two scoops

I was powervoting into the wee hours for my girl Storm on Rockstar, which is really good Dvorak typing practice (keepin’ it geeky) and I hit this:

I thought to myself, “It’s 3am and the interweb thinks that I am crazy.”

No special reason for it, but I decided to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. I’ve been curious about it for awhile, but never thought I had the time. It’s definitely easier on my hands than the Qwerty layout and should eventually give me a speed boost. Ultimately, I just want to be a better touch typist and take care of my hands.

As it turns out it’s pretty easy to get started in most OS environments. In OSX it’s as easy as visiting System Preferences -> International -> Input Menu (Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> Details.... in Windows)and adding the Dvorak or Dvorak-Qwerty layout. Both get you running with the alternate layout, but the Dvorak-Qwerty layout has the special ability to revert back to a Qwerty layout when you hold down the Command or Option keys. That’s nice for keyboard shortcuts that are more about position than anything else. You can also switch between all your layouts with the keyboard shortcut Command+Option+Space (Alt+Shift in Windows I think).

To practice I’ve been using these lessons, but it’s nice to have something to track your progress too. So I grabbed Dvorak7min and got it running in Terminal.

$ cd /usr/local/src/
$ curl http://www.linalco.com/ragnar/dvorak7min-1.6.1.tar.gz | $ tar xfc -
$ cd dvorak7min-1.6.1.tar.gz

You’ll need to uncomment this line, (remove the #)

#CC      = gcc

now we can build and install.

$ make
$ sudo make install

Now you can use the tutor by firing up Terminal and running dvorak7min.

Have fun!

Typo is so unstable right now, I could scream. This blog has been offline more often than up it seems. I fixed things so that at least it doesn’t bring down the rest of totallyrules.com with it each time though.

I’ve made a few changes, slimmer sidebar, no trackbacks (never worked anyway) and a lighter theme. I’m holding my breath as to whether this will work or not.

Looking for alternatives and yes, I’ve tried Mephisto (twice now) and I’m waiting for it to settle down as well at this point.

Dan Benjamin posted another nice getting started article, this time on installing RMagick on OSX from source. I tried it and things went smoothly, awesome right?

Well, a little bit later came a nice howto to making snazzy Web 2.0-like graphics using RMagick. It sounded sweet and I tried it, I even had Joe time how long it would take so we could compare it to a typical Photoshop workflow. From copy to paste and execution the whole process took about 6 seconds. There was a problem though…no text. I investigated and in order to annotate the graphics, Ghostscript needs to be installed. There’s a nice FAQ for OSX that uses Darwinports, but if you’d like to stay in the original spirit of Dan’s original article and install it under /usr/local/ you’ll need to try the following:

cd /usr/local/src/
curl http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ghostscript/ghostscript-8.54-gpl.tar.gz | tar xfz -
cd ghostscript-8.54-gpl/
./configure
make
sudo make install

cd ..
curl ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz | tar xfz -
sudo mv fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript

cd ImageMagick-6.2.8
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install

sudo gem uninstall rmagick
sudo gem install rmagick

That gives you ghostscript and the ghostscript fonts, and voila annotated graphics!

I decided it was time to freshen up my PC desktop. Miles, one of the geeks sent me a new/old video card so I could play some of the more recent games. I’d been meaning to do a fresh install of Windows for sometime and I just sold the my mini-itx linux server so I thought perfect time to setup a nice dual-booting system.

Several GRUB issues, disk read errors and formatting my Windows install later (note: even when you have a backup, do a triple check of it, I wish I had) I was a little sweaty and a lot peeved. The root of all my problems was a faulty IDE cable. Curses! So, here I am listening to tunes in Ubuntu asking myself when I plan on finishing that Windows install I need to redo. I’ve lost all my game installs and game data, emulators and roms and a load of abandonware due to my own frustration and a bloody IDE cable! Console/Portable gaming wins here.

Ah well, Ubuntu is quite nice. Dapper Drake is miles ahead of Breezy Badger already. I feel a bit weird not using Gentoo, but maybe when we move we’ll need another server and I’ll be sticking with Gentoo on that front. Joe has been saying nice things about KUbuntu, which I might try out. While I’m thinking about it though, I found a nice KDE/Gnome comparison on the Ubuntu Forums.

Let’s see if the fiancee likes the switch…

Lyle forwarded this link from k5, another how to start a startup article. Or so I thought, this one is pretty funny in spots including this new gem, and it is quite a line:

Who’s the better shot? Give them the gun.

Ethan and I came up with the “Zombie Team” test for figuring out whether or not someone is ready to work on an intense project, be it a start-up or otherwise. The test is this: If zombies suddenly sprung from the earth, could you trust the perspective team member to cover your back? Would they tell you if they got bit? Most importantly would you give them the team’s only gun if you knew they were the better shot? If the answer is no to any of those questions you need to let them get eaten by the cubicle wasteland of corporate culture, because they aren’t ready for this kind of work.

That’s money. I’m taking that to heart. I consider myself lucky, that Joe is a pretty good shot even if he’s constantly ducking during Time Splitters II.

I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t care. Nintendo’s Wii is awesome. It’s completely won me over and the number of DS games has me this far from pre-ordering a whatever-color-I-don’t-care-just-give-it-to-me DS Lite. Seriously, the games that are coming out for Wii are remarkable, and damned fun.

On the other side of the aisle I got a chance to soak in the PS3. It’s pretty, but honestly, has not really got me going at all. They are some beautiful looking games coming out, but it’s more of the same. It doesn’t stand out. That’s not a bad thing though, because Sony really isn’t trying to rock the boat. Their controller proves just that. It’s the old controller with some Wii-inspired motion sensing. After all the jokes about their old banana/boomerang shaped prototype, they’ve reverted to their original dual shock controller, add motion sensors and dubbed it “Dual Shake.”

I did enjoy the new Guitar Hero and another music-related game Singstar (a Karaoke Revolution like game with some interesting musci choices and the music videos to go along with them). My new friend, Sam, really dug Lemmings for PSP. Finally, a decent game for Sony’s portable (ouch!). No really, I was considering picking up a PS3. Despite the Nintendo loving blood in these veins, I was prepared to branch out and pick up a non-Mario friendly console for the first time. But for $500/$600 bucks? That’s my share of rent!

I’m looking forward to checking out some PC titles later today and Microsoft’s booth. Lots more to post, but there’s time for that later. I hope you enjoyed this little bit though.

Thanks to Flickr.rb. Wow, thank you Scott Raymond.

My Flickr account is about to expire. A friend of mine, Dan Phiffer tapped me last year with a freebie pro upgrade. This was really useful for somethings like dumping my E3 photos and making more than one photoset. But I’m not sure I’d like to renew.

I tend to use Flickr in spurts and the only compelling reason for me to renew is to keep my photostream. If I regress to a free user once more, then about 560 photos will disappear from view, comments and all. That’s fine, the most recent 200 is cool, but what if I want to check on an old photo? I can’t, unless I have the original url. That’s always rubbed me the wrong way.

Back before the paid account, there was a trick to grab the old urls by setting your photos to private page at a time and snagging the urls from the public feed. But I’m lazy, I should let the code do the heavy lifting for me. So, in the dying days of my account I decided to archive those ever important links. Here’s the first half of that effort.

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'flickr' # insanely easy flickr library
require 'sqlite3'
require 'cgi'

db = SQLite3::Database.new('flickr.db')
flickr = Flickr.new
dedi = flickr.users('dedi')

# i have 77 pages of photos at the moment this should really be variable somehow
total_page_num = 77

1.upto(total_page_num) do |page| 
  puts "Page #{total_page_num - page + 1}"

  criteria = {
    'user_id' => dedi.id, 'sort' => 'date-posted-asc',
    'per_page' => '10', 'page' => page.to_s }

  begin
    for photo in flickr.photos(criteria)
      title = CGI::unescapeHTML(photo.title)
      db.execute("insert into photos('photo_id', 'title','url','source')
        values (?,?,?,?)",
      photo.id, photo.title, photo.url, photo.source)
      puts "Added #{photo.id}: #{title}\n"
    end
  rescue RuntimeError => err
    # some photos (with privacy settings) raise this exception
    print "Skipping, error was: ", err, "\n"
  rescue NoMethodError => err
    # sometimes the xml parsing mucks up
    # TODO: sort this out, and possibly retry
    print "Skipping, error was: ", err, "\n"
  end
end

There’s a lot I could improve on, but it didn’t take long to write or run and only choke on a few items. I went back and added the friends only and friends and family only photos myself (I only had about 6 of those). Next I’d like to get the photoset information.

Oh right, back to planning my class.