Being Mark Cohen

I often put my little guy into bed at bedtime and when work hasn’t consumed all my energy I like to have a little left to read with him.  As it’s school holidays my wife took the kids to the library and stocked up on books.  So tonight we had a choice and we decided to read Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr Seuss.

When we got to the end of the book my little guy saw two blank pages.

“Blank page” he declared.  He flipped the page.

“Another blank page” he said, and flipped again.

“More blank pages” he said as he flipped a few more.

He closed the book and put it down.  He thought for a while and then then said “I think Dr Seuss forgot to finish this book”.

“Maybe…” I replied, choking on a laugh.

“It’s too bad because now he’s dead.” He told me earnestly.

At which point I lost my self-control and he wanted to know why I was laughing about something so serious.

He makes a good point though.  It would be very sad to run out of time before your book is finished.

Posted via email from Mark’s posterous

If you’re using Entourage this is how you move your appointments to Exchange from local folders:

1. Fire up Entourage

2. Click on Calendar in the toolbar

3. Click on “All events” under Calendar Views

4. Click on an event, and then click the edit menu, then “select all”:

4. Then right-click on a highlighted appointment and on the popup menu choose “move to” and then choose your Exchange Calendar:

NOTE this may look  like it’s frozen as it moves the meetings across.  Leave it to run for as long as it takes.

Mark

Posted via email from Mark’s posterous

We’re rolling out new Macs at work in my team, and so I’m revisiting my must-have-done-before-I-start list.  This is a list of things I’ve picked up from a lot of helpful and friendly mac users along the way:

Setup:

• An up-to-date setup of Rails, Subversion and MySQL. Dan Benjamin has great guides on Hivelogic.  He does local builds off the source which mean tidier upgrades. Gets a bit tricky with the original bundled mac bits though.
  • Ruby on Rails
  • MySQL
  • Subversion
• Set up php.  It’s already on a new mac, but you need to configure it.  Here are instructions to set it up but I substitute Textmate (as below) as my weapon of choice for editing text files.
• I haven’t actually got this working but it’s a must-have for work macs if you have a massive NAS.  Set up Time Machine on a NAS.  That way if your laptop gets run over you know you have everything backed up.
• Get rid of the iDisk crap in the sidebar
  • Open a finder window (set focus on Finder)
  • Click “Finder” menu then “Preferences…”
    
  • Then click on the toolbar icon for “Sidebar”
  • Uncheck “iDisk” – fourth one down
    
  • Close “Preferences pane”
• I also like to show the full path in the status bar  - go to View, then “Show Path Bar”
  

Free:

• Firefox with a bunch of handy add-ons
  • FireBug for web page development and debugging
  • YSlow – for web page optimisation
  • Web Developer Toolbar – handy for disabling js, images, css, etc
  • Talon – Screen grab long, scrolling screens in their entirety.
• http://www.sequelpro.com/ – desktop mysql client
• Skitch – great tool for grabbing screenshots and annotating them. Also has online hosting and websharing capabilites
• xcode – Install off the OS/X disk
• Remote Desktop for Mac – Connect to your Windows machines using remote desktop.
• Microsoft Messenger for Mac – Chat with your Windows Live buddies. We run a corporate chat server using Jabber, which I use iChat for.
• Skype for long distance telephony
• Tweetdeck for twittering away. Although since twitter got lists I use this less
• Stuffit Expander – expander utility for rar files and more (OSS Alternative I don’t use but you might like: UnArchiver)
• Virtual Box – To run any virtuals you need. Alternative to vmware fusion or parallels
• Quicksilver 2 – quick-launcher, use the mouse less. Like Spotlight on steroids. Run it, press ctrl-space, and have access to launch any app or take a bunch of actions
• chmox – a chm reader for Apple. (Microsoft Help file format)
• DivX – divx video player for Mac
• Dropbox – storage in the cloud with mac, windows, web and iphone clients, and sharing with friends. use this referral link to get extra storage.
• http://cyberduck.ch/ – FTP client with nifty features like double-click to rerun past jobs.

Commercial

• http://macromates.com/ – TextMate
• 1Password – Secure password storage.  A gift form a friend, I couldn’t live without
• http://www.panic.com/coda/ – Coda is a great web page editor for editing rails, php or static files like css / html. Includes syntax highlighting and all the usual bells and whistles. Integrated support for subversion is nice too.
  • Joe Bergantine’s .seestyle Coda theme styled to look like the editor that stars in Railscasts (easy on the eyes, light on dark)
• AppZapper – described as the uninstaller Apple forgot. Worth the $13.
• Microsoft Office for Mac – I bought and tried iWork, and I’ve been playing with Google Docs. I tried NeoOffice a while ago. Microsoft Office is worth it. I have Professional, which includes Entourage with support for Exchange.

Things I haven’t bought yet but want in future:

• Omnigraffle – A mac equivalent of Visio. A little pricey but hey, cheaper than Visio.
• Balsamiq desktop – an adobe air app, which is a really handy and high tech way of producing hand-drawn-esque IA in an Adobe Air App
• Versions – a really nice GUI Subversion client

Slightly dangerous mactip only for the Mac techies

Go system preferences / Printers. Right-click any printer installed. Choose Reset printing system and all printers get wiped, all queues deleted, etc

My notes from the presentation:

Sprites are cool, they were cool before and they’re still cool.  Pillage ideas from late 80’s sci fi.  Oh look, a bird.   Forty two. Oh and don’t diss 8 bit.  It’s also way cool.

That was the Pulp Fiction of Tech sessions.  And I loved every minute of it