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Replace text with jQuery and Regular Expressions

January 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Today, I wanted to hide some text on a web­page I was work­ing on. It was a lot of text all through­out the doc­u­ment, but each instance was inside a span and within paren­the­sis inside that.

I could have edited it all out, but it would have been really time consuming–the CMS I’m using had each one in its own element–so I needed a quicker, more pro­gram­matic way to deal with it.

I needed to replace text within a bunch of ele­ments using a reg­u­lar expression.

To do it, I used a bit of jQuery magic:

$('span').html( function (foo,oldhtml) {
var content = oldhtml.replace(/\(.*\)/gi,"");
return content;
});

To walk through this:

$('span').html( function (foo,oldhtml) {

Here we get all the html/code inside each span. Then we open a func­tion with foo as the index (no clue what this means, it’s just what the doc­u­men­ta­tion says) and old­html is a vari­able that lets us manip­u­late what used to be in there.


var content = oldhtml.replace(/\(.*\)/gi,"");

Here, we make con­tent a new vari­able and use replace and a reg­u­lar expres­sion that looks for any­thing that’s in paren­the­sis and removes it. The .replace func­tion is a reg­u­lar Javascript func­tion, not any fancy jQuery nonsense.

Of impor­tant note here: the reg­u­lar expres­sion does NOT go in quotes, but the “replace it with this” string does. Also, you have to escape the paren­the­sis because if you don’t, you end up grouping.

The rest of the code just dumps out the new, manip­u­lated string; and because we’re using the html() func­tion, the returned string is what ends up as the con­tents of the orig­i­nal selected span.

Got that? Good.

Posted in computer, open source, web | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Remove “The File You Are Trying Top Open Is In a Different Format” Dialog

from Excel

January 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

I export a lot of csv files from our web appli­ca­tions at work into Excel, where I do manip­u­la­tions and analy­sis. This is prob­a­bly 50% of my job.

I enjoy it, but one that’s always drove me crazy–if the web app serves up a .csv, but labels the exten­sion as .txt or serves up a .tsv (ie. tab-seperated) and calls it .txt or .csv or any sort of mis­match like that, you get an annoy­ing error, some­thing like:

The file you are try­ing to open is in a dif­fer­ent for­mat than spec­i­fied by the file extension…

Here’s how to turn that stu­pid error off (cour­tesy of msdn.com):

Basi­cally, you have to add a new key to the reg­istry (open regedit.exe and browse to the right spot, see below. Note: on my com­puter, I had to put it in …/Excel/14.0/.… instead of 12, because I have the next ver­sion up, what­ever it is (Office 2011?)

  • Loca­tion: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security
  • Cre­ate a new key:
    • type: 32 bit DWORD
    • name: Exten­sion­Hard­en­ing
    • value: 0 = Dis­able check; 1 = Enable check and prompt; 2 = Enable check, no prompt deny open

By default (ie. if they key doesn’t exist), the value is set to 1. Trans­la­tion: it’s always going to ask you.

Cre­ate that key, restart Excel and you should be good to go!

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Goodnight Micah

an album of traditional folk songs

December 14, 2011 | 1 Comment

About the Album

I recorded this album of folk songs together as a Christ­mas present for my fam­ily this year.

With the excep­tion of Whether or Not, a Water­deep song, these are all tra­di­tional Amer­i­can folk songs.

These record­ings are released under a CC-BY-SA license—you’re free to copy, redis­trib­ute, remix or oth­er­wise use these works as you see fit, how­ever, if you release your work pub­licly, please link to this page (and I’d love for to you con­tact me and let me know.

Down­load the Music

Track List

  1. Waltz­ing Matilda
  2. Keep on the Sunny Side
  3. Frog­gie Went A’Courtin
  4. You Are My Sunshine
  5. John Henry
  6. I’ve Been Work­ing on the Railroad
  7. Oh Susanna
  8. Pay Me My Money Down
  9. Oh My Darling
  10. Whether or Not
  11. Hard, Ain’t It Hard
  12. This Land Is Your Land
  13. Good­night Micah

Fur­ther Ramblings

I recorded the album at church, with the totally awe­some Audio-Technica mics we’ve got for the choir. They sound pretty freakin’ awe­some, very warm and flat. Unfor­tu­nately, I wasn’t able to record all the songs in the same room, which is why some have some great, nat­ural reverb (the sanc­tu­ary) an some don’t (the library).

I pointed one mic at my gui­tar and one in front of my mouth and gave it all I had. It’s no way for a pro­fes­sional to record, but since I had no inten­tion of lay­ing down any other tracks to go with these, I didn’t even bother with a click, let alone mak­ing sure the vocals didn’t bleed into the gui­tar mic and vice versa.

Inter­est­ingly, I had to split the tracks apart (I recorded in stereo with each mic on one chan­nel) and repan them to cen­ter things a bit–out of the box, it was panned to hard left and right.

Over­all, I’m mostly pleased with it. There’s a bit of an obvi­ous flub at the begin­ning of Frog­gie Went A’Courtin, which will drive me crazy for­ever (until I get chance to re-record it per­haps), but oth­er­wise, it’s not too painful.

Posted in music | 1 Comment

Review of A Bunch of Noisetrade Music

mostly folksy stuff

October 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

I pulled a mess of albums off Noise­trade the other day.

Today, I queued them all up and hit play–I fig­ured I’d share the results with you.

The Sleepy Turtle’s Brother You’re So Kind

Well, they don’t call them the Sleepy Tur­tles for nothing–this is slow, über mel­low music.

It’s not bad, actu­ally. It has a sort of shoegaze-without-the-wall-of-fuzz feel to it, like Starflyer 59 meets Rich Mullins with a lit­tle bit of Sufjan’s Christ­mas albums thrown in for good measure.

The pro­duc­tion is full of weird string stuff, man­dolins, dul­cimers or some­thing, with some wav­ery keys in the background–it’s really not a bad sound, but some­thing about it is rather famil­iar: Jars of Clay’s sec­ond album, per­haps, with­out the per­fect melodic hooks and nailed-to-the-wall songwriting.

And it’s really the song­writ­ing where this album falls down–the songs aren’t bad, but they’re largely forgettable.

Ves­pers

Tell Your Mama

First and fore­most, this girl(s) can sing. Her voice is just great and the har­monies they pull off are spot on–she’s acces­si­ble in a Natalie Mer­chant sort of way (unlike Over the Rhine, for exam­ple, who have gor­geous, oper­atic vocals), but with­out any sort of forced quirk­i­ness or twang.

Over­all, this is fun, pleas­ant indie/folk/Americana. Very Five O’Clock Peo­ple, actually.

The title track really solid­i­fies this–this is some twangy, mandolin-and-slide kind of stuff with some solid drums back­ing it up.

I also pulled down a sin­gle from their new album, The Ves­pers 2, called “Will You Love Me.” This is even better–a sort of banjo + quiet female vocals thing, that occa­sion­ally drops into a rolling upright bass and shuf­fling drums gait. Very cool.

Ryan J. Lane’s The Blue Book

Ok, this is some crazy stuff. I’ve like Ryan J. Lane for a while, hav­ing found some of his stuff on Noise­trade a while back.

This album is also pretty dang good–lots of bizarre noise stuff, mixed with folksy strum­ming gui­tars and banjos.

“Would You Show Us” throws a Danielson-style curve ball at its straight­for­ward lyrics, mak­ing the lyrics “Jesus, would you show us what it means/ to be a lov­ing human being” tiny and over­borne by bizarre effects and noisy loops, turn­ing what could be a really bor­ing Chris­t­ian lyric into a heart­felt won­der­ing whether the whole idea is even possible.

The record con­tin­ues with sim­i­lar bizarre and inter­est­ing pro­duc­tion that really makes it a worth­while listen.

Elliot Road’s The Dust Cov­ered Man

This is some seri­ously twangy, close-harmony old-timey kind of stuff. Over­all, it’s not half-bad–the musi­cian­ship is solid, the vocals are solid and the har­monies are about as old-timey as possible.

The only real prob­lem is that it’s a lit­tle heart­less and not nearly haunted enough. As some­body who sings this sort of music, I can vouch for this being the hard­est part of singing this sort of music–you have to make either sing-along style fun, or Johnny Cash-style haunted/melancholy.

And this album cer­tainly isn’t sing-along fun–it’s much too depress­ing (in the most pos­i­tive sense of the word) for that. But while it bor­ders on fright­en­ingly ret­ro­spec­tive at times, it doesn’t quite cross that line into really great.

That said, if you’re look­ing for some good new old-timey music, this is cer­tainly worth the listen–it’s got a ways to go before it gets to great, but it’s worth your time. The fid­dle work on here isn’t amazing–there’s no vir­tu­oso displays–but it’s solidly well-done.

I’ll also bet their great to see live–I think they’d make the per­fect show to see in the fall, sit­ting out on the lawn of some Park Dis­trict build­ing somewhere.

Jill Andrews’ “The Mirror”

From a pro­duc­tion stand­point, there’s noth­ing amaz­ing about this record. It’s sim­ply another smooth, peace­ful slightly poppy record. I don’t know what you’d clas­sify it as: it’s not jazzy like Norah Jones, but it’s not painfully rec­og­niz­able as “pop” or “folk” or whatever.

But the song­writ­ing here is really pretty solid. Par­tic­u­larly “Wake Up, Nico,” the sec­ond track, which nails the lone­li­ness of a par­ent trav­els a lot to the wall–the music, lyrics and melody all work in sync to be both ten­der, happy and sad all at once.

“Another Man,” late in the album, also brings a great, hooky melody with­out being cloying.

Ben Har­ris’ “Train Sta­tion Blues EP”

This is a pretty raw, one guy and an acoustic kind of deal.

While the first song isn’t par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable, the title track, makes up for it with a truly haunt­ing cho­rus of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Char­iot’ at the end.

The third track, “Welded to Mine” is also pretty dang good–the acoustic gui­tar doesn’t need any flair to carry a nice folksy, almost Dylan-esque melody and one of the most peace­ful man­dolin solos I’ve ever heard.

I’d be curi­ous to hear more of Harris’s stuff, par­tic­u­larly if he’s going to flesh some of these songs out with a big, more full sort of band.

Dirty Guv’nahs’ “Youth Is In Our Blood”

When I first played this album, I posted the fol­low­ing on Google+:

Sounds like an pop ver­sion of the Black Crowes. Not bad–they’re pretty tal­ented, but it’s a bit more radio-friendly than I really enjoy.

That opin­ion still stands. It sounds like Nick­el­back got in a fight, nay–a civ­i­lized dis­cus­sion, with the Black Crowes. And Nick­el­back pretty much won.

If you’re into that whole radio-rock thing and want a lit­tle dash of South­ern rock infused into it, you might give this a try.

Oth­er­wise, I’d say skip it. It’s not bad, it’s just radio-friendly, which is most often not what I want com­ing out of my speakers.

Posted in links, music | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Math Substitution in Vim

September 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today, I needed to change some our term codes into human read­able text. Because our codes oper­ate on fis­cal year, which rolls over in July, codes for the spring term include the actual cal­en­dar year they’re in. But the code for the fall term includes the cal­en­dar year plus one (ie. Fall 2011 is writ­ten as 201210, where the “10” at the end means “Fall” and the first 4 dig­its are the fis­cal year).

To change those pseudo-programmaticaly, I wanted to use a math in a sub­sti­tu­tion in vim, namely n-1 (where n=the fis­cal year in the code).

As it turns out, this is really pretty easy (as this page points out). Here’s how to do a math sub­sti­tu­tion (note, I’m going to use under­score as a delimter, so this is eas­ier to read):

  1. Find what you want to sub­sti­tute and group it like you would if you were rear­rang­ing stuff, ie. use paren­the­sis:
    :%s_\(2010\)10
    (or more accu­rately):
    :%s_\(^....\)10 (ie. grab the first 4 char­ac­ters at the begin­ning of a line)

  2. Tell vim that you want to replace it with a cal­cu­lated value:
    _\=

  3. If you’re going to make a string together with your math, you’ll have to con­ca­ten­tate any strings together with value. Use ” . ” for this (with your strings in quotes):
    'Fall ' . (ie. stick the string “Fall ” on the front of what we’re doing to do next)

  4. Do the math, using submatch(1), where the num­ber in paren­the­sis coore­sponds to what­ever you grouped in the begin­ning. Just like throw­ing in \1 or \2 in your sub­sti­tu­tion, you can use submatch(1) or submatch(2).

    The sub­match is your orig­i­nal value. Throw the whole cal­cu­la­tion in paren­the­sis and put it after your con­cate­nat­ing dot, and you’re done:
    (submatch(1) - 1)_g

To sum up in copy and paste friend­li­ness:
%s_\(....\)10_\='Fall ' . (submatch(1) - 1)_g

Or bro­ken up (with each sec­tion on its own line) for clar­ity:
%s
\(....\)10
\='Fall ' . (submatch(1) - 1)
g

A cou­ple notes:

  • I have no idea what hap­pens when (1) is a string, rather than a number.
  • I also have no clue how far you can take this or what the syn­tax is for more com­pli­cated math operations.
  • I hope I never have to find out.
Posted in linux, open source | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Apple Instinct

August 25, 2011 | 1 Comment

Today, I did a quick pre­sen­ta­tion on Google Voice for some peo­ple here at Mil­likin, talk­ing about what it is and how it can ben­e­fit people.

To get pre­pared, I did just a bit of research and, more impor­tantly, wrote up a 3 page usage and con­fig­u­ra­tion handout.

This was the first time, I’ve ever had an Apple-esque instinct: I wanted to ignore some options and just make it simple.

A Mul­ti­tude of Ways

See, there’s a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent ways you can use Google Voice. With tex­ting alone, you can choose to send/receive mes­sages via:

  1. the Google Voice web UI
  2. the Google Voice app for Android
  3. via your phone’s native SMS client
  4. via email
  5. via the Google Voice exten­sion for Chrome

The lat­ter, by the way, is my rec­om­men­da­tion for any­body who wants a good way to do a lot of tex­ting with­out using their phone a lot.

All those options have advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages, dif­fer­ences sign­f­i­cant enough that the route one per­son takes wouldn’t work very well for another.

For exam­ple, I for­ward all my texts to my phone and use my phone’s SMS client. That works great over­all, but if I ini­ti­ate a con­ver­sa­tion via text, it’ll come from my “real” phone num­ber, not my Google Voice number.

For me, that’s not a big deal–I don’t mind con­fus­ing my friends a lit­tle bit. But in a professional/sales/recruiting atmos­phere, that’s not really acceptable.

The Apple Instinct

Once you start intro­duc­ing all these option, it becomes really dif­fi­cult, really quickly to describe to some­one how to set some­thing up–for every option above, there are 2–5 dif­fer­ent set­ting s that have to be changed in two or three dif­fer­ent places, appli­ca­tions to install, and exten­sions to applications.

It gets hairy pretty quickly. And when pre­sent­ing that to users who don’t enjoy that sort of tin­ker­ing, the ben­e­fits that some­thing like Google Voice can pro­vide get lost pretty quickly.

As it turns out, most of my audi­ence were excited and were tin­ker­ing and try­ing things out before I fin­ished presenting.

But I didn’t know that’d be the case going in, so I wanted to make it as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. And I found myself wish­ing there were fewer options, want­ing to cut some things out so that the end users would be less con­fused and the prod­uct ben­e­fits more imme­di­ately obvi­ous to them. I had the Apple Instinct.

Posted in computer | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Linus Torvalds, Ethics and Forking

response to Linus' recent interview

June 20, 2011 | 1 Comment

A while ago, I read this inter­est­ing inter­view with Linus Tor­valds, the founder of the Linux ker­nel. I’m hardly smarter than Linus, but I’ll say a cou­ple things:

  1. His posi­tion on ethics is either stu­pid or poorly artic­u­lated. He says that ethics are pri­vate, but then imme­di­ately turns around and say [the shar­ing of code result­ing from the GPL] is “just very fair.“

    Some peo­ple (most? all?) would say that “fair­ness” is an eth­i­cal issue.

    This non­sense about ethics being pri­vate smells pretty strongly of a reac­tion to fun­da­men­tal­ism that is, in my opin­ion, equally fundamentalist.

    It’s the kind of ridicu­lous “pri­vate spirituality/ethics/etc” that gives rel­a­tivism a bad name. Ethics are noth­ing if they’re not public–they’re the way we treat each other.

  2. His opin­ion on Tivoiza­tion is interesting:

    Don’t think that just because it runs open source you should con­trol the hard­ware. It’s open source. If you want to make open hard­ware, make open hardware.

    I’m not sure how I feel about this (I think I dis­agree, mostly because I belive that if I own the hard­ware, I OWN the hard­ware), but it’s an inter­est­ing and coher­ent point of view.

  3. His opin­ion about the Android fork is right on:

    I think forks are good things, they don’t make me sad. A lot of Linux devel­op­ment has come out of forks, and it’s the only way to keep devel­op­ers hon­est — the threat that some­body else can do a bet­ter job and sat­isfy the mar­ket bet­ter by being dif­fer­ent. The whole point of open source to me is really the very real abil­ity to fork (but also the abil­ity for all sides to then merge the forked con­tent back, if it turns out that the fork was doing the right things!)

    Replace ref­er­ences to Linux with Gnome and Android with Unity and you’ve got my exact opin­ion on the whole fiasco. I’ve never under­stood why peo­ple com­plain about fork­ing in one breath and say “com­pe­ti­tion is good” in the other.

    A fork is sim­ply a recog­ni­tion that the orig­i­nal code (and the devel­op­ers) failed in some way.

    The argu­ment about whether there’s wasted effort in a fork is often a mis­di­rec­tion: if the project hadn’t forked, you wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily have twice as many devel­op­ers in the sin­gle project. A lot of those devel­op­ers would find other projects to work on where they’re not just ANOTHER developer.

    And like Linus points out, you can always steal code from the other open source fork for your ori­gial project, if it turns out they’re doing bet­ter work than you are.

Linus is an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, and this inter­view is no excep­tion. I’m curi­ous how oth­ers react, par­tic­u­larly to that ridicu­lous “ethics are pri­vate” nonsense.

Posted in linux, open source | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

4 Mini-Reviews of Albums

from Noisetrade

June 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Yester­day, I ended up down­load­ing a mess of albums from Noise­trade, some that we rec­om­mended and some that came up after I searched for “like Robert John­son” and “like Woody Guthrie.”

Nobody was really like Robert John­son. Not even close.

But some of these albums were pretty decent, par­tic­u­larly Josh Gar­rles and Lan­don Sheely. Here’s 5 mini-reviews.

Carl Thomas Gladstone

The Abo­li­tion­ist Hymnal

Over­all, pretty lame. The instru­men­ta­tion is very strummy, noth­ing inter­est­ing in the instru­men­ta­tion. Sounds like either an elec­tric plugged straight into the board or a inex­pen­sive acoustic, also plugged in. At the same time, there’s a lot of hes­i­ta­tion and

Lyrics and melodies are a bit too sim­ple and easy, feels like home-written church music.

Sum­mary: Not recommeded.

Josh Gar­rels

Love & War & The Sea In Between

Pos­si­bly the most eclec­tic album I’ve ever heard. Tracks vary between pop rock, a full-on (and very lis­ten­able) hip-hop/rap track, and a banjo and slide-driven coun­try tune, with sev­eral soul­ful, funky things thrown in for good measure.

And they’re all supris­ingly decent songs. Per­haps a lit­tle heavy on spiritual/Christian themes in parts, but not over­whelm­ingly so.

Musi­cally, it’s solid, with great pro­duc­tion val­ues. This guy can sing (and rap) great–he’s got this great, full, almost low voice, with a great range.

Josh Rouse

Sum­mer­time: Noise­trade Sampler

This is nice indie pop/folk/etc. It’s the kind of thing you can put on dur­ing a din­ner party and every­one will like it.

It’s just nice. It’s not incred­i­ble or awe­some or any­thing like that.

>Lan­don Sheely

2009

This is rowdy, chaotic old-timey music, mostly banjo-driven. It’s kind of fun and crazy and grating–it sounds mostly like 3–5 guys learned sev­eral songs, then got a lit­tle bit drunk and set up some mics and recorded an album.

Over­all, it’s not bad. The one thing they did well is keep the pro­duc­tion sparse, empty and raw. It’s no Rick Rubin, but it’s in the right family.

Not sure whether this is some­thing I’d return to on a reg­u­lar basis, but I have a sneaky sus­pi­cion that under­neath the shout­ing, not-on-the-beat hand­claps, and the almost grat­ing vocals, there’s some decent songs–there’s a rea­son there’s 5 guys singing along.

Update since writ­ing these para­graphs (but before I actu­ally posted this): I’ve looked up Lan­don Sheely’s site and he’s got a cou­ple other pages of music–at a quick glance, there doesn’t seems to be too much overlap.

Mark Mazzu

an unti­tled Noise­trade sampler

After lis­ten­ing to the rough and tum­ble Lan­don Sheely stuff, this album is rather disappointing–it just doesn’t have a lot of energy. It’s all peace­ful, sim­ple worship-style pop.

It sounds very much like some­thing recorded in somebody’s base­ment, acoustics plugged straight in with some non­de­script keys/strings in the back­ground. Every­thing is played or sung well–Mazzu’s voice is smooth in a Andrew Peter­son sort of way, but it has a bit of an ama­teur feel to it, like it’s try­ing to be a seri­ous album but is really just some­thing some guy recorded.

The lyrics, too, are a bit empty and easy. Sim­ple Chris­t­ian worship-type stuff, but noth­ing par­tic­u­larly unique or challenging.

Over­all, this album really isn’t bad. It’s just not very interesting

Con­clu­sion

I found myself fol­low­ing up on Josh Gar­rels eclec­tic, sprawl­ing awe­som­ness and Lan­don Sheely’s bizarre, fre­netic old-timey-ness. The other artists I found largely for­get­table. Josh Rouse is clearly incred­i­bly talented–his stuff is great to lis­ten to, but it’s not par­tic­u­larly captivating.

That incli­na­tion to follow-up and learn more are pretty good indi­ca­tors of how inter­est­ing the music was, how good it was, whether or not it moved me and, more impor­tantly, whether or not I wanted more.

And I’m look­ing for­ward to playing/hearing more of Lan­don Sheely’s chaos.

Posted in music | Tagged | Leave a comment

No Luck Finding A Decent Podcasting App

for Android

June 8, 2011 | 4 Comments

Ok, here’s the thing. I have an iRiver H120 with Rock­box on it that plays pod­casts like a champ.

I mean, it’s per­fect: more than enough stor­age space. When I push stop, it auto­mat­i­cally marks my place in the mp3, and then restarts at that EXACT spot when I turn it back on, long bat­tery life. Every­thing I need to lis­ten to hour and a half (or longer) pod­casts on my 20 minute com­mute to work and back.

Now, though, I’ve got an Android phone. This should be bet­ter. Granted, I’ve got less storage–I haven’t replaced the 2GB SD card that came with the phone yet. And bat­tery life isn’t great. But remem­ber, we’re talk­ing about a 20 minute com­mute, and I have a car charger for any­thing longer than that.

AND (this is where it gets good), I’ve got unlim­ited data. Unlim­ited. It’s not scream­ing fast, but it’s 3G, so with a bit of buffer­ing, it should be able to keep up with a nor­mal mp3. I would think.

What I OUGHT to be able to do is this:

  1. Install a pod­catch­ing app.
  2. Import my pod­cast aps from Google Reader.
  3. Have it cache a few episodes on wifi.
  4. Stream any­thing else I want on demand.
  5. Book­mark the place I’m at in the mp3 when I get out of the car.
  6. Start play­ing the same mp3 at the same spot when I get back in the car, whether or not I’ve restarted the phone, killed the pod­catch­ing app, etc.

I can’t find a pod­cast­ing ap that does more than 1–3.

Using Sub­sonic was ok, but it tended to for­get what episode I was lis­ten­ing to, and couldn’t be relied on to start back up at the same spot at all–it had no book­mark­ing sup­port at all. The only time it would restart in the same place was when the app didn’t die between uses.

Google Lis­ten thinks it knows what I want to lis­ten to when I get in the car. It’s con­stantly mak­ing sug­ges­tions, none of which are EVER the mp3 I was in the mid­dle of last time. More­over, it often bombs out on ogg feeds and other such cor­ner cases.

I’m not going to pay $7 for dog­gcatcher when I own an mp3 player.

My next attempt is Mort­Player + Google Reader. It looks promis­ing in the book­mark­ing depart­ment (thank­fully), but it only has local file playback–no streaming/subscription capa­bil­i­ties at all.

You would think this wouldn’t be so hard–it seems like my require­ments aren’t so crazy. But maybe I’m a weirdo.

I’ll be try­ing out sev­eral of the other pod­catch­ing apps in the Android mar­ket over the next week or so–if I find some­thing decent, I’ll post a review.

Posted in Android | Tagged | 4 Comments

Marlin File Browser

a GTK file browser with Miller Columns

June 1, 2011 | 2 Comments

You know that crazy columns view that OS X has in its file browser? Tech­ni­cally, they’re known as Miller Columns, and in my opin­ion, they’re a really great, fast way to browser com­pli­cated file trees: they expose lots of infor­ma­tion all at once. They’re also very key­board friendly–just use the arrow keys and return to get where you want, very quickly.

Unfor­tu­nately, OS X’s Finder is just about the only bear­able file browser out there that has Miller Columns. Dol­phin, for KDE, has an imple­men­ta­tion that dumps they key­board friend­li­ness and the intu­itive file brows­ing. I for­get the details now because I purged them from my memory–trying to use Dolphin’s Miller Columns UI was too painful.

Recently, how­ever, the Ele­men­tary Project released Mar­lin, a GTK file browser with Miller Columns. And they actu­ally work right.

Ok, “work right” is an overstatement–Marlin’s still very much in beta (alpha, even), but the over­all imple­men­ta­tion is solid and the UI design is solid (the edges are still pretty rough, although I have a sneaky sus­pi­cion that has more to do with GTK2 vs GTK3 incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties than with their UI design).

I think the Ele­men­tary team copies a bit too much from OS X as a gen­eral rule. How­ever, I’ve been stumped as to why, when Linux offers about 8000 file browsers, there hasn’t been a sin­gle one that a) looks like it was coded in this cen­tury (I’m look­ing at you, GnuStep) or b) works cor­rectly. Mar­lin might not be fin­ished yet, but it’s on its way to solv­ing that very problem.

PS. It’s really very fast. Why Nau­tilus is so much slower than this, I’ll never under­stand. Wait, let me rephrase: why Nau­tilus is so ridicu­lously slow, I’ll never understand.

Posted in linux | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

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