Testing something in Ecto, and to bring you this story.
Dean comes back from his stuff at Engineering Expo about a week or two ago to present me with these:
“Josh, I have brought you the balls of Microsoft.”
Cute. That is all.
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Day… What? Yeah, I'm Three Days Behind
Ugh. So it has been three days. I’m missing Days 5, 6, and 7. I already had my topics set…. but I never really followed through.
This is because I’m seeing that time is better spent on doing, rather than writing on doing. A healthy mix of experimentation as well as documentation is necessary, but I’m becoming more tied down to this blog as if is my job to report daily.
Who do I have to blame? Me. It’s this cycle of striving to do something, but realizing that my passion wasn’t good enough. So let’s post something else.
TextMate: Desktop Blogging Software for the Mac (vs Ecto and MarsEdit)
In an effort to streamline the blogging process, I’ve been looking at some alternatives to my current usage of TextMate. I hope by doing this that it’ll save a lot of time and reduce the friction required to get a post up here.
Instead of using the web interface provided by WordPress, I’ve been using TextMate as my main blog editor (blogged about it here). I’m pretty sure a whole lot of you developer kinds have heard about TextMate and the ridiculous extensibility of the bundles, but it seems as though the Blogging bundle has been gone largely unmaintained for some time. (Maybe a year or so, but I may not be looking hard enough. I even looked through the public list archives, but couldn’t find anything… If anyone knows of the status of this project, let me know.)
Previous Workflow
When I get the desire to write, this is normally how it goes:
- Open up a new blog page using shortcut I crafted (ctrl + opt + cmd + n)
- Fill out the text for “Title: “
- Write the post
- Create keyword field (“keyw” + tab), fill out keywords
- Create category field (“cat” + tab), wait for server, select which blog I want, select the blog AGAIN in a second dialog box(for some reason, this never got fixed)
Then I’d fill out the title, and start writing. After I was done, I would type “keyw” + tab for the keyword field, then type my keywords, cmd + opt + ctrl + p for preview, and post using ctrl + cmd + p to post online.
Problems With This Workflow
- Timezone Bug: Talked about this before. I don’t know if this is ever going to be fixed, where if you reupdate an old post, you will continuously subtract or add the difference from your time zone and the GMT. For example, if I fetched this post and reposted it, it would be 5 hours behind. I didn’t realize this for a long while until I started posting in intervals faster than 5 hours when I noticed that certain posts were written earlier than I had thought.
- Double Dialog Boxes: There’s also a strange bug requiring a blog to be selected twice on the drop down menu before looking up categories or posting to the blog. If you’ve got multiple blogs, this is just a little annoying.
- No live preview
- Image Handling: It’s cool that you can tell it to upload to your blog, but there’s no image manipulation… nor is there a way to get some Flickr integration.
- File Creation And Saves: The file that you create while posting should have the filename of the post title. If there is no title, then ask them with a dialog box. (I love this feature in MarsEdit and Ecto. I don’t have to worry about making up crazy permutations of “asdf” and numbers.)
Features That I Hope To Keep
- Linking: Creating links from the clipboard (ctrl + shift + L) and from the top Google search (ctrl + cmd + shift + L) is a feature I don’t want to let go.
- Snippets: There’s something to be said about TextMate’s ability to do so much with so little. The ability to type a few characters and hit tab to create a data field is ridiculously handy.
And so, I have started to look at Ecto and MarsEdit, to see if I can become a little faster. But of course, I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of TextMate for everything else. So many lovely shortcut keys… the delicious snippets… everything, but for this specific domain of blogging.
Delayed Ion Drum Rockers From Amazon
I was sad to find out that my order of the sweet Rock Band drum set has been delayed this morning. /cry.
They were supposed to get here today, but it looks like their estimation has moved to the 23rd.
This really puts a damper on my weekend rocking plans. I guess it just means I have to go rock out somewhere else. Through sweet code.
Face-melting solo? Check.
Small posts feel so weird. It’s like in that land between Twitterville and Essaytropolis. It’s like I’m on the highway, with a blown tire, not knowing if you walk one way or the other.
EDIT: Looks like there is some discrepancy as to how Amazon figures out the priority for shipping these things. I ordered mine on the 20th of August, and by the looks of it, no one else on the Rock Band forum had ordered these before me… but yet, these people are getting it earlier. Called Amazon, and they’ll be getting stuff in stock on Friday. This is still garbage though. I should call again and ask for a discount.
Day 4 – Blogging
It’s so amazing to have this connective tissue called the Internet between like-minded people. I am constantly amazed at the organic growth of this thing.
I feel amazingly privileged to have some developers visit the site and comment on my comments on their software. I just hope to have others do the same with the software that I hope to write one day.
This got me to thinking about blogging the process of The World’s Next Best Thing (TWNBT). Basically, until I come up with a project to pursue after this week, I’m going to be referring to it in this tongue-in-cheek manner. Back to the point.
Keeping things in the public has its purpose. I just need to learn to not keeping things in the open for the sake of it being in the open. You see, I follow standards and structures that I believe in blindly quite often. Only recently, I’ve started to question some of the core things about life, let alone TWNBT. Through facing these questions I feel like I’m learning a boatload of lessons.
Lessons, Lessons, Lessons.
But really, what a lessons without actually applying them? They just become another list of things, another cause of listlessness in my life.
I feel like blogging helps me here. I feel like when I write something down for the world to freely access, including me, I feel like I’m leaving something behind. I feel like the lesson becomes a part of me in some meta-electronic/spiritual way.
And this is why I must continue to blog. But at the same time…
Actually DO SOMETHING.
That’s the key. Application.
Oh, yes, that was a pun. I made a funny.
Rock Band 2 Is Going To Eat Me Alive
Harmonix, you brilliant purveyor of delicious time “occupying” goodness.
You guessed it, it came. Even though I read all these horror stories about Amazon being bad on game pre-orders, I knew my Store In The Clouds would provide.
I’ve been able to tear myself from this amazing gaming development feat to bring you this quick review of the whole shebang.
- While I had owned and played through the Wii version of the game, I don’t really have a good reference point to compare it with its first revision, since the Wii dropped a lot of features. The lack of DLC as well as character creation/editing might have really angered some Wii owners, but it didn’t mind me.
- DLC: I was fine with getting them in disc form. Heck, I could just rent them using Gamefly anyway. And besides, I love sightreading songs: It gives me quite the rush. (I guess I could have somehow threw in some pun with Rush, but I refrained.)
- Character Creation: Funner than I imagined. I just like to play the songs, but being able to play dress up… but most importantly the guitars. I might find this more fun because I’m currently in the market for my first electric guitar, though.
- The UI is slick. I love the revamped song selection screen. I might estimate that you can now see twice as many songs or more, with even more information on difficulty of the song across all instruments. Having the album art also helps to identify the song. If I feel nerdy enough, I’ll tear through this UI.
- HOPOs (Hammer On’s and Pull Off’s) seem much more responsive than Rock Band “1″. But I feel this way about Guitar Hero 3′s ease of HOPOing vs GH1 and GH2′s near impossibility of it. I kinda prefer more ridiculous fretboarding than strumming: Makes me feel more like a rock star.
- Song Selection: I like. I feel like there were more contemporary songs that I knew in RB2 than RB1. And with DLC, I’ll be able to pick and choose. As always, a couple songs will piss me off, but that’s expected.
- Nintpicking, do you actually gain a tiny tiny bit of Overdrive as you whammy through a sustained white note while already being in Overdrive?? I don’t think this was the case in Rock Band 1, where your Overdrive bar would not increase or decrease.
Okay, that’s that. I hope to not touch this game until my drums arrive. I haven’t said a word about playing Rock Band 1, though… time to go unlock some Achievements.
What An Achievement Whore.
I know. And I just found out today Stack Overflow has badges, rewarding users for active usage of the system. So very interesting. Feels a little gimmicky, but hey, still a cool idea. Does anyone know if Atwood and Spolsky explained the reasoning behind this feature on their podcast? Can someone point me to it?
Okay, Back To The Verk Verk.
Day 3: Regroup
After a normal sleep cycle, I returned to my computer to start cracking.
Of course, life threw its usual curveballs. After church, I had realized that my printer was being wonky. I also realized that NewEgg’s return policy on broken items sucks (you have to pay for shipping for sending it back), which makes me not want to order from them ever again unless it’s something like an.. xbox live 12+1 month card. (Which I didn’t get from them, because buy.com has it better. DO IT.) I’m probably continue to order from Amazon… I love everything about this company, from Prime down to its amazing return policy.
That took a while, then I had a couple hours of fun on the guitar as well as the 360. Eh, it was bound to happen.
Productivity
Then I buckled down. I realized all the physical needs of a human being, including sleeping and eating, really gets in the way of doing some productive work. I worked on and am still working on organizing all the web “properties” I have. I’m talking email addresses to AIM screen names to… you guessed it, domain names. Yesterday night, I did something I should have done a while back.
I finally bought joshk.im. Currently, I’m beta testing something called SweetCron, which is perfect for the purpose of that site. I have this strange feeling this might be a project I look forward to committing some changes to. Yes, even though it’s PHP… but it’s so well written! So pretty! I’ve never seen CodeIgniter code before, and it looks very very clean. I’m only used to seeing the insanity that is Symfony. It might just be that the guy who’s writing this thing, Yong Fook, is quite good. It was interesting to find out that SweetCron was going open source just as I found his blog a couple months ago. I really do hope for great things, if he’s reading this.
But alas, I may do something else with my newly acquired shiny domain name. I’m fresh out of ideas at this point, but I really wanted it to be a site for just that.
So What’s The Next Project?
I’m still figuring this out. I hope to have a list of my requirements for this project. Here’s a preliminary list:
- Must not depend on advertising as the main stream of revenue
- Basically comes down to freemiums or charge per use.
- Must use Rails (if I’m doing a web project)
- This is to learn Rails, btw… I’m not saying Rails is the end all for web projects.
- Must be doable by “myself”
- I’m sure I’ll be hitting up people left and right for help, but largely, it has to be my own.
- It could be a source of pride, but I need to make sure I can do something on my own.
- Must not neglect health of body and mind
- This is like… uber important. Must maintain some kind of healthy habits.
- Must blog daily progress reports, like this one
- Accountability: So people can call me out. Important thing is to stay truthful.
- You’re going to see lots of FAIL on this blog starting from… before this blog started to the day I die. I hope to see more WINs in the days to come, though.
- Maybe, possibly, someone else is trying to do something like I’m doing. Maybe by doing this, I can find someone else who’s trying to do it his or her own way.
Sidepoint: Blogging Schedule
So I’m looking back on February 2008′s posts, and it seems like I stopped blogging like a madman after I found Twitter. Then this blog turned into, for lack of a better phrase, a Twitter archive. But before then, when I actually contributed to the world with some meaningful posts on the web… ugh… 2.0 market and on life in general, I would have multiple posts in various stages of completion.
I’m back at that stage. I have screenshots and halfway finished posts all over the place. I may need to slow down a bit, but I feel so energized.
I want to have these daily blog entries about the status of the “project”, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be doing some other random updates along the way. I have a feeling something about Rock Band 2 is going to get posted. Effing Braid needs to get a good review also. So many lovely post ideas…
Completely Random
Man, what the heck did I do with all this time I’m using up for the blog? I really have no idea. Must have been watching and playing things… Hmm. If I could have tracked all that lost time… but really, what’s the point then? What’s the point of being meta with things that you can’t change if you’ve already changed and are looking back?
Ah, the meta-life post. [Creates a new draft] I’ve deleted and rewritten this post so many times, physically, electronically, and mentally. ARGH.
CHANGELOG
Removed Twitter Archive Posts From Main Page. I felt like it was breaking the flow for people who were actually visiting, and not using a feed reader.
I know, this is a WIN for everyone who hates it so much. But you know what… I have something even more sinister down the line.
Posted using Ecto 3.
Sidenote: I Haven't Felt This Way Since Freshman Year Of College
The title of this post could have been easily Twittered, but I think I might need a couple hundred more characters.
Back in those days, I didn’t care about the hours of sleep I lost, or the retarded Physics classes I skipped. I remember having an incredible desire to put together what was called the “JKmain Journals”.
Now, it could be that I’m looking back on this event with nostalgia, but I truly believe that I haven’t really “innovated” since then in the arena of web applications. More or less, it’s been small improvements on past code or design. Until the day I die, I’ll probably attribute “Journals” as my first true web application project.
Although there was barely any security (heck, I remember using some other project for this since I didn’t want to do it, and there was a huge vulnerability with a bit of domain hacking, which wasn’t the other project’s fault… subdomains…), I learned a lot.
Now that I’m re-embarking on this journey, it’s getting a little trippy. It might be the lack of sleep and abundance of caffeine. Or, it might be that I’m finally feeling like I’m doing something worthwhile again.
Let’s hope that this fire doesn’t die down too quickly. While I believe I haven’t done anything, I believe I have. Having this mixture of states bothers the extremist in me.
I really should go to bed before I do more damage.
Day 1 & 2 Of Thirty: Introduction
This post’s written with good ol’ TextMate. I’m still working on that mac desktop blogging software review post, now that I’ve added Blogo into the mix.
Deadline: 10.10.08
I’ve decided to give myself 30 days. Thirty days to do something that I deem worthwhile. And hopefully, I won’t have some grand vision like I do with so many of my freaking projects: I hope to just do something small. Really, the goal is to have that something small turn into something big.
Of course, I’ve given myself deadlines many many times. I can already recall the cutesy number games I play with dates of the calendar year. This time, I hope that there’s an added outcome of something awesome, rather than just a list of lessons to be learned on what not to do.
The Goal
The goal is to create a service/product. A useful and useable service/product that can be somehow used to fulfill someone’s need in exchange for money. I want to experience the entire gamut of development, from planning to delivery, from a first person perspective.
It could be a web app. It could be a desktop app. It could be a blog. Heck, it could even be something that doesn’t involve computers. But I know, it’s gotta be something creative. After 30 days, I want to be able to say: Wow, that was time well spent.
Of course, this requires the definition of what time well spent is. I guess all the past time planning all those past web applications were time well spent. It’s just that there wasn’t any tangible outcome.
So Now What?
Well, I’m hoping to keep track of each day’s worth of work for HanMeta in post form. These two days, I’ve been writing up some fresh content for the Josh Kim dot Org blog, but I’ve been thinking about creating a more tech focused blog.
Really, the next couple of days are going to include reflections as well as planning. I’m hoping for about a week of planning, followed by two weeks of implementation, followed by a week of testing, give or take.
There are just too many ways I could use up the next 30 days, but I just need to find out what’s the most opportune way to do so.
Maybe I’ll upload the project map that I’ve been holding in my head for so long… or just fabricate a list of sorts.