Preston Lee's Blog

Category: computer

  • Convince Your Manager You Need A Wiki

    self-portrait-poster-2.pngSometimes the pointy-haired manager just doesn’t “get” the wiki concept. Here’s something to email him/her..

    The business benefit of a wiki is two-fold. First, project members and team have a single, common platform for managing documents which is easy to reference (in email, IMs etc), cross-platform, accessible, and perhaps most importantly, searchable. Second, it gives the business instant transparency into project state. By standardizing on a wiki as a place for status reports, minutes, project plans, design documents etc., both business and development has a shared, direct place to go for information, reducing expensive request/response cycles incurred when the business requests information.

  • Please Stop Saying "Google Simple"

    It should be generally assumed that designs should be as simple as possible. So if you’re working directly with a competent designer, you need not say so. If your designer does not hold this as a core working principle, get a new one.

    Client: “We’d like you to design a next-generation car dashboard for our new line of luxury vehicles. The car will feature all the latest gizmos: GPS, iPod integration, satellite radio, automatic environmental controls, you name it. And the interface needs to be simple. Google simple.”

    Me: “Ok.. here’s what we’ll do. We’ll remove the wheel, pedals, and all conventional buttons and displays. Instead, we’ll mount an LCD to the dash, and display a single text input box. Voice recognition will fill in this box for the driver, and when (s)he says “Search”, the car computer will return the first 5 million commands (s)he most likely meant. The driver can then touch the command which they meant and have it execute. Alternatively, the driver can say “I’m feeling lucky!” to have the car automatically execute the most likely desired command, such as “Turn right”, or “OMG STOP NOW BEFORE WE DRIVE OFF THAT CLIFF!!!” If the driver survives long enough, they’ll get to enjoy the lumbar support and tunes from their iPod.”

    Client: “…”

    Me: “We can call it ‘Sue-gle’.”

  • Why Outlook Sucks: Part 2 of 900,000

    Note: Yes, this is still on an older version of Outlook because that’s what I’ve had to use. Please feel free to contribute to this series in your own blog via trackback/ping, and I’ll post links en mass to the front page when I get enough!

    Let’s delete a folder to which messages are directed via a rule.

    error.jpg

    Outlook does some dependency checking and found that deleting the folder will hork a rule. Good. Unfortunately we get a disgruntled little dialog box entitled “Rules in Error”. (Shouldn’t this be “Error in Rule”?) The use of a table I surmise would be to support display of a laundry list of errors, but since there’s only one in this case and the table won’t wrap the error text, we get to scroll all the way over to the right. Not that it really matters, because I don’t have a choice on how to proceed. The “Close” button gives me no indication as to what will happen when I click it.

    I never have this issue in Mail.app, because when I delete a folder related to a rule, the rule automatically becomes disabled and folder reference unselected. Here’s what a simple rule looks like after you delete a folder to which it directs email.

    rule.png

    No annoying dialog, and I can easily rewire the rule since it wasn’t deleted. Also, if I create a new folder with the same name, the folder automatically gets wired into the old rule. Makes sense!

  • Advice For The Telecommuter

    If your laptop has a fan on the bottom, don’t use it when you’re naked.

    Update: Stop looking at me like that. It’s never happened. Honest. 🙂

  • Why Outlook Sucks: Part 1 of 900,000

    Let’s find an email from Toni regarding her party next weekend. There appears to be a search box in the toolbar.
    full.jpg
    Wait.. that seems to be only for contacts. Nevermind.

    menu.jpg

    There’s a find button to the left which brings up a toolbar, but it appears to search only the Inbox. Unfortunately I have a bazillion folders and rules and have no idea where the message is located, so I’ll go over to the “Options” menu (of all places) and start an “Advanced Find”.

    advanced2.jpg
    Uh.. ok. I have no idea why I need “More Choices” or “Advanced”, and apparently I’m still searching only the Inbox. Let’s “Browse”..

    select.jpg

    Now that we’ve systematically selected every possible place the email could be–which could apparently be in my Calendar or Contacts–we can click OK and go back to the “Advanced Find” dialog and click ‘From..’

    sub.jpg

    Great.. the engineers decided to reuse the same old contact finder dialog. There are a lot of people with a ‘Toni’ in their name, so we’d better embark on a separate sub-find quest to identify the correct contact record. Make sure you click ‘Find Now’ and not ‘New Search’ when you’re done.

    res.jpg

    When we come back from a coffee break, we see Outlook proudly presenting a result set, sorted by date, most recent first. That’d be great, except that if I’d received it recently, I probably wouldn’t need to use an ‘Advanced Find’ to locate it, would I? The results are also displayed within the dialog for some reason instead of the main window, so I guess I’ll have to keep this up on my second LCD, which I’ll now repurpose as the “Dedicated Advanced Search Dialog Monitor”. Whatever.

    Just for shiggles, let find an email in Apple’s Mail.app.
    picture-1.jpg
    Holy freaking crap. I typed in ‘toni party’, and it gave me emails from Toni about her party, sorted by likely relevance. It was immediately clear how to search and the results took less than a second to display, despite the fact the PC is apparently faster spec-wise and I have magnitudes more email on my MacBook Pro. Huh.

    Update: Part 2 of 900,000

  • Configuring Rails To Use Gmail's SMTP Server

    OpenRain.com uses Google Apps For Your Domain, and all email flows throw Google’s servers. Unfortunately, Rails 1.2.2 can’t send via smtp.google.com out of the box. As originally pointed out by Anatol Pomozov there is a solution. Here’s the simple version tested with Rails 1.2.2.

    1. Save this code as lib/smtp_tls.rb within your rails app.
    2. Add this code to config/environment.rb.
    3. Use ActionMailer as normal.

    Updated 2008.01.04: The original link was b0rken, so I pastied the code instead.

  • ..But *Should* You Fix That Bug?

    ladybugWe have a natural desire to fix things. As engineers we find satisfaction in resolving technical problems and, if you’re following test-driven practices, keeping them resolved. These thoughts flow through our minds as the primitive keyboard-wielding code monkeys we evolved from. What distinguishes us from our fecal-flinging counterparts, however, is our ability to question these instincts and wear business, user and developer hats simultaneously. Here are some additional questions we should consider before immediately reacting with technobabble.

    • What business value could be realized by addressing this issue? It would be ideal to resolve it, yes, but is there any ROI for the time spent?
    • How risky is this? If cleaning the big red button could potentially fire the nuke, you might want to leave the booger on it.
    • How critical is this issue? If sufficient workarounds exist or this does not prevent people from working, perhaps you could move it below other todo list items that are.
    • How does this make users feel? Requiring the user to click OK every two minutes will create desire to stab you with a sharp object. Your death will generate bad vibes around the project.
    • What is the business impact? If the tree fell, but nobody lives in the woods.. what tree?
    • What are the dependencies and dependants? Superman requires his tights be dry-cleaned before saving the planet today. You might want to run to the dry-cleaners.
    • When could a resolution actually be delivered? It may take 2 minutes to fix, but if users can’t get it for two months perhaps the work can be postponed.
    • Who is be most appropriate person to handle it? Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s the guy who actually wrote the code.
    • What actually needs to be fixed? Don’t replace the alternator if you only need a battery.
    • Where does this fall in the project timeline? If the next deliverable is already late, you might need to rescope by sitting down with the business and reevaluating what is truly necessary.

  • The $1K Home Recording Studio Mac Add-on

    Update 1: Check out “Making Friends With Some Guy Named Mike” on this band page of mine for an awesome example of this studio in action.

    20 years ago digital home recording wasn’t plausible. 10 years ago we started to see its potential, but most hobbyists (read: very cash-limited people) were limited to using still-primitive versions of multi-trackers such as Cakewalk, Cool Edit Pro or Cubase with either COTS Sound Blaster PCI cards or ridiculously over-priced, high-noise, high-latency specialty cards with break-out boxes such as the Lexicon Core 2. Running on Windows 95 or 98, we regularly struggled with the stability of the platform and device drivers. Today, you can have your own personal studio capable of producing DVD-quality recordings by adding a thousand dollars of equipment to your existing computer and music rig. Here’s my living room/home theater/recording studio/Mac haven, all driven by a single Mac Mini..
    home-studio-thumb.jpg
    Here’s are the core components..

    • Mac Mini (Intel).
    • Big 1080p LCD television/monitor. The Mac Mini drives this beast with a DVI-to-HDMI converter cable.
    • Logic Pro (Apple’s recording software). For my needs, it’s really either Logic Pro or Pro Tools. For various reasons I’ve stuck with Logic Pro run in a distributed manner with other Macs in the house using built-in Xgrid functionality over gigabit ethernet.
    • Headphone amp w/studio headphones. You need at least one good headphone set to properly lay down track on top of track, but when you have people over you can usually get by with three or four. This is too much load to be powered directly by the computer, so the dedicated headphone amp is necessary. I have a Behringer HA4700. (I didn’t want to add my Event 20/20 references monitors to the already cluttered layout, so I have them in another room.)
    • PreSonus FirePod. This is a truly outstanding input device for recording the entire band simultaneously. The unit is rack-mountable, connects via FireWire and optical cables, and has pristine noise-free pre-amps.
    • Microphones and stands.
    • Instruments. I have a full-size Yamaha keyboard (pictured), a bunch of vocal mics and guitars, and a rack of mediocre analog schwag. BYOI, whatever ‘I’ happens to be.

    If you’ve already got a Mac setup and some music equipment, grabbing Logic Express, PreSonus FirePod, decent vocal mic and a bunch of cables for $1K will turn your system into an audio powerhouse which your friends will envy.

  • Apple Aperture Features Explained For Non-Photographers

    The RAW format pictures produced by my Canon XTi are often in excess of 10MB. Couple this with “continuous shooting” and a fast CompactFlash card, and I can easily fill a 4GB’er in a couple days. I’ve used Apple’s Aperture for about a month now through the holidays and a friends wedding, and have been very pleased with the product.

    Aperture is more like ACDSee or Picasa than Photoshop. It’s about fine-tuning, managing projects, browsing, searching, sorting, packaging and publishing, and does neither layering nor psychedelic effects typically associated with digital picture manipulation. It’s iPhoto on crack. Here are a few features which I like.

    1. Full-screen mode. This is similar to iPhoto’s full-screen mode, but with much better tools. The “adjustments” overlay provides typical white-balance and exposure controls, as well as a slick RAW-only section and easy-to-use tools for tweaking specific color ranges. All adjustments are non-destructive, so you can freely experiment with tools without worrying about being able to revert to the original. There is literally no “Save” button. The transport at the bottom is nice, too.
      full.png
    2. Versioning & Stacking. Rather than copy/pasting files to make small adjustments while preserving the original, the versioning mechanism provides a great way to have many different versions of the same file, such as for different cropping ratios and color/sepia prints. Stacking allows you to make good use of continuous shooting on your camera by allowing you to select the best shot from a series and hide all others in the browser. The loop tool (see image) is a pin-point zoom pointer which works in both the browsing and viewing areas.
      browse.png
    3. Management. Understanding the various types of containers admittedly took me a few days to truly “get”. Once I did, however, it’s nice how Aperture combines typical concepts such as “Folders” and “Projects” with “Albums”, “Smart Albums” (search-based albums), “Light Tables”, “Books” etc. It’s easy to keep things organized while simultaneously being able to find things.
      picture-5.png
    4. Meta-data. In addition to handling EXIF/IPTC information and allowing changes at import time, making changing to images en mass is easy with the “lift and stamp” tools. Adjustments such as camera settings, tagged keywords and exposure changes are easily “lifted” off a select image and “stamped” onto others. This is especially useful when working with stacks.
      metadata.png
    5. Backup. Aperture vaults are basically files on backup volumes (such as removable firewire drives) which can be sync’d to when plugged in, kinda like having rsync built into the application.
      picture-6.png
    6. Offline. When each photo is 10MB, you can’t keep every photo with you. You can, however, store the “master” on an external volume and keep a high-resolution preview and all meta-data with you at a fraction of the data size.
      picture-7.png

    If you’re using OS X and are somewhat interested in photography, I’m sorry, but you’ll probably want to bite the $279 bullet and buy Aperture, though I got my copy for about half that as a bundle deal with my camera body.

  • RAZR v3, Bluetooth, T-Mobile Internet & OS X

    Here’s the lowdown on setting up your Motorola RAZR to connect to the internet wirelessly via your bluetooth enabled Mac after signing up for T-Mobile internet services. I live in Arizona and have had no issues following these steps on several Macs.

    1. Grab this.
    2. Copy the “Motorola GPRS CID1” file into /Library/Modem Scripts

    3. Go to System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Devices and click “Set Up New Device…”

    4. After selecting the more obvious options to set up your phone, enter the connection settings as in the following screenshot. (The password is “internet”.)
      internet-setup.png

    5. After completing the wizard, select “Connect” from the new icon visible on the menu bar at the top of the screen.
      connect.png
      (Suggestion: manually “Disconnect” your phone when you’re done with the internet connection, as putting the computer to sleep while connected seems to cause issues when the system wakes up.)