September 2006 Archives

My experiences with Ubuntu have been pretty darned good. GNOME isn't half bad, and it really has come a long way - and with the right wiggling, Ubuntu does a pretty good job of being nearly transparent to Windows people. Nice and easy to use, amazingly enough. And that in itself is a huge step for Linux.

Next up on the agenda: Kubuntu. I've always been a fan of KDE over GNOME, and as someone already pointed out to me, while you can install KDE on any distro, there is Kubuntu. And Kubuntu comes with KDE as its primary window manager. Nice. So today I install it on an old Dell Dimension 3000 I scraped up (thank you J. - I may not have the connections like Bray does to get spanking new Sun boxes, but sometimes I can scrape up an old box to mess with). Exciting? Yep. Hopefully it'll be as smooth as Ubuntu.

iTunes 7 was just slapped into both my Apples, and while I’m sure there’s plenty of features I still haven’t explored (new ones, old ones, who’s really keeping track anyway?) I can tell you this, and it inherits part of its qualification from previous tellings of the same thing: iTunes (in this case version 7) does not suck.

If you don’t already have it (like, if, for some reason you keep your software updates turned off or something equally odd, like you use Windows), you should instantly run and get it. Never mind, just click here. Running is exhausting anyway.

So, what makes it so not-sucky? The new(ish) interface is slickened up a bit, updated slightly, with loads of sweet new buttons. Man, remember back in the day, when brushed aluminum was all the rage? Yeah, I’ve tried to forget those days too.

Three new views, downloadable album art (i.e. iTunes finally grabs the album art for you, instead of relying on all those third party apps that sort of never really actually worked), and (from what I read) soon-to-come on-demand videos. For those of us that actually blew a wad on an iPod Video and don’t spend gross amounts of time just ripping DVDs. So that’s potentially pretty exciting. I’m sure there’s more - I really don’t delve too deeply into all the hidden features of iTunes because I mainly use it for what it was originally intended: playing music.

So back to the whole reason that iTunes doesn’t suck: the interface. It has always been, and will always be, an unbelievably sweet piece of software not because it plays music (there’s a lot of those) but because the interface is so darned good. And now they seem to have improved it somewhat, making it a bit more album-centric (which is great compared to the unmanageable mess that having 15,000 songs or whatever can become.)

Man, those new views are just sweet. Especially that ‘flip through your album covers’ view. Fast, efficient, and with a high neato factor. Color me impressed (and happy.)

I really liked Ubuntu. In fact, I’d say that it’s a very feasible system for just about anybody, and will (easily) accomplish any task one could throw at it. I spent a solid three weeks throwing everything I could think of at it, and aside from the learning curve (thankfully and very effectively lessened by the ease-of-use of the interface and the wealth of online knowledge) it’s freakin’ great!

But I don’t much like Gnome. It’s kinda goofy. And I’m really picky about my interfaces (being, after all, a very happy OSX user). So I went ahead and installed KDE and got it running quite nicely… this being, by the way, quite a testament to the ease of use of Ubuntu (and Linux, in general). It’s just not as cryptic and insane as it used to be (not to date myself, but my experiences with Linux date back to the early days of Red Hat and Slackware, which I hear is still as impossible to use as ever.)

Anyway, KDE is great - much more mac-like and pretty. It runs smooth (seriously - Linux is stupid efficient. I can’t stop being impressed at how well it runs on some horrifically old hardware.) Someone who actually reads my blog mentioned Kubuntu, a KDE distro of Ubuntu… so now that I had a few minutes, I looked it up.

And I’m downloading the ISO now. I’m pretty excited, actually - the KDE interface looks nicely optimized (as opposed to my current installation of KDE which is more than a bit messy) and cleaned up. I expect the majority of things will be the same (a good thing) so this can only be a good time. This time I’m also going to download and install a PPC version… I have an old Power Mac G4 Cube that can just barely run Panther (won’t even touch Tiger), so I’m hoping Kubuntu will breathe new life in an otherwise oh-so-tight little machine. Happy days in geekland!

Well, one of the things that boggled my mind (and there’s a couple of ‘em) with this whole Typo thing was the Amazon sidebar, which supposedly did wonderous things. Billed as “Capable of displaying books referenced in your articles”, I was excited to see what the heck that means, and (some might say more importantly) how to do it.

As usual, documentation was found to be severely lacking.

I hate to think that developers would take for granted that people would somehow “just know” how the syntax for this works (or even that there needs to be syntax). In fact, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt right away and say that it must be in development, and that documentation is no doubt on the way, or exists somewhere obscure. Yeah. I should also note that if you’ve managed to get Typo running (no mean feat), then there’s a good chance that you’re technically adept enough to figure all this out.

So I’m writing this to help out The Not-So-Darned-Technical Guy. That guy who’s just technical enough to hammer his way through installing and getting Typo running, but is banging his head against a wall figuring out these niggling little details that everyone conveniently forgets to mention. Hopefully it’ll help somebody out there.

First and foremost, here’s an article that also addresses the issue. Be warned, while very thorough and well-written (the whole RubyNoob site is full of some really good articles), this particular article made precious little sense to the likes of me, but it might be super useful to anyone who’s been a software developer for the last decade of their life. The last part of the article is really the most useful to The Rest of Us, and it only takes a tiny bit of interpretation.

This is the controller for the Amazon post-processing text filter. Using this filter allows you to enter links to amazon items with an href like this: href=”amazon:097669400X” and turns that into something like this: href=”http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/097669400X/scottstuff-20.”

But wait, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The first thing to do (before we interpret that little snippet) is to actually activate the “Amazon Text Filter”. There’s a few ways to do this, so first I’ll outline the way I did it, and why.

In the Typo administration area, click on that link at the end that says “Filters”. This’ll take you to the magical text-filters area, and shows a list of the current text-filters. What’s all this? Explanation coming right up!

A text-filter (just being thorough here) is (basically) a big funnel that all your text gets thrown into and emerges formatted a certain way (this depends, of course, on which filter you use.) The filter will interpret little bits of code that you use as stand-ins for more complex bits of code and replace them accordingly. This sounds confusing, doesn’t it? Hm. Think of it this way: you have a car. You put 4 hubs on it, one at each end of the axles. You push it through a filter, and when it comes out, it’ll have tires, brakes, cables, bearings, and all the stuff that wheels on a car have. In much the same way, a filter will take, for example, a very simple bit of code, and when it is published, that filter will replace those simple bits with much more complex, functional bits. This saves a lot of time and energy that you can then use for more useful tasks. Like writing articles.

So, back to the task at hand. You’re sitting in the “Filters” area of the Typo administration. You should see a list of filters, including one called “Markdown”. Click on the “Edit” button on that line. Why Markdown? Well, because I really like it and it’s easy to use. John Gruber, the man behind Daring Fireball, has written this excellent guide to Markdown. But don’t fret, this method works for all the different filter types, so really, you can click “Edit” on whichever filter you use (as long as you’re using a filter, of course) and follow along.

About halfway down the page you’ll see a checkbox next to the text “Amazon”, followed by a short description. Check that box. You’re not done yet, though - near the bottom is a textbox where you have to enter your Amazon Associate ID. I’m not actually sure if that’s 100% necessary - you may be able to reference Amazon books without that ID - but if you *do* have an ID in there, you’ll get credit for any sales originating from your site. It’s not much (of course), but hey, every little bit counts. If you have an Associate ID, enter it here. If you don’t, here’s a link to Amazon so you can get one. It’s free, so go get one.

Once you’ve entered your ID, click the “Store” button. Congratulations, you’ve enabled Amazon filtering. Now comes the fun part - how to use it!

Remember that paragraph waaay at the beginning of the article? It had two very important bits of information - let’s revisit it:

an href like this: href=”amazon:097669400X” and turns that into something like this: href=”http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/097669400X/scottstuff-20.”

Depending on which filter we’re using, this can be interpreted in a few different ways. Here’s a couple of examples (first standard HTML and then Markdown):

Ruby On Rails

[Ruby On Rails](amazon:097669400X)

Either of these will produce a link that, when published, will link to Amazon with all the correct additional numbers needed. That’s pretty cool, right? Of course it is. And even cooler, the sidebar has now picked up the reference and is displaying information direct from Amazon.

Wait, wait, what’s that number? How do I find it? It’s true: when you go to Amazon and look up a book to reference, you get a bewildering amount of numbers and letters. For example, the book we just referenced has the following URL:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/097669400X/sr=8-1/qid=1157129841/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-4780181-0475957?ie=UTF8

The important number is the one after “product” (in this case, “097669400X”). That’s the ASIN number, and the one you have to use in your filter. Look up any book in Amazon, and you’ll find that number in the same spot. Copy and paste it in, and you should see results.

With that information, you’re done! Kick back, relax, and enjoy the fact that you didn’t have to set a single breakpoint in the Rails code to figure it out. ;)

Pretty sexy, ain’t it?

Tanaka-bear is back in our arms after his little operation (he was fixed this weekend), and he seems to be doing fine. He’s bright, alert, and almost as pissy as always. He’s also back to his ol’ shenanigans (like headbutting the fridge) and crawling all over us while we sleep.

It’s a sigh of relief all around, no doubt. Poor little guy. But he’s happy as a clam right now and tooling about the apartment, ensuring that his domain hasn’t changed in the last 5 minutes. All good.

In other news, my Faders SUM autoblocker belay device has disappeared. After setting some routes, I had it hanging off a rope, and it seems to have walked away. Yep, just like that. Fortunately, the Faders SUM isn’t a very common device ‘round these parts, so there’s a possibility of running into it again. I pity the fool attached to it, if that’s the case. Yeah. And it'd better not be who I think it was, because I'd rather not spend the rest of my life in jail.

What else? Oh yeah, today I go back down to Mayami’s excellent climbing gym for the first time in weeks. I’m weak, out of shape, out of practice, and out of sorts, but it will be fun. What will not be fun is climbing with the very tip of my middle finger missing. Tanaka-bear got pissed at me the other day and (basically) bit it off. Can I climb while missing this rather critical part of my crimp-hand? Not sure, but definitely going to find out.

Finally, here’s a link to some seriously funny shit: What if WWII was a MMORPG. Enjoy…

Typo is pretty neato so far. Integrates a lot of very cool features, lots of spiffy AJAX has been sprinkled in, and it’s fairly quick. I’m digging it.

Is it better than Movable Type? Sad to say, so far I think the answer to that is no. MT is simply more full-featured and still boasts plenty of AJAX interface whiz-bangs and all the speed. Of course, Movable Type costs money, which Typo does not, and Movable Type isn’t a Rails app, but… if one already has a license, then there’s just no real reason to migrate. No good one, anyway.

All that aside (and because I don’t believe in good reasons), I’m seriously not enjoying the prospect of migrating my Movable Type entries to Typo. Right now it seems I have two options:

Option 1: I enter each entry manually. Oh God, the throbbing in my head just increased tenfold.

Option 2: I attempt to use a migration script. I found one on poocs.net that might work, but the documentation on just how to use it is slim. I keep running into this whole ‘documentation sucks’ scenario. I just think that the whole attitude of “If you can’t figure it out, then it wasn’t meant for you” is totally shitty. I switched away from Windows so I wouldn’t have to bash my head against things all the time.

That, right there, is what we call an “analogy.” Anyway, looks like Option 1 it is, unless someone can come up with a better solution. That’s a lotta freakin’ entries though. Groan.

Then there’s the template situation - making the site look good again. For now, I just don’t care. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed at the prospect of dumping all these old blog entries into Typo, and am just not dealing with the templating at all.

As long as I’m moaning, I’m going to go ahead and say that Ruby on Rails is a little more fragile than I expected. It’s being touted as this bulletproof, rock-solid framework, yet it doesn’t work half the time (I get all kinds of errors while using Typo, can’t get Radiant to work at all, and countless other complaints.) I blame this on the host, more than anything, and Dreamhost has really gone to pot in the last few months (don’t know what’s going on with that, but come on guys, get your shit together. The email issues alone are killing me - and my clients - but the stability issues and the sickeningly slow servers are making life impossible) Then again, the technology should be stable enough that the host shouldn’t be having these kinds of issues. Then again, this is pretty new technology, so whatever, it’s all moot.

Phew, enough moaning, I’m done. I have Ubuntu to go play with, and a whole site to recreate in CSS. Let the games begin!