Family Business

We took a quick trip across the border into Canada for Father's Day weekend.

I’ve been known to spout off “rules” such as the following:

Don’t expect a tool to be any good at something it wasn’t designed to do.

(That is actually one of my favorites.) In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I’m moving things around on my blog. Techy stuff has been moved to WordPress. Vox has a nice feature to limit access to posts/comments to family, so family-only stuff will be found there.

I’m using Tumblr to aggregate everything into one “home page” of sorts. Also, quick/fun posts will be hosted there, since they make it so easy to dash off something. If you're subscribed to my RSS feed, please subscribe to this feed instead.

Thanks to John Gruber for alerting me to the existence of Tumblr.

I recommend you make a trip out there as soon as you can.

Grapes from Unti

If you find yourself writing text that you’ll eventually post to the web, hopefully you’ve heard of text-to-HTML translators like Textile and Markdown. These tools take plain text formatted with a very light syntax of special characters that can generate formatting like bold text, bulleted lists, and so forth.

I am a big fan of Textile and use it frequently when I set out to write something new that I plan to post to the web (like this post). I’m coming around to see the value in Markdown, however, because it does a better job of taking existing text and translating it to HTML without any manual cleanup. It works especially well when copy-pasting text in e-mail that you want to post online.

Both of these are very useful when writing web applications, since they allow you to convert plain text input from the user into something formatted when displayed in the browser. I’ve used them both from within Ruby scripts, but unfortunately there seems to be an issue with the Ruby gem port of Markdown (BlueCloth). The standard gem install does not seem to do what’s necessary to allow you to use BlueCloth in your own apps or from the command line. (RedCloth doesn’t have this problem.)

So, here’s what I did to get around it…first, install the gem.

sudo gem install bluecloth

If you hit an error on that step, follow this tutorial for installing Ruby on your Mac. Then, run the BlueCloth installer.

sudo ruby /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/BlueCloth-1.0.0/install.rb

At this point you should be able to use BlueCloth from within your own Ruby scripts. But let’s take it a step further and enable the bluecloth command line app.

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/BlueCloth-1.0.0/bin/bluecloth

At this point it’s runnable, but it still needs to be added to your PATH. Add the following line to your .bash_login file:

export PATH="/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/BlueCloth-1.0.0/bin:$PATH"

Woo hoo! You can now use BlueCloth in your Ruby apps and call bluecloth directly on the command line.

Note: According to the documentation, RedCloth is supposed to be capable of rendering Markdown-formatted text via additional options. I could not get this to work, and from what I have read not all of the Markdown syntax is supported anyway.

I’ve been doing some work with Textpattern lately, and it’s a really nice CMS for simple web sites. It’s kind of like Ruby on Rails in that 90% of the things you’d commonly do are built in, allowing you to focus on what makes your site unique.

One small thing it doesn’t have (out of the box) is a way to display the search term used on a search results page. We’re all used to the way Google displays the “Results 1 – 10 of about 2,000,000 for your search term here” near the top of the page. Even if the total number of results aren’t listed, it’s nice to know what you’ve searched for.

Fortunately, this is pretty easy to accomplish, since the built in search function puts the search term in the query string. Knowing that, the txp:page_url tag can be used to access the correct parameter:

<p>Search results for <strong><txp:page_url type="q" /></strong></p>

It’s just that simple. Happy searching!

The October 17, 2007 issue of PC Magazine asks the question:

Is Tech Support Getting Worse?

Maybe. Probably. Perhaps. But I don't care. And I don't think you should either.

When purchasing an item, any item, please buy the product designed such that you don't need to call someone else and ask for their help to use it. Trust me, you will be much happier in the long run.

Tech support is like health care...the best long term solution is to change your ways and need less of it.

I can't decide if this is ridiculous or completely awesome.

I'm still on the fence.

The Caps Lock key is completely useless. Actually, it's worse than useless because when you accidentally enable it  you then need to fix whatever you "meant" to type. Do yourself a favor and put something of value in its place.

In Mac OS X, go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse, and then click Modifier Keys in the lower left side of the screen. From there, you can turn the Caps Lock key into something sensible, like another Command key.

In Windows, you will need to download a piece of software called KeyTweak to do this. (This is because Windows is a terrible piece of software.) My choice in this case is to make the Caps Lock key another Control key.

You should find it easier to copy/paste after changing this setting. Additionally, you'll be less likely to smash your computer with a hatchet due to Caps Lock induced rage.

It was time…I pulled the trigger and got a new Mac. To be more specific, I purchased a refurbished MacBook Pro, one of the newer 15” models with the 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. Overall, I am quite happy.

Interestingly, Apple has tweaked the initial out-of-box experience somewhat since I bought my last Mac.

1. The first time you boot the machine, you are treated to a cute welcome video. This is somewhat like the animation you see when you reboot your TiVo.
2. One of the initial setup steps is to choose from the autodetected wireless networks. Nice.
3. If you’ve ever bought anything from iTunes, the computer knows your name, etc. after you supply that username/password.
4. You are prompted to take a picture that represents “you” with the built-in iSight.
5. OS X immediately downloads any relevant software updates. There are about 10 items to download, instead of the 80+ you’d see in Windows.

It just gets better and better.