Being Mark Cohen » Uncategorized

Sunset at La Perouse

Mark Cohen — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:57:36 +0000

RIP Dr Seuss

Mark Cohen — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:59:32 +0000

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.

iPhone Macro Fruit and Veg Photos

Mark Cohen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:12:27 +0000

I took these photos with my DIY iPhone macro lens when I went on my weekly outing to buy Fruit and Veg at Freshpoint Markets. Click the image to see a few more, or click below for full gallery

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Macro photography with an iPhone

Mark Cohen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:48:44 +0000

Friends at work told me about this neat trick where you extract the lens from a CD drive and you “mount” the lens on a mobile phone to make a macro lens. I thought it sounded interesting, and after a lot of scrounging I got a drive off my neighbour. It’s not as easy as it sounds to get the lens out, you really have to dig for it. But once it’s out it works brilliantly. Of course the focal length is fixed so you have to move forwards and backwards until the focal plane is where you want it in the picture. Here are a few pictures I took with my phone tonight. I have an incase slider case on my iphone, and I mounted the lens inside the case. if you keep the lens intact when you remove it, it will have protruding bits on opposite edges. these fit neatly into the lens hole in the slider case. Yet another example of photography being fun without an SLR

See the full gallery on my Posterous here

The Beach – Queenstown Style

Mark Cohen — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 05:31:23 +0000

Posted via email from Mark’s posterous

Busy day at Maroubra Beach

Mark Cohen — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:35:47 +0000

Posted via email from Mark’s posterous

How to migrate your calendar to Exchange in Entourage

Mark Cohen — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:25:39 +0000

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

My before-I-even-start setup on a Mac

Mark Cohen — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:13:17 +0000

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.
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

Reset print queues on a mac

Mark Cohen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:13:00 +0000

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

#WDS09 jQuery – Session notes

Mark Cohen — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:11:29 +0000

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