Listen to music, look at photography, bicycling, or read ramblings below.

• April 12, 2008

  Good Noise Bad Noise at the Belmont

  

  With special guests.

• April 12, 2008

  Savannah and Nic

  

  At Savannah’s sixth birthday party. Soooo cute!

• April 12, 2008photography

  The Bluffs

  The BluffsTrain Track Marker — on the tracks at the Bluffs.Rusting Can — at the Bluffs.Tree Art — at the Bluffs.

  ‹›
• March 11, 2008lastfmprogrammingrubymac

  We Made it to 1.0!

  I made a nice improvement that I feel warrants a 1.0 release. That improvement is simply a hash that stores genres for the life of the process so that an additional query to last.fm is not needed. I fixed a bug where “q” wasn’t cleanly aborting the process. Also, I did a little spring cleaning with the code… moved everything out of a main file and into separate files for better organization.

  I’m happy to say that build.last.fm accepted my application! So you can now find the tagger on build.last.fm.

  If anyone out there would like a feature added, just let me know and I’ll see about implementing it.

  Get 1.0 now!

• February 28, 2008lastfmmusicprogrammingruby

  Last.fm Tagger 0.9

  I’ve made a few improvements to the Last.fm Tagger. Namely, the ability to cleanly abort the tagging process. Other features include displaying a count of tracks selected in iTunes, as well as the number of unique artists in that selection.

  As always, you’ll need the wonderfully awesome RubyOSA gem installed.

  Download it now.

• December 17, 2007

  chocoface!

  

  Savannah cleaning up the cookie mess with her tongue

• December 17, 2007photographyfriends

  Matt's Pad

  emmatt — at Matt's pad.Talkin' About Something — Mr. Matt talking.Zelda — the itty bitty kitty.After the Movie — it was cold!

  ‹›
• December 17, 2007photography

  neon sax

  

  a sax light on this huge machine thing

• November 5, 2007macsoftware

  MusicBrainz, Picard, and OS X

  Oh how excited I am, for Picard works (without building from source) on my Mac now. Oh, this is the greatest day in a long freakin’ time. It was the one last app missing from my usual Windows routine.

  Get it now! and start tagging.

  Maybe this fella should think about paying the wonderfully awesome MusicBrainz team now :)

• October 9, 2007lastfmmusicmacprogrammingrubysoftware

  Last.fm Tagger for RubyOSA Update 3

  I’ve once again improved my little Last.fm script for use with RubyOSA. It needed updating badly. There were quite a few things bugging me.

  What’s new:

  • Nice console messages telling you what’s happening.
  • Support for skipping over identical genre’s.
  • Ability to continue or abort tagging process. So if you don’t like that tag, type ‘n’.
  • Use -q to subdue tagging confirmations.
  • Full UTF-8 support, as well as proper URL escaping.

  Download it now! And have somewhat useful genre’s to choose from.

  I will tackle cleaning it up later. Add me to your RSS reader if you want script updates.

  Remember, you can get RubyOSA with the Last.fm Tagger here.

• August 30, 2007healthbicyclingpolitics

  How To Ride Your Bike To Work

  How To Ride Your Bike To Work

• August 9, 2007firefoxlastfmmusicprogrammingsoftware

  eMusic.fm Greasemonkey Script

  
  I finished a v0.1 of my eMusic.fm Greasemonkey script. What it does is pretty simple. On an album page, it will pull the 10 most popular tags from last.fm and inject them into the page below the description.

  I found myself looking at last.fm for a particular artist to see what the community has labeled it as. This provides a more insightful look into artists you may not be aware of.

  Download my eMusic.fm greasemonkey script

• July 10, 2007gadgetsiphone

  Ugly iPhone With Belkin Headphone Adapter

  
  I am so angry. I ordered an adapter made by Belkin for my iPhone so I could use my favorite headphones. It’s absurd that you have to spend $10 to do this (or spend $100 on new headphones that I don’t like) and it looks like complete crap. It doesn’t fit in my pocket very nicely either. This does not make Apple look good.

  This is all thanks to the recessed headphone jack.

  UPDATE: I sent this piece of crap back.

• June 27, 2007programmingwebdevrailsrefactoring

  Simple Rails Refactoring

  I needed to attach articles to our default template when running migrations. This was currently executed like so:

  type = Type.find(1)
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << type }

  Pretty simple. Find the first type, which is supposed to be Pages. Iterate through all templates and assign Pages to them.

  I needed to do the same for Articles too, so to get it done quickly, I just repeated what I did previously. So the code looks like this now:

  type = Type.find(1)
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << type }
  
  type = Type.find(3)
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << type }

  Now I’m finding Pages + Articles, then iterating twice over the Templates and inserting on two separate occasions. To foreign users, I thought it may be a little vague, so I decided to add comments:

  # Set default template for pages
  type = Type.find(1)
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << type }
  
  # Set default template for articles
  type = Type.find(3)
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << type }

  Now! Whomever reads my code will know what I was thinking and could probably help clean it up a bit. But wait a sec, Rails adds some pretty nice syntactic sugar to make comments completely unnecessary. Take a look at the same code without comments:

  type = Type.find_by_name('Page')
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << type }
  
  type = Type.find_by_name('Article')
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << type }

  I think the code is self-explanatory without comments now. But is there a way that I can reduce that still to one line? Sure. The type variables are not needed anyways. So let’s get closer to one line:

  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << Type.find_by_name('Page') }
  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << Type.find_by_name('Article') }

  This looks swell. I removed the variables and just put the finder methods add what’s being inserted into the Template association.

  This can be refactored one more time. I can append multiple calls to an array insertion, therefore reducing my code to one line.

  Template.find(:all).each { |t| t.types << Type.find_by_name('Page') << Type.find_by_name('Article') }

  Now it’s lean.

  I make it a point to do things like this as many times as possible in one day. Something that Dave Thomas at RailsConf stuck with me. It’s not an accurate quote, but it goes something like this:

  Always check in code that is better than before. Even if it’s a small improvement.

• June 6, 2007mac

  Automatically Set iTunes Track to Skype Mood Message

  navigate to: ~/Library/Preferences/
  open file: com.skype.skype.plist
  add new sibling to root named “SKShowITunesSongAsMoodMessage”
  set class to Number
  set value to 1

  restart skype

• May 23, 2007conferences

  During RailsConf, I was lucky enough to have my camera ready to take pics and mo

  During RailsConf, I was lucky enough to have my camera ready to take pics and movies during the super secret surprise lunchtime band.

• March 25, 2007musicmusic-compositionyamaha-rm1xaura

  Way Back When

  I spent the majority of my later teenage years overdosing on computers and music… making music, that is. A few times a year, I find myself listening to the so-called music I made. It really reflected who I was: a kid obsessed with meta-consciousness, psychedelics, alternate realities, and generally anything weird.

  So I present to you one track I made while traveling:

  ▶ Play aura_-_user_02.mp3now playing ↓
• March 19, 2007lastfmmacprogrammingrubysoftware

  New Last.fm Tagger for RubyOSA

  Laurent Sansonetti was generous enough to ask me if I wanted to contribute my little Last.fm script to the RubyOSA samples directory. And of course, I was more than willing to do that. He actually updated the script to make it even better! Now, you simply select which track in iTunes you want to tag, and run the RubyOSA script. The script will then query Last.fm for the most popular tag, and set the genre to whatever the tag on Last.fm is.

  Here’s the updated code:

  Remember, you can get RubyOSA with the Last.fm Tagger here.

  Thanks to Laurent for making an awesome library. It makes playing with Ruby even more fun!

• December 26, 2006blogging

  Testing out Blogger

  I am trying out Blogger. While I’ve never tried it ever before, in the long existence that it has, I’m pretty impressed at the simplicity of it. I like the way it handles publishing. No need to get a host with Rails, PHP, MySQL, etc just to have a blog. Get you some cheap hosting and go get a Blogger account.

  I do have some wishes though: Some kind of data import. I have a year or so worth of posts that I want on here with the corresponding dates.Syntax highlighting… a little superfluous, I know but I sometimes post Ruby stuff on here and would like to see it highlighted. Maybe I’ll just post screenshots.So I’m not completely sold yet, but I do like it so far. My old (slow) blog can be reached at: blog.633k.net.

• December 20, 2006mac

  Automatically Map Network Drive with OSX Upon Login

  After a little prying, I was able to finally figure out that a network share can in fact be mapped upon login. It’s easy, and I’m an artard for not knowing this before.

  1. Manually map the drive you want to auto-map at logon
  2. Go to System Preferences
  3. Select Accounts
  4. Select “Login Items” under your username
  5. Add a new item by clicking the plus
  6. Select your networked folder and click Add

  That’s it. Heh. Make sure you store your login information if you don’t want to be pestered by the login prompt everytime.