iBook Audio Issue

March 3rd, 2010

After running the utility Onyx on my computer to both clean it up a bit and change some settings, I suddenly found my computer having some troubles.  Dialog boxes would just beachball shortly after appearing, and the applications that created them would have to be force quit.  After trying to change my volume, I noticed that something was wrong with my audio, so I turned off the text-to-speech I had set up for dialog boxes.  After this, the beachball problem stopped.

But I had no audio at all.  On further investigation, I noticed the OS was not recognizing any audio devices, input or output.  I found a forum thread discussing this issue.  I couldn’t find the cause, but I did find a solution.  I simply had to download Quicktime from Apple and reinstall it over my current install.  Since then, I have full audio and no problems with it, and no unusual beachballing.

I’m not sure what happened that caused this problem, but it might have been related to the permissions check Onyx does on loading.  I hope to avoid it in the future.  I will be more careful using Onyx in the future anyway.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Computer | No Comments »

Disappearing iPhoto Library

February 15th, 2010

Today, I noticed a strange thing while doing a bit of filesystem cleanup:  My entire iPhoto library, containing 8000+ images, had somehow turned into a 300k alias file pointing to nothing.  Concerned, I looked elsewhere to make sure I hadn’t just stored it in a different location for organization purposes and the alias had broken.  I hadn’t.  Then I remembered earlier today noticing that my hard drive seemed significantly roomier than normal.  I had just emptied the trash a couple days ago (usually don’t empty often, just in case), but there shouldn’t have been anything nearly that big in there.

Luckily, I use Apple’s Time Machine for backup, plus my own other methods.  In Time Machine, I went back about two weeks before the actual library was there.  Restored it of course.

I have no idea what happened there.  I hadn’t used iPhoto or been reorganizing anything around that area for a full month.  If I had somehow accidentally created an alias in the folder, there would be no reason it wouldn’t perform he normal action of appending alias to the name.

I’ve had weird issues with files for a while now, mainly with iTunes (disappearing songs).  Not nice having things just disappear.  If I hadn’t noticed, my Time Machine backup might have gotten overwritten (my disk for it isn’t that big).  I would have had to revert back to my other backups then, which may not have been up to date.

I do have weird issues because of scope problems with the Finder.  Expose to show the desktop doesn’t bring the desktop into focus, just shows it.  I frequently hit command keys to act upon the highlighted file on the desktop, only to find I’m focused elsewhere, and have performed some action on something else.  Also, I forget how it happens, but I frequently think I am in a browser window when focus is on the desktop.  I hit command-T, only to hear a weird noise but no new tab.  I later find an alias to something new on the side of my Finder window.  Still none of this should have caused my problem.

I worry about individual files disappearing.  Those I will most likely not notice, maybe just not for a while or maybe not ever.  I also don’t have as thorough of a secondary backup system as I do with the iPhoto library and some other things, so they might get overwritten in Time Machine before I notice.  If I don’t ever notice, that wouldn’t matter anyway though, as they’d just sit on my Time Machine drive, without me even knowing it.

I may have to figure out a better way to do secondary backups, and I may have to figure out a better way to organize my files so that I can notice more easily (I’ve been working on organization for a long time).  Backup to my server may be a good idea.  I have my home server as well as 50GB of backup space on my Dreamhost account.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Computer | No Comments »

Google finance adds split handling

January 21st, 2010

Looks like it’s been a good while since I’ve posted on this blog. My “professional” blog, which gets much more traffic, has been getting my focus, and I’m still not sure what will be happening with this blog.

Anyway, on with the post.  I use Google Finance for my everyday checks on my stock portfolio and the market in general.  I check for prices and news.  It gives me a basic idea of my returns for each stock and for my overall portfolio, though it doesn’t seem to match perfectly with my tracking in Quicken.

A while back they began tracking dividend payouts.  They are not entirely accurate, which is probably why the numbers are off.  They also are not applied to the returns of individual stocks, only the whole portfolio.  Since Quicken can show me per-stock returns with dividends, this provides a nice comparison between market returns and overall returns.

So just today I looked at my portfolio after having not payed attention to it for several days or so, and suddenly my returns were way up (from around 60% overall to 80%).  I was somewhat excited for a second, but confused because the overall market had not jumped that much, and as I looked through prices, none seemed that different from where they were.

I noticed my return on Apple had gone way up even though the price had only gone up a bit.  Then I saw the number of shares and though “That isn’t how many shares I have”.  I excitedly thought, “Did Apple split?”  Looking at the page on Apple and the related news, there was no sign of a split.  So I looked at my transactions.  I had manually put in my splits before as purchases with no cost.  They were there still, but my initial purchases were wrong for some reason.

I soon realized:  Google is now taking into account splits automatically, which means my added split transactions were just adding more shares to my actual number.  For some reason Google had, for all of the split stocks, modified the purchase number of shares and purchase price, lowering the former and raising the latter so the overall cost-basis was the same.  I had to remove my added split transactions and then look up the data for the original transactions so they were correct.

Everything is back to normal now, my returns are back to a mere 60%.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Toby | No Comments »

Applied for Job: Bluestar

October 29th, 2009

Angela Berlingeri, my instructor for my Web II class, forwarded me an email about a potential PHP developer job at bluestar-design.com.  There weren’t any details about the job, including information about what skill levels and sets were required, so I went ahead and sent my resume.  Julia Brigg sent me an email fairly quickly saying she might have an entry level position (the kind I’d need) in the near future.  Yay.

She also forwarded my resume to an associate, who called me immediately.  He needed a full time developer, which would conflict with my schooling, so I was unable to meet his need.  But he did say that he might be interested once I graduate.  Yay again.

Suddenly I have some job prospects here.  That is a good thing.  I was just starting to get a little concerned about going through my savings.  This was by far my most positive job application yet.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Toby, WebD | No Comments »

iTunes CDDB info for the Yars

October 17th, 2009

In January, my former band The Yars released their first full album (they were all shorts or live while I was there).  I’ve had a copy of it since then, but haven’t imported it.  I had heard the songs tons of times as Dwight was working on them, so was certainly burned out on them.  I also don’t entirely like the sound direction the songs have taken, and it’s a little weird listening to another drummer play them.  And it wasn’t in the iTunes store, so they had no CDDB data.  I wanted to wait for that.  So I never got around to importing it.

Today I decided to.  It’s been in the iTunes store and other venues for months now.  But still, there was no CDDB in the Gracenote database that iTunes uses.  I could go to the store and see all the track info, but there was no way to get it to the album.  But I found this article describing how you can copy store songs to a playlist, then use one of Doug’s scripts to copy them to another set of songs.  So I went to the iTunes store to copy them to a playlist.  Unfortunately, the new fancy iTunes song playlist doesn’t allow this to happen.  The songs are like HTML elements on a page.  And I had planned to boycott getting new versions of iTunes because they had cut off support for third party access.  But just recently I think the very features that were now causing me trouble, plus the full new version number, had enticed me.  I found the “Column Browser”, which does have a Cocoa style list of the songs, but I searched every possible genre with no luck at finding the Yars.

After much mucking with this, I remembered I had iTunes 7 still installed on another partition.  I rebooted into that system and fired up iTunes.  It spun the disk and of course said there was no CDDB info.  I went to the store.  I waited for the store to load.  It never did.  I logged in to my account, and waited again.  It logged me in, but still didn’t load the store.  I looked through several modifications of Google searches to see if I could find something saying that iTunes 7 no longer works with the store or something like that, but found nothing.

When I went to my music library (empty), an advert told me to get iTunes 8.  So I clicked the link, went to the Apple website, found the little link that mentions G3 owners, found the place to download iTunes 8.2.x, downloaded about 90 MB, and installed.  On opening, the store finally worked.  I got the script, made the playlist, copied the track info, and then submitted the track info to the Gracenote CDDB.  I couldn’t import these songs to my library, since that iTunes is not attached to it.

So I restarted into my normal OS, and opened iTunes.  Let the disk spin.  Again got the message, no info for the album in the CDDB.  So I am of course sufficiently unhappy with the hour I spent trying to get the actual tags from the iTunes store.  And of course writing this post only adds to the time I’ve spent on this.  I’m not going to import the album at this point, and I’m not sure how to handle the issue.  I could go back into the old OS with iTunes 8, import the music there, then move the songs to the other disk, restart and import them into my normal iTunes library.  Or I could manually enter the information.  Either way, I won’t be happy.  Bullocks.

[Update 11/07] I finally decided to try again.  The CDDB info was there this time.  Perhaps there was just a delay with it propagating or something.  The info seems to be correct.  Happy that wasn’t an issue like it had been the one day.  Now the only issue seems to be that the disc is having trouble being read.   I think I’ll let Dwight know, see what he says.  Perhaps he’ll be offended that it took this long to do anything with the disc.[/update]

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Computer | No Comments »

Geocities closure

October 15th, 2009

My former roommate/bandmate had mentioned a few months back that geocities would be closing.  I had my site on there until I started my own server and entered the world of server side scripting and databases.  The site is still up, though I haven’t used it in years.  The last thing I did with it was to simplify it, link only to the more important content, and make sure to have a notable mention of my new site.  But I still wanted to preserve the old stuff.  I’m not sure what I may have backed up from there still.

Geocities doesn’t offer any way to download files at all through its file manager, and I wanted an easier way than opening each file through the editor, copying and pasting into a local file.

A post mentioned using wget to download the whole site.  I guess Mac OS X doesn’t come with wget (a nice utility for downloading http stuff from the command line), so I had to install that.  Using it didn’t get all of my files though, because much of the old stuff was no longer linked, and some of the files were accessed with javascript.  It also didn’t get files linked from within CSS or javascripts.

I tried using iCab to download everything.  It has a nice site download feature that allow you to follow links and set limits on what is downloaded.  But it kept failing at some point with a cryptic error -1100.  It downloaded less than wget.

So I ended up having to get the items not gotten by wget by copying from the geocities editor and pasting into local files.  The images had to be viewed and downloaded.

So now that is backed up before the shutoff date in just 11 days.  I doubt I have any use for it, as I think all of the old stuff that was really in use was pretty well destroyed or disabled.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in WebD | No Comments »

Potential Freelance Group

October 15th, 2009

I am very excited about this.  Last week I asked Nadia, a girl from my Web II class who is good with design, if she would like to form a freelance-like group with me.  She had mentioned earlier in the semester that she didn’t like the idea of going fully freelance, being totally alone.  She liked to have people to critique ideas and collaborate with, as well as to share expertise.  I had thought when she mentioned that to ask her about forming a group, but my shyness and unsurity made me wait.  I finally did it, and she said yes, and was excited about it as well.

We talked a bit (via email) and she wondered who else we could include in this group, so I mentioned Jason, another good designer from our class.  We asked him the next day of class, and he said yes.  He, of course, was also excited by the prospects.  And he has had experience with freelance design.

They are both very good at design, which I am not.  They can do flash and drawings and what not.  I am fairly good working with scripting and data, and have, and have some experience turning designs into HTML/CSS.  So we should complement each other well.  We seem to work together in class well as well, which will hopefully make things work smoothly.

So we’ve been talking a bit via email and class.  We have to figure out things such as what sort of business entity to become, how we will handle money (don’t want any disputes with this), what sort of contract we will use, etc.   We will probably want to become an entity like a partnership, with a separate name from our own, so that we have a brand and people can pay that single entity.  This will also make sense for tax purposes.

Part of the idea of this is to be like freelancing, but with the support and image of the other members of the group, so we don’t want it to start off as something complicated and expensive.  It is also going to be set up as something that can be done on the side of a full time job.  We want it to be easy for people to come and go if need be, and maybe even have only part of the team work on some projects.  Our entity and other choices will have to reflect this.

We’ve discussed where to find clients, and we may start with some free sites, such as for non-profits, to figure out how things will work and get a group portfolio going.  Those shouldn’t be too hard to find.

We will continue talking, get things going, and hopefully it’ll work out.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Toby, WebD | No Comments »

Wordpress.com blog

October 15th, 2009

I have created another blog, separate from this one, on wordpress.com.  I did so as a requirement for the Web Design II class I am taking at Tri-C.  It mainly stores information about the project we are working on for the class.  Since it is my first project of this sort, full from start to finish for a client, it contains my first workings and views on parts of the process.

I am not sure how to handle this blog though when I am done with class.  It obviously will no longer be needed for that, and maintaining two completely separate blogs has its problems, what with increased maintenance time, separated data that all may be related, separate presences, etc.  It may work though if they have two distinct purposes.  I’m not sure that I really need it separate though.

Wordpress.com has a number of features, such as integrated stats and greater connection to other blogs, but it has limited features and some important features such as style need to be payed for.  So I may not want to keep the account.

So I could potentially just merge it onto here.  I have also been thinking about maintaining two blogs or one blog that has a fully separated category of posts from the front end with completely different appearance and no access to the other categories.  I would do this on my planned portfolio site for my “professional” posts while I maintain the other blog for my personal posts.  So I could potentially place the wordpress.com content on the professional blog and move some of my older web and server related posts there as well, maybe after a bit of cleanup.

I am also considering breaking away from wordpress by building my own blog ware.  This would give me more control over the data, the blog functionality, and integration into the rest of the site.  But this would take some time, and I have a lot of other projects that would have priority over that.  Getting it anywhere near the capabilities that I like from wordpress especially would take a while (don’t even know how to handle pingbacks/trackbacks).

Tags: , ,
Posted in WebD | No Comments »

Unemployed

September 23rd, 2009

This is a little late perhaps, but I am now unemployed. My internship at RPM had been done for school purposes at the end of spring semester, but I had continued on to train the next intern. I of course had quit out at the Lizard around the end of spring as well. I finished at RPM at the end of August there, and have since been without a job.

I haven’t really been looking that hard for a new one. I have little motivation to at the moment, and am working on doing some things around the house and some other personal issues for the moment. I also want to get together a good portfolio before I really start looking.

Ronda Leffel, who is the new director of the eBusiness program I am in at Tri-C, has been and will continue to look for jobs for me. There is the possibility of a job at Sherwin Williams, who is headquartered in Cleveland and recently partnered with the school. The program is touted as having a 100% placement rate for students. Though I do know one who never got placed, I am fairly confident that I’ll get something at some point.

I luckily have a fair amount of savings from my years of working at the Lizard combined with thrifty spending and careful saving. I should be fine for about six months. I’m not sure if I really want to eat all of my savings that isn’t in stocks or cds, but I may risk it. If I get worried about available funds, I’m sure I could quickly find a job at a restaurant again.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Toby | No Comments »

Teacher spot reports for knowledge check

August 10th, 2009

School administration would on occasion randomly choose some teachers to write a report. The report would be either a short (1-2 page) paper that must be written on the spot with little or no resources, or a longer (perhaps 10 pages) research paper which they will have a specified period to complete and can use any resources they want.

The topic of the paper would be randomly assigned, asking how they apply or could use certain educational principles in the classroom. Some possible topics might include how the teacher uses or could use Piaget’s or Vygotsky’s theories, positive reinforcement, levels-of-processing theory; how do they handle the different learning styles of studens; what implications a recent educational news story might have for them; how do they apply technology in the classroom; or a more general question like how new educational theories have shaper their teaching styles.

The check would help ensure that teachers are paying attention to and using both well established and new educational theories to hopefully provide the best education they can to their children. Educational theories often are adopted slowly or aren’t translated well into teaching styles. There is a whole lot that can be done to improve the education system just by fully implementing the recommendations of the vast available knowledge pool of educational learning theory.

Tags: ,
Posted in Ideas | No Comments »

« Older Entries