Author Archives: bluedepth

Drafts Changes Workflow

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The more I use the Drafts app for my iPad and iPhone the more I love it and the more I want to use it. It’s actually changed the workflow for my “Post-a-Day” WordPress blogging as well as my regular blogging in general. What I used to do was copy the Post-a-Day prompt emails over to my WordPress blog and set the post type to Drafts and let them sit there. I’ve never been a huge fan of the editor built-in to WordPress, but copying the emails to Drafts and storing them there, syncing them to Simperium which then synchronizes them across all my devices that have Drafts loaded on them, which is now just my iPhone.

The app itself has so many neat features, being able to store multiple drafts and have them swipe-accessible from the left makes switching files a breeze and then when the post is done and ready to be published I can swipe from the right and select as many services as I want to send my drafts off to. It’s the perfect promontory to launch Day One, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress. Generally speaking, the drafts themselves almost always follow a certain path, first to Day One then to WordPress because then WordPress sends links to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr on my behalf with the publicize feature. But sometimes I write things that don’t go to my blog, in that case I can send to Day One and Facebook. I have configured the apps representation in Facebook to conform to my “Sharing” security group, so even if I tap the Facebook option I don’t have to worry about my private sharing thoughts leaking out where they don’t belong.

The only thing (yes, there is one of these for every user) that I would really love is a Drafts app for Mac OSX. That would let me hack away on Drafts entries on my iMac without having to clear off workplace desktop space to set up my iPad. I think it’ll just be a matter of time before we see those options start to become available. I would pay $15 for an app like that without even batting an eye.

PAD 1/21/2013 – Hindsight is 20/20

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“When you were 16, what did you think your life would look like? Does it look like that? Is that a good thing?”

When I was 16 I didn’t really have any clue what I would be doing for the rest of my life. I wasn’t really thinking about the future at that point. There were more important things, like school and sleeping. Honestly, sleeping. When I was a teenager I found myself really craving a lot of extra sleep, so much so I would pass out after school, wake up for dinner, and pad back to sleep. It wasn’t until years later did we find out that for a lot of kids in that age range, that they really don’t get a lot of the sleep they really need. I was a little science experiment right there.

I knew on some level that what I wanted had more to do with computers as I was running an old-style BBS and was exploring social media even before social media was a term that was coined. The technology back then, when I was 16 wasn’t really all that great – at least not compared to now. Now there are so much better things available to everyone, a lot less bulky and work without surprise failures.

So I guess what I had in mind, what little mind I had, did come true. Was it a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy or was I destined to end up where I am now? These are things that I’ve thought about on and off again for a while. I’ve written before about how I wouldn’t change anything about my past because that would make my current life a lie. I don’t really think time travel will ever be possible, and I’m thankful for it. To go back in time and change something would cheat you out of learning those things that you needed to learn. If you travelled back in time, I bet anything your life would fall apart.

Wether or not it is a good thing is only partially part of the deal. It is what it is. The biggest thing I think that anyone can do really is to make the best of what they have. If it’s not much, do your best and be happy with that. It’s just another cheat to set some artificial conditions on your happiness because how many people actually get there? It’s far better for you to establish that you are happy now. Instead of pursuing happiness, declare that you have it. It makes chasing it far easier.

Reset Button

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Every once in a great while I will take one 5mg dose of Melatonin right before bedtime. I like to think of it as an occasional little helper that helps me crash hard for sleep. It doesn’t get in the way of dreaming for me and is always feel super refreshed and recharged afterwards. Maybe because I got eight and half solid hours of sleep might have something to do with it. If you have problems getting to sleep and staying asleep, skip Lunesta, Ambien, or Intermezzo and instead try one little pill of Melatonin.

WordPress Jetpack and Post By Email

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Several days ago, when I had all that trouble working with Jetpack for my WordPress.org blog I couldn’t get stats to work. I sent a support ticket to the developer of Jetpack and it turned out that it was a problem with my web host, iPage. Once they fixed the problem on their side, the stats worked again. There was another problem, one that hasn’t worked for a very long time and I gave up hope almost. There is a feature of Jetpack called “Post By Email” and this feature should work, but never has. I once again opened a support ticket with the developer of Jetpack and told them what was wrong.

Late last night I got an email from a WordPress.org Forum [Post](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/jetpack-post-by-email?replies=13#post-3952121) that I’ve been commenting on stating that the issue is solved if you upgrade your installation of PHP to 5.3 on your web host. So I logged into iPage, found the PHP settings, pushed them to 5.3 and then tried again. My test post worked like a charm!

So much so that I am sending this post via email. It should arrive in moments and then I’ll publish it. Hooray! I love a fix. What a great way to start the day!

Friday Flashback – March 8th

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2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.

For the want of pgrep on Mac OSX

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I’ve got an issue at work, of course. I’ve got a Mac OSX xServer that has grown crotchety and so I’ve gotten to making things better by using killall on various running processes in order to “clean up the mess”. This is all fine and good and these processes respawn and the world goes back to normal and everything is fine, however I also want to renice this pesky command and give it a lower priority. While killall can do a search by name, renice requires a pid. The way you get pids is to run the ‘ps’ command, but this gives you a big pile of data and really all you want is just the pid itself, so you can pass that to renice.

So here’s how to get your cake and eat it too on Mac OSX Leopard Server:

1) First, change your shell – the default for root is /bin/sh, do this by issuing this command:

chsh -s /bin/bash root

2) Then you’ll need to give bash a profile, create a new file call it .bash_profile and fill it with this text:

[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc

3) Next you’ll need to fill out that .bashrc because that contains the function you need to replicate pgrep:

pgrep() for arg; do ps aux|grep $1|grep -v grep|awk '{print $2}';done;

4) Log out and log back in and you’ll end up in bash, not sh, and you’ll have a new command at your disposal, pgrep. You can then use pgrep CommandName and it’ll spit out the pid related to what you are after.

5) Then you can use this new function with renice this way:

renice 20 `pgrep CommandName`

One thing to note here is that the ` character is the backtick character. You’ll find this hiding out in the upper left corner of your keyboard, it’s the unshifted tilde button.

FBackup: Free Is Good

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At work I was asked to put together a server on the cheap which I’m fine with as long as everyone understands that doing so has some implicated risk. A server cast on a desktop machine is a risky proposition. You don’t have power support from redundant power supplies, you don’t have RAID which can protect you from hard drive failure, and the machine is not designed to be a very robust server in any stretch of the imagination – it just lacks the processing and RAM that would really answer the need strongly. However, once I covered those risks, everyone was still on-board with me moving forward. I rolled a server out, used an Operating System that would be best to not speak about and set up the software.

Being a part of the technology from the great beast, of course it didn’t work well at first. There were hidden requirements, annoying requirements. Requirements with “dots” in their name. Once I figured out the how and got the thing running I took it down from the lab place I was working on it in and moved it to its permanent home in our machine room. From the point of deployment which was a few days ago I’ve had a niggling worry that the thing is going to fail, as any machine could when it relies on just one hard drive. I needed a backup solution.

The built-in backup solution in the “product” that I was “using” as an “operating system” was just not going to work. I needed something that would work well and be free above all else. I went to the great sage and eminent junkie Google and eventually ran across FBackup. It’s not glorious, it’s not complicated, but it is exactly what I was looking for. So now with that software installed, and it’s quite good in fact for the “operating system” I was using I don’t have to worry so much about that “server” going down. If it does, eh, who cares, at least the data will be safe. For those that wonder where I put my backups, I have a NAS, a handy dandy DroboNAS that isn’t the fastest tool in the shed, but at 16TB, it certainly has a lot of space and it’s RAID means that I don’t have to worry so much about hardware failure with that box.

So, hooray for FBackup. It’s free, and while I can’t spare any change for it, what I can do is recommend it. If you are looking for something handy and you can’t get your hands on a native installation of ‘tar’ like you should be using, this is quite good. It’s not Backup Exec of course, but then, I would rather chew a lightbulb than even hear the words “Backup Exec” spoken aloud.

Goodbye Carl

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Carl Levin is not going to run for office in 2014. For the guy that pushed NDAA (AKA American Citizens as Enemy Combatants) and said nothing in 2000 when all it took to prevent George W. Bush from being president was one single senator… Goodbye Carl. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!

Now we can think about getting a real honest democrat in that seat. NDAA. *cough*

FitBit Part Two

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I have returned my poor dead fitbit back to best buy and used my 2-year warranty. They returned the unit, put up a $100 gift card then tore up the old 2-year contract because its one-use. Then I picked out a new FitBit One (new and nicer) and they applied the gift card and then all I had to do was pay for the pro-rated new 2-year protection plan. Total spent? $3.83. I’m good with that. Yay!

FitBit

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My FitBit failed yesterday. The poor thing no longer wants to work and when I plugged it into the charging base it just started to flicker with half the display actually showing. It was just another nail in the coffin that was yesterday and I was only half-expecting FitBit to honor their warranty because I doubted I had my receipt.

As it turns out, I started rolling up my receipts and storing them in a little collection box in my kitchen. I opened the drawer last night and rooted around for it, not expecting to find it. Not only did I find it, but I also discovered to my chagrin that when I purchased the FitBit I also purchased the “Performance Guarantee” with Best Buy for $15, which covers the device for two years and expires on 8/28/2014. So not only do I not have to muck about with the warranty procedure and wait for shipping and processing, but I can get a new unit as soon as I can get myself down to Best Buy.

Now I know what I’m doing for lunch. 🙂