Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ruby troubles

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I have found what worked for me when setting up a developer environment for RoR:
http://mentalized.net/journal/2006/02/02/kill_the_rails_pluralization/
For some reason, the pluralization feature of Rails was gumming up the works. Once it’s dead I was up and running! Yay!
This is one of those gotchas that should be looked at for upcoming releases. It took me a while to find this solution after looking all over everywhere…

New Addition!

Two of the most beautiful people I know have a new addition to their family:
jake5.jpg
His name is William Jacob Cashin and he was born Friday April, 28th. Get this, he and I share the same birth-weight: eight pounds and fourteen ounces!
Yay!

Tess Jamming out.

Tam and I are at SERBA to see everybody. Tam went to the Gala and I stayed in the room to babysit Tess. The clock radio has big buttons on the top for different genres of music. She found the Rock and Roll button and I recorded the results on my RAZR.
Download file


Whew!

I am typing on my rejuvenated and much missed Lombard. I got it back this morning and am stealing a few moments at the Mall of GA Atlanta Bread Company.
It seems that when Tess unfolded the screen she must’ve stepped on the joint that contains the hinge and the AV in such a way that the AV card cracked. It could have been much worse. While they were at it, the good folks at Daystar replaced the missing keys, upgraded the RAM, replaced the rear door, and the top case! They also tweaked the MACh Speed Control settings in such a way that I’m able to take advantage of the L2 cache; every time I’ve tried to futz with its settings I’ve crashed the Mac. It’s right now, and I’m not going to touch it!

Sick Lombard

The Lombard is in intensive care under the excellent care of Gary and the good folks at Daystar computing (makers of the xlr8 Mac CPU upgrades). Say a prayer for it! Or send $2985 to the Benjamin Westafer Benevolent Society. Yikes. I’m hoping to have it back next week. I didn’t realize it was now eight years old. I do want an excuse to get a new one, but I’m very attached to the Lombard. It’s been a workhorse and hopefully it will have a new lease on life when it returns.

Simple Clock

OK, so I have trouble getting up in the morning. I’m constantly late and unfocused; well, that’s what I’m told. Anyway, I wrote a clock for myself in AppleScript with some borrowed code and some of my own and here it is. The magic of the script takes place in a crontab. The crontab is really simple to make, but it means a trip to the Terminal. I know, I know, I’m supposed to use launchd, and I will get around to that, but the crontab is faster for me. Here’s the script:

tell application "Finder"
set volume 10
end tell
set volInt to 60
tell application "iTunes"
set sound volume to volInt
set song repeat of user playlist "wfae" to one
play track 1 of user playlist "wfae"
end tell
set whichButton to ""
repeat until whichButton = "No, I'm up!"
display dialog "Snooze?" buttons {"No, I'm up!",
"SNOOZE"} default button "SNOOZE"
set whichButton to (button returned of result)
set sleep to "sleep"
if whichButton = "SNOOZE" then
tell application "iTunes"
pause
end tell
do shell script "/bin/tcsh -c '/bin/sleep 300'"
tell application "iTunes"
if volInt < 100 then
set volInt to volInt + 10
set sound volume to volInt
end if
play
end tell
end if
end repeat
tell application "iTunes"
set song repeat of user playlist "wfae" to all
set volInt to 60
set sound volume to volInt
play track 2 of user playlist "wfae"
end tell

Save this as an Application and put it somewhere. Mine's in my home directory.
Open the Terminal and type:

crontab -e

Type the following (crontab -e spits you into vim)

15    8    *    *    *    open    iTunesWakeUp.app

The spaces inbetween the items are tabs. One mustn't forget the tabs, oh best beloved.

type :qw

and you'll get a nice message from the Terminal:

crontab: installing new crontab

You can check it by typing crontab -l

Now, go to sleep and wake up to iTunes.

A few gotchas:
I've pointed my alarm at track one of the playlist "wfae". This can be whichever of your playlists you choose. BTW, track one on my alarm is the sound of an alarm bell.
Track two is the live stream from WFAE, the NPR news station in Charlotte, NC.