Being real honest: almost everything did.

I have undone so much that I’m back to where I started 4 months ago. My entire idea about not wanting to use Wordpress. Trying to simplify blogging by creating my own content manager. It was all nonsense. I have finally come to an understanding that blogging is a rather large time commitment. I had been told this, but didn’t want to believe it. When adding the developing time of my very own content management system … It’s made blogging impossible to keep up with.

So back to a new start again. No promises or commitments for the future. Not sure why I posted this post.

Anyway, Here are a few quick updates:

• I got an iPhone 3G!!! It’s really sweet to use. I love almost everything about it, except that the battery life could be much longer. Battery life could always be longer… What I need is a battery that never needs charging… That would be nice.
• I really like the idea of Wordpress right on my new iPhone! This way during down time I draft out ideas for posts. just like this post
• I am no longer a student (Hurray!). I have joined the work force as a developer in the corperate world. It’s slow moving and not quite as much programming as I would like, but it’s fun.
• Dr. Pepper is the best soft drink. It has 23 flavors of deliciousness. No other soda has 23 flavors. You need to try it.

Hopefully more usefull posts come in the future.

Update: I really need to read through these posts before I post them … my grammer and spelling … awful.

The Pico_C is one of three in a series of super small USB jump drives. The C design is my favorite of the three one piece with no moving parts. Most jump drives have tops that get in the way or fall off all the time. With the design of the Pico_C a cap is not required. The other designs are one piece, however A and B have moving parts. In my experience, moving parts break.

Did I mention that this drive is REALLY SMALL!

When I first decided to purchase this drive I wanted something small and fast. I was very close to just getting a microSD card and a microSD USB reader. Instead I purchased this wonderful USB drive. The advantage that the microSD cards have is there ability to be interchanged. Today I could have 4 GB, tomorrow I could have 16GB. Plus I could own multiple SD cards and only one reader. The USB drive though is one part. This was the biggest reason for going with the Pico.

Here is the Front on the Drive:

And the Back of the drive:

Now that you have seen the pictures let me explain more about what I have noticed to be good and bad about this piece of hardware. I purchased the 4 GB model for less than $20. I’m sure in 3 months it’ll be half that price (even with inflation).

Speed:

I was not extremely impressed with the speed of the drive. I tested on both Windows XP and Mac OS X. Neither seemed to write or read at speeds that I would desire. I like to use my jump drives with portable applications like FirefoxPortable. This way I get my own settings and bookmarks. However It still takes 10 seconds to launch Firefox on XP.

I was able to transfer 1 file at a time to the drive at 7MB/sec. If I started transferring two or three files, transfer times grew almost exponentially. It ws really bad.

Reading from the drive is much faster. I have noticed this from almost all jump drives. During a test I was able to achieve an average around 12MB/sec. Which still doesn’t meet what I could call fast standards. Even Super Talent specifications state that the drives should be able to reach “Up to 30MB/s (200X) data transfer rate.” This is not true in my experience.

I was disappointed about this.

Durable:

Really quite amazing. It could almost be a piece of solid steel.

Size:

Remarkable!! It’s as small as the length of my finger nail. Thats Crazy Small.

Overall:

I would recommend this jump drive, although if your looking for speed … look else where.

All my new post have been done via phpMyAdmin. It’s ugly, barely functional, and not practical. It scares me to use phpMyAdmin to do posts.

Here is a snap shot:

Repentance:

I couldn’t keep it that way, so I have just started to create my admin page. It’s almost functional, however needs MUCH, MUCH work.

Admin pages so far:

Post Listings

New Post

After school is done … which is soon, more time will be put into fixing this issue.

~ $ history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head
70 ls
58 ssh
58 cd
49 vpnclient
34 mysql
32 exit
25 find
22 mysqladmin
11 sudo
10 hdiutil

I enjoy reading others results. I rediscover commands like “mate”, which launches textmate via terminal. Also, most of my “true” unix interaction happens over ssh, as you can see.

So the most obvious email client to use as a mac user to use is Mail.app. So I wanted to start there. First I feel the need to clarify something. That is email clients have a similar expectation to internet browsers. There are so many “required” features, if I was to focus on every feature or failure this would be a 100 page post. I want to list of few things I enjoy and a few things I have issues with Mail.

What I enjoy about Mail.app

• True Mac Application
• Look and Feel of OS X
• AddressBook Integration

True Mac Application:

Cocoa applications are awesome. There are some many little features that come with using Cocoa that this can be easily forgotten. Features like spell check, drop and drag to attached files, move text from across applications, Spotlight Search, and more. I could try to come up with a complete list, but I would forget something. All of this though makes Mail a better experience.

Look and Feel of OS X:

I probably could have combined this with the above point, but I felt it deserved a point all on its own. Mac applications have a familiar interface. Mail has a slightly different look with the icons on the tool bar. Other than that it’s much like other mac applications. The way Mail works is exactly how you would expect it too, and I like that. I don’t want to learn an interface if I don’t have too. I can just use the application, with little learning curve required.

AddressBook Integration:

I use AddressBook for many different applications. AddressBook syncs with my phone from iSync, it can be used in Pages to fill fields, and used in iChat to show names of people instead of screen names. Having everyones emails in AddressBook is also very convenient. I don’t what to manage multiple address lists. If I have to add or change a contact, I would have to do it in multiple locations. With Mail having AddressBook intergrated into the application, it makes life easy.

Issues I have with Mail.app

• Speed, slow downs when changing folders and fetching email from server
• Lack of built in horizontal/widescreen view
• No Shortcut keys to move mail from inbox to folders
• Junk Mail Filter doesn’t work well
• Can’t Add Email Aliases that you don’t have create an inbox for
• Doesn’t work well with Gmail IMAP Service

Speed:

Mail is not very fast when using IMAP. I did a rough benchmark to prove my point. So I cleared the cache in Mail and relaunched the application. As soon as Mail became visible I started the timer. Then stopped the timer as soon as 6000+ message folder became filled with messages. The time came to 3 minutes and 6 seconds. This is just the headers to the email in the folder too. Emails are still being completely cached to Mail at this point. A second test I did was with my inbox. It is bout 200 messages and it took about 17 seconds to load. Most the time, all I want to do is read my new messages in inbox. Waiting 17 seconds when in a hurry can seem like forever.

To give a little more information about the benchmark. I’m using a DSL connection where I can download files via http at a rate around 400 kilobits per second. To preform this benchmark I had all the settings in place in Mail.app. Then closed the application. While Mail was closed, I deleted all the cache files under ~/Library/Mail/. From there I launched Mail and the folders begin to repopulate from the server. I will admit that the Mail client does have to download some extra information from the server that in normal use, it would not have to do. However, if the times are doubled because of this, it’s still slow.

Widescreen:

Wide pane view is a fixable problem with a plugin. However this is not a built in feature of Mail. The Mail plugin system is not officially supported and The fix comes in the form of a unofficial mail plugin called WideMail. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it does work. Every so often, like when upgrading to Leopard, I had to wait for this plugin to work for Mail’s newest version. With no official API, Mail plugins are not reliable.

Shortcut Keys:

If you have used gmail before and learned many of the shortcut keys it’s really hard to find a client that compares to that. I also think that Netnewswire has given me a similar experience. I’m a keyboard guy, the mouse has its purpose, but not here. When using email your hands should remain on the keyboard as you replay and write new messages. Why would I want to move my hands to the mouse or trackpad. In gmail you can select, move, label, and delete messages with out ever leaving the comfort of your keyboard.

Mail.app does have some good shortcut keys like “Get Mail”, but in the best situation, there shouldn’t even be a “Get Mail” button. With IMAP IDLE protocol email is pushed to the client. Mail also allows you to tab through the mail panes from folder view to message list to individual messages. Reading email is a small part of actually “doing” email. Reading is the easy part. I need to categorize and sort through email so I can actually figure out who I need to get back to. Mail keyboard shortcuts do exist but they are very limited.

Junk Mail:

I have used the built in junk mail filter for at least 6 months, and spent lots of time training it. There where so many false positives and junk that slipped through the built in filter. It made the situation worse some times. I would spend 15 minutes going through junk mail to see if it’s really junk or not. The best alternative I have seen is SpamSieve. It isn’t a perfect solution. It’s similar to WideMail since it is a plugin and has very little official support. SpamSieve is really amazing though. It takes time to train, but it works extremely well. SpamSieve also cost $30 dollars.

Email Aliases:

In mail the only way to send email from an alternative address is to add a second incoming inbox to the mix (aka New Account). Unlike in Gmail’s web service where you can add alternative Email addresses without adding a POP3 or IMAP incoming email server. I don’t understand why Mail doesn’t have this kind of option. It would be really nice feature to have.

Doesn’t Work well with Gmail:

Finally, I use Gmail as my email host for a few reasons, but Mail doesn’t play well Gmail’s IMAP server. There are a few ways that Gmail doesn’t play nice. People have hints all over the place to attempt to make Mail.app with GMail usable. However there are still many problems that just can’t be addressed. I’m not going to bother going into detail about these problems.

In conclusion there are so many issues with Mail.app that I don’t use it anymore. I’m always wishing there was a better email client out there. Well, this is part 1 of more to come …

nklockenga$ uptime
13:38  up 15 days, 02:31, 3 users, load averages: 0.09 0.19 0.16

Fifteen days and some change with out a restart. This length of uptime has not ever been achieved during the life time of my macbook pro. Only a year or two ago with my powerbook this was a common occurrence. This is by no means a benchmark for reliability but it does make me happy. Down time in any fashion, even mere minutes, is not productive time. I’m my experience the time where my computer needs to be rebooted for a number of reasons is at the most inconvenient times. Along with my restore process and a number of security fixes that have been released lately, things are looking up. Although I have seen evidence that this may not be the case for everybody.

Number of PHP source lines of code:

find . \( -name '*.php' \) -exec cat -- {} \; | wc -l

     860

Number of CSS source lines of code:

find . \( -name '*.css' \) -exec cat -- {} \; | wc -l 

     573

That makes a total of 1433 lines of code.

I don’t usually do any type of web application programming, but this seems like a ton of lines of code. I think this is the biggest reason that website application development sucks.

As a side note, I have added page caching to the site, so hopefully there is virtually no wait time for a page to load.

A month ago I went to install boot camp and ran into some serious problems. There are lots of Apple Support Discussions about people running into similar problems that I ran into. It was sad, but I didn’t need windows that much, so I just waited until I had sometime during easter weekend. In the past before Leopard and Time Machine, I would do backups with
Superduper!. This made hard drive crashes and recovery stuff simple with exact copies of my drive. This time though, I decided to chance it and restore from Time Machine.

Restoring went very smoothly, I was very impressed. Took sometime, not any longer than I expected though. I did run into one issue which had me panicking. This was when I first tried restore it failed to recognize my internal laptop hard drive. After a reboot back into the Leopard Install DVD, I tried again, it worked fine. The only “down time” other than the restore time was having to reinstall cisco VPN client, which was broken for some reason.

After getting bootcamp up, I don’t know what I expected, but getting to use windows isn’t really exciting. I even downloaded trial version of fusion and use virtualization off my bootcamp drive. I use windows here and there for IE and Visual Studios.

Let me list somethings that I have decided to do intentionally in my blog:

• No Comments
• Single Column Structure
• Simplistic/Plain Design
• Thin Width, forcing long pages

I wanted to talk about each of these points, and the reasoning behind it.

No Comments:

My initial inspiration of this is from John Gruber on his Daring Fireball Blog. After Reading his blog for almost two years now, I have not once wished there was comments. If I have something to mention to Gruber (which has not happened yet), I could easily email him. In many other websites like TUAW comments are the life blood of the the blog. This user interaction is what builds a community around TUAW. Since I am not trying to build a community, I find little reason for comments.

The other issue I have with comments is that I don’t want to write the code for it (at least not yet). You can blame this on laziness, but currently it just isn’t a feature that I find important enough to code.

Single Column Structure:

Based mostly on personal taste is what drove this “feature”, if you want to call it that. To help understand let me share something with you.

Having used a RSS reader for sometime now, even before a RSS reader was a feature in Safari, I have loved having control over my content. The reason I bring up RSS readers is because you can render the information from a feed into an environment that removes common website distractions. I wanted this same feel when reading my own blog on the site itself. Few distractions hopefully makes a more enjoyable experience while reading. I do have to compromise features like categories and archive links that some people find useful. In my experiences though, I just search for what I’m looking for anyway. So you can expect me to add an internal search sometime soon.

Simplistic/Plain Design:

I have always struggled to create anything that I would call “beautiful. So instead of attempting to be a artist, I thought if I could make something as straight forward and logical as possible I could avoid making an ugly beast of a blog. So by no means am I trying to create a zen like experience, but rather keeping life simple because it’s easy. I also intentionally choose a single color to be the theme of each page. So the blog is black, the Projects pages is green, and the Links page is red. Each color doesn’t have any particular meaning, but rather helps the user understand where he or she is on my website.

Thin width, forcing Long pages

When I first started blogging I knew right away that my weak point in blogging. I’ve tried to cover it up on this post but if you haven’t already noticed, I’m a pretty bad writer. You may be asking yourself … “Then why blog?”. Well, let me tell you.

I have created a blog for a single purpose: A place to collect and publish (not in any official matter) my work as a programmer. Since software and coding is important to me, this seems to me to be the best way to share not only my creations over time, but ideas and information that I discover along the way.

What does this all have to do with having a “Thin width”? It’s as simple as I don’t like to write a lot, but I do enjoy the illusion of having much to say. The thin width creates a neat appearance of clean writing too. I’m not sure if I’m the only one that feels this way, but some reason I do enjoy reading more when I feel like I’m accomplishing something, even if it’s scrolling down every 30 seconds. So this gives me a sense of accomplishment not only as a reader, but a writer as well.

More posts will come. So stayed tuned, and add my site to your rss reader.