iWoz

iWoz, originally uploaded by smithco.

Thank you Lombardi!

Woohoo!

Lombardi just made the Flames-Wings game 1-0, and now the our boys are playing better than they have in far too long.

Go Flames!

A Mac Desktop Picture Changer Using Flickr

My recent switch to Mac has so far been nothing but awesome. Generally, Macs are just better at everything. But, there is one application that I miss from the Windows world: a wallpaper changer that uses photos from Flickr. John's Background Switcher did exactly what I wanted, but that only exists on windows.

There is photocast trick over on Mac OS X Hints, but that has the limitation of only using recent photos out of a Flickr stream. I would really like to pull random photos out of my Flickr photostream, just like John's Background Switcher does. I'd also like to have some specific Flickr interaction, like jumping to the displayed photo, or showing the most interesting photos.

Unfortunately, I just can't find a good application on the Mac to do this. Thus, my only solution is to write one! I think that this should be a relatively simple application when it's done; however, discovering the most elegant way to put this together will be a small adventure. It should be fun and a good way to explore some of the principles of Mac development.

We'll all just have to see how this develops.

To keep the information about this project separate from the miscellaneous clutter of this blog, I've started a new blog specifically to journal my progress. You can visit this project journal at http://flickrdesktop.blogspot.com.

Off to California Soon

It's set. I'll be moving to California soon for a short contract at UC Davis to do a bit of research on the hydrocarbon distribution in peach trees. I'll be there March through July. Davis is right next to Sacramento, or about an hour from San Francisco (aside from certain bars, it's a fun town), or a bit less time from the Napa Valley (no, i won't refuse the merlot). It's unfortunately a bit too far from San Jose (I would have loved to go see the Sharks-Flames game on April 5th at the Shark Tank), and it's definitely too far from San Diego (I love the zoo there). It's also not far enough from Los Angeles; but, nothing is really far enough from Los Angeles. It should be fun!

See Davis on Google Maps

4-1! and the game's only half done

Nuts, Russia just scored, But, our boys are still three up on Russia, and the game's only half over. It looks like they'll easily take the win and have a perfect record this time round. This is definitely one of those "great to be Canadian" games.

Update: Final score of 4-2. A great victory for our boys. The fantastic work by Pryce had a lot to do with it.

A Moment From My Visit Home For Christmas

Emacs Tip: Install Ispell on Windows

One little hiccup with running Emacs on Windows is that, by default, the spell checker does not work. The reason is simple enough, Emacs relies on an external program called ispell to do the spell checking work, and ispell is typically not installed on Windows.

Installing ispell isn't too difficult, though it's not trivial either. The first requirement is that Cygwin needs to be installed, or at least, the cygwin1.dll shared library needs to be somewhere accessible. Once Cygwin is installed, you can download ispell. See the README file for instructions. Do make sure to follow the instructions! Especially, do not forget to set the variable DICTDIR. It's easy with the instructions, but skipping a step can result in odd errors.


Afterwards, ispell can be invoked on the current Emacs buffer with the simple command M-x ispell.

Tinkering with iLike

I've decided to give iLike a whirl. So far, it seems alright. However, I'm not convinced that it's as interesting as MOG or the Filter, but, the real time reporting it adds into iTunes is cool.

You can visit my iLike profile if you like. And, if you're using iLike, add me as a friend.

ps2pdf tip: How to Get Around the "broken" ps2pdf Arguments

I through hours with a ps2pdf problem. Thank God someone on the PostScript news group managed to help me out. Here's the story for posterity's sake.

I'm currently working on a LaTeX document with some photos in it. As I'm using the PowerDot class, which is incompatible with pdflatex, I need to convert all my images to EPS and use ps2pdf to get my final PDF document. On the first attempt, I used the command

ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

and it worked, except that my photos came out all muddy, a result of over compression. So, I added the option to turn off compression,

ps2pdf -dEncodeColorImages=false file.ps file.pdf

and end up with the wonderfully obtuse error message

Error: /undefinedfilename in (false)
Operand stack:

Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1122/1686(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:70/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: No such file or directory
MiKTeX GPL Ghostscript 8.54: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

Ick.

It turns out that ps2pdf on Windows is a batch file, and batch files do not accept = in an argument. I had no idea that this was the case, but so it is. The solution, which is annoyingly absent in the documentation, is to replace = with #. Thus, the command on windows should be,

ps2pdf -dEncodeColorImages#false file.ps file.pdf

Like that, it works. And, I get my beautiful uncompressed photos in my document.

Emacs Tip: No Tabs Whatsoever

I my last post, I tried to describe how to get rid of tabs in Python mode, and managed to not get it quite right. The previous command, python-guess-indent, really only turns off the indent guessing, but doesn't actually remove the tabs. It just happens that tabs are only used for every other indentation level. I had only tested the first level and missed that the tabs are still inserted later in.

So, to get rid of all tabs all the time, add the line (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) to your .emacs file. This turns off the replacement of spaces with tabs globally. Hooray! tabs are gone.