Pastie << self

John Gruber agrees with me about "look and feel" protection

I have a warm fuzzy feeling inside. In comments recently regarding Apple's lawsuit against HTC John Gruber closes with:

I can’t speak to the hardware and “architecture” issues, but I despise the idea of “user interface” patents.

I've often lamented how sad it is to see everyone trying to copyright their "look and feel". I've clearly pointed out that you'd really have to patent such things to have any type of legal protection. Not that I'm suggesting these companies start patenting their app's "look and feel". I agree with Gruber that you should not be able to protect such things. It stifles innovation.

And, yes, I intend to keep harping on this periodically until said companies (they know who they are) get their heads out of their asses about copyright. They're welcome to read my lengthy article on the subject in their quest for understanding. :-)

Want to learn more?

If you're interested in learning more on the subject you can read my entire Design Piracy Series (start at the bottom) where I tear this silly "my web app look and feel is copyright me" argument to pieces.

Western Digital, OS X, S.M.A.R.T, and Load Count

Not sure how helpful this will be for anyone, but I just learned way more than I wanted to know about how f#$%ed up hard drives can be. I just upgraded my 15" MBP with a brand new Western Digital 500gig Scorpio Blue drive and installed Snow Leopard. Previously my Leopard install had 9x% filled my previous 320gig drive and I'm sure it was fragmented to pieces. It was slow.

Now it's wonderful and fast... except sometimes it would randomly "lag".

• Beach ball for half a second while using Propane with no load
• Occasional strange lag after hitting enter or doing random stuff like scrolling a window in Safari (again with the system otherwise bored).
• Wesnoth would very briefly freeze randomly during gameplay.
• Right clicking an icon in the dock would take longer than it should.

Maybe I'm ultra sensitive to my responsiveness, but it was very frustrating. It "felt" a lot like the hard drive was spinning down and I was waiting for it to spin back up. Writing a quick Ruby script to keep the hard drive busy writing tiny bits of data seemed to help, but that was no solution.

Finally I took the bottom part of my case off to listen to the drive... and it was parking the heads every 5-10 seconds. It would get quiet, spin up, get quiet, spin up, turn off (sounded like it), spin up again... craziness.

I'll save you the rest of my research and just share what I've learned:

• You can measure load/unload (head parking?) counts via your S.M.A.R.T. drive's stats.
• A quick way to do this on OS X is SMART Utility.
• General consensus across the net seems to be that several hundred thousand load counts are bad. PDF specs for my new drive list 600,000 load/unload cycles.
• If you see a reason to tune this you can use hdapm (and set it to load on boot).
• Yes, I played with OS X's built in sleep settings. No, they had no effect.

Some people blame Mac OS X's built in power management, that it doesn't put all drives in the "right" APM mode... and claim that the same drive on Windows exhibits different behavior. I can't confirm or deny this, but if so it would be really annoying that OS X isn't doing the "right" thing here.

My 85 hour "New" Western Digital Drive

That's loading/unloading 162 times per hour! Or less than half a year to reach the drives rated spec of 600,000 load/unload cycles.

160gb Seagate Drive in my 2 year old 17" MBP

Loading/unloading 85 times per hour. One million load/unload cycles and counting. Funny thing is I've never noticed any performance problems on this system. Perhaps the half reduction makes a big difference in actual everyday use?

Summary

I'm just informing here. I'm not saying telling you to rush to check your drives (but if you do, share your findings!) or get all in a frenzy. I'm not saying that a load count of 1,000,000 is for sure beyond your drives capacity.

I found enough lunatics online raving about S.M.A.R.T. stats without ANY comprehension of them to join that crowd. I don't imagine that just because I already knew what SMART was and spent 30 minutes reading a few web pages that I'm now a SMART expert. However...

I had a performance problem with my new drive. I solved it by altering the power management settings with hdapm. I'm now much happier. :-)

If anyone knows more about this subject that I do and wants to share, it'd be greatly appreciated!

Pastie Learns Go

Thanks to Jim Dovey's work on a Go syntax for TextMate, Pastie now supports syntax coloring Go source code.

Pasting a lot of Go code? Pastie's Go site will pre-select Go as your Pastie language: http://go.pastie.org/

Perl, Java, or C# more your style?

If you aren't a fan of the default Ruby on Rails language setting you might be happy to know Pastie now supports passing your language of choice as a parameter. This should make it easier to bookmark Pastie ready-to-go for your favorite language.

Here area some examples:

• C# - http://pastie.org/?p=20
• Perl - http://pastie.org/?p=18
• Python - http://pastie.org/?p=16
• Java - http://pastie.org/?p=9

You can see the numeric for all available parsers by viewing the source of the language drop down on the new paste page. I'm also considering more URLs... We'll see how that works out. :-)

Pastie learns C#

Today I added C# support to Pastie. I used the C# bundle referenced from this blog post. It seems to at least cover the basics. I would include some attribution here but have no idea who I should be giving the thanks to.

If anyone else has a better TextMate syntax file I'm all ears.

I've pasted a sample if you'd like to check it out.

Invoicie: Blinksale for the iPhone

The recent launch of Logpost motivated me to build my own API-driven only app. That and my shiney new iPhone 3GS is just craving for me to build some apps for it. So here we go. You'll need a Blinksale account to try it out - but that is the entire point after all.

Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

I actually forgot the URL, but here you go:

https://go.invoicie.com/

For the security conscious: Invoicie doesn't store anyone's password. They are only used to access the API for your current session and are actually sent (securely over SSL) with every request. When you aren't using Invoicie it has no idea what your password or account is.

The Little Things

Isn't it always the little things that end up taking your time before launch?

Pastie <3 iPhone

A bit late to the party but I only recently started glancing at Pasties using TweetDeck on my iPhone. The usability sucked. So I fixed it. :-) Enjoy.

Google 1 / Wolfram|Alpha 0

But Spock and Uhura? Really?

Copyright Hysteria

The first case of the pot calling the kettle black this new year: Jason Freed blogs about Trademark hysteria and how trademarks are being misused by companies these days for the silliest reasons.

I wish he could apply the same critical thinking skills to 37signals own sad case of "Copyright hysteria" that I've quite vocally blogged about in the past.

Just because you can slap a "Copyright (c) 37signals, LLC" sticker on everything you touch (whether it's legally copyrightable or not) does not mean you should.

Pastie adds embedding JS support

So you like pasting your code to Pastie, but you've always wished it was easier to include that same code in your blog or webpages? Wish no longer.

Below is an embedded Pastie of a cute little helper I wrote during the process of adding this feature.

Here is an example of how Pastie use's the helper to avoid worrying about all the document.write stuff... and just concentrating on building a straight HTML view.

I'm also thinking of allowing you to pass a param that determines which of the available color themes your Pastie is displayed with.

Any thoughts of ideas? Does this fit the bill for those of you who've been wanting an easier way to get Pastie's into your blogs?

Looking for a RubyConf 2008 ticket... anyone?

If anyone has an extra RubyConf 2008 ticket for sale, I'm interested... drop a comment here I'll get back with you right away.

I meant to get one early, but it didn't happen.

Thanks Rails Machine. Long Live Pastie!

Just wanted to give a shout out to Rails Machine who just bumped Pastie's storage from 20gig to 40gig today. In case any of you don't know Rails Machine is an awesome place to host your Ruby on Rails hotness and they also provide the server, storage, and bandwidth to keep Pastie up and running.

Yes, I know Pastie has it's issues from time to time (the damn Ultraviolet library I think) but let no one confuse them with Rails Machine problems. :-)

Rails Machine rocks!

Leopard, 64-bit MySql, 32-bit Ruby, World of Pain

So I'm trying to get a Rails stack working on my new MacBook Pro... without much success. I thought I'd do the cool thing and install the 64-bit MySql (since I do have a 64-bit chip, ya know) but I've run into the same problems as others.

I've read these (found via Google):

• http://blog.bmn.name/2008/02/issues-with-mysql-27-gem/
• http://cho.hapgoods.com/wordpress/?p=158

I've tried tips from the comments:

• building various ways including ARCHFLAGS where arch is i368, x86_64, etc
• removing /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/universal-darwin9.0/mysql.bundle

No matter what I do I'm left with one of the following problems (i386 arch):

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _mysql_init
  Referenced from: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle
  Expected in: dynamic lookup

or this (x86_64 arch:)

dlopen(/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle, 9): no suitable image found.  Did find:
	/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle: mach-o, but wrong architecture - /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle

Several people said they found the solution, but nothing I've tried has worked. Does anyone have a better solution to this problem than downgrading back to the 32-bit version of MySql? I wonder if I built Ruby from ports if that would fix it.

Any suggestions? When I get THE answer (if there is one) I'll update this post.

UPDATE: One REAL solution posted here.

Where it all started

I supposed we all got started somewhere... I'm going thru old hard drives and old CDs today and thought I would post this. Without further ado, my first website. Eleven years ago.

Thank god I'm not alone

I'm really glad I'm not the only one who is speaking up when the smell coming from 37 Signals' direction starts to be a bit on the stinky side.

He's actually criticizing their posts on startups (which I usually enjoy, actually) but ends with this criticism:

If you’ve ever used their apps, you know how weak-sauce they are. So weak is their sauce that the first demo of Google App Engine was a quickly-made clone of their Campfire application. 37 Signals whined about and resulted in it being taken down. What a bunch of jokers.

I actually love 37 Signals' "weak-sauce" (translation: simple) apps... :-) I'm a paid user of most (and a lot of my clients pay for Campfire). I do agree though that it's ridiculous to build the absolute simplest apps possible (their claim) and then deny others the right to also build simple solutions that compete with their own.

Image from here:

If HuddleChat was a ripoff of Campfire then Campfire was a rip-off of iChat (or pick a more similar chat program, you have tons to choose from) which was a rip-off of mIRC which was a rip-off of... BBS chat?

Chat programs usually have history that scrolls off the top, include a text entry box, and allow file transfers . This is true of Campfire, HuddleChat, IRC, almost any major chat app I can think of. This is nothing new and 37 Signals doesn't own (or have a copyright for) the "concept" of group chat.

I know HuddleChat is old news, but this is my first opportunity to blog on it. :-)