Ups and Downs and Everything In Between

• Not really a long day, but it feels like it because it started so early. Now off to dinner and then personal stuff. That’ll be cool. #
• At dinner discussing sex and religion. @BloodyLaughter to me: Can you NOT be an asshole for 2 minutes? Me: No, I really like it! #
• Why so little written on best-practices for website deployments? You’d think state of the art would be further along than “ftp your files.” #
• It kind of bugs me that my LinkedIn profile will never be more than “85% complete” ’cause I have no appropriate “Education” info to fill in. #

• In Katoomba ordering breakfast from cute, cute waitress. Also, public urinals in Australia are just big pee-walls, not stalls. Who’s hungry? #
• Hiking down the Furber steps in the Blue Mountains National Park. Taking pictures too. It’s very pretty here, smells like moss and ferns. #
• OMG, I’m in the most amazing little cafe EVER! It’s like a cross between a hobbit hole, a Scottish pub, and the Enterprise’s holodeck! #
• Ohhhh…I so, so should have ordered the small nachos. Have 2hrs on train to digest, then have to work on new freelance coding project. #
• Didn’t think I’d ever actually need to advise anyone to seek counsel from NCSF—much less a relative—but today I have. http://ncsfreedom.org/ #
• Early to bed, early to rise? Yeah, right, except for the fact that I have an all-staff meeting at 8:30 AM tommorrow. Night, tweets. #
• Ugh. Up at 8 for a “strategy and team-building”
  meeting for work. Here’s my idea for our strategy: no meetings before 10 AM! Srsly…. #
• Holy shit, it’s only 8:30 AM but I’ve never seen Redfern St. so packed. Are they all going to work? No wonder Earth has so many problems. #
• Eat my dust, other pedestrians! I learned how to people slalom in Times Square! #

• WEB PEEPZ: CSS has been stagnant for a while, so hypothetically, if you were to get a book about it this year what would you be looking for? #
• Lazy day. It’ll be past 3 soon and I’ve not even had breakfast yet. Then again, sometimes I don’t eat breakfast until 9 on busy days, so…. #
• A strange man dressed in a black suit, a top hat and a beard just stopped @BloodyLaughter and I to tell us we should make babies. WTF? #
• At a cafe in Newtown writing blog drafts and updating my resume. The hardest part is trying to fit all the new stuff on a single page. #
• Back home after shopping a little with @BloodyLaughter for harem outfits. I like treating gender a little like a buffet. #
• Finally done updating my résumé and—to outdo myself—I added the hCard+adr @microformats and a zoom layout http://maymay.net/resume Now, bed! #
• On my way to catch a train to the Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. First thoughts: Oh. So this is what 9 AM looks like from outside. #

Without doubt, the most common use of computers today is to create written content of some kind. Blogs are an obvious example, but written content can take a number of forms. Writing manuscripts for publication is another example.

No matter what kind of writing you’re doing, using good tools to make your writing technically better is an incredibly handy thing. Letting the computers do the technical stuff—the stuff they’re good at—let’s you focus on the creative stuff: writing great content. Which is why, if you use a Mac, you’ll be happy to hear that any application’s text field let’s you do a number of really cool things (as long as it’s a Cocoa application, of course).

1. Auto-complete unfinished words

Try this out:

1. Open TextEdit, from your /Applications directory. A new blank document will open.
2. Type Hel and then press the ESC key. A drop-down menu will suddenly appear with an alphabetically sorted auto-complete list of suggestions, sourced from your computer’s current language dictionary. It looks like this:

This feature works with both Pages and, for those of you still using it for some reason (I know you’re out there), TextEdit, too. Also, if you’re a developer and a writer as well (like I am), you’ll be happy to hear that this feature also works with Xcode’s Code Sense feature, and suggests completions for variable, function, class, and method names in your code.

2. Spellcheck as you type

A Cocoa text input field also has a number of other tricks up its sleeve. For instance, in many applications you can elect to turn on the “Check spelling as you type” feature, which will cause words you misspell (words not in the computer’s dictionary) to appear with a dotted red underline. If you right-click on these words, the contextual menu that appears will offer spelling corrections.

However, sometimes we use words like those in slang or colloquial language that isn’t in a proper dictionary. These words will still appear to be “misspelled” when you type, so in these cases, we can tell Mac OS X to “Learn Spelling” (also from the contextual menu). When you select this option, you append that spelling to your personal dictionary. (This is really just a plain-text file located at ~/Library/Spelling/lang file, where lang is the language code you’re typing in. For Enlgish, this file is ~/Library/Spelling/en.)

3. Look up word definitions and search for text in Google or Spotlight

Last, but certainly not least, another neat thing you can do with text on your Mac is look them up with Dictionary.app. Simply highlight some selectable text on screen, right-click and select “Look up in Dictionary”. This will cause Dictionary.app to open and display the definition of the selected word.

Since Dictionary.app can also look up articles in Wikipedia, this is also a very quick way to go to a Wikipedia article without ever having to open up a Web browser.

Also, from the very same menu, you can open a Web browser. Simply select “Search in Google” to cause your default Web browser to launch a Google search for the highlighted text.

• Yes! HtmlValidator Plugin for Firefox finally works for Firefox3 on MacIntel! http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/download.html #
• …is shocked at the apparently widespread lack of knowledge of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard among his fellow system administrators. #
• I am torn. Do I work on the 8 billion personal projects I can try to do or do I laze about and choose to cuddle in bed instead? Maybe both? #
• Okay, cuddling was made of awesome. Now some psuedo-work time, mostly involving the enjoyment of watching Mail.app’s Activity Viewer window. #
• Sometimes I think “programming” is just the art of reusing other people’s code in clever ways. Kinda like a librarian, or a collage. #

• Performance review at work went pretty well, mostly glowing feedback. I do hope we can talk about $ soon, though. Time is money, my friends. #
• The Drupal aggregator module is neat—I am continuously dismayed w/ how many devs know their stuff well but can’t maintain their code at all. #
• I’m only half way through it but this is w/o doubt the best talk on business mgmt I’ve ever seen: http://tinyurl.com/5hky8p #
• Ok, I think it is bedtime. I got nothing I intended to do tonight done, but I’m chalking tonight up as a learning opportunity. See ya later. #
• In my dream, I was pulling glass out of the skull of an old man who died. I am now slightly freaked out at myself. Where’d that come from? #

If you’re a Mac user who often uses VPN connections, you’ll notice one very disappointing thing about connecting to your corporate or personal network over such tunneled connections: typically, Bonjour-style addresses (such as “computer-name.local”) don’t work. This is because multicast DNS (or mDNS) doesn’t work over a tunnel. Though there are ways to get it functional, they are pretty complicated and require that you have a lot of esoteric networking knowledge.

However, if the services you typically access via Bonjour use static IP addresses, then there is one age-old networking technique you can use to simulate Bonjour-style naming conventions without actually using Bonjour. This, of course, is the /etc/hosts file.

The /etc/hosts is a simple, static, text-based mapping of computer names to IP addresses. It does exactly what Bonjour does except it doesn’t keep itself up to date when things change. Of course, if you’re using static IPs for the services you want access to, you can pretty safely assume that things aren’t going to be changing frequently anyway. Long-time sysadmins will laugh at this, but I say let them laugh. This is remarkably useful and very easy to implement.

Let’s assume I’m running a personal web server on my home network, and I can access my home network via a VPN. On my home network, my web server’s IP address is, say, 192.168.2.100, and I usually access it as http://server.local/. All I need to do is open a Terminal prompt and run the following commands as an administrative user:

sudo echo "192.168.2.100	server.local" >> /etc/hosts

That’s it. What this does is hard-wire the name server.local so that it always resolves to the IP address 192.168.2.100. Now, anytime anything on my computer tries to access server.local, it’ll always access 192.168.2.100 directly instead of ever needing to make an mDNS query on the network. The net effect is that we can trick our computer into thinking that Bonjour is working, even when it’s not—such as over a VPN connection.

Note that in default cases, hard-wiring an IP address like this completely prevents your computer from ever asking other computers (such as DNS servers) what the current IP address for this name is. That means if the IP address of the remote server changes, you won’t be notified, and things will just not work. So be mindful that you’ve made this change, and revert it as a first step in troubleshooting procedures.

By the way, Windows users can do the very same thing simply by editing their etc/hosts. They can find this file at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and can edit it with Notepad. They will also need to install Bonjour for Windows to get Bonjour working in the first place, of course.

• Today only some improvement of symptoms, but major excitement seeing the presentation turn out great! Will blog it later. Half-day at work…. #
• I was really excited about stuff this morning. What happened to my enthusiasm? Augh…I hate projects that drain my motivation SO MUCH. #
• @sheershir Speed-dating, eh? I would make a joke about relationships ending quickly but that is far too crass, even for me. Have fun! #
• In other news, my patch to the Drupal 6 API docs for l() was finally committed. This makes me happy in a warm and fuzzy sort of wiggly way. #
• Just got invited to the opening of Wall-E in NYC but can’t go because I am on the other side of the planet. Am now suddenly rather homesick. #
• @essinem Your cat’s name is Athena? @BloodyLaughter’s cat’s name is Athena, too. #
• What the heck do four sexy girls playing violins and a cello (very well) have to do with my name? http://tinyurl.com/6z6dyg #
• Aaauugh…head hurts, sinuses hurt, arms and back hurt. I should so be in bed already. #

• I am achey and completely stuffed up so am seriously considering calling out sick today. Maybe I’ll take a half day instead, not sure yet. #
• Set up a company NetInstall system image with a custom “Target Web Browsers.mpkg” with Apple’s PackageMaker in 10.5 Server Tools in seconds. #
• This system imaging automation POC is going so much better than even I ever imagined it would. I’m so excited! This’ll save me so much time! #
• A word to the wise: when you ask a barista in Sydney to “surprise” you with a drink order, they are very comfortable to oblige you. #
• In other news, @BloodyLaughter and I just got served chicken schnitzel in the shape of Australia for dinner. #
• Holy crap. How did I get 178 friends on Facebook? I mean really, when did that happen? #
• Last time I tried SnapzPro X a QuickTime bug made it unusable for me. Now, I’m combining it with Screen Recycler to record my presentations. #
• My first attempt at recording my first presentation for a Uni tech club is now rendering. I’ll be embarrassed tommorrow but I’m excited now! #

• Trac 0.11 has (FINALLY!) been released. My favorite thing about Trac: The answer to “there’s gotta be a better way” is always “there is.” #
• Read through Web Directions South http://tinyurl.com/65j7w7 and am now struggling to find the motivation to keep working. #
• You know you’re a nerd when #127: Your programmer coworkers call your hobby project ’so geeky’. #
• You know you’re a nerd when #365: plan to work on “so geeky” hobby project but then write v0.9 of DreamTracInstall http://tinyurl.com/4msp2r #
• Going to bed with a stuffy nose and painful sinuses sucks. Come on Eucalyptus rub, do your soothing thing. I have a review meeting tomorrow. #