Every time there is an update to stuffit, it starts bugging you to upgrade.  The problem with this is that the only time I use stuffit is when I double click a zip or other archive file, which means it pops up and asks me to update right in the middle of the extraction.  This usually seems to make the extraction process freeze up, and so the only possible way for me to extract the file is to go download the upgrade.  This infuriates me, and I need to go find an alternative to Stuffit (any suggestions?), but for now I just dutifully update.  The problem is, they ask for an e-mail address, which I feel no obligation to give them (I’d rather go unzip from the command line really).

The simple solution is of course to go to Version Tracker or Mac Update and search for the piece of software you want.  There you go, all downloaded and no pesky e-mail address requests.

UPDATE:  FIXED!  About 10 minutes after posting this I found the bizarre (to me, maybe someone can explain it) solution for this problem.  It was as simple as moving any meta tags before the script tags in the head element of the html document.  <script><meta> = heartache <meta><script> = salvation.

headnod.

Please let us know by e-mail or in the comments if you encounter any strangeness.  I need some sleep now.

The fact that we are able to release the podcast now is a very happy tribute to the success of our (read Akatombo Media’s) work in other areas.  Both CEATEC JAPAN 2006 and JISSO PROTEC 2006 are currently underway running on the specialty cms product we have designed for managing the websites of exhibitions.  The CEATEC website especially is running on multiple web servers with incredibly high traffic, but our cms has been running nearly flawlessly—allowing me to spend the time that I need to be on call and immediately available to solve problems, working on editing audio and converting an iWeb generated podcast site into a temporary home for our podcast.  If any of you happen to be involved in an Exhibition or Convention type organization and are interested in talking to us about how our cms product might help you, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll answer any questions you may have and put you in touch with our sales agent.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the podcast and please comment with your suggestions for the show or any problems that you find.  We may even do a proper intro next time.

Incidentally, the RSS feed for the podcast is separate from the normal feeds for the site, so to subscribe to the podcast in your aggregator, use http://www.akatombo.com/podcast/rss.xml or Click here to subscribe in iTunes.

UPDATE: The iTunes Subscription url was wrong.  Please try again if you had encountered the error before.

Just open up your terminal and enter

I’ll explain my half solution here and propose a possible hack that could make this work better and keep you from accidentally freezing your app when Mac OS X decides it is time to jump into Japanese entry mode without asking.

The half-solution

The solution is very simple: when you use find and replace window Japanese text is handled fine.  So hitting cmd-f before entering Japanese text, then cmd-a to select all, cmd-c to copy, cmd-w to close the find window, and cmd-v to paste the text into the document you were on at the insertion point gets Japanese text into the document without problem.  That may sound like a long list of keyboard shortcuts, but they are all natural, muscle-memory shortcuts for me and, I’d guess, for most power users.  Still it remains a pain in the posterior, and since no other applications require a workflow like this I end up with a Japanese-text-frozen text mate about half the time. There has to be a better way!

A proposal for the other half

I can think of a number of things that could be done to automate the workflow described above, but let me describe the one that seems to me most likely to be achievable through the use of existing tools (It may even be poossiblw with bundles though it was beyond me to figure out in the brief time I looked into it):

I envision some type of environment monitor that can be set on a per-app basis that would allow the firing of actions before certain actions when in certain environments.  This app would be configured as follows for text mate.  When in TextMate in an Asian-character input mode and the active window a document, a character producing keystroke would open up the find and replace dialog before sending the keystroke through.  When the active window is the find and replace dialog and in an Asian-character input mode, switching to an non-Asian-character input mode or hitting cmd-w would execute the following: cmd-a,cmd-c,cmd-w,cmd-v,switch input mode if that was what triggered the sequence.

This idea is a total kludge, but would certainly make my life easier.  Like I say, there are a ton of other ways to do pretty much the same thing (a find and replace document wouldn’t even have to be the external editor).  In addition you’d really want any selected text to be copied to the external editor, and a lot of other little niceties, but as it sounds like it will be quite a while until Allan even thinks about making TextMate handle Asian fonts, I need all the help I can get as soon as I can get it, so that I can quit jumping between editors.

Keys to catching the brain rain:

• set aside 10 minutes, each and every day


• have pen and paper handy


• allow yourself the freedom to think crazy thoughts


• don’t worry if nothing really productive springs to mind right away


• periodically scan over your notes from these sessions as things may pop into your mind after they have “marinated” for a while


• if no ideas pop into your head pick a fun topic and doodle a bit


• use word association to get things rolling if you feel stuck e.g. thinking -> thoughts -> mind -> brainstorm -> brain rain

Well, just in case there is anyone else out there who has been doing things the way I have been, I’m revealing my idiocy to the world.  I’m still relatively unskilled when it comes to dom scripting so if any of you have any tips, please let me know.  And now on to my embarrassing lack of knowledge:

Probably one of the most common I do in dom scripting is adding and removing elements to the dom tree (client side form validation and things like that).  Adding elements has been no problem though it often seems like I’m going through contortions to specify where to add things.  Removing things has always seemed wrong.  The only way I knew to clear an element was to set innerHTML to an empty string. 

If you are familiar with innerHTML you’ll know that doing something that doesn’t actually remove the element, it just removes everything inside it.  So if the element you want to remove is alone inside a parent node you can remove the offending element altogether, but in a situation like:

It it impossible to just remove the h2 element and leave the p tag in tact.  The best you can do it to remove the contents of the h2 element and end up with something like:

Which is not at all what we want.  I also knew of removeChild, which was fine when I could identify the both the parent of the node I wanted to remove, and the node I wanted to remove.  I also knew of parentNode, but somehow in the muddled swamp that is my brain the two concepts never found each other until today when I realized I can do this:

Rereading this, I feel like I was way too excited about it, but it hit me like a bolt of lightning and made my life quite a bit easier today.  I hope it helps somebody else out somewhere down the line.

svn diff doesn’t have a built in option for ignoring whitespace, but gnu diff does, so we use that.

to use a different diff command us the --diff-cmd parameter to svn diff, and to pass options to that command use the -x parameter.

If I was going to run the command in gnu diff directly I would use diff -uw /path/to/file1 /path/to/file2

In svn I want to diff against the latest version in the working copy (BASE) so I only need to pass in the file to diff and no revision info

Here is the command:

Now at some point I have to see if I can figure out how to hack the subversion bundle for textmate to make that option available to me in the nice html highlighted view.

Finally I asked if pdf files were treated as text files because I had a fair number of pdfs in the project.  Everyone said that pdf files should be treated as binaries, but told me how to check.  Right click (or control-click in the absence of a two button mouse) on a pdf file in the project drawer.  If you see “Treat files with “.pdf# Extension as Text” as the bottom-most option in the contextual menu that pops up your problem is different than mine, maybe you have a bunch of log or cache files that are being searched?

My contextual menu said treat as Binary which means that somehow TextMate had gotten set up to treat PDFs as text and it was searching all of them.  So now the problem is solved, searches only take a minute or two now.  On the good news front, it appears that Allan is working on a threaded find operation (meaning you’ll be able to keep editting as the machine searches) and working on making it so that TextMate doesn’t have to keep every matched file open in memory.

UPDATE: It looks like the latest cutting-edge-release addresses the issue with peak memory for find in project.

[FIXED] Peak memory usage when doing Find in Project should no longer be that of having all files loaded into memory.

I haven’t tried it out or anything yet, but if it truly fixes that: Very nice!  Thanks Allan.

I couldn’t find any information about it anywhere, so I took it upon myself to figure out how to make a command in TextMate to allow it to do automatic function lookup in PHP based on the existing .  The advantage of being able to use Documentation for Word command in the PHP bundle which allowed a user to go find an entry in the online manual for the selected word in Textmate.  The biggest advantage to using PHP for looking these things up is that you don’t have to be online to lookup a function.  I generally find that I’m more productive and focused when I go offline to program.  It keeps me away from the temptation to go online to look something up real quick, coming back 3 hours later staggering and wild-eyed from a wild information intake bender.

Without further ado, here is a screenshot of the bundle, settings and all.  Click the thumbnail to view it full size.  A rough explanation of how it works is below the image.

The hardest part about figuring out how to do this was that php interface to other problems is Applescript, but TextMate doesn’t support Applescript.  I searched the manual and mailing list and the rest of the web in hopes of finding a way to make Textmate execute some Applescript code (later on I found information that would have been very helpful on the TextMate wiki), but was having no luck.  Then I remembered that TextMate can execute shell commands, so I went in search of a shell command for executing Applescript and found it in osascript This applescript requires an argument (the currently selected word in TextMate) and arguments weren’t allowed until 10.4 so it would likely not work in pre-Tiger versions of Mac OS X.  The -e parameter lets you feed the Applescript in line by line instead of giving osascript a file to load and execute, so that is what we did.

We pass in $TM_CURRENT_WORD as an argument and the applescript passes that word onto PHP as search term.  I was very happy to get it to work, because this is the first time I’ve ever been able to make Applescript do anything useful for me.  Either the ways I generally think I would like to use Applescript are different than what Applescript is actually intended to do, the applications I’ve tried to do these things with don’t have complete enough Applescript support, or I just don’t know what I’m doing with Applescript.  I think it is mostly the last one, but I get the feeling that there were liberal doses of the second option in there too.

At any rate I’m very happy that I can now use phpfi with TextMate, and now I have to dive into an extremely tight programming deadline.

So here are the details of the basic idea:

Target: People (primarily small to medium-sized non-Japanese owned or managed businesses, but anyone who wants it really) with an English blog, who would like to have a Japanese blog mirroring the content on their English site updated nearly as quickly and written by a native speaker.

System: Depending on the client’s blog setup, we would like to automate the service as much as possible.  In most cases it should be as easy as you posting your entry in English, and it showing up on your blog in Japanese by the same time the next business day.

Setup: You will, of course, be required to have a blog ready that can handle posts in Japanese.  We can help you get that set up at our normally hourly rate, or if you want a design specifically targeted at the sensibilities of the Japanese web user in your demographic target, we can agree on a price for the design of your Japanese site ahead of time.  Just contact us and we’ll get started on a proposal for your site.

Pricing: We’ll have to work to find the sweet spot for pricing, but at the moment I’m thinking that we’ll probably charge a monthly fee based on some type of average monthly posting amount.  If you are posting every day you’ll pay more than if you are posting once a week, and if you write all long posts you’ll pay more than someone who writes the same amount of brief posts. 

Selective translation: We may also be able to offer translations of only some of the posts that you put up, but one of the key points of the service is simplicity, so this would only be possible under certain conditions.  The bright side is that if this is what you need, we can help you to meet those conditions.

Further Thoughts: It seems to me like it might be desirable to some, that comments to the site also be translated.  This would require a greater workload and more back and forth between you and us for each interaction with users, but it is certainly a possibility if there is a demand for it.  Translating comments one-way (we translate all new comments that come in from users, and provide a report daily) would be even more readily doable.

So what do you think?  Would you find a blog translation service useful?  If so, would you like to be one of the pilot customers of the service at a temorarily discounted rate?  Let me know, and if you’d like your comment to be private, please feel free to use the contact form

NOTE
While your working copy is “just like any other collection of files and directories on your system”, you need to let Subversion know if you’re going to be rearranging anything inside of your working copy. If you want to copy or move an item in a working copy, you should use svn copy or svn move instead of the copy and move commands provided by your operating system. We’ll talk more about them later in this chapter.

One of the hardest things about running a small business based on providing (mostly) one-time services to clients is that you generally tend to either have way too much or nothing to do.  This can make it really hard to get into a good work rhythm, making those extra-busy periods that much harder.  An added difficulty is that I have a really hard time focusing well on work in the morning, being much more able to work late into the night.  UltraGirl’s job starts early in the morning and ends in the early evening so if I want to spend time with her, and I do, I need to conform with her work schedule as much as I can.  It appears that I’m heading into the over-capacity period in the cycle, so I need to figure out how to make myself as effective as possible.  A few things I have been trying out, that help out when I can keep doing them consistently:

1. Go to bed early, and wake up a couple hours before I need to get to work to give my body time to get going.
2. Try to break my work into small pieces, and break my day into short periods of finely focused concentration
3. It is OK to drink coffee, but don’t drink 6 cups.
4. disconnect from the Internet, when the task I’m working on doesn’t directly require it, forcing myself to write down the ideas that I find I want to research—saving that distraction for later, and freeing myself from the interruptions provided by IM and e-mail.

Here is one response I received to get things rolling:
Lists. Definitely daily lists are good. Make your new list for tomorrow at the end of today, when everything outstanding is still fresh in your mind. It’s encouraging to see things ticked off of them, and they help to show all the tasks at hand and prevent you from getting too distracted.

A clean desk. Remove everything that’s not related to the project you’re working on. Put it in folders, on the floor, on a side table, on the windowsill, where ever you can’t actually see it.

Now you try. What techniques would you recommend for making sure you get a lot of work done.

Just a note in case I see this problem again or it helps someone else out.

I think it is very important that I update both blogs.  I want Akatombo Media to be the kind of company that is as transparent as possible in what it is doing.  I have to get over some of my business school training to accomplish that goal, but I’m working on it.  As part of that I’ll need to do something about making sure that both of Akatombo Media’s blogs get updated.  I guess the options are as follows:

• Devote a much larger chunk of my day to blogging, and make it a set part of my schedule, not something I try to make time for
• get a member of the staff to write the Japanese blog, and let me focus solely on the English blog
• get a staff member to translate each post as it comes out
• Write for the English and Japanese blogs on alternating days

I’ll think about these options, and try to find some mix of these or whatever else I think of to make sure that things start to be updated more frequently.  I’ve been missing quite a few days once again on the English site too, but I’m working on improving that.  Limiting my input media, to the extent I’ve been able to keep up with it, has given me more time to think about things, much of which will probably become fodder for future topics.

I hope to write some more a little bit later about the ecommerce functionality we enabled in this project and will likely to that in a later post, but for know the train is about to arrive, so I’d better pack Calculon (my powerbook) away and get ready to go meet the client.

Today my attention was spread over work on a lot of things, and though I didn’t make huge progress in any one thing, I knocked quite a few things off of my to do list. We are preparing a more powerful server to take over for the server that is currently hosting all of our websites so I have slowly been getting it ready to go. It will run on FreeBSD 6 and I already had that installed. Today I finished up installing all the ports that I need and did some planning for the data and configuration migration that will need to take place before things are ready to go. I hope to get the server up and going over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays so I’m not spending many large blocks of time on it.

I came much closer to finishing a client project that involves translation, web design, and programming work. I just have four more items on my list of things I need to do on it before I can hand it over to the client so I hope to have it done tomorrow if all goes well. I keep finding little ways that the site could function more smoothly, so I have been doing quite a bit of complimentary programming work to fix little annoyances in the underlying content management system. I always try to throw a little bit extra in for free, but this particular client was very patient when the illustrator he hired didn’t get things done in time to meet the deadline for getting the project finished before we had to start on the CEATEC JAPAN 2005 website, a project that pretty much monopolizes our time for a good portion of the year.

I also did quite a bit of work on organizing the tools we use to manage our work-flow—trying to consolidate where our information is kept so that we minimize the number of repositories we need to keep an eye on. Finally on the personal side I did some updating on a wiki that my girlfriend and I are maintaining containing information related to our house hunt (we are working on buying a new house, remodelling an old one, or buying some land and building a new one). Well, I’m sure that I am the only one that could possibly be interested in this, and it is getting pretty late so I’ll wrap it up here.