My Faves from WWDC
almost home
sheepfilms
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

roma★

Andulka
macklin celebrini has autism

titsay

Kaledo Art
Monterey Bay Aquarium
cherry valley forever

#extradirty
NASA
Show & Tell

Origami Around

shark vs the universe

Janaina Medeiros
we're not kids anymore.
KIROKAZE

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Argentina
seen from Argentina
seen from Chile
seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
@musiccodewine-blog
My Faves from WWDC
I haven't listened to this song or album ("Earthling") in years. Just tried it out...and wow. Great fucking song. This came out in 1997! Bowie ages well.
I'd just minimize the browser and listen. The video takes away from the song...a lot of shit going on in there.
While in Brazil in July, 2014, my family stayed at a place called Jardins for about 10 days. We were a few blocks from Avenida Paulista - the heart of São Paulo. I ventured out for a walk along Aven
"Avenida Paulista na Manha", a song I wrote on my iPad while in Brazil this past summer, was featured on the iOS Music and You podcast episode #19. Kinda cool!
Cartoon + Light Bulb = Idea
This ---> article, got me thinking....what were in cartoons to represent an idea before the light bulb was invented?
I'm a Web Developer?
Over the last year I’ve become more of a web developer than I had planned. It’s not a bad thing; it’s a great thing! For years, in my career I’ve built countless tools in either Excel or Access to compliment larger, off-the-shelf software applications that businesses use to plan their supply chain.
Last year, with one of my clients, I saw a need to convert one of the Access tools I built into a web app. The main reason was because the Access app was being used a lot and others needed to either add to it or, at least, view the data so they could do their jobs. We tried hosting the Access app over the network, but that proved to be frustrating at best. So, behind the scenes I went ahead and built a proof of concept using a new to me framework called Laravel. In short order I had something going and convinced myself that this could be a thing and the value would be very high. Now, I just needed to convince the client.
About a month or so passed and a new requirement for the Access app came up. I said let’s try and fulfill that requirement with a web app. The requirement didn’t necessarily need to be part of the Access app, so, it seemed feasible from a business requirement standpoint to have a separate app. I got to work. I ended up buying a new Mac Mini to serve up the website (you did what?), set up the web environment and pushed out a prototype of the new functionality for the client. I was so pumped to show them. I knew they were going to be blown away. I mean, I used Sass and some killer jQuery stuff…hell, I even opened up that MacMini and upgraded the hard drive to an SSD. This shit is dope! Woo hoo!
So, I presented what I had accomplished so far and they’re reaction was: “Yeah, it’s close to what we want, but it needs to do X, Y and Z. When will those things be done?” I came back down to earth and felt a little queezy. “But, did you notice the clever CSS thing I did there that took me hours and hundreds of Stack Overflow posts to read through to figure out how to do it?”, I thought. It then hit me. A lesson I’ve learned millions of times before: they don’t give a shit what it took to do the thing they need, they just want it to work per their requirements.
Fast forward to today. I have ported over all the functionality that was in that Access app over to the web app. Plus, we’ve done a lot more since. Feedback has been great. I still get a little stung when the client isn’t impressed with my latest, awesome, super-fantastic JavaScripting….but, when the client tells me that the tool is helping them do a better job or eliminates hours of non-value added activity, that feeling is like no other. It’s AWESOME!
So, yes, over the last year, I’ve learned a lot of different technologies to build web sites. I can develop websites. And that’s been great. But, unless that app doesn’t help the client, what’s the point? Remember that the next time your plumber comes by and says, “Did you see the amazing wrench I used to fix your toilet?”
The Roots brand new album, “…and then you shoot your cousin” is available everywhere now!
iTunes: http://smarturl.it/iATYSYC
Amazon: http://georiot.co/aATYSYC
Google Play: http://smarturl.it/gATYSYC
Insta-buy!!
SF Landmarks
This Sutro Tower looks like it belongs in Mordor.
Sweet
Where's the wine bottle?
Jesse Winchester sings "Sham-A-Ling-Dong-Ding" and slays Elvis Costello and Neko Case
I didn't know about Jesse Winchester until coming across this link. The link was from a tweet about his passing (4/11/14). What a beautiful song. Now I need to dive deep into some Jesse Winchester music. RIP Jesse
I got back on stage with Nine Inch Nails in Melbourne last month armed with a Blackmagic 4K camera, and here are the insane results, in full 4k resolution.
So good!
Since I moved my blog to tumblr a couple of years ago, I have been really bummed that there was no easy way to embed syntax highlighted code in a post. The best you could do with a default tumblr theme is have your code embedded in a pre tag.
To get syntax highlighting working there are a couple…
In my last post, I was trying to get Gists to work. I came across this post. It really helped me out!
Getting Back on the GTD Horse
For the last couple weeks I’ve been trying to get back into the “getting things done” mode (e.g. GTD). I found that I am entering actions or todo’s for myself in a few applications on my Mac. One is in my GTD software (Things for Mac). Another is the Reminders app and the other is in nvAlt.
Sometimes I find myself all over the place and then I end up not practicing GTD anymore. So, to help make it stick, I had to think about why I’m using three different pieces of software to record the tasks I have to do and how can I simplify managing these tasks.
Why Reminders app?
It seems like I’m using this app more for personal items. Items I shouldn’t forget and won’t live on too long (e.g. buy something from Amazon, research a new feature in Laravel, find out about some new wine, etc.). I like the built-in Reminders app (as a repository) because I can throw things in there via Siri from my iPhone, Fantastical (on Mac or iPhone) or the Reminders app itself (which I rarely use). However I enter in the tasks into Reminders, I’m usually accessing the tasks via Fantastical.
Why Things?
Things is for work and/or non-personal items that I need to keep track of and help prioritize my work. It’s got a little more to offer to categorize actions by projects or areas of responsibility. I’ve been tempted to use OmniFocus, but I have a feeling it’s a bit too much for me and Things is good enough.
Why nvAlt?
For work or when ever I’m researching something, I take down all my notes in nvAlt. It’s quick and easy and I can then access those notes from any text app on my Mac or on my iOS devices. It’s great! Usually, when I’m in a meeting taking notes, I’m jotting down actions items for either myself or others. So, meeting notes and actions are all in one. This is kind of a problem. Unlike Reminders and Things, there is no “ticking of the box” when something is complete with this approach. You end up losing track of the actions.
So, to quickly summarize, I basically have two buckets of actions. One for work and one for non-work stuff. That’s fine and I can deal with that. I’d like it to be just one bucket for the sake of simplifying things, but I feel as though the separation between work tasks and non-work tasks between these two buckets helps my brain process things.
However, I do have an issue I need to fix. I really should have the actions in nvAlt converted to actions in Things. This way I won’t lose any actions amongst all the notes I’m taking. Rather than rely on me to remember to parse my notes (which frequently doesn’t happen), I need to come up with a more reliable approach. I thought about this issue over the last few days and I think I’ve put together a good start to a solution that I’d like to share. Here’s an overview:
Poll the folder that all my nvAlt text files live.
Find a certain text pattern that identifies a line of text as an action.
Send that action to Things.
Write in the file that the action has been sent (so it doesn’t keep looping on the same action).
Here’s what I did:
I wrote a python script that processes a file and looks for any embedded actions in my text files.
This python script then sends the actions to the Things app via AppleScript.
This script also writes back to the file that the action was sent. Sort of telling the file, “hey, I got it…there’s now action in the GTD app”.
All this starts with Hazel keeping an eye out on the folder that houses all the text files. I have a rule set up that checks to see if there any “recent” (in the last few hours) text files that have been modified. It then processes the files through the python script.
Check out the following python script and let me know if this can be improved. https://gist.github.com/shawnzizzo/10196732
Took this while in Downtown San Diego during Christmas. Just thought it looked cool.
The iCloud File Bucket Can Suck It
I spent the last 10 minutes trying to find a file I was working on a couple months ago. I was looking through all my folders that I have for my projects and I couldn’t find the damn thing. Then I remembered, “oh yeah…. I used Keynote in that project. I’ll open up Keynote and look at the recent files I worked on in the File > Open Recent… menu path.” And boom… there it was. Then I right-clicked on the name of the file to see where the file is and it’s in iCloud. Shit. I had forgotten that I tried out the ability to use iCloud with Keynote so that I could also have the presentation on my iPad (which I never ended up using to present with).
All along I’ve been a bit skeptical about Apple’s approach to cloud storage…aka…the virtual opaque bucket ’o files. This real world example just showed my why it seems flawed. And that I’ll be running back to the way I organize my files as soon as I’m done typing this in my text file that is stored in a folder. Yes, it could be that I might be stuck in the middle of legacy file management (folders, etc.) vs the new way (tagging everything to pull files out of the iCloud box). But, I don’t think so. Apple’s idea of storing files in the cloud isn’t right. You access your files through the app you created the file with or based on how you tagged the file and get it via the Finder app. Seems like a very un-Apple way of making things more difficult than easy.
I much prefer the Dropbox approach.
I can access my files from any device (Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, etc.)
I can access my files from any app that supports that file
And… it just works; without me thinking too hard about where the damn file is.
Apple today announced that it will be participating in the "Hour of Code" initiative this Wednesday by offering free workshops in its U.S....
This is pretty cool. I had never heard of this (Hour of Code) before. I know I'm biased, but I think everyone should have some level of understanding when it comes to developing software.
Presenting Fantastical, the Mac calendar app you'll enjoy using. Quickly create new events with natural language input and much more.
It was funny. I was trying to add a reminder via Fantastical (great calendar app for quickly adding events and reminders to any calendar) this morning with a time associated with it. Then I saw couldn't do it. A couple minutes later, I then saw I had an app update...and wouldn't you know it, the latest update allows you to add a date and time to a reminder. Sweet!
Going with Sass
In the last week, I started using Sass to help with writing out CSS on a project. I’ve never really been that good with CSS. Kind of felt like a bit of a mystery and shooting in the dark. Moreover, it always felt strange to have this big file to dump all the stylings into. Or even worse, having a bunch of CSS files linked up in an HTML file. I would lose track of where I was and end up tripping over myself. Plus, I think coming from an object-oriented programming background, it just didn’t feel right. So, Sass, amongst other many useful things, helps with simple organization and keeping things DRY.
I’ve done the usual Googling to learn about Sass. The Sass website is a pretty good place to start. However, I just purchased a strong, foundational book on Sass by Dan Cederholm called Sass for Web Designers. It’s a guick read and extremely helpful. It takes you through the core of Sass, plus some practical ways on how to use it.
Obviously, I’m in the early days with Sass, but there has been one change that has freaked me out a little bit. That is the change to my CSS workflow. For years I have used Espresso (formerly CSSEdit) to hack around to get some decent stylings on my web pages going. This is a great tool for dealing with pure CSS. You make a change in the CSS and you can automatically see the change in a preview view…wihout saving the file first. In addition, it has some very helpful UI elements that would write quick entries into your CSS file (e.g. changing fonts or colors, etc.). This was great for quickly iterating through a design. With going with Sass, I can’t use Espresso this way. Because you have to compile your Sass code into CSS, Espresso doesn’t have the feature to compile then refresh. So, I did some research and there are a few ways to use Sass and iteratetively design. For now this is my approach for editing styles on my web pages:
Edit .scss files in Sublime Text.
Save.
Use LiveReload to watch the directory where my .scss files are, compile them into .css files and then reload my browser(s).
There are pros and cons with this approach vs using Espresso. One of the pros is that it renders your changes within multiple browsers…Safari, Chrome or Firefox (I think I can try doing this with IE on a virtual machine, but I haven’t gone that far….yet). A big con is the time it takes to iterate changes. The saving, recompiling and refreshing of the browser takes seconds vs fractions of a second via Espresso’s live preview approach.
However, there is a bit of a sleeper pro that I think will trump this time-to-iterate con. And that is I am actually learning a lot more about CSS and memorizing a lot more of the commands. This has to do with the fact that I don’t have a GUI to rely on or “cheat” with. Also, when your working with Sass, you really need to have a good understanding of how the compiled CSS file will turn out and how that will impact your website.
To summarize, Sass really helps with keeping my CSS workflow organized, efficient and it helps reduce “bugs” in the CSS. My workflow is still a little in flux, but I think I like where I’m heading. Plus, I will become a little better with my craft going this route.