My first iPhone application is available for purchase on the iTunes store as of today. Pretty happy with that, the last 10% did take 90% of the time

The application is called “Today Dashboard” and it is intended to be used either to quickly get some info about the day, or to keep it running beside your monitor at your desk.

It gives you current time, current weather, today and tomorrows calendar events and current news. The calendar and news comes from google calendar and google reader which are pretty popular today and I really like those services.

If you’re interested in trying it out here is the link to the iTunes store.

Computers, Geeky, Internet, Mac OS X

I know I said I hate cellphones, but an iPhone is a computer — then a cell phone and for that reason I love this device.

Having an internet connection all time is great! We’ve been on a few trips and can lookup directions or find out what the weather is wherever we are. The only downside is Heather’s addiction to Flight Control

So with that, here are the apps I use and like the most:

OmniFocus – TODO application following GTD (Getting Things Done). Works great with the the Mac OS X version syncing over my webdav server.

Evernote – Really cool note app. Geo tags all notes with where you took them and you can see them on the map. Syncs with their server so you can get your PC and iPhone synced wirelessly. You can search for text in images and it will match them, great for business cards or wine labels.

Beejive IM – Good instant messaging app.

Facebook – Most of my friends are on facebook so this is great to keep up with them. Wish it had push.

feX – Sync your contacts with Facebook. Gets their photo and birthday for example.

Simplify Music 2 – Play music from your home library on you iPhone. Only issue is that it can’t do it in the background. I have more music than space on my iPhone so this is great.

MotionX GPS – Replace your garmin forerunner. This app tracks your speed, elevation, and maps where you went and can email, twitter, or facebook that map to friends.

Sonos – Better then the controller I bought.. by a lot!

Flight Control – Simple and addictive game.

NetNewsWire – RSS news reader, syncs feeds and read status with the desktop client.

Lose It – Calorie tracker

I wish there was a p90x iPhone app that you could enter your routines and track your progress on. Maybe I’ll write one..

Computers, Geeky

This looks like a very impressive tool.

Here is the link to use it: http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html

Watch this screencast to see what it can do: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

It goes live today but you can’t use it yet.

[update] It goes live on monday

Computers, Internet

This is really cool.. man they have a lot of time on their hands.

Internet

I’ve started using twitter. If you’re using it also then feel free to follow me. http://twitter.com/dcardamo

Computers, Geeky, Internet

This is really cool, someone has mapped out torrent activity from a global perspective and laid it out on google maps:

Internet

Here is a list of applications that I find myself using very commonly over the past few years. There have been many more but in the end they don’t get used as often so I’m not listing them here. I’m also not listing the ones that come with Mac OS X, just the additional ones.

General Use

Growl – Growl is a great notifying system that puts non-irritating popups on your screen. Very configurable and lots of applications make use of it. If you install Adium (see below) then it will offer to install growl for you.

Inquisitor – This is a fancier interactive search for Safari. Also works with other browsers.

iStat Menus – Very nice looking menu bar stats. Gives things like CPU usage, network traffic, etc. I really like the calendar menu item since it can show you the month calendar with one click.

Perian – Adds common codecs to quicktime so you can play most files. Also supports high def.

Quicksilver – Very awesome launcher app, among other things. Not obvious to use, but once you get started with it, it becomes essential. You can start with a tutorial.

VLC – Media player, I like this a lot more than quicktime. Can play most files and well.

1password – One password for everything. I could put this in the internet category since it plugs right into browsers, hit Apple-\ and it will log you in to the website. I’m leaving it as a general app because I use it for remembering all my passwords. The authors of this app are very generous, they give out free licenses very often. I think I got mine through macheist.

VoodooPad Pro – Personal wiki. This app is great for capturing all your memos and notes. Use it as a journal, meeting minute log, etc. Since all your documents can hyperlink to each other it makes finding and relating your info easier. The author of this app is very quick to respond and provide bug fixes.

OmniFocus – Great todo list manager. They call it getting-things-done which is a process of capturing and finishing off tasks. They also have an iphone/ipod app that can be your mobile version of the desktop app so that you can keep both in sync.

Internet

NetNewsWire – Great RSS news reader, and free.

Transmit – Good FTP client. There are probably free ones out there that are just as good, but I bought this a while ago and still find it meets my needs.

Adium – The best IM client. Can connect to most (all?) networks.

Office

iWork ‘08 – Much friendlier to use than microsoft word, excel, or powerpoint. Much cheaper too! Especially if you have several computers and get the family license.

Microsoft Office 2008 – I use this primarily for Entourage which is like Outlook for the PC. This is useful so that I can book meetings, other than that I could just use Apple Mail instead. Coming with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) will be built-in support for exchange, just like the iPhone. At that point I’ll delete these Office apps because they look ugly, use more CPU then they should, and often frustrate me to no end.

PocketMac Blackberry – This is a necessary evil, for some reason you can’t charge your blackberry over USB unless you have this driver. I don’t use the syncing capabilities.

Programming

Textmate – I like this editor a lot. I also use VIM and miss its keybindings when I use TextMate, but other than that TextMate is great. Its easily extensible (wrote a few of my own bundles) since you can do it in any language you like (Python, Perl, shell, etc). I really wish it had split windows, thats the only important feature that it is missing in my opinion.

Parallels Desktop – I find that Parallels works great, its faster than VMWare Fusion when running QNX Neutrino. My only beef about this app is that they release major versions in what seems like less than a year requiring their end users to pay to upgrade. I guess it is good that they are working on it so hard, but at the same time as a user it would be nice to not have to pay to stay up to date. It is also very hard to find older (few months old) versions of this app so if you buy it, save the DMG file.

VMWare Fusion – I’ve been using this one more often recently, upgrades have been free compared to Parallels.

Photography

Aperture – Great photo database and RAW processing application. There are other good alternatives also.

ApertureToGallery Plugin – I use this plugin to sync with my gallery website.

NoiseNinja – Removes noise from images, does a good job. Don’t need this as much since I started using the Nikon D700.

Spyder3Pro – I got a Spyder3 color calibration device for my monitors since my prints were coming back terrible. This was caused by having monitors that weren’t calibrated correctly. In the end this device should save time and money so that I don’t have to print more than once.

Adobe Photoshop – I have CS3 version and got it for an unbeatable price (it is legitimate). I’d have a hard time (impossible?) paying $700 for this application. Two alternatives that come to mind are Pixelmator and Gimp.

Computers, Mac OS X

I’ve been meaning to put together an entry on my favorite Mac OS X applications since I know several people getting started with the OS. This christmas break I sent in my macbook pro for repairs since it was getting kernel panics, corrupted graphics, and hanging. It turns out that the problem was the Nvidia 8600M GT fault which is so common that Apple extended the warranty from 1 year to 2 years for this fault which is great for me because Carbon Computing replaced the logic board for free under warranty for me. I’ve had it back for one day now and all seems well, phew!

I was really impressed with Carbon Computing, they fixed it within 1.5 weeks, even during the holidays.

I’ll be posting again in a minute my favorite applications, after Erica and I finish playing in her portable jungle

Computers, Mac OS X

Tonight my blackberry didn’t stop buzzing for several minutes. Turns out a spammer was using my mail address to spam a decent part of the globe at a very fast rate. The only thing I know of to help prevent someone pretending to be someone from my server is to enable SPF. So HLD is running SPF now and this will affect any mail sent from the hld.ca domain.

If you are using an HLD account and have trouble sending out email, let me know. Spammers suck…

Computers, Geeky, Internet

Mike at The Online Photographer had a great post about sensor sizes in cameras. What I agreed with most is the concept of “points of sufficiency”. He’s mostly discussing digital cameras but also points out that this applies to computers also.

Generally speaking, unless you want to run vista or a very high end recent game, a computer from several years ago is probably sufficient. In fact, as more and more web apps are created the need for faster computers becomes less relevant, things like integrated always on network would probably be more usefull, or portability.

As far as digital camera sensors go, the areas with the largest room for innovation are probably dynamic range and low light conditions. The human eye can see so much more dynamic range than a sensor can, one good example is my previous post about the lunar eclipse. To the human eye, half the moon was eclipsed but was still visible and red, the other half of the moon was bright as ever. To the camera, half the moon was black, the other half was white.

And wouldn’t it be cool to not need a flash at night?

This is probably a few years away from now, but I don’t think sensor size can solve either problem fully. Someone is going to have to be creative.

Computers, Geeky, Photography

Heather every now and then geeks it up more than myself. This week was one of those times.

Heather bought a Roomba

Geeky, General

I created a new TextMate command today to get the HTML documentation for the current word highlighted from the QNX 6.3.0 online documentation. If you’re looking for POSIX docs integrated with textmate then this should work for you also:

#!/usr/bin/env python
#

import os

word = os.getenv("TM_CURRENT_WORD");
char = word[:1]

print """<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.location = "http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.3.0SP2/neutrino/lib_ref/%s/%s.html"
//-->
""" % (char, word)

Computers, General, Mac OS X

I have decided to switch to TextMate as my editor. I’ve been using Vim for a while now and still think its a great editor but have decided to make the switch.

TextMate is really easy to customize. I usually do my editing with Vim on the Mac, and through NFS I compile QNX applications inside Parallels or VMWare which mount my Mac filesystem. I don’t want to maintain my own cross-compilation environment to build QNX 6.3 apps using darwin but it would be nice to issue build requests from Mac OS X.

I looked at the “Makefile” bundle which came with TextMate and it was very easy to read and looked like a good place to customize this to do what I wanted. I copied all content from the Makefile bundle’s run command to a new command in my own bundle. It went from this::

. "$TMSUPPORTPATH/lib/webpreview.sh"
html_header "Running make"

make ${TMMAKEFLAGS} 2>&1|"${TMRUBY:-ruby}" \ -rtmparser -eTextMate.parse_errors

echo "Done." html_footer

To this:

. "$TMSUPPORTPATH/lib/webpreview.sh"
html_header "Running make"

ssh qnxvm ". ~/.zshrc; cd $TMDIRECTORY; make ${TMMAKEFLAGS} 2>&1" |"${TMRUBY:-ruby}" \ -rtmparser -eTextMate.parseerrors

echo "Done." html_footer

What that does is execute a build request in the same folder as the one I’m currently editing, but on my virtual machine using ssh as the transport. Using ssh keys it just executes without me having to type my password. I get a web output with links to my files that I can click on if there are compile errors to bring me to the code line. For this to work, you need to make sure that both systems have the same folder hierarchy.

And to seal the deal, I’m making this wordpress post remotely using BlogMate which is a TextMate bundle!

Computers, General, Mac OS X

Saw this on google video today, and this has to be the most flexible person I’ve ever seen. Makes me cringe… http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8705268198162394845

General, Internet

I’ve been using Desktop Manager as my virtual desktop pager/manager on Mac OS X. Problem is that it doesn’t seem to be maintained anymore (last update May ‘05) and is a PowerPC binary.

I just found Virtue last night and it’s based on Desktop Manager but is maintained, Universal binaries, and has a couple other great whiz bang features like the sticky pager by the mouse:

Now I’ve only got 2 more apps to replace from PowerPC to Universal/Intel. Ecto seems to be slow on the uptake which is surprising, and Flip4Mac which is supported by Microsoft for WMV codecs.. not surprising. Update: Antonio posted a comment saying that microsoft doesn’t support Flip4Mac and that they are close to completing their universal binary version.

Computers, Mac OS X

My Xbox 360 died this morning. It had 3 red lights flashing, all of them except the top right which according to this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article means my box is dead and needs to be repaired.

I tried unplugging everything and plugging it back in, leaving the power out for 5 minutes, removed the memory card, hard drive, controller, disc, etc. All to no avail… the box was toast.

Took a nap, came back an hour later and turned it on and voila, all green… Now I’m thinking, how long till the next death and how long will it last?

Games, General

http://cwrapper.sourceforge.net is a great application for colourizing the output from programs like make, gcc, ps, df, etc. I find it particularly usefull for make and gcc since it highlights warnings and errors.

Its extremely easy to install. I had to modify it a bit to compile under QNX but it works out of the tarball for linux. Basically: tar jxvf cw.tar.gz; cd cw; ./configure && make install; echo "export PATH=/usr/local/lib/cw:$PATH" >> .bashrc

To configure other programs or tweak it, edit the wrapper config files in /usr/local/lib/cw

General, Linux, Mac OS X

Here’s my halo 2 stats

Games

I’ve been using 3 different terminal emulation programs for Mac OS X. So far I haven’t found any that are perfect. Here are the three of them and their pros and cons:

Apple’s Included Terminal app: Pros: - Comes with Mac OS X (”free”) - Handles transparency Cons: - Doesn’t handle my linux character codes very well. backspace doesn’t work very well, some characters look different than they should, etc.

iTerm iterm.sourceforge.net: Pros: - Handles most character codes well - Transparency - Tabs (great, but now I use GNU screen windows so I don’t need it anymore) - Free, and open source Cons: - After a random amount of time, some characters are blank on the screen requring complete application restart.

GLterm http://www.pollet.net/GLterm/: Pros: - So far handles characters well “out of the box” Cons: - Shareware ($10) - No transparency since it isn’t a quartz app

So far, I think that iTerm is my favorite but I’ll play with GLterm for a bit longer. The default mac terminal could be made a lot better.

Mac OS X

I upgraded the server from User Mode Linux to XEN Linux. The benefits so far are that it is much faster CPU and IO wise, and I’m going to look at it to see if it’s more efficient on memory usage also. While doing this I also upgraded to the 2.6.10 kernel instead of the old 2.4 kernel I use to be running.

Hopefully it’s as stable as UML was. The community mailing lists have been fairly responsive so far so I’m pretty happy with it.

Linux