Status-Q

Follow-up to the spoof corporate stock photos: Dave Hill pointed me to the nice 'demotivational calendars' at Despair Inc:

Click for more...

(I only feel able to post such things about engineers because I count myself as one of them :-) )

A UK design firm has released a set of spoof corporate stock images, in categories such as 'Team building' and 'Success'. Here's one you can use when your company does a circular on 'equal opportunities':

There are some very good text editors for the Mac.

SubEthaEdit is nothing short of wonderful for its collaboration features - if you haven't tried this, you should find a friend with a Mac and do so - and it's not at all bad as a general-purpose editor. TextWrangler has a somewhat nostalgic Mac-classic feel to it, but has a wonderfully useful feature of being able to browse, open and save files on a remote machine via SFTP/FTP. You simply pres shift-cmd-O and shift-cmd-S instead of cmd-O and cmd-S. If, like me, you spend a lot of time editing config files and web pages on remote servers, this is very nice.

But the one I've recently converted to is TextMate. I'd seen people starting to rave about this app, but hadn't quite worked out why. The more time I spent with it, though, the more I liked it, to the extent that I forked out the 39 EU to buy a license within a few days, not something I'd often do for a program that didn't even have documentation. The Bundle system, which groups together the functionality associated with particular types of file, is very nice, and I find I'm starting to miss the various shortcuts, completion mechanisms and auto-expansions when I'm entering text into anything else.

It doesn't have TextWrangler's convenient access to remote files, but I've long been a fan of the Transmit FTP utility, and if you specify TextMate as the editor then everything's pretty seamless.

And then this week, not only did documentation arrive, but people are starting to produce screencasts, showing how to get the most out of it. More info here.

OK, so this is a quick test using Xinha Here, a rather neat Firefox add-on which gives you WYSIWYG html editing in any text-edit box.  Quite sweet if you end up creating HTML posts, for example for your blog, and you do it through the browser.  I like it. 

I'm using Firefox more and more now, but it still hasn't quite replaced Safari as my main browser on the Mac.  There are just too many convenient drag-and-droppy-type things you can do with Safari.  It may only be a matter of time, though. Here are the current stats:

Jim Bumgardner, better known as KrazyDad, does some wonderful stuff. He does things with Flickr, he does things with Flash, and it's all great fun.

This is his Mona Lisa, for example, made entirely from Flickr photos with the tags 'mona' or 'lisa'. Click on the image to see some more. And make sure you know about possibly the most important button in Flickr which is the little thing labelled 'All Sizes' just above a photo. You really want it for these! You can get some of them as posters, too.

Go to his site and browse around. It's worth it.

I've just been reading a thoroughly enjoyable book on web site design. It comes from the creator of the CSS Zen Garden, a wonderful site which I first mentioned here nearly three years ago.

The idea of the Garden was to promote standards-based web design and, in particular, to show people what could be done with CSS in an age when most people were using tables for all their layout and embedding <font> tags in their HTML. And so the site became a showcase for a single web page - a single page of HTML, that is - but rendered in hundreds of different ways simply by changing the CSS and the associated graphics. The HTML remains unchanged. Have a quick look at this, this, and this, for example. The designs are generally carefully tailored to this particular page, and wouldn't always work for a whole site, but it's still a great resource and inspiration for any web designer.

And now David Shea, who created the site, and Molly E. Holzschlag have written The Zen of CSS Design, which looks at 36 of the designs and talks through, in very readable language, what we can learn about design, and what we can learn about CSS, from each of them. This is not a book for CSS beginners, but if you know the basics it comes very highly recommended.

I now want to go and redesign all my web sites. Oh, for some time....

I've been experimenting with the Open Source backup system 'Bacula', which is gaining popularity as an alternative to the venerable Amanda.

I wanted to use my Linux machine to backup our two Macs, so I needed a version of the Bacula agent bacula-fd which was built for Mac OS X. That turned out to be pretty easy to do, but since I've had an amazing number of visitors to the post where I made a copy of 'wget' available, I thought I'd put this up here too in case anyone else is looking for it.

So here is a gzipped tar file containing the basics. Note that this doesn't contain any of the other bits of Bacula, only the file daemon that you'll need if you want to back your Mac up over the network from elsewhere. I haven't done extensive testing, but it seems to be working OK. This is from Bacula 1.38.2, and was built on Mac OS X 10.4.3.

Some quick notes on how to use it:

The path names here can be changed if you edit the appropriate config files - these are just the ones I used.

1. Copy bacula-fd to /usr/local/sbin (creating the directory if necessary)
2. Edit bacula-fd.conf to your requirements. See the Bacula website for docs if you don't know how to do this.
3. Copy bacula-fd.conf to /usr/local/etc (again, creating the directory if necessary).
4. Set the permissions so that bacula-fd.conf is not generally readable.
5. Create the directory /var/bacula/working as a working directory.
6. You probably want hfsplussupport = yes in the Options bit of the FileSet declaration on the server.
7. You can now test it from the command line with
   sudo /usr/local/sbin/bacula-fd -c /usr/local/etc/bacula-fd.conf
   Add -f and -d100 if you want it to stay in the foreground and print debugging info.
8. On Tiger, the right way to start things on boot-up is to use launchd. Copy bacula-fd.plist to /Library/LaunchDaemons (editing it if you've used any different paths).
9. You can use sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/bacula-fd.plist to load it into your currently-running launchd. You should then be able to see it with sudo launchctl list.
10. Assuming that worked OK, you can start the daemon running with sudo launchctl start org.bacula.bacula-fd.

An interesting post on John's blog. Who does Tony want to take over the family firm? All may not be as it seems....

Everybody in a business has their own special view on its products. Use this rather nice cartoon to find out where you fit in...

Fortune had a nice article entitled "Torrential Rain" about Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. But it's gone behind a premium-rate wall. There's a copy here. I liked this, against the background of Cohen's Asperger's Syndrome:

Last month venture firm DCM-Doll Capital Management bet that Cohen could indeed make BitTorrent a business, investing $8.75 million in the startup. Now Cohen has to prove himself again, showing that he can thrive not just in the programming world--a place where logic rules and theories can be proved true or false--but in the fuzzy corporate world too, where compromise reigns and intellect doesn't always trump idiocy.