Category: Technology

Technology

Ancient history

petewareLeave a comment

I’m googling myself and collecting some of the results:

Technology

Google App Engine

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I’ve always been a fan of the djangoproject.org and it’s what I use for my web server at home: www.peteware.com
But the coolest news is that Google App Engine is based on it. Here’s some info:

For me, Django provides a great object to relational mapping interface combined with a wonderfully clean seperation between business logic (a view in the django world) and presentation (a very nice templating language). Each piece is wonderfully independent from the others.

Technology

Bling for the Blog

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I’ve been adding some bling to my blog. I started with the easy slideshow widget:
slideshow.png
which you get to directly from “Settings — Layout”
Then I found out about using clocklink.com
timelink.png
which you can add with the
and use the html that clocklink.com provides.
htmllink.png
My final bit of bling was going to amazon.com and going to your account. You can add various widgets. I decided to add my favorites. It also inspired me to get an associate account so I can link directly to products.

Technology

Recent additions to the Mac

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In the constant quest to have the latest and coolest toys, here are some things I’ve recently added to my Mac.
– Chax adds some nice features to iChat:
Picture 1.jpg

Technology

Time capsule rules!

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I’ve got to admit, Apple’s Time Capsule rules!
Starting off was a little slow. The initial backup was 60Gbytes or so and took
nearly 16 hours to finish. I did this over the wireless connection. It
wasn’t a big deal. I had my laptop plugged in and just left it on overnight.
The transfer rate average to be about 1.2MB/sec (~10Mbit/sec) but as you are
watching, it really drags on
My girlfriend’s MacBook got backed up as well.
So now I’ve got this nice wireless backup going on. Both laptops share the backup drive without interference.
It’s a little of a let down at that point. You start up “Time Machine” and all
you see is exactly what’s on your desktop. After that, it starts to back up
every hour. The interface took a few tries before it really sank in how it
works. I’d expected to drag and drop to get to a backup file since it provides
a “Finder” interface to the backups. Instead, there is a “Restore” button to
bring things back.
Another thing that outsmarted me is that I kept checking for when the next
backup would happen. But it wouldn’t happen. The big “Power off” letters in
the Time Machine menu didn’t click for a long time. Finally, I realized it
wouldn’t do the backup unless I add my laptop plugged in to power. Makes pretty
good sense since you don’t want a lot of disk activity if it’s running on
batteries.
In the event of a my laptop disk failing, I’m supposed to be able to have the
install disk go to the backup and recover the system to any point in time.
Hopefully, I’ll never have to find out if it works but what’s the expression:
“Hope is not a plan”.
You can check out the Time Machine features.

Technology

Gettting Grab screen writing jpeg instead of tiff files

petewareLeave a comment

By default, “Grab” on MacOS saves the file as .tiff. Why? There’s no preferences to change it. Fortunately, there’s a pretty easy way by opening a terminal window and running the command line:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

You need to reboot for it to take affect. You can make other choices: jpg, tiff, etc.
You can also set the “location” and read the current values

defaults read com.apple.screencapture
Technology

C#: Silly syntax hint

petewareLeave a comment

I found myself wanting to make sure a couple objects that spport IDisposable were cleaned up. I’d written

    using (DurationLogger log = new DurationLogger(s_log, "Writing CSV file"))
    {
        using (FileStream fs = File.OpenWrite("temp.csv"))
        {
             // ...
        {
    }

A simple transformation makes it much more readable:

    using (DurationLogger log = new DurationLogger(s_log, "Writing CSV file"))
    using (FileStream fs = File.OpenWrite("temp.csv"))
    {
         // ...
    }