robotic thoughts...

I had no idea such a think existing until a few days ago when I was cruising around Flickr. I ran into a series of photos by a guy who was creating some fantastic stuff. And one of his pictures was of his Nixie Clock. It's a clock that uses special tubes that can show digits like this

It's really a beautiful thing. I have had a love affair with the tube for audio purposes and now for telling time too. I think that would look nice in my living room. Don't hesitate to head over to this site and buy me one.

Camino will have spell checking built in soon. Last week Infinite Loop had a link to a blog entry in Sucking less, on a budget where pinkerton reported that he had checked in spell checking to the trunk of Camino. Although three days later he posted a new entry saying:

I realized i biffed the static target on the branch, so the branch builds still don't have spellcheck. Sigh. I'll fix it when I get back to virginia

Even though it's not quite there yet I'm still excited to know that this feature is on it's way to my desktop as I'm writing this blog entry in Camino right now!

Now if we can just get address book integration with Thunderbird in OS X...

UPDATE: The latest alpha release of Camino 1.1 includes spell checking and many more improvements. I'm afraid to upgrade as it will break Inquisitor which no longer supports Camino :(

Computerized sound has always been fascinating to me. Ever since DOS played Circus for me I've been hooked. Oh and don't forget all those old mod player programs from back in the day. You know the ones where really geeky goth kids put together the latest Depeche Mode song into a mod file. Ah those were the days.

Then along came Re-Birth from Propellerheads which emulated the old boss step sequencing synth and drum machine. I can't even remember how many hours I wasted making nonesense noises come from that program. After Re-Birth there came Reason, an all in one electronic wonderland. But what about the good old days?

The good old days have come back thanks to some really cool hackers out there. Paul Slocum has been creating all sorts of cool stuff. He's in a band called Tree Wave and they make music with an old 286 computer, a Commodore 64, an Atari 2600 and a dot matrix printer. Yeah that's right. A dot matrix printer. Can't get much more old school than that! If you don't belive me go check out their gear on their website.

Paul was nice enough to create a Synthcart for the Atari which is a bit limited but still cool. There is one guy out there working on MIDI control for that cart. That would be nice! Paul has also created a Cynthcart for the Commodore 64. You can buy both of those over at atariage.

So that covers the basics but what about the NES you say? Well there is a company called wayfar that is creating a device called MIDINES. I bought the 1.0.2 version a while back and it's loads of fun. Basically it gives you MIDI control over the synth inside a Nintendo Entertainment System. Rad!

In my last post I described most of the applications I use. There were a lot of menu bar programs in the list. I dont think I can fit anymore programs into my menu bar at this point. Especially when some programs have a lot of menus then you lose some of the items there. I'll have to resist the urge to add more programs that use the menu bar as their home. Here is what it currently looks like.

From left to right: Remote Buddy, VirtueDesktops, Synergy, Butler, Menu Meters (Disk I/O, Network Traffic Transmited/Received, RAM Used/Free, Swap Pages In/Out and Total, Processor Usage for both cores), AirPort, Sound, Power, MenuCalendarClock, Tunnelblick, Spotlight

I don't really use Remote Buddy that often so I could probably not have that one start up at login time if need be. And the only thing I ever use the Butler menu for is fast user switching even though I only have one account on my MacBook Pro right now. It is handy on my PowerBook since Lucie is using it right now.

The most useful of all the menu bar additions is Menu Meters. Especially when developing with Zope and Plone. Sometimes you create some code that really stresses the machine and you'll see it right away in the menu bar. I also know that when iTunes goes to update podcasts that it will eat up all my processor power.

The first beta of Quills, the blogging software that powers this fine website, was released yesterday. Quite a few changes took place from the first alpha to the first beta. Reinout van Rees made the page templates sane and Plone friendly. Kudos to his efforts! Tim Hicks and Tom Lazar made the MetaWeblog API stuff work again among other things. A fine effort by all. Yours truly even contributed a little bit to the cleanup and I made the changelog, w00t!

I officialy retired from the Windoze world in October 2003 when I bought my first Mac, an Aluminum PowerBook G4. It's the best thing that ever happened to my computing world. One thing I've noticed in the OS X world is the amazing applications. They all intertwine to create a powerful workspace. One example is transferring files with iChat. Just drag the file or folder onto the text input and hit return. It's that easy! In my two plus years of Mac usage I've come across some really nice programs of which I'll share here.

• Butler -- Butler is a program that has many useful features. The two that I utilize most often are the pasteboard and the application launcher. The original reason I stumbled across this gem was the need for a pasteboard. I had tried several other apps like iClip and some other lame program but none compared to the pasteboard inside butler. You can assign keyboard shortcuts to anything inside butler so access to my pasteboard is a snap. And opening an application is as few as four keystrokes away! There are so many other things this program can do that I don't even use but it's nice to know they are there and that they are highly customizable.
• iTunes -- Obviously can't live without this one! With a music library of more than 14,000 songs iTunes makes everything easy to manage. Just the fact that it keeps everything organized on my hard drive based on id3 tags is enough for me.
• Synergy Classic -- Synergy is a program that interacts with iTunes. It gives me the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to many of the functions of iTunes I use a lot like rating, playing/stoping and showing the application. Synergy also provides menu bar icons to play/pause and rewind/fast-forward and a drop down menu. The other feature I really like about this program is the floating window that displays track information above all windows.
• Menu Meters -- This program gives me up to the second system information in my menu bar. It has four customizable system readings including hard disk activity, network activity, RAM and processor usage. This comes in handy when your system starts to freak out. You can quickly find the cause and remedy it.
• Witch -- Excellent little PreferencePane app that gives you keyboard shortcuts to show all application windows or all of one applications windows. Nice if you often have a billion windows open.
• Shrook -- This is a really good RSS and Atom news reader. I just recently forced myself to start subscribing to RSS feeds and it's really nice to be on top of the things you care about.
• Camino/Firefox -- I rarely use the built-in browser on the Mac, Safari. It just feels foreign to me and I don't know why. I constantly switch between Mozilla's Camino and Firefox. Camino is a cocoa version of the Mozilla rendering engine and it's super fast. It has just recently received more attention from add on developers. While Camino is fast it still doesn't have the extensibility of Firefox. If I am developing XHTML/CSS pages then I'll switch over to Firefox. But if I'm just perusing the web it's Camino all the way.
• Thunderbird -- Another Mozilla application that I use instead of the default Apple application. I like the interface of Apple Mail but it just doesn't understand the IMAP protocol enough for me to use it. So I have been using Thunderbird for quite some time now. It has some drawbacks but it's the best at handling IMAP that I've found.
• Colloquy -- This is an IRC chat program. It is still under quite a bit of development so it tends to be a bit buggy at times but it's still the best IRC client on OS X.
• svnX -- This app is a gui front-end for subversion. It has most of the features you'll need for everyday use and keeps getting better as new releases come out. The only big thing it is missing is the ability to edit svn properties. But still the best solution for a graphical subversion client.
• iTerm -- Another program I've been using for a long long time. iTerm is a tabbed terminal program. It's nice but could use a bit more TLC from the developers but overall a nice Terminal replacement.
• Acquisition -- The best p2p program on the Mac. Integrates nicely with iTunes so that when you download a song it adds it to iTunes automatically. These guys put out more releases of an application than I've ever seen so be prepared to download the latest quite often.
• Parallels -- An amazing virtualization program. This allows me to run Windoze XP, PC-BSD and any other OS I can get my hands on directly in OS X. It's a million times faster than Virtual PC ever was and works like a charm.
• SubEthaEdit -- SubEthaEdit is a collaborative editing program. It utilizes the Bonjour zero conf networking to allow you to edit a document with a group of people. Very nice for when you want a colleague to take a look at your code. The newest version has brought a slew of new features along with it making it more powerful than ever.
• VirtueDesktops -- This is an application that I've just stumbled across recently. It gives you the ability to have multiple desktops like you can on Linux and Unix window managers. Basically it's like having Fast User Switching for yourself. And there are four of you! Good looking piece of software for such an early version. I look forward to seeing how it evolves.
• Path Finder -- A Finder replacement that gives you a tabbed interface and a whole lot more. I've just started using this one so I'm not completely sold yet. But it is nice to have tabs in a Finder window.
• Remote Buddy -- If you have a Mac with a remote then you'll love this program. It gives you control of a lot more apps than the default Front Row apps. It also gives you a way to use the mouse and the keyboard via the remote.
• Transmit -- The best FTP program for the Mac.
• OmniGraffle -- Nice app to create UML diagrams, visual mockups and all sorts of other things.
• OmniOutliner -- Another app from the Omni Group that gives you the ability to make very detailed outlines and lists. I wish you could merge two copies of the same outline though. That would be boss.
• VLC -- A video player that supports most video formats. If it didn't work in Quicktime then try it in VLC. Chances are it will work better in VLC. I've recently had problems playing a few DVDs in DVD Player and had to revert to this fine program.
• Airfoil -- Admittedly I don't use this program very much but it is quite cool. It gives you the ability to stream any audio source from your computer to an AirPort Express.
• Digital Performer -- When I upgraded from AudioDesk (the default software that came with my FireWire audio interface) I faced a dilemma. It was either Digital Performer or Logic Pro. I like Apple apps but I was already familiar with the DP interface so I decided to upgrade to Digital Performer. And I think that was the correct decision. It's a very professional audio/MIDI workspace. It's a bit overwhelming sometimes but it's never failed me.
• Genesis Plus -- The best Genesis and Master System emulator for the Mac.
• Nestopia -- The best NES emulator for the Mac. Wish it had the network play like Nesticle used to though.
• Stella -- Best Atari emulator that I've found for the Mac. Head on over to Atariage and pick up some roms.
• Cocktail -- I love to tweak the settings on my computer. This app helps me do just that. It gives you an interface to set all sorts of hidden system options and more. My favorite is the verbose mode startup so I can see all the details when my Mac starts up.
• Delicious Library -- If you own a lot of DVDs, books, video games and music then this is the application for you. It gives you a nice interface to catalog all that you own. You can scan in all your collection using your iSight and the barcodes on the things you want to add. Makes quick work of cataloging your collection. And you can use some tools to export everything and create a website of your collection.
• Google Earth -- If you haven't used this app yet you really should. It allows you to explore the world via satellite. Probably one of the coolest programs I've ever used. And it's really freakin' addicting.
• Logorrhea -- This utility allows you to search your iChat logs. Spotlight can do it to but not as fast. And Chax has a log viewer built in but the search is weak. So I'm still using this fine app to get the low down.
• MenuCalendarClock iCal -- I'm really picky about how my menu clock shows me information. The default clock info just doesn't cut for me. So I found this program that allows me to display the date and time in any format I want. Genius! It also gives you a little calender sub menu when you click on it in the menu bar that can show upcoming events.
• Service Scrubber -- The OS X services are a nice little touch to the operating system. But I rarely use them because they are so cluttered with all kinds of useless functions that I never use. This program allows you to clean up that list. And it also allows you to redefine the keyboard shortcuts for all the services (some of which conflict with existing shortcuts). Use this in conjunction with Hot Service and you've got a usable services menu. Unfortunately Hot Service doesn't work with Intel Macs yet.
• EvoCam -- This is a web cam app that I find quite amusing. If you have an iSight or any other web cam for the Mac then you should try this out for kicks. You can set up this program to upload images to your web site, use it for surveillance and a myriad of other things.
• Xyle scope -- If you've used the DOM Inspector in Firefox then you have probably had that not so fresh feeling. It's written in XUL and the interface is a bit lacking. While Xyle Scope isn't as powerful as the DOM Inspector it does offer a much nicer interface and some usability enhancements that make me really want to love it. It's a really nice app for exploring the DOM but it still needs some love to surpass the Mozilla app.
• Paparazzi! -- Have you ever wanted to take a screenshot of a web page that was longer than your screen. Well now you can with this slick little app.
• Chax -- There are some things about iChat that are really annoying. Like having to click accept on every new IM, that's just silly. Chax puts an end to my misery by fixing almost every gripe I had about iChat.
• Tunnelblick -- If you use OpenVPN then this little menu bar app will be right up your alley. Easily turn VPN access on and off via the menu bar.
• Artis Screen Tools -- In particular the Artis Screen Ruler. This on screen ruler is the best in it's class. They have actually upgraded this software to a different product named xScope that I think is less user friendly and overly complicated. So if you need a simple on screen ruler then this is your best bet.

I probably missed something in there. But that's a pretty good list for now.

I'll tell you what, RSS is addictive. And the folks over at Tech eBlog are keeping me on the sauce. Just added their RSS to my reader yesterday and found this extraordinary machine:

The dodge lineup keeps getting better and better. The Magnum, the Charger rebirth and now the rebirth of the Challenger in '08. This car looks mean as hell! I think it may even look better than the original:

That new one is really slick. Let's hope I have enough money to buy it in 2008.

Lucie and I went in to Paris on the 21st for La Fête de la Musique. Our first stop before catching any music was Versailles. Unfortunately the place was undergoing a bit of maintenance as stated on the back of the Orientation Guide:

The public Establishment of Versailles has embarked upon extensive estoration works in the Palace and the gardens with the aim of both heritage conservation and enhancing the welcome accorded to visitors.

We apologise to visitors for any inconvenience that these works may cause.

Ok, apology accepted. As you walked in you could see the massive amount of work going on. The whole Royal Courtyard was torn up and it looked like they were doing some archaeological surveying. The outer facade was getting a face lift and the gardens were getting a hair cut. None of the fountains on the grounds were turned on which was a bit of a bummer. Inside the palace the hall of mirrors was being restored. We got to see half of it as the other half was still sealed up. That was the only work being done inside that we saw.

Next stop, Montparnasse and La Fete de la Musique. A day in France and some other european nations where there is music everywhere. In the streets, restaurants, metros and monuments. The biggest event was at La Grand Arche where a bunch of lame pop groups performed. We walked from Montparnasse to the Eiffel Tower and then to a bar nearby to watch the festivities at La Grand Arche. I think the US should participate in La Fête de la Musique too. Maybe we'll start in Fortville and work our way to the coasts!

On Thursday we went to the Louvre. We saw a lot of really cool sculptures, artifacts and paintings. This completed my viewing of the 'Axe Historique'; La Grand Arche de la Defense, L'Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde and Le Louvre. It's really cool inside the glass pyramid (Napoleon Hall) where all the entrances are to the exhibits. There are some really nice looking exhibit areas too. We didn't see everything but we saw most of the important stuff. We'll have to go back and catch all the stuff we missed some other time.

Yesterday I rebooted my MacBook Pro. That sounds simple enough. I have verbose mode on at all times thanks to Cocktail so I normally watch all the output of the startup. Hey, i'm a geek, that's what geeks do. So everything looks fine and then OS X launches the login window app. All I get is a blue screen. No login box. This scares the shit out of me.

So now what? Lucie had a similar problem with her old Titanium Powerbook recently so I was accustomed to using the single user mode. There is a really good resource about single user mode here. First order of business, run fsck. Everything checks out fine. No errors on the hard drive. So now what? Well I tried every remedy I could find online, move the netinfo db out of the way, move the login window prefs out of the way, move network settings out of the way. None of that was working. Then suddenly it dawned on me. It must have been that piece of crap program I just installed last night! That's right, I had installed a program called DoubleCommand to remap the enter key on my keyboard to fn so that I could forward delete easily on my computer. That timesaver sure backfired on me. So in the end I just had to remove DoubleCommand from /Library/StartupItems, problem solved.

The moral of the story: If you install a program that runs on startup check to make sure it works when you install it. Not a few days later.

One day at work the idea came to me out of the blue. Claytron! How perfect is that. I wish I would have thought of that one sooner. My name is Clayton and adding one letter transforms me into a robot. It even fits perfectly across my knuckles Blues Brothers style.

I just looked at the whois record for claytron.com and I registered it on April 11, 2005. That seems like a long long time ago. I promptly put up v1 of the site, this image:

A crudely drawn image of a robot made in Illustrator and poorly inverted to have a black background. I've learned a lot about Photoshop and Illustrator working on this site. The first design for this blog was horrific! It was a million gradients put together with these awful dark colors. You couldn't even read the text.

What you are looking at now was the second design I came up with. It's all based off of a super simple sketch I made which basically had the ink/blood splat and the line that you see coming out of it. The rest just sort of fell into place. Like the people at the footer of the page for instance. That happened purely by accident. I got an email from iStockPhoto telling me my credits were going to expire soon. I logged on and downloaded some pics and that one worked perfectly. The boxes on the right hand side were created in about ten minutes. I was just messing around in Photoshop and it really translated well to a portlet.

It's really nice to have this site live. I've been developing what you see here for about 6 months off and on (including the redesign). It's my first blog so we'll see how up to date it stays. I've always got things to rant and/or rave about so it shouldn't be too difficult.

PEACE

don't tell me how to live. why does everyone have to scape goat the smokers in this country. what about the fatties? how about firing people for being really fat instead of being a smoker. i'm sure the health risks are similar. what about the alcoholics? that can't be healthy either. i finally quit smoking again but i just don't understand the hatred towards people who smoke.