TNSFF

Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.

18 Feb 2011

A Collection of Things I've Found Useful That I Will Forget About ... So I'm Typing Them Out

Lately, I've been in that mode where I'm basically just trying to stay ahead of my to-do list. The combination of work, getting my wisdom teeth yanked, and this drastic winter have lead to me mostly just trying to keep up. It's not a fun place to be, but with the combination of some long days and some Omnifocus, and I've mostly been able to come out the other side.

I've collected a handful of things that have proven very useful lately, so I figured I'd throw them up here so I can find them again in a year when I'm trying to dig myself out of another hole.

This isn't really much of a blog post, as much as it's just a collection of stuff that is useful to me. Feel free to stop here.

Skitch

Skitch is a super handy screenshot/quick image editing tool. It sits in your menu bar until you need it, and then you just quickly grab a screenshot, throw in some arrows or text or whatever you need, and then it shoots it off to an FTP site or wherever you want. It's super handy.

See, handy!

Ruby/Rails

One of the things I've been trying to spend more time doing is building little web sites. I'm a big fan of Ruby on Rails, but I hadn't upgraded to Rails 3, since building Rails on the Mac has always proven to be a big pain in the ass. After a whole bunch of Googling and piecing together different sets of instructions, I think I've got the steps down. They are, roughly:

  • Build a local version of readline and dump it in something like /opt/local or /usr/local
  • curl the latest version of ruby, untar it, enter the directory
  • run autoconf
  • run ./configure --enable-shared --enable-pthread --prefix=/opt/local --with-readline-dir=/opt/local CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
  • make, sudo make install
  • Boom, you've got ruby in /opt/local

Next, you want to install rubygems and then rails:

  • curl the latest version of rubygems, untar, enter
  • sudo ruby setup.rb
  • sudo gem install rails

Now you've got ruby, rails, and your gems all setup in /opt/local (or wherever).

csshX

Cluster SSH is something I'd never seen before until one of my co-workers was using it the other day. We have a lot of servers where you need to do something on a bunch of boxes at once (or tail the logs on a bunch of boxes at once). Normally, I end up with 10 tabs in Terminal and flipping back and forth between them.

csshX is a nifty, Mac-native cluster ssh client. You open up a bunch of hosts, and then you can send the same command to them all, and it nicely tiles your windows so you can see them all. It's so simple, and so brilliant.

ddrescue

Finally, as I've been building up a media server to feed my AppleTV, I decided to go back to the many CDs I burned in school and grab some old music. It was like opening a time capsule--little video clips, email, school work, music--reminding me of who I was 10 years ago.

Sadly, my memory works better than the memory of an optical disk. There were a handful of CDs that I burned that weren't working very well (or, well, at all).

That sucked.

Thankfully, there's a little tool called ddrescue. I downloaded and built it. It's been running for the last week trying to scrape every last valuable bit off of those CDs (and has saved some of the amazing papers I wrote in college. Amazing.).

The big takeaway? Don't use ddrescue. If you're relying on CDs as backups, burn copies of CDs. Spend 100 bucks and buy a big ass hard disk ad back things up there. Back things up the cloud (Amazon, Mozy, whatever).

Basically, avoid having to use ddrescue.

14 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-14

  • At the Grille, getting ready for Cs/Heat. I'd the Cs pull this out, it'd be a major upset, with only 9 healthy players. #
  • Huge Celtics win today! Rondo came up big in the 3rd, including standing in the middle of the Heat huddle. And LeBron chokes. #
  • Might be my favorite win of the season. #
12 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-12

  • Saw Ray break the record and then a severely shorthanded team fall apart. All star break can't come soon enough. #
  • Man, I'm glad we went into Egypt and overthrew their government with our military and are now stuck there forever. Totally worth it. #
11 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-11

  • If hockey was always like this I would watch all the time. #
  • Someone should have told me the NHL got fun again. I gave up with the dumb 4v4 and a point for losing. #
  • Bruins/Habs goes nutty again! #
  • @fraggle22 Unreal. I'm not sure there's anyone left to play the last 40 seconds. in reply to fraggle22 #
  • Alright hockey, I'm back for now. Don't screw it up. #
  • Giving @Twitterrific on the Mac a go. Digging it so far. #
  • Jerry Sloan retiring is crazy. Jazz have always been my second favorite NBA team. I guess sometimes things need to change (next stop: Indy?) #