Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

Inaugurating a new “Geek” category for this post with the hope that I can prune back most of the current categories into Geek and Non-Geek. Anyway =>

You're probably on a Macintosh and noticed it hanging momentarily every ten seconds or so. You probably recently downloaded Photoshop or Dreamweaver or some other Adobe product that made you download and install the Akamai download manager before it would let you download and install the Adobe product you wanted in the first place. Being conscientious about organization and maintenance of the files in your computer you probably deleted the Akamai download manager after you used it. You went on your merry way and are probably enjoying your Adobe product. At some point you realized this really annoying hang that your computer has been doing. You went to the Console app and saw a list of error messages a mile long about a call to some plist feature that OS X couldn't find. You have glimpsed the trail of your enemy. A brief Google search turned up a few dated clues. You've found yourself here. Welcome. Let's kill that fucker, shall we?

Here's the error -

3/19/10 12:10:10 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[398] (com.akamai.client.plist[606]) Bug: launchd_core_logic.c:4103 (23932):13   

3/19/10 12:10:10 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[398] (com.akamai.client.plist[606]) posix_spawn("/Applications/Akamai/loader.pl", ...): No such file or directory  

3/19/10 12:10:10 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[398] (com.akamai.client.plist[606]) Exited with exit code: 1  

3/19/10 12:10:10 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[398] (com.akamai.client.plist) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Well, thanks a lot. You check out your Library folders and can't find a plist item for Akamai. You can't find anything for com.apple.launchd. Spotlight doesn't find anything for Akamai. Spotlight doesn't find anything for com.apple.launched.peruser. The trail is going cold. This is why you hate “download managers”. Aren't you capable of managing your own downloads?

Well, the sad news is that since you're a conscientious, but perhaps not completely and utterly thorough computer user, you didn't dive deep into the README that was provided in the Akamai folder. There was actually some useful info buried in there. Here's the fix.

First, you have to go back to Adobe and pick out any trial product to use (again). This will cause the Akamai thing to be reinstalled on your system, which is all you're after. It'll download that goofy Akamai thing again to a disk image which you then install. It will then start downloading the Adobe whatever. You can stop the download at that point. Now open up the Terminal and paste this command -

/Applications/Akamai/admintool uninstall -force

This is the only proper way to uninstall that stupid thing that you didn't want on your computer in the first place and for which they don't even provide an uninstaller, just a little hint in a README buried in the Akamai folder. Restart your computer and hope it forgets all about it. Carry on...

Props to the Apple Forum for providing the answer.

Well, it has been quite some time, hasn't it? So much has changed! So much is still the same! Where to begin? I've once again written this post in my head so many times that I don't know where to start. How about the first thing that jumps to mind?

Okay, the first thing that jumps to mind is that I just found a card in my backpack yesterday. It was given to me on new years in Portland, the night of my last show with RRE. I don't remember who gave it to me, which was probably their plan (or maybe I was just so out of it that I really don't remember). Anyway, later that night I was sitting in Mark-a-rita's hotel room and realized that I'd been carrying this card around in my pocket all night and maybe I should open it and see what it was. It was from everyone in the room, which was basically a great number of my really close friends from the RRE experience. As soon as I a saw all the signatures on it and a couple of the things that people had written I shoved it back in the envelope. I heard somebody behind me say “Oh, did he just open it?”

I couldn't read it then because I was totally overwhelmed. From the time that I announced that I was leaving the band to that night at the Aladdin I was completely flooded with so much emotion from so many people with whom I'd shared most of my adult life that I myself was emotionally paralyzed. It was amazing, and amazingly difficult. Most Sundays after gig weekends during that period I would spend at least a little while crying and not knowing why. I was leaving of my own free will and for reasons that were plenty good enough for me. What was this all about?

By the time I got to Portland I couldn't take it anymore. I'd had enough of people being so nice to me. I didn't deserve it. People gave me cards with hundreds of signatures on them telling me that I'd be missed. Someone organized a can drive in my name at our Thanksgiving show, for Pete's sake. What did I do? I just played the bass! I'd have been doing it anyway, hopefully, and instead I got to make friends and play shows and get good at the bass and be a rockstar for years. I didn't deserve this outpouring.

So, to anyone reading this who was around in that period, this one's for you.

I know I'll see some of you again, but I'll never see all of you again. My life has been a blessing, a dream. When I can transcend my neurosis and the chaos of my life currently for a few brief moments and really just take a breath, I feel so profoundly grateful for being a part of it. You and I made it together, and it was so. much. FUN! I kind of get it now, some of what there was to be sad about. Change is usually a wonderful thing, a necessary thing, but in a sense I feel like I've quit my family. Like I've spit in the face of the thing that we built. For that I'm both sorry and thankful for having had the experience in the first place.

I guess that'll do for now. Hopefully this gets the writer's clog out. I love you guys.

#life

And that's that I didn't start programming when it first occurred to me that I should. I'd be at least four years further along. Sigh...

A brief list of the things I've been working on.

The front burner:

1. Wordpress customization
2. CSS
3. Photoshop
4. jQuery
5. GitHub

The back burner:

1. Rails
2. Sinatra
3. HAML
4. SASS
5. Webby
6. Facebook APIs

A whole lot of PHP, CSS, JS, and when I have time, Ruby.

Get something real up and running quickly. Running software is the best way to build momentum, rally your team, and flush out ideas that don't work. It should be your number one priority from day one.

It's ok to do less, skip details, and take shortcuts in your process if it'll lead to running software faster. Once you're there, you'll be rewarded with a significantly more accurate perspective on how to proceed. Stories, wireframes, even html mockups, are just approximations. Running software is real.

With real, running software everyone gets closer to true understanding and agreement. You avoid heated arguments over sketches and paragraphs that wind up turning out not to matter anyway. You realize that parts you thought were trivial are actually quite crucial.

Real things lead to real reactions. And that's how you get to the truth.

from “Getting Real“

-via 37 Signals

And on that note, this blog is going away soon. I'm going to be needing this space for something else.

Basically, just what it sounds like. The time during which your application, script, program, or whatever is run.

...that the DOJ approved the merger of everyone's two favorite companies in the touring business – TicketMaster and LiveNation? They found no reason to have anti-trust concerns with a merger between a monopolistic ticket service and a monopolistic concert promoter/venue owner. But wait! There's more!

One person who may have had some input into this decision was FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. Fun fact about Mr. Genachowski – one of his previous gigs before he came to Washington was on the board of directors at – wait for it – TicketMaster! I'm sure there was no conflict of interest if he did in fact have a say in this decision.

I'm sure we've all heard of Obama's hard-ass chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Fun fact about Mr. Emanuel – his brother, Ari, is a hard-ass Hollywood talent agent. He was supposedly the inspiration behind the character Ari on the HBO show Entourage. I'm sure that his being on the board of directors at LiveNation played no part in swaying the DOJ's decision to let this absurdly anti-competitive, big-business friendly decision to go through.

I might as well have voted for Palin...

So, you've gone and installed MAMP and WordPress on your computer, or if you wanna sound really hip you call it your “local machine”. You've gone and started building out a wordpress site for your school because your current website is an outdated embarrassment. Wordpress is kind of the no brainer choice, or so your buddy told you, because it's super easy for anyone to use who's familiar with a word processor. You'd like to attempt to keep the content on your site fresh, so it sounds good to you. Then you have a meeting with your principle and your so-called webmaster to talk about getting some of the things you've done put up and made available to the world. Then they drop a little piece of info on you.

Your school's webhost doesn't do PHP, and they don't know if the district will let you move to another host. Let me tell you what this seemingly innocuous piece of information means.

It's means you're screwed.

PHP is a programming language. It's what's formally known as a scripted language. I have a post here that explains what that means. Wordpress is written in PHP. The advantages of a scripted language are what lead them to be used to write the majority of cool, interactive websites in the world. If you wanna sound hip you call them “web apps”, since that's what they are. Site kind of implies a place, a static location that will be there when you come back and won't have changed much. An application is something you interact with. It does things for you, like letting you write news for the frontpage of your school's website that it will then display to the world without your having to go in and code HTML. Applications run on computers, or servers if they are web applications.

Compiled applications (the other kind besides scripted) have already been digested into machine code, which is to say 1s and 0s, prior to being run. This means that they are essentially frozen and you can't alter anything about the source code without going through a rigamarole. Scripted languages, in contrast, can be altered on the fly to add new features or fix bugs without having to be recompiled into machine code. This makes scripted languages perfect for constantly evolving web apps. The source code is right there on your webserver, and you can go and make changes to it. The downside is that you have to have some special programmatic gear installed on your server.

Scripted languages have to have their respective libraries of code installed in order to for them to be “interpreted” at “runtime”. This whole long explanation is to tell you that since your webhost doesn't appear to have the appropriate libraries installed, your WordPress application is going to look like a bunch of gibberish to your webserver. You can upload it, but as soon as you point a browser at the index.php file, the server is going to throw a “what the fuck is this?”, also called an error. That's why you had to install MAMP on your computer in the first place, remember? And unfortunately, installing PHP isn't an easy process, especially for someone who almost certainly doesn't have the proper “permissions” allotted to them in the operating system of the webserver.

I realize there's a bunch of gobbledeegook in here. I'll try to un-muddy the waters a bit in subsequent posts. Specific questions are most welcome. I should clarify that any webhosting company in the world is going to have PHP, and most likely a raft of other languages installed so that they can accommodate all types of clients and their disparately coded applications. That your school's webhost doesn't have PHP – the most widely used web programming language in the world for the last decade or so running – tells me that your district has their own hilariously outdated webservers set up in the furnace room of some office somewhere. We may be dead in the water, Jimmy...

#generaldevelopment

Because there is going to be one, trust me. This device isn't as obvious as iPhone. It's kind of subtle. Which means that those of you who have done the spiritual work to prepare for it will be fine, but those who haven't done the work, well, they're probably going to miss a lot of this at first. So you'll see some noise about who needs this thing, it's just a fancy desk ornament, and so on. I am telling you this now so that you can be ready for the harsh voices and they won't hurt you when you hear them. Just let the negativity pass by you. Do not engage with it or try to fight it or argue with it. Step aside, and let the dark energy flow away.

Peace, enlightened beings. This is what you and I were put on earth to achieve. And that is what this device ultimately is about. Yes, you can read on it, and watch movies. But those are functions. Features. Those aren't its purpose. The purpose of a device is something different altogether. What this is about is bringing people together to form the universal One, the great synchronization of human vibration in a global mesh of energy, like the planet in Avatar. That is the real goal. We are all one person. One spirit. I am inside you, and you are inside me. (Not really.) But anyway, do not allow yourselves to forget the higher purpose of what we are doing.

Oh, and we are totally going to fuck the cable carriers. But that too is just a side issue.

(Via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs » Steve.)

Out with the old, in with the newer. Yes, I just spent the last 3 hours writing SQL queries, mostly by hand in order to move this blog back from Drupal to Wordpress where it belongs. Some of the effects are still evident, such as the weird catagories. Luckily I find this kind of shit fun now, so I'll fix it tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by.

This post is for my buddy Jimmy. He's a teacher in CT and has set up a Wordpress.com site for his classroom. Of course the parents love it, and he's the young techno-hip teacher in the school so his principal has allowed him to go and set up a new site for his school, whose hideous and outdated site was left for dead by the side of the road several years ago, apparently. He just sent me an email asking about downloading Wordpress. I responded by asking why because downloading and using Wordpress isn't the piece of cake that you might think it is if you've never dealt with web servers and databases before. So I decided to make this public so that he and I and we may refer to it from now on. Besides, this hasn't been blogged about nearly enough...

When I first downloaded Ruby on Rails I was a bit perplexed. It came with a README that gave these installation instructions that made no sense to me at all. I didn't know anything about webservers at the time, or for a few months afterward, so here's what I learned. This applies to Wordpress as well.

Wordpress and Ruby on Rails are both (more or less) database-backed content management systems. (If you know anything about Rails, you go right ahead and light my comments section up.) Drupal is, too. This means that the post that you're reading right now isn't stored as a word document or a text file on a file system as you know it on your computer. It's stored as plain text in a database. Search the term here for a brief newby explanation from my ongoing programmer journal/book. What this means is that you have to hook wordpress up to a database server to have your content served. You also need to hook it up to a webserver to have your content served to and from a browser. This sounds complicated because it kind of is until you do it once or twice.

If you are a Mac user go Google MAMP, and download it. the AMP part of MAMP stand for Apache -the webserver, MySQL – the database, and PHP – the coding language that Wordpress is written in. Pardon my grammar. Install it. Now you have a webserver and a database server on your computer, so you can play with Wordpress now. In the MAMP directory somewhere is a folder called htDocs, which is the root of your webserver.

If you make a subdirectory under htdocs called Wordpress, unzip and copy all the files from a Wordpress download, and start MAMP, you can then point your browser to http://localhost:8888/Wordpress and install wordpress in a way that you can then use. You also need to create a database. Use the PHPMyAdmin feature of MAMP for this. Just figure it out. You won't break anything. Create a database and give WordPress the name of that database. you're good to go with Wordpress on your “local machine”.

Comments/Questions are down there.

More to come.