Category Archives: Technology

VLC vs. DVD Player.app

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Apple’s DVD Player.app has been broken for so long, I honestly can’t remember the last time I was pleased with it.

It’s very telling that if you go to Apple’s web site, you can’t find DVD Player there. If I was them, I’d be ashamed of it too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows Media Player worked better.

Since (at least) Snow Leopard version 10.6.4, and continuing now in 10.6.5, DVD Player has been impossible. Routinely it crashes before you get to the main disc menu, and I’ve probably sent in 20 crash reports.

But no more. I switched to VLC. And you know what? “It just worked.” It’s a shame Apple can’t make software like that any more.

Google Docs on Mobile Devices

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This is cool: you can now edit your Google docs on your mobile devices.

IMG_0046.PNG IMG_0047.PNG

I’ve become quite the fan of Google Docs. That whole cloud thing beats emailing a spreadsheet back and forth between me, the church secretary, and the clerk of session. To say nothing of automated offsite backups, and (now) mobile access. Also, the price is right.

irb with readline on mac using rvm – vi keystrokes

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One last whack at this problem. I just got email from a reader of this blog. (Well, technically, a reader of Google, which reads everything, so I shouldn’t feel too impressed with myself.) Anyway, he found my blog post and emailed to tell me the problem with my .inputrc, which was that I needed these two lines:

set editing-mode vi
set keymap vi

I already had the former, but it’s probably been 5 years since I learned how to write a .inputrc file, and I must have missed learning then about the latter. So I added it, and it works like a champ!

Black Friday – Mac Office 2011

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I’ve been trying to decide whether to upgrade my old copy of Office.

The problem with Office is that I only use Word. I’ve pretty much switched from Excel to Numbers, and Keynote is so good that it’s been years since I even thought about running Powerpoint.

So why upgrade? Well, I do use Word a great deal. And Word 2008 is so slow that I routinely type ahead of it (e.g., when applying different styles to two paragraphs) and get it confused. That’s when it’s running. But it’s so ridiculously slow to load, I always leave it running. Supposedly, it’s faster now, especially launching. (Opening .DOCX files is faster, but I never use those. I would, if the Antiword folks would support them, but I’m content to stick with .DOC until, well, forever.)

So should I upgrade? Probably. It’s not a slam dunk, but with these newly-announced Black Friday prices I can probably talk myself into it.

Google Refine

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A while ago, Google bought the company that made Freebase, a tool for making sense of messy data. Earlier this week, they released a 2.0 version of that software, now renamed Google Refine. Watch the videos to see what that does.

This looks pretty darned impressive. For great chunks of my career, I’ve been doing work like that the hard way. In the 1980s, I started my career by doing data reduction in Fortran, but quickly graduated to sed and awk, and in the 2000s I used perl and ruby. Of course, when I say “the hard way,” that is in hindsight. Each of those was an improvement over what I used before, and this looks like it could be a similar type of improvement.

(I still do some of that kind of work even now. It’s been a couple of years, but I probably spent at least a week, spread across too many evenings and weekends, massaging the church directory from a text format Word document into tabular spreadsheet data.)

Church Website – Decisions

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I’ve read the tea-leaves and it’s pretty clear to me that Apple has quietly abandoned its iWeb software. Okay. That’s fair; I pretty much abandoned it a long time ago, myself. Whenever I have to make changes to the church web site, I always cringe because it means I have to crank up iWeb and figure out again how it works.

So. That leaves me with the dilemma of how to replace it. On the one hand is the static website. I could throw one of those together using webgen. Perhaps with a few hand-coded extensions using erubis, haml, sass, and a smattering of kramdown.

The problems with that approach are that it would (a) take me forever to get right, especially if I made the error of using semantic markup instead of tables. Not to mention (b) inserting me into every part of the workflow, insuring nobody else could ever take over as webmaster.

Then, on the other hand, there’s a full-fledged CMS like Drupal or Joomla. The price is right, and other people have already done most of the work. I see that plenty of churches have gone this route.

The problem with a CMS is that–wow!–it’s not like setting up a WordPress blog. It’s more like setting up a couple of dozen…or maybe a few hundred. It’s like landing a jet on the Hudson River, or charting out the chronology of the End Times: I know there are people who do that, but I’m not sure I could ever be one of them.

Chuck Music

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New music is one of the unexpected benefits of having suddenly discovered the awesomeness that is the TV show Chuck.

I hardly listen to the radio, and the radio stations up in the high desert are why. We don’t even get AM radio up here. There’s not much on the FM side either: a handful of religious stations, only one of which has any music to speak of; a country-and-western station, which I don’t listen to; and a classic rock station down in Palm Springs, whose music I’ve known about these last 25-30 years. That leaves KCDZ 107, the only truly local station up here. And, sadly, I don’t care for the music it plays. At all. (Sorry.)

But Chuck has all kinds of music, and I’ve only heard some of it. So, for example: “Now We Can See,” by the Thermals? Great song, and an awesome choice for the scene in “Chuck vs. The Ring” where Chuck and Casey tell Emmett they’ve quit.

Or “Bye, Bye, Bye,” by Plants and Animals? Again, an excellent song, and a perfect for the Parisian ending of “Chuck vs. The Other Guy.” (In part because it foreshadows the following episode.)

Or, from “Chuck vs. the Tooth,” how about — content advisory! — “Right Round,” by Flo Rida? (That link is probably NSFW, by the way.) There were a whole bunch of versions on Amazon (including about a dozen Karaoke treatments) so I got the one that wasn’t marked “explicit lyrics.” Well. It makes me wonder what they could do to make the lyrics any more explicit. It’s a good tune, though.

But there are also gems like “Mr. Roboto.” Kidding. I never liked the version by Styx, to be honest. But this cover version by Jeffster is awesome.