I decided to just leave it as a tumblr subdomain, even though I could have just made a subdomain like blog.nathanherald.com, so that I don't have to worry about permalinks ever again. I used to think that what I wrote on my blog needed to follow me around and keep all the permalinks updated to work and all of that, but I've changed my mind.

What I put into Flickr can stay in Flickr, same with twitter, github, and now tumblr. I'll keep my own backup, but let them manage the public versions of my content.

I'm not going to change the rss or any of that and this version of the blog will disappear as soon as I am motivated enough to take it down.

I made a script to copy over everything from here to there and all but two posts made it. Sadly, I don't think I can forward permalinks along without creating a giant table of this url now goes to that url. Maybe I'll do that another day, but not today.

Now I'm going to dig into the templating to see if I can make it look how I want. Looking around, I found these tumblr sites that give me hope that I might could achieve the look I have in mind:

• http://hunsonisgroovy.com/
• http://livejamie.com/
• http://cameronmoll.com/
• http://davemorin.tumblr.com/
• http://gooseppie.tumblr.com/
• http://marre.tumblr.com/
• http://blog.hardgraft.com/
• http://matthewbuchanan.name/

We'll see how it goes.

Very interesting open source command line utility to setup a fake Dropbox like sync scenario. I like some of the ideas.

Then I learned that they were encrypted, but that anyone at Dropbox could decrypt them. Now, I do understand that to provide folder sharing and other features they have to be able to let people in, but that doesn't mean I think it's a good idea.

So, I figured I could trust them.

Then, recently, they let anyone into any account by using any password. That's a pretty bad mistake, especially considering that I have a lot of files that I can't let anyone else have access to. I really need to be able to count on them to do their job and at least keep my file's access limited to my account.

I am going to move my sensitive files off Dropbox. I am not going to quit using it altogether; it's still the best way to share a folder to collaborate. However, I am going to be a lot more careful about what I put where.

I still need a place to store my files so I can keep them in sync accross my devices. After researching, I decided that Strongspace appears to make the most sense to me: it's pretty much glorified rsync.

rsync is great because it's old, secure, unix-y, and I trust it.

So I signed up and starting moving some files over. I plan to keep some files just in the clear, while keeping others in an encrypted volume that is then rsynced around. That should allow me to store and sync pretty much anything I want and be sure that it is kept up to date everywhere, with the tradeoff that the encrypted stuff won't be accessible on my mobile devices.

However, Strongspace is down right now.

I can't get to the website, the command line tool doesn't work, and SFTP doesn't seem to work either.

Maybe I just need to tote an external HDD around.

I still think Strongspace is a good option, but I need to do more research into their past reliability.

This should be a solved problem. Use client side encryption and allow shared folders by generating a new key for that folder and distributing it to all the contributing parties. If you want to allow the web app to have access (so you can see a nice list of your files, download, etc), then you can give it your key. It would be less secure, but it's your choice.

And, maybe just to make it even more awesome, you could choose for some folders to have an entirely different key to prevent them from showing up in the web interface.

Someone make this, and soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8SS-rUEZPg

Per different conversations today, these are five things I really need to just get over and do:

1. TDD. I do it sometimes, but I need to just be disciplined and practice it all the time. My primary issue is that I can't always figure out how to test some of the harder things.
2. Run. I used to run every week and I need to get back to that.
3. Read. Often I check twitter, etc. when I could be reading books.
4. Eat breakfast. Skipped way too often.
5. Be more positive. And less of a curmudgeon.

Airfoil 4 can stream any audio source from your Mac to your Apple TV and it works great with the Rdio desktop app. However, it doesn't by default know about the album art, track name, artist, etc.

Rdio desktop now supports applescript and Airfoil 4 uses applescript for metadata lookup, so all the pieces are there waiting to be hooked together. All you need is the correct .scpt file and it all just works. Here is that file (com.rdio.desktop.scpt):

tell application id "com.rdio.desktop"
  if it is running then
    set my_name to the name of the current track as string
    set my_artist to the artist of the current track as string
    set my_album to the album of the current track as string
    set my_duration to the duration of the current track as integer
    set my_logo to the artwork of the current track
    set my_info to {my_name, my_artist, my_album, my_duration, my_logo}
    return my_info
  end if
end tell

Find Airfoil.app, Show Package Contents from the context menu, navigate to Contents/Frameworks/TrackTitles.framework/Resources/Applescripts, and drop com.rdio.desktop.scpt there.

You may have to switch away from using Rdio and then back for it to pick up this new file.

Note: the duration part doesn't seem to be working yet.

One of my fav photos from our trip to NY

Either way, we get him June 1st. Expect photos, videos, and the like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5C4N7UwVS4

Yesterday marked my being a director at CDIA for 3 months. I always say that it takes 3 months before you really know your job and what is expected of you.

Nothing but difficulties. That junk is 150MB or some such. Amazing.

After watching the Vice Guide to Travel - Liberia, I've been a bit melancholy. Thoughts of people warring, destroying, raping, and eating each other have filled my mind. I guess I just dont know how to process it. These things have always persisted, but how does the world ignore it so well?

What's a man to do with this information? What is my course of action? Can I live and work like people are good? Can I ignore all of this any longer?

Not that we dont have problems; things have been better. Yet, things are the best they've been. I've got a new job, we are looking to get a new car soon, we are looking into having children, we are paying for property that we might own one day, and nothing is past due.

Does that mean anything?

Can we afford to ignore everyone on the planet forever? Can we afford to let people suffer, let people war, let people go hungry? Sure, an individual's problems will always look small compared to the totality of problems in the world, but how do we justify our inaction?

What is the protocol? What can I do? Am I really this hopeless just because I'm not rich? If I had money, could I effect real change? Is there real change?

I guess I just have a lot of questions.

I am making an ORM for Mongo called Mongol. Everything is working fairly well because of the fantastic Plucky library which handles all the fancy querying for me. CRUD seems pretty easy to get up and running for something like this. It's all great fun.

Mongo presents new opportunities for designing the DB schema, but these also turn into challenges. Modelling associations with a tabular style database is pretty straight forward: the id of a parent model is stored in the child. This makes it very easy to design a has_many and belongs_to rails-style setup.

With Mongo, there are so many more options for how to associate models. For an app I am working on I wanted to store an array of id's from the child models inside the parent model as a field. This would look like:

// book:
{
  id: 1,
  title: "Some Story",
  authors: [1,2,3]
}

// authors:
{
  id: 1,
  name: "Some dude"
}
{
  id: 2,
  name: "Some other dude"
}
{
  id: 3,
  name: "Some dudette"
}

In this setup, the authors don't have any direct knowledge of the book that they are associated with. The book holds all the info. Contrast this with a traditional has_many and belongs_to setup:

// book:
{
  id: 1,
  title: "Some Story"
}

// authors:
{
  id: 1,
  name: "Some dude",
  book: 1
}
{
  id: 2,
  name: "Some other dude",
  book: 1
}
{
  id: 3,
  name: "Some dudette",
  book: 1
}

In this setup, the book doesn't have any direct knowledge of the authors that it is associated with. The author's each hold onto their book. This is probably better for data integrity purposes, since each author can only ever be associated with one book, but I think the first method can be better for simple eager loading, counting without fetching, and other things like that.

The cool thing about Mongo is that you can support both of these styles of associations. I am calling the first style a many and from setup. I chose from because the author finds out it's related from the book.

This is what this looks like when using Mongol:

class Book
  include Mongol::Document
  index :title
  many :authors
end

class Author
  include Mongol::Document
  index :name
  from :book
end

I think this makes a ton of sense, but I would love for other people to vet this. I am going to finish the tranditional has_many and belongs_to associations for Mongol soon, and they will work like this:

class Book
  include Mongol::Document
  index :title
  many_related :authors
end

class Author
  include Mongol::Document
  index :name
  belongs_to :book
end

I think many_related is more expressive, especially in contrast to just many.

What do you think? Please, feel free to comment on on the Github Project for Mongol

My site was down again this morning because of missing ruby gems.

How do gems get uninstalled from my shared server? How could rack be missing? It was installed yesterday.

A simple gem install rack and my site is back up, but really why?

The whole thing baffles me. I can't wait until I get the time to move this site to heroku.

Yesterday I was reminded why I love teaching so much.

The students were building paper prototypes, sharing ideas, getting feedback, redesigning until the interactions made sense, talking loud, and laughing together. They were excited about possibly building these interfaces one day - some sooner than others.

The best class I teach is the one where they don't need me, where their own ideas come to life.

My good friend Justin Giovanetti has just released a new product called Tempolates.

If you need an easy way to arrange your flash animations to keep in sync with a certain tempo, then this is your product. I plan to demonstrate this to all my students for the class where they create flash animations where timing with music is part of the assignment.

I've waited and waited for years until we were of the means for me to be able to buy the one I want for her. Year after year, I've had to postpone.

Today, finally, I got it.

Oh, and I'm 27 today.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html

The new TSA procedures are unacceptable. There are many arguments as to why, but in my mind I only have to make one: I have two little nieces.

I don't have any children of my own, and may never, so these two little girls are the closest I have to that. They do not deserve, under any circumstance, to be forced to choose to either be photographed naked or be given an "intimate pat-down."

It's unacceptable.

If the cost of flying is to have one's junk photographed and/or grabbed, then that cost is too high for me. YMMV.

Order it.

Want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgC3zjNH1oU

The best commercial for a product I have seen all year. The pacing is amazing.

A student had the idea to do a drop shadow that fades out half way down the page this morning. This is the resulting example file that shows how it is possible with current CSS3 technologies that should work in most modern browsers.

Something like modernizr should help with providing a fallback for lazy not as up to date browsers.

Rating: 4.5

It is joy working with this display.

I also now have plenty of room for my tablet on my desk. Using a tablet with a laptop is strange because the laptop has the keyboard and mouse all in front of the screen, making it really deep.

It's probably rather obvious, but I just launched a new http://nathanherald.com. This also means that I had to move this part of the site to /blog which is probably where it should have been all along.

Now that I finally have a decent homepage I need to start working on redesigning this blog's layout and functionality. Maybe next month.