The morning light was cutting through the leaves of the walnut tree outside the kitchen window. It felt a little bit like this.
Summer Morning
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Old San Francisco
This site has been going around the interwebs for a while and I finally took a look at it. As luck would have it, there was a dot on Irving Street, between 3rd and 4th Avenue, which is exactly where I used to live. I clicked the dot to load the picture.
After I got my bearings it hit me: the building on the far right is my old building, looking very much like it looks today. The 3rd floor apartment was mine. And here’s an interior shot of the window that faces due west.
I love San Francisco. Or at least the idea of it. When I go back now I’m happy I moved away. But I have tons of great memories from living in that place. And I love old pictures. So I probably got a little bit too much satisfaction out of seeing this. It also explains why I like “Bullitt” more than anyone probably should.
Gruber on the Kindle Tablet
I agree with every single word Gruber writes here.
Tech Writers Are Still Idiots
Post-Jobs, Apple Needs to Open Up
via Post-Jobs, Apple Needs to Open Up | PCWorld Business Center.
Does anyone have their head farther up their ass than Katherine Noyes?
Tech Writers Are Idiots, part 82
In its latest report, McAfee notes that among the plague of malware, the fake antivirus software problem is now hitting even the Mac. "This puts the Apple platform squarely in the crosshairs of malware authors. It will be interesting to see if this type of malware makes its way to the iPhone and iPad as well. It is probably a case of ‘when’ rather than ‘if.’
Anyone who knows anything about iOS apps knows that they are sandboxed. If an app was infected, it can’t affect the system or any other apps. And if an app is straight up malware or spyware, Apple will pull it from the App Store, assuming it gets in in the first place. If you jailbreak your phone, all bets are off. And frankly, who cares?
People will buy anything
When I first heard about Coffee Joulies on Kickstarter, I thought it was one of the dumbest things I ever saw smart people get behind. Looks like I was correct.
Compressing Git Repository
I recently moved a decent sized project from Mercurial to Git, using the method Dan Benjamin outlined here. I noticed that the .hg repo was 88.3MB while the .git repo was 141.3MB. That’s quite an inflation. So I ran git gc to try to compress the repo. That didn’t change a thing. However, running git gc --aggressive got the .git repo down to 78.5MB. Nice! Assuming that the repo still works without any problems :) To my knowledge, the care and feeding that Git requires is one of the few drawbacks of Git compared to Mercurial. But I’m plowing forward with Git. I like how it handles branches better than Mercurial and branches are something I want to use more often. Also, everyone is using Git, and this is one area where it doesn’t really pay to be different. Just go with the flow and life will be a little bit easier.
Related: Git Compression
Software and Process Patents
Because of software and process patents any company could be sued for almost anything. It is impossible to know what the next patent to be issued will be and whether or not your company will be at complete risk. It is impossible to go through the entire catalog of patents issued over the last 10, 15, 20 years and determine which will be used to initiate a suit against your company.
via Mark Cuban
It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to me if the methods I’m using to estimate split distances and finish times in Splitcaster is infringing on some patent someone filed fifteen years ago. But how would I know until I’m sued? This hasn’t even happened yet, but it very easily could, and that in itself pisses me off.
On the flip side, maybe I “invented” this on my own. Should I go through the process of patenting it so that I could then go through the process of suing people who steal my process, either on purpose or inadvertently? No. It’s a no win situation for small businesses and solo developers. The only winners in the software patent wars are the lawyers and the big businesses who can afford to pay them.
Squirrels
I had a little bit of fun with an old super-zoom digicam, iMovie, and the squirrels in the tree out front.
Weird OS 10.7 Lion Audio/Video Problems (and how to fix it)
NOTE If this post saves your sanity and keeps you from rebooting five times a day, please consider purchasing either of my iPhone apps: Split Finder or Splitcaster. Thanks :)
HINT: If you’re having the same problem as me, restarting ‘coreaudiod’ solves the problem. You can do that either from Activity Monitor or by running this command in Terminal: sudo killall coreaudiod
See below for more details.
Anyone else having audio/video playback issues with 10.7 Lion? From time to time, much more often than I’d like, audio and video playback breaks. The symptoms are as follows:
- Audio from Flash (specifically MLB.tv) doesn’t work.
- I’ll Quicklook a .m4a or .mov and it won’t play. It just sits there, then beachballs for a bit, then finally give you this message: “An error occurred with the preview of this document.”
- Sometimes iTunes will continue to work. Sometimes not. Always works via AirTunes.
- Playing back a video in QuickTime Player X doesn’t work. It acts the same as using QuickLook. Playing the same video back in QT7 works, but the audio won’t play.
- System and app sounds (like alerts, the “iTunes finished converting songs” sound, and the feedback when changing the system volume) all work.
- Playback in GarageBand results in silence.
- Same with iMovie ’09.
You get the idea.
Another thing I just noticed today, August 30, 2011, is that the screen will flash when a system alert should sound but can’t because audio is dead. It acts as if the “Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs” option is on, even though it isn’t.
In general, the problem has to do with Flash and media playback. I thought maybe using AirPlay in iTunes screwed things up. But perhaps it’s just from putting my mid-2009 MacBook Pro to sleep. It was working last night, then I put it to sleep by closing the lid, and now the sound is having problems again. And it seems that only a reboot of the machine fixes the problem.
UPDATE Wednesday, August 3, 2011
I had a hunch that force-quitting the ‘coreaudiod’ process from Activity Monitor might fix the issue without a reboot. iTunes just stopped playing audio, so I gave it shot. It worked! Next time things break, I’ll be more thorough about testing this out. But so far it looks like killing coreaudiod (it’ll start right back up again and won’t affect the system) seems to do the trick. You might need to restart the offending application, too.
UPDATE Thursday, August 4, 2011
The issue cropped up again just now and simply killing ‘coreaudiod’ fixed it. No need to restart the apps that weren’t working properly. Annoying, yes. But this is so much better than having to reboot, especially since rebooting with Lion seems to take twice as long as it did with Snow Leopard.
UPDATE Sunday, August 7, 2011
If you aren’t seeing “coreaudiod” in Activity Monitor’s list of processes, make sure that you are viewing All Processes.
UPDATE Sunday, August 21, 2011
For the record, this is not fixed with the 10.7.1 update. This issue also causes weird problems with playing back DVDs and I’ve noticed sometimes Hulu videos won’t play correctly. Getting Hulu to work simply requires killing/restarting coreaudiod. DVD playback requires killing coreaudiod and restarting the DVD Player app.
UPDATE Thursday, October 13, 2011
It seems like the 10.7.2 fixed the issue, at least with my mid-2009 17″ MacBook Pro. Hopefully the problem has been resolved for everyone else.
UPDATE Monday, October 24, 2011
So maybe it’s not 100% fixed. At least twice since the 10.7.2 upgrade, my computer stopped playing system noises (alerts, the “file deleted” noise, etc.) even though audio worked fine in other places. Running sudo killall coreaudiod fixes the problem as usual. So I’ll keep my TextExpander snippet around a little longer. Bummer…
UPDATE Friday, February 3, 2012
OS 10.7.3 is installed and audio still craps out from time to time. It’s certainly weird. I was able to play iTunes just fine, but system sound effects weren’t working just a minute ago. sudo killall coreaudiod continues to work.