Will serves up episode 5 of the animated Calico Monkey. Go watch the funny, and check out his store too… Hopefully he’ll share more illustrations soon.
Is it weird there’s no monkey in the comic?
Fun with Fake Tilt Shift Photography
Sean pointed out Christopher Phin’s Fake Model Photography tutorial that shows you how to transform a photo into what appears to be a macro shot of a miniature model. Turns out this meme has been out for a while, and there a few collections of the style.
Easily distracted today, I looked through the iPhoto collection I have locally and experimented with a few pictures. I like the one below best.
- Before:
- After:
I’ll likely play with some more photos and upload those to flickr if they turn out interesting enough.
St. Louis Gateway Arch to replace Monopoly’s Boardwalk?
A local forum points out Hasbro’s Monopoly board-game is getting a new Here and Now edition. The gimmick is the addition of cities, national landmarks and attractions, and allowing Internet voting for selection of those icons represented.
St. Louis’ candidates are the Gateway Arch (most recognizable), the Delmar Loop (incorrectly represented on Hasbro’s site with a photo from downtown), and Laclede’s Landing (St. Louis downtown riverfront scene). The Arch dominates the local race with 95% of St. Louis’ 43,976 votes.
Checking the results on the other cities, there’s more of a fight between landmarks spreading out their votes, and they don’t have much more voters than St. Louis. The promotion details explain:
the vote totals will determine where on the board those landmarks will be placed. The top voted city will be honored with the coveted blue property traditionally occupied by Boardwalk.
Could St. Louis claim the hottest spot in Monopoly?
(this post brought to you by “the procrastination of more interesting things”)
Busch Stadium Open House
Kelly and I joined Sean and Lucy at the new St. Louis Busch Stadium for an open house event yesterday evening. All the public spaces were open, and only a few sections still under construction and the private boxes were off limits. Food and beverage venders were open, so you could even get a taste of game day.
I’m not a big enough baseball fan to know how well the new ballpark will actually work for the players and the spectators, but I like the new space – it seems to fit in nicely; I especially like how connected to the rest of downtown it feels with open views inside and out.
I look forward to Ballpark Village filling out the empty block where half the old stadium existed, a few more buildings would be nice addition to the scenery.
Snipsnap to WordPress Import
I’ve just imported the blog content out of the SnipSnap wiki I’ve been running for almost 3 years. It wasn’t the cleanest process, I’ve got some stray links to dead content, but I’m happy enough with the results. If there’s a better way, I wasn’t patient enough to find it. I’ll look through the rest of the wiki for any pages (non-blog) later and pull that handful in manually if it’s worth it.
Snipsnap outputs RSS, WordPress imports RSS. Sounds easy, but it’s more involved than you may expect. Issues: Snipsnap only outputs the last 10 items, and the RSS it outputs is pre-encoded with some snipsnap specifics. Sadly, there’s no way to change that in configuration, so some java source editing is required.
Grab one of the latest source projects from http://snipforge.org/download/, I used snipsnap-1.0b3-uttoxeter-20060208-src.
I was impatient finding just the right source to change, so I found several relevant places and updated the count from 10 to 10000 to adequately cover the number of posts contained.
Snipsnap source where I changed that number:
- RecentlySnipChangedFeeder.java
- List changed = space.getChanged(10);
- Rssify.java
- while (iterator.hasNext() && result.size() <= 10)
- if (list.size() < 10)
- BlogImpl.java
- return Rssify.rssify(getPosts(10));
- SnipImpl.java
- .getChildrenDateOrder((Snip) Aspects.getThis(), 10)
- .getChildrenModifiedOrder((Snip) Aspects.getThis(), 10)
Rebuild the Snipsnap project with ant, and install your new app. I exported from my existing snipsnap app, and imported into the new one. Once that completed, I could download and save /snipsnap/exec/rss?type=rss for the full RSS containing all weblog posts.
Now some minor file scrubbing remains. WordPress requires valid XML, and also appears to expect the item/content:encoded element to contain your HTML marked up, and wrapped with CDATA. What instead exists is HTML Encoded, with no CDATA. There are also some Snipsnap inserted images and formatting markup. I manually found/replaced strings with BBEdit, but a series of regular expressions would have worked just as well, and certainly resulted in more geek-points.
All that’s left in the WordPress admin is to load the RSS import screen, select your downloaded RSS, and let it do it’s thing. I raised a few database errors up front, but it then displayed the list of imported snips, and it looks like everything came through correctly.
Remaining issues: The RSS importer assigns the userId to 1, so if that’s not you, you’ll have to update it. Also, the categories are not assigned, so you have to manually address that or insert the needed data for the RSS and the WordPress importer.
I’m going to do this at least once more for other sites, so we’ll see if any major issues come up.
Apple Boot Camp for Windows XP and OS X
Apple announced a public beta for a new utility called Boot Camp, allowing users of Intel-based macs (iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro) to easily install and run Windows XP.
Holy Shit
After the contest to hack the EFI of the Intel Macs to run Windows, I didn’t think this was far off, but I certainly did not expect it to come from Apple.
Casey first alerted me to this, and my initial impulse was to reply, “why the hell would I want to dual boot?” The answers are slim, with the highest on the list being “because you can,” shortly followed by “could I play Half-life 2 or Counter-Strike: Source?” That’d be rather impressive… But certainly not productive. One of the reasons I bought the MacBook was to abandon Windows.
Anything requiring me to turn off my current Mac OS where everything pretty much “just works” and switch to Windows without access to running my OS X programs will be disruptive, and running Windows without official support from either Apple or Microsoft promises a rough experience.
the Apple Remote Control (IR), Apple Wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard or mouse, Apple USB Modem, MacBook Pro’s sudden motion sensor, MacBook Pro’s ambient light sensor, and built-in iSight camera will not function correctly when running Windows.
However, if I could just install some Windows libraries and then run programs compiled for windows without the full OS, and do so natively while remaining in OS X, then I’d be happy. Hopefully some day soon we’ll see that instead.
But I’m a glutton for punishment, and will at least try Bootcamp it to see what happens. Apple offers some details on requirements and issues one might expect.
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.
After I backup my Mac.
Update:
So!
Today I ran Boot Camp, which had me burn a CD with hardware drivers, set the partition size for Windows (5GB default), and mere minutes later, I was rebooting to a Windows install CD.
Note: They’re not kidding when they say you need a Windows XP disk with Service Pack 2. I started with an MSDN disk handy containing that, XP Home, and something else accessible via boot-menu. Sadly, that menu was unusable as the laptop keyboard was not even initialized during the emulated boot process. So don’t bother attempting this unless you’ve got the XP CD proper: the one that you’d get at the store, with your PC, burned ISO to a bootable disk, whatever. And your legal XP license key. That you acquired legally. Microsoft is happy you want to deface your Mac, as long as you pay them for the priviledge.
Anyway, I got a “real” XP disk, and let Windows install. It was… a windows install. Nothing special there. So it puts files on the disk, boots off those files, and I’m looking at the default Windows background wallpaper. Without the hardware drivers, the resolution isn’t perfect and the color depth is off, but it’s certainly Windows. I inserted the disk containing the previous mentioned drivers and the auto-run installer kicked in. Approving the driver updates led to another reboot, and finally that damned Windows startup sound and I’m looking at Windows in 1440×900.
Pretty easy, and very creepy.
(In fact, I’m typing this update in Firefox, in Windows. On a Mac.)
Then, the time spent in “Windows Update.” While that ran I installed Gaim so I would feel so disconnected while operating in Windows. After some long downloads and a reboot, the updates were complete.
First fun thing – Half-Life 2 CDs. Pop disk 1 in, auto-runs… and lets me know I’ve got embarassingly little space available to install it’s content. A quick look at my mess reminds me I failed to give the Windows partition anything more than the default 5GB, which might sound like a lot… (have you looked at how much space your new windows install takes up?), but really 5GB isn’t if you want to dump a few modern games on your drive. No obvious way to resize my partition.
So I start over in Boot Camp with a 15GB Windows partition for round 2.
2 hours later…
Half-Life 2 CDs! (I’m still anxious to try Counter-Strike) At this point we’re still just Windows on a computer, nothing exciting while I swap CDs. Since HL2 runs with Valve’s Steam app, I’ve got to wait a while for it to decode/authorize/download updates. So I let that run.
While that’s downloading, I pull out my Doom3 CDs. Again some disc swapping, and Doom’s done! And Steam is still downloading and applying updates. While it does that, let’s just see how Doom runs…
I can’t make Doom 3 slow.
Nice. I’ve not used a machine that ran Doom well until my MacBook.
Looks like Counter-Strike: Source is 99% patched now, so I’ll end this post with this:
- Boot Camp was simple and quick, and had I allowed for more space the first time, I wouldn’t have had to repeat my steps. Majority of time consumed was basic waiting on the Windows install.
- I’ve never had a machine that ran Windows this well. It’s almost a shame I’ll only use it to play few games. Most of my time I’ll be back in OS X doing everything else.
Textpattern vs. WordPress
In this corner…
A flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.
And in this corner…
A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
Both are PHP/MySQL apps I have installed on a Windows server running Apache. Configuration was largely straightforward. We’ll see which is preferred over the next few days. Or weeks. I’d like to replace SnipSnap, but I’m not holding my breath.
Diet Dr Pepper Berries & Cream
On the way home tonight, I picked up a bottle of Diet Dr Pepper Berries & Cream to see stay awake for a bit longer, and to figure out what it’s supposed to taste like. Kelly says cough syrup. I say it tastes like not sleeping. Curse you caffeine!