used it.

My typical modus operandi is to set the party shuffle to a rated smart playlist (3 stars and up or 4 stars and up).  Then if i want to add an album in the mix I can select it and 'Play Next in Party Shuffle' or 'Add to Party Shuffle'.  This is where AppleScript can come in handy.  Doug Adams wrote a nifty little AppleScript that allows you to select a track and add that track's album to the party shuffle!  This really comes in handy when my eMusic downloads arrive in iTunes.  I can sort my library by 'Date Added' and then select a track from one of the newly imported albums and have it start playing next in the party shuffle.  Totally effing awesome.

So herein lies the next issue.  Let's say I just downloaded five albums and imported them into iTunes.  You would think you could highlight a track from each album and then use the 'Play Next in Party Shuffle' script.  But instead it pops up with a selection dialog with all the albums in your library.  For me this is completely useless, I have 2000+ albums.  So I went ahead and modified the script to add the album for each selected track.

After doing so I emailed Doug about the modifications.  As you might guess, he gets a ton of emails with modifications and fixes for all the scripts posted on his site and can't possibly include them all.  I also don't think he quite understood the purpose of the modification.  But since most of the scripts are licensed under the GPL you can still benefit from my mods!

There are two scripts.  The first one is the 'Play Album(s) Next in Party Shuffle'  which allows you to select one or more tracks and have each track's album be cued up next in party shuffle.  The second script is 'Add Album(s) to Party Shuffle' which does the same thing except it adds the album to the end of the party shuffle.  That way you don't have to add an album in the middle of another!

Both of these scripts require that the party shuffle is currently playing.  I couldn't find a way around that in AppleScript (but I'm still an AppleScript n00b).  The only other item to mention is that I added a property to the top of each script called 'show_party_shuffle'.  If this is true then you'll be taken to the party shuffle after adding the tracks.  If you don't want to be switched over, you can set it to false.

Cat macros are pretty damn funny. Especially when combined with other internet memes like PostSecret. I was playing around with skitch and decided to modify a cat macro to make it funnier...

Uploaded with Skitch!

There was a little poem I wrote a couple years ago that I thought I'd lost due to a backup malfunction. While backing up some old jam session and song idea projects I happened to stumble across it.

a golden tongue not full of words

after nine one may wonder
why eel etch the sky
get your twelfth ear through the tube
rome intense hiss desert

I haven't blogged in a while.  Time is not permitting.  Went camping last weekend and tried out my new hiking boots. They kick much ass.  Aircraft aluminum lacing system was an excellent idea.  Listening to The Joggers right now.  Good shit.  Isn't cake supposed to have a rarities album out some time.  I just bought a bunch of other music from eMusic and iTunes.  Hopefully just as pleasing.  I'm searching for a new car.  My eye is on a Volvo 850 wagon.  If i'm lucky a '97 T-5 with low miles and a low price will show up soon.  I should upgrade this site to use Plone 3.0 (but i'm not sure if Quills is ready for that).  /terminate rambling.

I hope that the current roller derby revival lasts a long time. Lucie and I witnessed our first bout tonight and it was a blast. Now you're saying, "Why the hell is he talking about roller derbies? Didn't that sport die a long time ago?". It did die. Now it is breathing new life and governed by the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA).

If you are living in Indy (or any other city with a derby team) you have to check this out. Our very own Naptown Roller Girls put the smack down on the Hard Knox Roller Girls tonight. Things were looking bleak for a few minutes but the Tornado Sirens (Naptown Roller Girls) pulled out to an 18 point lead at the second intermission. They held on to win by 3 points in the last Jam. At one point one of our girls (Touretta Lynn?) threw one of the Hard Knox girls (black-n-blue) down and a fight broke out between them. The Naptown coach ran over to break it up and was then thrown out for doing so. If that wasn't crazy enough the coach came back over and threw a chair into the rink and proceeded to get into a fight with one of the refs! This was pure madness. Finally the dust settled and all was right in the world again except that black-n-blue should have been thrown out.

This is the NRG's first season and it's been a pretty good one so far as I can tell. I'll see you all at the next bout on May 12. Go Tornado Sirens! I'll be yelling the loudest for Jane Ire #1984 because she was totally kicking ass against Knoxville. J. Roller #420 is in a close second.

There has been all sorts of excitement about Amit Singh's MacFUSE product recently on the internets. For the life of me I could not figure out why. Amit went ahead and cleared all that up for me in his Macworld 2007 talk titled "Taming Mac OS X File Systems".

The thing that really got me excited about this technology is the interweaving of the web and your computer. When he started showing of the DocsFS I was sold. The PicassawebFS was quite interesting as well. I wonder if the same thing would be possible with Flickr?

Ok so maybe no small children were eaten but Quicksilver is a very impressive app. I finally decided to give it a try a couple weeks ago and I'm still playing around with all the features. It took about three days until I could drop Butler and now I'm using QS exclusively. I had most of my Butler functionality set up within minutes. Triggers (keyboard shortcuts) for sleep and logout were a snap (using the extra scripts). The only difficult part was getting the clipboard history (pasteboard) to show up. I enabled the plugin but had to refresh the catalog for the Shelf & Clipboard. (UPDATE: Apparently you need to access the shelf and the clipboard before you can catalog them and use them via the QS menus. To do this, go to the QS menu -> Plug-Ins (underneath help) and then open them up) The last piece for me was getting custom pasteboards working again. This is where the shelf comes in handy. You can create a text clipping and send it over to the shelf for safe keeping and then access it via the QS menu (or via a trigger for the Shelf which I also have set up).

The possibilities really seem limitless for this app. I keep running into more and more excellent tips and tricks. Here are some links to help you on your merry way.

• Howard Melman's manual for QS.
• Nick Santilli over at The Apple Blog has been doing some good writeups and screencasts on the subject.
  • Screencast of how to get started from scratch (this one is a little old but gives you a good idea of how to get rolling)
  • His latest was a really simple but effective tip about using Quicksilver and the Finder together.
  • Screencast about the Clipboard features
  • Screencast about how to use the catalog
  • Another screencast about using scripts
• If you are feeling really geeky/social you can use Twitter + Quicksilver
• An enhanced iCal event and todo creator write up over at Hawk Wings

I have also been busy hacking away trying to make QS do my bidding. I wrote a little script that can open a terminal in iTerm for me based on my bookmarks. I've run out of sensical ctrl + cmd shortcuts so this fits the bill nicely. Now all I do is invoke QS, type single quote to go into text mode, type my bookmark name and then tab over to select my 'iTerm Tab.scpt'. Here is the code for the script. Just copy it and paste it into a file and save it as 'iTerm Tab.scpt' and put that script into your '~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions' folder (create it if it doesn't already exist)

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
	on process text thetext
		if thetext is "" then return 0
		
		tell application "iTerm"
			activate
			-- talk to the first terminal
			tell the first terminal
				launch session thetext
			end tell
		end tell
	end process text
end using terms from

Pitchfork has really jumped the shark in the past year or so. Why do they waste their time to write a track review of a Paris Hilton song. They give it one and a half stars which in itself is retarded. Why give it any stars. You know it's going to be trash. I guess they are just trying to draw in a different crowd to their flash ad infested website. And this isn't an isolated incident with the Paris Hilton song.

Another example is their new love affair with Lil Wayne of all people. Here is what they have say about his 2005 effort Tha Carter II:

Wayne dabbles scatological throughout ("Dear Mr. Toilet/ I'm the shit"), sometimes even elaborately so ("You niggas small bubbles, I burp you/ I'll spit you out and have your girls slurp you")

What the hell are they smoking? They should seriously think about setting the pipe down and checking themselves into a clinic. They must have put an ad into the bubble gum pages looking for a new reviewer because of stuff like this. Again another review of trite pop bullshit and they give it one star. What is the point of this? On the same page they review a song by Rick Ross and give it three and a half stars. But you know that's a load of crap when you read the description.

Contrary to hater-instincts, we here at Pitchforkmedia Inc. don't get righteous boners every time a rapper mentions cocaine in a song (Lil Wayne excepted)

I just don't understand this infatuation with Lil Wayne. They need to hire some new Hip Hop reviewers that have a clue. But even if they are falling off they are still on top of a lot of good happenings in music. So I'll continue to visit until they start giving Paris Hilton songs three stars