I basically screwed up my iPhoto library and spent the past two nights rebuilding it.

The main reason for the catastrophic failure was the inconsistent way I was managing the photos. I could not make up my mind between allowing iPhoto to copy photos into it’s photo package or whether it should simply “refer” to photos found in my library. So, I had photos in both places.

For a while, this worked fine. However, I began to worry about duplicates so I went on a duplicate file witch hunt and found that I had loads of duplicate files haunting my cramped 500GB drive.

Yes, I’m suffering.

However, most duplicate file finders are essentially brain dead. In my head, finding and effectively removing hundreds or thousands of duplicates in tens of thousands of files is impossible with any of the tools I’ve found. The reason for this is because tools are only good enough to list the duplicates side by side, but unable to give you automation commands such as allowing you to eliminate all duplicates found in a particular directory.

For instance, you might get a duplicate report like so:

iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05678.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05678.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05679.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05679.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05680.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05680.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05681.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05681.jpg

In this situation, “Marco’s 4th Birthday 2” is the folder that has the duplicate files. Imagine I had 90 files in this directory and I found duplicates in 300 similar folders.

Happy hunting.

First, the tools I’ve found generally only allow you to delete 1 duplicate record at a time. I could delete the duplicate directory but it might just have some files that are unique. Plus, I generally can’t delete the directory right form the GUI, I have to go back to Finder, navigate there, delete it, and re-do my duplicate file search to trim down the list.

Repeat until done.

Second, if I could select one duplicate and simply tell the tool “Delete all duplicates in the parent directory” we’d be done. Extra credit for nixing the directory if all files wind up being nuked.

Oh, but I digress.

I stupidly tried to consolidate and settle on storing all photos within iPhoto. Hoping that iPhoto would detect the dupes. It seemed to have this functionality, but it simply did not work.

(Sample duplicate photo dialog)

I somehow wound up in a situation where half of my files were symbolic links and none of them pointed to a valid location. So… I essentially failed at this task.

I then tried to hold down Ctrl+Command or perhaps Option+Command when iPhoto started in an effort to correct this. Holding down these keys upon startup invokes an undocumented feature that screwed up my library even more.

Yay Apple!

In the end, I decided to start over. I cracked open the iPhoto Library file (by Option+Click on he iPhoto Library file) and selected “Show Package Contents”.

I then copied the “Originals” directory to my desktop and deleted the iPhoto library. Yes, I lost any “modifications” that I made to the photos (such as brightness/contrast adjustments or cropping) but I could not give a rat’s ass at this point.

So, I fired up iPhoto again. It shook it’s head in surprise and wondered where the library file went. I instructed it to create a new empty library and off I went into a 2-hour import. 20 minutes of event auto-splitting later and I was back in business.

By Nick at 11:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So, tonight I set my dad up with gmail. He has been moving around a bit and moving ISP’s nearly as often. The changes to his e-mail clients were constantly causing him to reconfigure them and each time it seemed like such a struggle. Of course, I’m the tech guy who has to assist.

I approached him about using gmail about two years ago, but my brother was set against it claiming that gmail would not yield the experience he was used to.

This time around I just did it, and did it in a big way. I didn’t just set him up with just any o ld gmail account, I decided to change the entire domain name to direct e-mails to gmail. This is what Google calls “Google Apps for XYZ Domain”. The configuration is pretty intense and not something the average user can set up. However, once it’s set up you essentially have the following.

Google gets all mail directed to your domain. You get to keep your domain and you get to keep your existing e-mail address.

You get a control panel where you can create a homepage, manage google chat, create web pages, manage e-mail accounts, create online calendars, and have access to Google Docs (docs, spreadsheets and now presentations).

My Dad mentioned on numerous occasions that he loves some of the glitzy features of his “Incredimail” e-mail client and I knew that although gmail was the ultimate in reliability and usability, he might not even see that if he could not send his emoticons.

So, I did three things to make him feel more comfortable.

First, I enabled POP access so he can have his cake and eat it to. Doing this assumed that using gmail’s POP and SMTP server would be “easier” to configure than the trouble I had with my domain hoster. Time will tell.

Second, I populated his contact list with all of his family members and added pictures so he’d see as much visual jazz as I could possibly muster.

Third, I created this friendly ad of his grandson saying, “Gmail Rocks!”

By Nick at 1:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago, I ran some performance tests to see how fast various machine and OS configurations would convert a standard video clip from one format to another. This is a task I do a lot and a task that I knew would determine if I bought a convenient MacBook Pro or a Mac Pro powerhouse.

What you see below are the results of the few simple tests with some analysis on why I think I saw the performance I saw.

The 8-core Mac Pro that I’m using for these tests has some limitations. It’s not fast at all things. First, it has a single 7200rpm SATA drive. This drive is not nearly as fast as, say, a set of 2 15000rpm SAS drives configured in a RAID0. The Mac also has 2GB of memory which seems like a lot at first, but really isn’t that much when you’re dealing with 20k photos, a lot of video, and heavy apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. As memory gets low, the slow disk comes into play as the OS pages stuff that’s not used onto disk so it can execute stuff it does need in memory. When this happens a lot we call this thrashing. This happens to me sometimes. One day, I’ll upgrade to 4 or 8GB of memory and get rid of this problem.

That said, when memory usage is low and the CPU cores are full of instructions, the machine yields pretty decent performance.

A friend sent over a link which looks at the performance gain you can expect by going from a dual-core system (e.g. Intel Woodcrest) to a Quad-core system (ala Intel Clovertown). The author correctly states, IMHO, that the only tasks that will really benefit from the additional cores are rendering and encoding tasks.

Like the author, I notice that my 8-cores are essentially idle when playing a game like World of Warcraft. CPU utilization looks something like this:

The reason for that is probably because most of the work is happening on the video card and the CPU is just loading 3D objects onto the card, dealing with user input and sending and receiving udp datagrams.

AVHCD Encoding to AppleTV Format

The main test that I performed (on a decent number of machines) was to convert a 74MB AVHCD file at 720p resolution to the AppleTV H.264 format. Here are the results:

All times are in seconds. As you can see, the 3.0Ghz Clovertown Mac Pro beats everyone. I should note that the author in the previous link was not using the special 3.0GHz Clovertown that’s found in my Mac. In general, Clovertown systems have clock speeds slower than the 3.0GHZ common speed found on most dual-core Woodcrest machines.

During the 58-second rendering process, my cores looked like this:

Oooh, that’s a sweet sight to see!

Plus, the machine was completely usable. I was even in iPhoto publishing lots of photo events to .Mac and I felt like the machine was essentially idle. I have found that this kind of multitasking seems better implemented on the Mac than it does on the PC. Though, I must admit that I’m a bit subjective in my opinion.

DVD Encoding to Apple iPod Format

My second test involved the great dvd ripper, Handbrake. I had a 23-minute clip on one of my DVD’s and I decided to pit my humble MacBook (Core Duo) against my Octocore Mac monster. The results were not surprising. The Mac Pro beat the MacBook by a factor of 5.6x:

There are some gotchas with Handbrake that I had to play around with to get the results I wanted. If you play around with Handbrake, you see that it has de-interlacing capabilities. The settings are None, Fast, Slow, Slower, and Slowest. If you use one of the “slow” settings, the rendering process becomes serial in nature and Handbrake is essentially only able to use a single core for its work. This drastically slows down the rendering process.

Since I could not really tell the difference between the Fast and Slow modes, I decided to use the fast mode since I was able to burn a huge number of DVD’s in a single day.

Some Analysis

The better performance of the Mac Pro system when compared to he MacBook and some of the other systems tested is a combination of multiple factors:

• Clock speed of CPU
• Presence of accelerated encoders**
• Clock speed of memory
• Clock speed of front-side bus
• Size of L2 cache
• etc.

** I saw some interesting results in the Handbrake log file: [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX MMXEXT SSE SSE2.

On the MacBook, I saw the same message (meaning the MacBook supports the same Intel multimedia extensions as the MacPro), but I also saw this:

“No accelerated IMDCT found”

An IMDCT is an “Inverse Modified Discrete Cosine Transform”. This is a computer algorithm that fits changes in color found in a photo or video to a sine curve set under various scaling parameters. You achieve a lot of compression doing this because it’s cheaper to say that the color changes found in a snaking path through an 8x8 block of pixels is similar to a cosine curve squeezed by 10% than it is to store each and every one of those 64 pixels. An IMDCT is a very CPU-intensive operation and if there is hardware on the video card or elsewhere that can accelerate this calculation, then this is yet another factor contributing to the speed differences between the Mac Pro and the MacBook.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to spend a premium on an Octocore mac, I would not bother unless you’re going to do these kinds of long renders. 4-cores on the Woodcrest model are more than enough for most applications, including World of Warcraft.

PS: Oh, and the DVD’s I ripped to my iPod were not copy protected. I would never…

By Nick at 11:54 PM |Tagged as apple , encoding , handbrake , mac , macpro , quicktime , video | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m a recent switcher to the Mac. My first computer was a TI 994a, then I moved onto a custom-built IBM XT (clone) running PC-DOS, then MS DOS, then onto IBM AT and IBM 386 computers running Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 (3.11, hah!), and eventually I was a very early adopter of Windows NT, then to Windows NT 4 (SP3!), Windows 2000, Windows XP and most recently Windows Vista x64 at work.

I’ve made a living on the Windows platform but I eventually saw that there was no need for this at home. As I see my kids growing more comfortable with computer technology, I wanted them to grow into a platform that made things easy and allowed them to be successful at anything they wanted to accomplish. In the end, Windows and Dell computers simply did not fit he bill.

Consider my kids’ iMacs. There is one cable running from the machine to the wall, a power cable. If you are a PC user, recall the mess behind your desk and consider if it’s all really necessary. On the iMac, the display is built-in and the mouse and keyboard are wireless. The iMac even comes with a remote, making it a comfortable DVD and music player they can manipulate via FrontRow as they recline on their chairs.

But I digress.

Over the past 14 months, I’ve replaced each and every machine in my home with a Mac. Why did I do this? It’s hard to say. Lots of reasons. Let me try to explain.

Over the past few years, my appreciation for Apple and the way the engineer their products has been steadily increasing. It was an iPod at first, then iTunes, then the experience of being in the Apple store. Apple’s marketing team blitzed my mind brilliantly. They knew me, a PC user, and slowly worked their way into my world by bringing key products to Windows.

As I saw the way they put software together and how well they engineered their physical hardware, I thought to myself there must be a better way than Dell, Windows, anti-virus, anti-spam, spyware, apps that barely work together and a tangled mess of wires behind my desk.

Then, Apple switched processors from the PowerPC to Intel. All the while, virtualization software was growing exponentially in popularity and performance was becoming almost native. Then Apple released Boot Camp, allowing Windows XP and Vista to run natively on any Intel-based Mac. It was all just becoming obvious. I could have my cake and eat it on flaming-fast, beautiful, hardware.

I started with a laptop, a MacBook, and gently eased myself into the Mac world. I listened to Mac Podcasts, tried out Mac software, and tried to simulate my regular workflows using Mac software.

There were some gems on the PC that I would miss very badly if I switched. Visual Studio, C++, and .NET are where all of my experience lay. Without those, I’m somewhat powerless to make the computer do more than what I can purchase or download. Google’s Picasa is a brilliant program and one that I still miss. But that’s where virtualization kicks in. Using Parallels or VMWare Fusion, I can run all of this side-by-side with my Mac software. Ultimately, though, if the Mac was going to be a successful replacement for my PC, I had to have certain apps run natively.

On the PC, I spent most of my time in these apps :

• Visual Studio for programming
• Ulead’s VideoStudio for simple video editing
• TextPad for text editing
• Google’s Picasa for photo management
• Sony’s SR2 Raw converter
• NEAT Image for noise-reduction of photos
• Adobe Photoshop for photo enhancement and gaming (map-making, for instance)
• Adobe Illustrator for all kinds of creative experiments (and for map-making, of course)
• Microsoft Word for word processing

I spend my time making maps for D&D (some here), managing my home photos (I have, like 22,000 digital photos), doing simple video editing (again, like 100+ hours of DV and HDV video), programming, and of course web browsing and blogging.

I chugged along on my MacBook… experimenting, downloading, and trying out. I did this for months and months. I was only “playing” with iPhoto, though, which I felt was never nearly as good as Picasa. I used the MacBook on the train for browsing the web (thanks to my phone’s bluetooth Internet sharing) and reading PDF’s. I subscribed to Apple Downloads and found some awesome gems:

• TextMate - An awesome text editor. I use it for blogging… like right now
• Parallels and later VMWare Fusion
• iStumbler
• MacDrive - Which helps me manage the transition from PC to Mac by allowing my PC to see my Mac-formatted external drive
• Flip4Mac - Which allows me to play Windows Media video on the Mac within QuickTime
• QuickTime - I think that a lot of people don’t realize how amazing QuickTime Pro is. At $29, it’s a serious must-have application if you do anything with Video
• Photo2Movie - An excellent program that turns photos into digital video slideshows… with some amazing Ken Burns effects
• Jungle Disk - How to automatically save and backup gigabytes of data on Amazon S3’s website for pennies a month. Well, maybe a few dollars… but not a lot of them.
• Hardware Monitor - Similar programs for the PC are just crap and they have to deal with gazillions of motherboard manufacturers. This program monitors everything in a clean and convenient interface
• Adium - For all your IM needs in a single window
• Quicksilver - The only program launcher you’ll ever need… for keyboard junkies
• TeamSpeex - A TeamSpeak client for the Mac
• ChronoSync - A wondrous file synchronization program
• Quadrium - Kind of like a fractal, image-processing, Yahoo! Pipes extravaganza.

For the latest mac software links, at least the ones that I find interesting, check out my del.icio.us links:

http://del.icio.us/NickCody/software%2BMac or subscribe

And, of course, the Mac has some built-in wonders:

• Grapher - An amazing graphing and plotting package which can animate charts and formula at the touch of a button
• Disk Utility - Norton Ghost? Who needs it. The Mac has this functionality built right in.

Now, yes, Windows has tons of software. Tons more than the Mac. I have found, though, that Mac Software works better together. Whether it’s support for Automator, or for special locations like iTunes and iPhoto stores, applications tend to make easy tasks easy and hard things possible. I borrowed the analogy from my friend the .NET Addict, who describes developing Cocoa applications that way.

For instance, when I want to insert an audio clip as background music for a slideshow, iPhoto shows me my iTunes library within the insert-audio dialog box and supplies a convenient instant-search box so I can quickly locate the tune that I’m looking for, right within iPhoto. 3rd party apps are amazingly consistent in this way, more so than I have experienced with Windows apps.

Then, it was time to take things up a notch and, for Christmas, I splurged and got my kids a pair of iMacs. I blogged about that experience back in December of last year.

I have never regretted that purchase. My kids were able to do more with the Mac with the same computer skills they had 5 minutes earlier, as they shared a Dell PC. The kids just ‘got’ the software and were able to do magic with it.

I even found an awesome typing-tutor program for the Mac, called TypingTrainer4Mac. My kids record their speed every day and have been steadily becoming expert touch-typists.

Then, about a month ago I decided to take the final plunge. After nearly a year of research, I had decided that the Mac was my platform.

I went and purchased a Mac Pro to finish the job I had started last summer. In addition to the Mac Pro, I went and replaced by old version of Adobe Creative Suite 1 with a brand-new version of Creative Suite 3 Design Premium for the Mac. This suite was perhaps my most important software purchase to date and was the final nail on the coffin.

But Apple didn’t stop there. Just a few weeks ago they released iLife ‘08, an amazing update to an already amazing built-in package. iLife ‘08 finally made me forget about Picasa (well, almost… Picasa is tons faster even with my 8-core Mac Pro). With the introduction of the ‘Event’ concept and tighter integration with their .mac service, I was sold on the Mac photo management workflow. iMovie ‘08 also leveraged the ‘Event’ concept and for the first time, I find myself actually with a viable platform to bring in my 100 hours of DV and HDV video so it’s all available for editing and DVD authoring.

But Apple didn’t stop there. They came out with an update to iWork which included a Spreadsheet package and some amazing usability enhancements for Pages, their word processor. Pages can now handle all editing tasks from simple word-processing to more advanced page layout (via two fully-separate modes of operation). Pages can even open the brand-new Office 2007 file format and has naive support for drop-shadows, reflections, and many of the native layout capabilities that I love about Office 2007 (I use it at work and Office 2007 rocks pretty hard).

The beauty of the “Apple Way” is that they don’t ever seem to stop. I know I sound like a drooling fanboy here, but really that’s what this post is about so I’m going with it since I’m sure to be complaining about this and that in the coming months as I go through withdrawal. This post is mainly about recognizing a successful software company who is simply hitting all the marks that I needed someone to hit in order to win me over. Unlike Microsoft, Apple updates their OS regularly and each revision is a major leap forward. Vista is nice, but it was too-huge an update and we waited way too long for it. It will take years for ISV’s to adapt their software to work the way Microsoft would have Vista apps work, if ever.

I have also noticed the obvious advantage that Apple has in designing the hardware along with the Software. Functionality like sleeping a notebook are so much smoother on the Mac than they are on the PC. You just can’t compare the experience. There are some amazing synergies that you get when you control both the hardware and the software. I’m sure an Apple TV is in my future as well since it works so naturally with my entire Photo, Video, and Music collection. The iPod itself epitomizes this integration and is perhaps the most popular example of how true and beautiful integration can be a reality.

All in all, I’m happy and excited about the possibilities in this new era for me.

By Nick at 4:25 PM |Tagged as ilife , imovie , iphoto , iwork , mac , switcher , windows | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Oh yes, it had to be done.

Very short parody, enjoy. Via RIApedia. Thanks Pavan!

By Nick at 8:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Nuby on Rails, Geoffrey Grosenbach, has posted a very complete and enjoyable bit on Ergonomic setups for programming on a computer… The Mechanics of Programming. The lessons are applicable to any kind of computer use so long as it is continuous and long-lasting ;-)

I found his adoption of the Dvorak keyboard layout enticing… but not enough to make me switch:

*Dvorak* This section may be controversial, so I’ll keep it short. I went cold turkey (http://nubyonrails.com/articles/dvorak) to the Dvorak keyboard layout about a year and a half ago. I’ve never regret- ted it and my hands are much more comfortable because of it. The layout of the keys means that one’s hands travel a shorter distance when reaching for the keys. …

There is a PDF of the essay.

Lots of good ideas there…

By Nick at 11:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A friend sent a link to Scott Adams’ blog where he goes through a simple and very enjoyable explanation on how to make a comic strip.

I encourage you to give it a read. I was fascinated by the process of opening u p a new 600dpi document and drawing a “rough” at a low-zoom and then graying out that layer and zooming in for the “inking” phase, where he gets a smooth high-resolution lines. Just like tracing paper.

Of course, my new love is that tablet monitor he raves about from Wacom, the Cintiq 21UX.

Thanks Kevin!

By Nick at 10:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Finally, after like 3 or so years, I am closing the doors on Bloglines. Bloglines has been my RSS Aggregator of choice since I started using RSS aggregators.

Like a lot of people, I started out with some of the offline ones like RSS Bandit and NewsGator. However, I found that I wasn’t always using my laptop (as a single store for offline items) nor was I always reading entries at work or at home. It became clear very quickly that an online aggregator like Bloglines was the solution for me.

I wrote about Bloglines here at Primordial Ooze many times. I wrote an early Bloglines RSS extractor in Python which helped me manage my iPodder subscriptions back in the very early days of Podcasting.

When I got a mobile device with broadband Internet access, I discovered Bloglines’ mobile version which was simple and perfect for my commute.

Then, the trouble began. Bloglines development was progressing slower than molasses. At some point during all of this, Google Reader came out. I could have moved over at that point but the Google mobile reader simply wasn’t ready.

Still, Google kept innovating and new features were being added on a regular basis. Contrast this to the sickly pace I was experiencing over at Bloglinesland. Only in the past 12 months has Bloglines slowly added features:

• A better mass-subscription editing mode
• More AJAXy goodness so I don’t have to refresh so much
• Um…

That’s not a very long list.

Then, all of a sudden, Google Reader announced that they will support Google’s new Google Gears offline plugin to Firefox.

I was interested so I export my subscriptions from Bloglines, imported them into Reader, checked out the mobile version and was simply amazed at the improvements made since I last looked.

• Far more AJAX than Bloglines could ever have, resulting in a cleaner less web-like experience
• Offline capabilities (though not too important to me)
• Excellent tagging and searching of feeds
• Reading trend analysis to help be continually cull and grow my subscription list to suit my changing reading habits
• The “Next” bookmarklet is fantastic for all of those feeds with annoying partial entries. It brings  up the next unread item, except the actual page referenced i n the RSS and not the content of the RSS! This will change the way I read RSS.
• And a lot more.

If you are a Bloglines user, you should consider Google Reader. IMHO, it’s better, more innovative, tons more features, and maintained with a lot more dedication which will only serve to increase its lead.

R.I.P. Bloglines

By Nick at 11:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Amazing!

The video gets better and better. Some of the bullet shots at the end are phenomenal.

By Nick at 9:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Blogging has been slow lately and part of my excuse has been that I’ve been so busy using technology that I forgot how much I liked to talk about technology.

Also, as my OS installs got refreshed and I continue my migration to the Mac (a rather extended process), I found that my blogging tools, or lack thereof, were inhibiting me from spreading the love.

There have been some advances to be sure. I replaced my old crappy phone with a Samsung Blackjack. My carrier changed, from Verizon to Singular, but I gained a key bonus. Aside from the increased reliability of the newer device, I now have a reliable Internet connection on the train.

That’s where I am now. Typing on my MacBook, using TextMate for blogging. My connection speed isn’t that good when the train is in motion using the Edge network, perhaps 7-40kbps, but I get the occasional 120kbs which is really nice. If I’m stationary and I get “3G” speeds, I can crank at a pretty comfortable 300kbps. Not bad for a little phone.

Oh, and this happens wirelessly using Bluetooth.

Work has been great lately, too. Very busy, but at the same time it’s been very rewarding. I’ve somehow found a means to spend more time working, getting more done, but still more time with the family.

My weekend gaming has been slow lately, but we played D&D for the first time in 3 weeks on Sunday. It was a bit of a rough session for me, being the DM, but it got me back into the groove. In my post on “A hybrid of tabletop role-playing and Internet play,” I write about how I got a remote player immersed in a standard tabletop D&D game:

http://d21-gaming.com/blog/2007/04/23/a-hybrid-of-tabletop-role-playing-and-internet-play/

I have lots more to talk about as my basement project has finished and I begin wiring and configuring my home network. I’ve done a lot with virtualization at home, facilitating TeamSpeak and GameTable servers available on the fly from multiple machines.

I think the train is a good time to blog.

By Nick at 8:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The king of Internet mapping programs keeps getting better. I’m not sure when they added this, but Google Maps now has a kind of 3D building view.

This is how New York looks at progressive levels of zoom:

The buildings also seem to be accurately portrayed. Consider this multi-level structure:

And the satellite view:

The angle is different, but pretty cool anyway.

I tried a few more cities and they were all partially covered: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago. Even the Queen City of Buffalo was covered. Of course, that probably only means that this has been out for a long time andI just now woke up from my shell.

Oh, and Google Maps also has a traffic overlay… cool if you have a co-pilot using a laptop during your commute but I’m not sure how else this would be useful:

By Nick at 9:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the spirit of this blog being a way for me to remember how to do things, I present a method to delete filenames under Linux that confuse the command-line utilities.

I had a script which, as a result of a syntax error, produced a file called:

—exclude-from=exclusions

Trying to remove this file by simply deleting it yielded this error:

rm: unrecognized option --exclude-from=exclusions' Tryrm —help’ for more information.

So, Googling found this link:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/delete-remove-files-with-inode-number.html

The method described there is simple. Find the file’s internal i-node number and use the find’s ability to execute any command on results it’s finds to invoke rm on the results.

Two simple commands fixed by file:

obraxus:~/backup> ls -il
total 2932488
1746866 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206   48218112 Apr 10 19:39 --exclude-from=exclusions
1746694 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206        328 Apr 10 19:41 backup_primordia.csh
1746494 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206        167 Apr 14  2006 crontab_file
1746547 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206   35799040 Jan 28 03:24 d21_200701.tar.gz
1746442 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206         25 Jan 28 03:55 exclusions
3216545 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206       2728 Apr 15  2006 moin_config.py
3216543 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206       2688 Apr 15  2006 moin_config2.py
1746546 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206 2915876864 Jan 28 03:23 primordia_200701.tar.gz

Then issue this command:

find . -inum 1746866 -exec rm -i {} \;

QED.

By Nick at 10:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is a very cool video and I certainly can appreciate the technology that went into creating a robot that can do that… that is, if it’s real?

Thanks Johnny!

By Nick at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You just have to watch this to understand!

Oh, and watch it until the very end since that's what brings the whole thing together!

By Nick at 11:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hot, off the presses!

(Link)

By Nick at 11:07 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So, I’m using a product called Jungle Disk which is a front-end interface to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

Jungle Disk really became useful to me when they implemented automatic backup to the S3 service. Currently, I save a bunch of files which aren’t huge in size, but would be a pain in the next to lose. Using the Jungle Disk backup feature, I save almost 5GB of files to S3. The backups happen continuously, every 5 minutes to 1 hour depending on which machine we’re talking about.

How much does this cost me per month? About $1.53! Consider these advantages:

• Your files are safely stored on a server somewhere in Amazon’s data centers, far from your home. A fire, for instance, would not threaten the data you have backed up.
• You can access the files from anywhere, assuming you can remember the massively complex keys that amazon supplies you with to protect your files. Man, I miss TrueCrypt while on my Mac.
• Did I mention the ridiculously trivial cost for this?

Jungle Disk stores the backups in folders based on your computer name. In my case, my root folder is accessed via a network share in OS X. On Windows, it looks like WebDAV is used and the S3 home folder is shown in “My Network Places.”

On my Mac, for example, I can see all of the files backed up by my PC and vice versa. File copies are pretty fast, too, though it’s hard to tell since your home or work network connection plays a large part in that.

Amazon S3 can also encrypt your files, but I don’t enable that. I figure that I’m going to encrypt anything really sensitive locally myself with my own software. So, if some Amazon system administrator wants to browse my files, they could, but the files I encrypt myself should be safe.

If you were looking into a different way to backup your personal files, I definitely think you should check out S3 and JungleDisk.

By Nick at 11:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The fan on my PC's video card got gunked up, made funny noises for a few weeks (which I stupidly ignored) and then eventually FELL OFF the video card onto my sound card. Kerplunk. The plastic clip holding the fan where it was must have melted.

The video card eventually died once the GPU fused to the silicon. I'm surprised it didn't start a fire.

So, knowing I want to [eventually] get a Mac Pro as a permanent upgrade path from my PC workstation, I wonder if I should spend any more money to repair it. Something very powerful and genetic is stopping me from spending $30 and getting a crap card to replace my Radeon 9800 Pro. Logic would say that's what I should do.

But you know me.

By Nick at 11:23 PM | Permalink

This is so funny I almost wet my pants.

Thanks Kevin!

By Nick at 3:52 PM |Tagged as gates , jobs , mac , windows | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Two people sent me links to Yahoo's new “Pipes.” Pipes is a very neat concept and some of the technology behind it seems pretty cutting edge.

What is Pipes?

Pipes allows you to mix and match various data sources such as RSS feeds and create something totally new. In it's very simplest form you can splice together two RSS feeds and create a single aggregate.

But, there are operators... filters... loops, content analysis, location extraction, language translation, and more.

You wire the various input sources into these operators and push them to an output which you can ultimately subscribe to. Outputs are RSS, Atom, and JSON (JSON is a data format that lets JavaScript get values without needing to parse XML).

Here is an iconic representation of my sample pipe, OozeTest1. This pipe aggregates my Blog's RSS with a flickr feed on keyword beach. Oh, and not any beach pictures, but beach pictures by my hometown in 11793 zip.

What people are saying about Pipes

This blog entry does a pretty good job describing the new Pipes service and offers some thoughtful commentary on the mixed reception it will likely receive.

Along with the good a service like this can do, content publishers may be scared of the service because it can be used to modify their feeds in arbitrary ways... like removing ads. Publishers can block pipes using various web tricks (blocking the “Yahoo Pipes” User-Agent, sending Yahoo! an e-mail asking to have your site blacklisted, etc.)

All the while, Yahoo! will now be the destination and penultimate aggregator of feeds, which seems like a pretty good business based on how I see FeedBurner expanding and expanding. I suppose there is no reason why just about all of FeedBurner's features could not be duplicated using Pipes. Plus, users will have arbitrary control on how the features work, which would be a step above FeedBurner's capabilities.

How did they do it?

Pipes seems to have been built using Perl and the Yahoo UI JavaScript library. I'm actually pretty amazed at what I see in the implementation. Although the GUI is a bit sluggish on my BlackBook, it's pretty darn pretty.

Plus, they draw these shiny pipes that aren't images and don't seem to be flash elements. I brought up “Page Info” in Firefox and looked at the media assets on the page... no pipe images. I right-clicked on the layout canvast (all parts of it) and didn't see any Adobe Flash player menus.

View source revealed a neatly implemented page, only two screenfulls tall. At the top are a bunch of links to javascript imports:

<script type=“text/javascript” src=“http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/common/utils/2/yahoo-dom-event_2.1.2.js”></script>
<script type=“text/javascript” src=“http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/common/utils/2/connection_2.1.2.js”></script>
<script type=“text/javascript” src=“http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/common/utils/2/animation_2.1.2.js”></script>
<script type=“text/javascript” src=“http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/common/utils/2/dragdrop_2.1.2.js”></script>
<script type=“text/javascript” src=“http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/common/widgets/2/logger/logger_2.1.2.js”></script>
<link rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css” href=“http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/common/css/reset-fonts-grids_2.1.2.css”/>
<link rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css” href=“http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/common/widgets/2/logger/css/logger_2.1.2.css”/>

I loaded up some of the files and see that the Yahoo UI library has some cool animation functions, some with names like YAHOO.util.Bezier. I'm still now sure how things are drawn but I'll continue to look into it since it seems like a neat technology.

There is a Yahoo UI blog, which I just subscribed to. Lots of videos in that feed, which could of course be spliced into your “Master Media Pipe” which you can create yourself.

By Nick at 11:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks Pavan (via Tech Blog)

By Nick at 3:15 PM |Tagged as iphone , madtv , parody , steve+jobs , youtube | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently became a fan of some of the new compression algorithms that WinZIP is supporting. The one that is working best for me is PPMd. I was able to get about 40% compression on my camera RAW files, about 100GB and reduce that to about 60GB.  This was a huge savings and allowed me to avoid a hard drive upgrade possibly for six more months.

I wanted to send a large PDF to friends and I know some of them use a Mac, so I was curious to see if StuffIt expander supported this compression algorithm. As it turns out, 10.x does not, but 11.02 does.

It’s funny, I’ve been seeing a reminder lately on my MacBook asking me to upgrade to 11.02 and I kept hitting, no, no, no. Then, when I tried to unpack my ZIP file that uses PPMd compression and saw how 10.x failed, I immedately upgraded and was pleasantly surprised to see the zip file unpack successfully.

By Nick at 12:02 AM |Tagged as stuffit+expander , winzip | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In this video, Jeff Han and Phil Davidson demonstrate how a multi-touch driven computer screen will change the way we work and play.

(link)

By Nick at 10:42 AM |Tagged as multi+touch , multi-touch , multitouch | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have done a very poor job at responding to feedback on my blog. On one hand, I get tons of blog spam that I simply haven’t controlled. As such, legitimate comments have gotten lost in the noise.

I just enabled a more strict comment policy for a little bit while I catch up with things. In going through some of the spam, I noticed a reader wondered if I had found a solution to my own question, Find by regular expression in Firefox?

Well, I found a solution in an AddOn called FindBarRX. When you hit Ctrl+F, you get an additional checkbox:

You need to use the JavaScript RegEx Syntax, but it seems to work.

By Nick at 5:27 PM |Tagged as firefox , regex , regular+expressions | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I tried this one on intuition and it worked. To track a UPS package, just go to google.com and type:

ups <tracking number>

For example:

ups 1Z71FEB1C2C82C8D66

Will bring up a link, “Track UPS package 1Z71FEB1C2C82C8D66”

If you type in ups <garbage> the functionality is not invoked. Evidently you need to enter either a valid tracking number or one that resembles a valid tracking number.

This also works for fedex, and possible other carriers:

fedex 900521226815

I’m sure this is in Google hacks or something, but it was simply pretty rewarding to just type it in expecting it to work and have it just work!

UPDATE: A friend wrote and said:

FYI, when you use Google to track packages, you don't need the "ups" or "FedEx" prefix. Just enter your tracking number. Google is smart enough it identify UPS, FedEx, USPS, and a whole bunch of other tracking numbers.

Thanks Derek!

By Nick at 10:58 AM |Tagged as fedex , google , google+hacks , hacks , ups | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A while ago, I had used the Google Map API to figure out how far I had run. My first pathetic route was here:

http://primordia.com/test/permalink/running/route1.html.

Now, all of that Longitude/Latitude crap I did was all pointless. Someone came out with a google map pedometer application.

You just click around a google map and your route is plotted and the distance recorded instantly! Check it out:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

Just remember to “start recording” and “double-click” when you wan to record your runs.

Happy Exercise!

By Nick at 12:02 AM |Tagged as google , google+maps , jogging , pedometer , running | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A friend of mine at work sent an excellent writeup on the processor trend towards multi-cores and how it affects your operating system, your applications, and ultimately the time you spend doing CPU-intensive tasks

I knew just about everything that was described in there, but I was interested to read about some of the iMovie filter and Photoshop tests that failed to be multi-core aware.

This is an excellent writeup which I promise will really solidify the whole concept of multi-core and what it can do for you.

(Link)

Way back in 1996–1998 (or so) I spent $2500 on a two-CPU Pentium 3, I think, where each CPU ran at 400MHz. The reason I bought it was simple, I had a job to do ASP programming (not ASP.NET… this was a LONG time ago) and I had a theory. Debugging an ASP application would be faster if the debugger and the web server ran on separate processors. This was back in the days of NT4 SP3 and the Windows NT Server Option Pack. The results were that the system was usable and debugging worked. Beyond that I just don’t know.

I also recall John Carmack talking about multiple cpu’s a long time ago, back in 1996 when he was developing QuakeWorld:

It looks like I am going to split the QuakeWorld client into multiple threads to reduce the avg 1/2 frame latency between input and packet sending. This is also a step towards building a multi-threaded Quake renderer, which will let multi-cpu NT machines render twice as fast. Lets hope the windows thread scheduler is decent...

This brings up another point. Who’s thread sheduling is better? Windows or OSX or Linux? I’ve worked with a lot of middleware vendors at work and they all support Windows and Linux. It’s funny how each vendor swears that either Windows or Linux has faster thread scheduling. I think it’s really hard to say who’s better since different processing loads can behave in one of two ways on a specific thread sheduler. It can be handled efficiently or it will not be handled efficiently. Actually, it’s probably a gray-scale.

If anyone knows about any studies done where processing loads are categorized and compared on each of these platform thread schedules, I think that would be interesting.

Oh, and since I’m reminiscing about old John Carmack plan files, don’t forget to read my favorite: OpenGL vs Direct-3D on Dec 23, 1996. In that entry he has my favorite quote of all time:

I'm sure D3D will suck less with each forthcoming version…

This is basically the Microsoft rule that I live by. I quote this all the time, although I usually say thet MS software “sucks less over time.”

By Nick at 11:32 PM |Tagged as amd , carmack , direct3d , intel , john+carmack , linux , multi+core , multi-core , opengl , osx , vista , windows | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Holy moley, this is a cool illustration. Read the bottom text to figure out what’s going on. Check out XKCD!

By Nick at 9:02 PM |Tagged as illustration , internet , xkcd | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is the second post in a series on graphic design with Microsoft’s Expression Blend and Visual C# Express Edition. In my previous post, I talked about the rich integration between Microsoft’s Expression Blend and Microsoft Visual C# Express. I showed how you can code up a collection of Points and databind that to a graphical object and have that object appear in the Blend design environment.

In this post, I’ll explore some of the fun that’s to be had by playing around in Blend and realizing those rich graphics changes in your C# project.

If you recall, we started off with a simple spiral; part of the source code found in Petzold’s Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation.

I could tweak the XAML file by hand, say to thicken the stroke, like so: