ExpanDrive

Maybe you heard earlier this week about Apple taking out a patent on some solar cells, so soon we can all have solar powered MacBooks and iPhones and blah blah blah.

Look: that might do it for my cousin Irene with the gold pigtails and a frilly pink dress, but that sure as hell doesn’t do it for me. I demand MORE POWER. And like John McCain, who’s so tough he wouldn’t even use a solar-powered sundial, I know exactly where to get it.

That’s right, I’m talking about a nuclear computer. I’m sick of being behind the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys in generating what is obviously the manliest form of power on earth. And don’t bother whining about “feasibility”. If we’d let weenies like you take over during the 60s, there’d be a Russian flag on the moon and the national pastime would be badminton.

A Mac Pro weighs almost 50 pounds, and enough fissionable material for an a-bomb weighs only 11—still sound impossible to you? Sure, you’d need turbines and a cooling system and crap like that, but Apple’s always bragging about how awesome its designers are. Now it’s time to put up or shut up.

On top of just being frickin’ awesome, nuclear computing would all but solve the national energy crisis. When you were running some pansy application like Mail or iWank or whatever, you could use the power supply in your PC to run the rest of your home, and even sell power back to the grid.

Look, I love the environment as much as the next guy—wind turbines, recycling, bottle deposits, hybrid SUVs; the whole nine yards. But solar’s simply not a viable solution for power users; I mean, what are you gonna do when the sun’s not shining?

Let’s say you’re playing Quake IV in your bedroom at 4am, and somehow fighting back the entire Korean Peninsula with a single measly railgun—do you want to get gauntleted because a “low power warning” pops up and ruins your FPS? Or do want your power supply to get so hot from rendering ultra-high-res blood spatter that you have to huck it in the bathtub to prevent a meltdown?

The choice is yours, people. Don’t let Steve Jobs talk you into buying an inferior product.

Image: MacNuke, created by author. From original work by Gmn wnr. Free use under cc-by-sa-2.5.

Shell Script Mistakes
“While there are lots of shell programming pitfalls, at least the interpreter will tell you immediately about them. The mistakes I describe below, generally mean that your script will run fine now, but if the data changes or you move your script to another system, then you may have problems.”

Robert Muraine Audition - SYTYCD 4
Robert Muraine is now my second favorite dancer in the universe, behind Michael Jackson (obviously).

“Chasing José”
“Over the last few years, Rob has negotiated prospective deals for Jose worth almost $2 million. Rob got Taco Bell to ante up $25,000, plus residuals, for Jose to star in a TV commercial in which Jose would hold up a huge burrito and say, ‘This thing’s gotta be on something.’ Jose demanded $50,000 instead and Taco Bell walked. Rob also got Jose an offer of $100,000 from GoldenPalace.com, which would require Jose simply to wear that company’s t-shirt and cap whenever he was on TV. Jose demanded $200,000 and Golden Palace walked. Then, Rob got Jose an offer of $75,000 from a reality TV show that wanted to film Jose in a wheelchair for thirty days. Jose demanded more, and the TV show vanished. Finally, Rob got Jose an offer of $500,000 for a movie based on his life, but Jose demanded $1.5 million and the offer vanished.”

Twitter bucks
I wonder if they’ll let you buy twitterbucks with flooz. John Gruber suggests a more realistic business model for twitter.

On Language: Emoticons
“The trouble is that the stylized drawings of iconography (rooted in the Greek eikenai, ‘to seem like,’ and graphein, ‘to write’) are threatening to take over the precise communication of words.”

Hoax: 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers
We don’t issue retractions here at Magnanimous. We silently delete misguided posts, and then link to their expose as if we never fell for it in the first place.

“Dear American Airlines”
“‘Dear American Airlines,’ the 180-page letter begins. ‘My name is Benjamin R. Ford and I am writing to request a refund in the amount of $392.68.’ But ‘request,’ he decides, is a word ‘too mincy & polite, I think, too officious & Britishy.’ He demands a refund.”

The situation with Address Book / Google Contacts sync is completely bizarre. The Google Mac Blog says that OS X 10.5.3 “now lets iPhone users sync their Address Book with Google Contacts.”

Awesome, but what’s up with iPhone requirement? Is there some special technology in the iPhone, a technology that doesn’t exist in full-sized computers, that makes the sync possible? Is this a business ploy to attract gmail users to the iPhone who might otherwise use a Google -> Address Book -> iSync double-bridge to get their gmail contacts on their Razr?

But then you can enable sync, without an iPhone or iPod touch, if you’re willing to brave a simple .plist hack? I’m very confused about what the logic is behind all of this.

Since graduating college, I’ve been a fairly happy Bank of America checking account holder. There are an absurd number of BofA ATMs in Boston and a reasonable number of branches. However, there is a $750 minimum balance requirement that sort of grinds on me - mostly because the account makes no interest. New checks cost a ridiculous $25, which I am forced to pay nearly every year as I move around.

A few months ago I saw an ad for Schwab High-Yield Investor Checking. It advertised 3% interest, no minimum balance, all ATM fees [domestic and international] refunded. It seemed too good to be true - but Schwab is a respectable name, so I gave it a good look and opened an account.

This is a great deal. It’s not too good to be true, and there isn’t a catch.

• 2.01% variable APY - [about 5x the national average]
• No minimum balance requirement
• All ATM fees are refunded [both domestic and international]
• Free bill pay
• Free checks
• Overdraft protection
• Built in brokerage account [with reasonable trading fees]

The major downside is that you won’t be able to interact with a real person at a local branch, although they have 270 investment branches you can supposedly go to for service. Apart from that, it’s pretty nice. The website isn’t quite as pretty as the BofA site, but is certainly just as functional.

For an even higher interest rate, Jon keeps all of his money in the the [dubiously named] Bank of Internet USA, which is currently yielding 3% on a $1,000 minimum balance. I’m not too sure about that one.

I’m sure you’ve heard about Git. Chances are you’re still using subversion. You scratch your head and ask: “Why switch away from subversion, it does everything I need?” Or maybe: “Why on earth would I want a distributed version control system? Screw you fanboy.”

For a long time I felt the same way. All the hype seemed weird; it’s just version control. I felt: “Git, probably pretty neat—but I don’t really care.” Is it going to make my day any better? Probably not. Is it going to be better than perforce, which is ridiculously expensive for a small business? Probably not.

It turns out I was wrong.

When the Rails project migrated away from subversion to Git, I thought I’d give it another look. Our nightly subversion backup had grown to 400+ megabytes, mostly due to an infuriating 7-year old subversion bug/limitation/feature that won’t let you fully obliterate a file from the repository. It sucks to inadvertently check in a 10 megabyte DMG knowing it’ll be in the repository FOREVER.

After the release of ExpanDrive, we were at a point in our development cycle where we had a little room to re-evaluate our development toolchain and see if our current process could be improved. At Jon’s urging, we gave it a shot. Using git-svn [awesome], we imported our entire source tree and history into a hosted GitHub repository. We’ve been using it full time for about a bit over a month are loving it. GitHub does a great job and provides a wonderfully simple interface. It could be better, but that’s another post. In the next few days we’ll be posting a series of articles on the highs and lows of our first month with Git.

Points for anyone who knows how I can reclaim control-a from WordPress.

“Pictures of TV”
Sometimes, while walking around town, I’ll see ridiculous ad copy on canopy signs or store fronts, and I’ll read them out loud in my radio announcer voice: “Natural Natural Natural Natural Food Snacks Groceries”. I think I’m going to start doing that with TV too.

“RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era”
“Unlike 1998, though, RISC vs. CISC actually matters, now. A close look at the design of Intel’s newest mobile architecture, officially named Atom, will show why the decades-old “RISC vs. CISC” debate is suddenly interesting again, and in some entirely new ways. In this article, I’ll talk about the penalty that Intel’s new Atom ultramobile processor pays for its CISC legacy, and how Intel plans to reduce the impact of that penalty with simultaneous multithreading.”

Wedding Pictures from the Sichuan Earthquake
Moving pictures from the earthquake in progress. Makes rain-on-your-wedding day, which isn’t at all “ironic”, also seem not very bad.

Zero Punctuation: Painkiller
I hate posting something on the same day as Gruber, but he’s out of date on this one, having linked to a review from two weeks ago, and I’m not going to abandon my pre-existing idea just because he gets to post one link at a time while I’ve got to type up like a dozen. Yesterday Zero Punctuation reviewed Painkiller, one of Matt’s favorite games: “Right in the beginning you get a gun that shoot giant wooden stakes, and when you hit the bad guys with it they’ll fly like 40 feet and get pinned to the wall… The physics engine is what makes the game fun.”

R. Kelly: Jury selection and the trial itself
“As R. Kelly’s child pornography trial is about to start, the judge’s media liaison gathers all of the reporters together to announce that we’ll be watching a sex tape in open court. He then delivers stern advice about doodling. ‘I am here to warn you,’ says Terry Sullivan, ‘that anyone who draws a depiction or a simulation can be committing the act of child pornography. … You don’t want to be doing that.’

It’s no secret that some of the best software comes from companies that eat their own dog food. But some programs are easier to dog food than others. If you’re working on project management app or bug tracker, then it’s simple. Your own software is part of your workflow. You find a bug, you fix it in your own software.

On the other hand, if you write software for keeping track of dry cleaning, or managing taxi queues, then you probably don’t use your own software all that much. I mean, once every few days you’ll pretend that you’re using your software. You’ll go through the motions and make sure everything works, but that’s not the same as using it. That’s probably why dry cleaning and taxi software blows.

We’ve been eating dog food here at Magnetk since our beta version. Sometimes, when I’m working on the web site or or server-fu, I’ll spend the whole day working through ExpanDrive. But other times I’ll be working on local files in XCode or emacs, and I end up hardly using ExpanDrive at all.

That’s about to change. Today we each made an entry called localhost in our Drive Managers that connects right back to our own computer. Our goal is to do 100% of our development over ExpanDrive. We’re eating dog food at every meal.

Remember when Dell didn’t totally suck?

Are you using bash-completion? I bet you think you are. I bet you’re not. It’s a horrible name (up there with “The Wire” and “Battlestar Galactica”), because people hear it and think that they know what it is, but they’re wrong. Don’t prejudge the bash-completion. It’s much, much more.

Everyone knows about [tab] completion. It’s great. We love it. But, it leaves a lot to be desired. How many times have you done something like this:

Continuity:~$ cd m[tab]

and then seen this:

magnetk/     makay_tex_source.tex     mathjob.pdf     
methods of theoretical physics.pdf     monterpp.pdf

Three pdfs, a tex source file, and one directory. Do you know how many times I’ve wanted to cd into a pdf file? Zero. I’ve never wanted to cd anything but a directory. So why does [tab] completion show me all those files that I’m obviously not interested in?

There’s a better way. In fact, bash already has a robust programmable completion system managed through the builtin commands compgen and complete. While bash is distributed with “programmable completion”, it isn’t distributed with “programmed completion”.

That’s where bash-completion comes in. It’s more than 9000 lines of pre-programmed completion artificial intelligence. It knows that you only cd into directories. It knows passwd only works on users, groupmod only works on groups, unalias only works aliases, and which only works on commands. And that’s just in the first 150 lines. The current version even includes a whole svn subprogram, so that it can figure out valid targets even for the various svn commands.

You can install bash-completion by Macports (sudo port install bash-completion), fink (fink install bash-completion), or apt-get (apt-get install bash-completion). You can also install it by hand. This involves downloading the file, unzipping it, and putting it somewhere.

Regardless of how you install it, you need to make sure it gets sourced when you start a new shell. Sometimes Macports et alias will do this for you, and sometimes they won’t. If you’re new to this, then source just reads a file and executes it line by line. Add a line to .profile (or another file that gets loaded when you open a new shell) that says source /path/to/bash_completion. For those of you with Twitter-eqsue character constraints on your dot-config files, you can also say . /path/to/bash_completion, where the . operator is a synonym for source that saves 5 characters at the cost of being infinitely less readable, and infinitely easier to misinterpret.

Then you’re done. Load up a new shell and enjoy. If you’re used to stupid file completion, then prepare to be amazed. You’ll find yourself groping around with [tab] in places you never would have imagined before, and you won’t even realize you’re doing it.

Monopoles is out, once again, earlier than other weekly link blogs.

Dino Run
“I can say without hesitation that the Big Black Wall of Doom is among the most harrowing presences I’ve ever encountered in video games” on Metafilter. For the record, the “Wall of Doom” is the only thing in the game that hurts you, and is properly called a pyroclastic flow.

Chronotron
The tutorial explains it better than words can, but you basically use time travel to cooperate with your past selves in completing the levels. It gets a little tedious when waiting around for you slow-assed past selves to finish up what they’re doing. Also, kongregate does that weird cross-site time-warp with Facebook, so watch out if you don’t want your friends to know you play flash games on the internet. Finally, as always, watch out for paradoxes.

Custom File Formats in Cocoa
For the nth time Matt Long posts a spectacular, time-saving, hand-holding, super-insightful Cocoa tutorial about a month after I figured it out myself, the hard way.

“Iron Man”
“Hollywood will think that the public loves Iron Man because it is a superhero movie, a fantasy in which an ordinary person finds himself endowed with supernatural abilities. In fact, the public loves Iron Man because it is a rich-guy movie–a type of movie that offers the same kind of fantasy fulfillment without the supernatural nonsense.”

Biggest Apple Store Ever Opens Today
And not but 3 blocks from my house.