(*web journal of Bill Williams)
Jesus freak. Neohippie. Mac geek. Florida native exiled in Fargo, North Dakota. Can I have more coffee please?
Want to get in touch? My email is my first name at this domain, and I'm on Twitter as @flpatriot.
Found My iPod touch
Signed up for MobileMe today. I'm *totally* not abusing Find My iPhone.
Totally am not.Remembering what to work on next
I’ve always had a hard time remembering what I need to work on when I get back from taking a break. So, I’m trying a new approach:
Let’s see how well it works out.
via tweetie
Safari autocomplete for Wikipædia
I’m not entirely sure what this Safari autocomplete for http://en.wikpedia.org/wiki/ says about me:
via tweetie
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
Google Maps seems to think there’s a highway directly from these apartments to my church back home:
via tweetie
Working around myself
My greatest strength as a programmer is also my greatest weakness: I love learning. This is great when I have to figure out the complex inner parts of an NSOutlineView in source list mode and *want* to do so, but not so much when apartments in the latest city of whimsy or Apple releases something shiny and new.
I need to find a way to work around myself; to make implementing complex issues as fun as researching them (ha). Part of the problem is process, or so I like to tell myself. If only I had a better version control system, or it were more integrated, or my windows had tabs, or I had a faster computer… if only, if only. Of course process is important — I don’t know what I’d do without my excellent and trustworthy task manager — but there will always be shiny new things to distract, and the more time I spend looking at them, the less money I have to spend on them. Yet in all this, I find myself fighting over seemingly obvious things to do no matter how much work has been done, like adjourn for meals at semi-decent times or take walks. The meaningful gives way to the medial, and I find myself lying awake at night wondering what precisely I’ve accomplished. How do you overcome distraction while continuing to take care of basic needs like food and sleep?How to fix Amtrak
Dear Amtrak: We want to like you, but your website sucks. Your "iPhone app" sucks. Your fares suck too, but that's another story.
Your website looks like it hasn't been touched since 2003 and was designed by the cheapest morons you could find. Don't tell me "I can use a train to get from A to B instead of an [airplane | car | unicycle]" — I'm on your site, I already know that. Don't just tell me I can, tell me why I want to — no dealing with traffic or airport security, big comfortable seats, free wireless internet, food that doesn't taste like it's from a hospital, in-car entertainment by unemployed car salesman — oh, by the way, make sure you actually have all those too. Tell me about how I can see America from the window of a train — from the prairies to the coast to the desert. Tell me what makes each route special — like how the Acela Express was the first high-speed train in North America, or the history of the Coast Starlight, or how the final battle of the Canadian invasion was fought just 400 metres north of part of the Empire Builder. Remind me of how taking the train is a very American thing to do. Make it ridiculously easy for me to decide I want to take the train, RIGHT NOW, to another city. Don't require fifteen billion different forms, either — for crying out loud, even the airlines do this better than you. I shouldn't have to know which station near Boston to choose if I can only use one of them to get there from here anyway. Let me print my ticket – or save it to my iPhone – and use that to board, today. Speaking of which, I should be able to do all this from a native iPhone app. After you do all this, it'd help if your train service was good too. It doesn't have to be as good as European train service, just good enough to make you a practical alternative to a six-hour drive or three-hour plane ride. That means decent food, spacious seats, room to walk around, and free internet access. If anybody at Amtrak happens to read this… make it happen. Make me proud to be a train-riding American.Backup
I have a confession to make: I do not currently have a backup system. The main reason for this is probably coming from worlds where junk accumulates rapidly (Windows) and everything lives online anyway (the cloud). But it's not acceptable in my current life as a novice Mac developer. Today, I will back up my files.
The question now becomes, “how?”, but as it turns out, this is highly dependent on how one works. Currently I'm desk-bound, with a Mac mini as my primary/only computer, but I'd like to be using a MacBook Air in the near future, with never working at a conventional desk again being something of a goal. As such, things that would work well now, like an external hard drive directly connected to my computer, won't in the near future. As a minimalist, I'm not a big fan of disk clones, as the cruft that accumulates inside a system is carried from one disk to the next.
What I really want is to make sure my data is just a sync away from being back on my machine. Fortunately, there are some useful tools that make this quite easy.
- GitHub: almost definitely the best code sharing site in existence. Push changes when a connection is available, and everything will always be a pull away. The complete replication of data on both ends is definitely desirable from a reliability standpoint.
- MobileMe is very much maligned as a service for fanboys, but so far as I can tell, quite reliable since last summer's meltdown. Syncing my entire digital identity without cables is a huge win. iDisk and a project I'm working on are actually a pretty good solution for documents.
- Photos/Video: Flickr is pretty much the best way of posting these. I imagine longer-form videos will be posted to Vimeo, should I ever make any.
- iTunes library: the current strategy is to keep my collection small and on my iPod touch (soon to be iPhone) at all times. This doesn't scale well for movies, and I'm honestly not sure what to do about that. Perhaps a Netflix subscription, or more judicious use of iTunes rentals.
- eBook library: This is a known unknown. I've yet to acquire an eReader device, and as such, my library is small. Kindle's “don't worry about it” is somewhat worrisome, especially with some rumblings that there is a strict limit on the number of times a book can be downloaded. Barnes & Noble’s new service has very limited selection, and little is known about the devices it will support. I honestly can't think of a good choice in this area.
Perhaps the most gaping hole in this strategy is around my iTunes library. It'd be very expensive to replace everything, but the only way that could happen is if both my computer and phone were stolen. There are definitely some other chinks in the armour, though, so a strategy for backing up ‘everything’ ;is clearly in order. I'm torn between using Time Machine with either a local disk or Time Capsule, and subscribing to an offsite backup service like Backblaze, which promises unlimited storage for $60 per computer per year. Perhaps I'll use both, just to be sure.
Seven Days
This is my to-do list for 1.0 of my first Mac app, a quote library. There's actually another one nice-to-have big feature after all these and it doesn't include putting up a proper website or writing the backend of the registration and update systems.
I'm in a rush because I'm completely broke and need to be back in Florida in 2.5 weeks.
Wish me luck.
