work – Page 8 – The Yonderist

First of all, many thanks to the folks at AtLast Software and at Google for making SketchUp Pro available to educators at such an unbelievable price — it’s now free for instructors!

As I re-acquaint myself with the application and begin to gear up for making illustrations of the crawfish boats, I am finding that there is an amazing variety of educational materials. One is Google’s own collection of videos, which are divided into sections for new users, intermediate users, advanced users, et cetera. There’s even a video on modeling a tractor.

There is also something called The SketchUp Show, which has a variety of lessons — they are up to Show 56 at this writing.

There is also a SketchUp Cookbook published O’Reilly — link is to Amazon. If you have O’Reilly’s Safari Online Book service, then you can find the cookbook here.

Including a Language within a Language in Textmate

2009-05-17

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If you want to include a language within a language, for the purposes of syntax highlighting for example, the include rule within Textmate allows it.

Here’s the example from the manual:

{   begin = '<\?(php|=)?';
    end = '\?>';
    patterns = (
        { include = "source.php"; }
    );
}

MacPorts requires Xcode

2009-05-13

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It’s right there in the installation instructions, but somehow I managed to miss it. And that explains why I couldn’t get git properly installed and setup. Bit I do wish that port would tell you that at some point. After all, I can’t be the only idiot?

Phew A Google search for the Error 77 code reveals that there are other idiots out there. One of my main goals in life has thus been achieved: I have learned that I am not alone.

Open Access Bibliography

2009-05-13

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Digital Scholarship maintains an open access bibliography which includes not only a list of journals but also guides to setting up open access materials:

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (ISBN 1-59407-670-7) provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement’s efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography’s references have such links).

Definition of Life

2009-05-04

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Found this great definition of life:

life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form.

Pragmatic Programmers now have “Pragmatic Life”

2009-05-01

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I own several of the Pragmatic Programmers books: TextMate, How to Program, and Version Control with Git among them. I like that I can purchase paired print and PDF copies of the books and that the PDF copies are always getting refreshed. I also like that I can keep e-versions of the books not only on my Macs but also on my iPhone. Well, the prag progs now have a new series, The Pragmatic Life. The blog for the series is here.

No Hidden .Spotlight Folder, Please

2009-04-30

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To get rid of the hidden .spotlight folder on removable volumes like flash drives, cd to the volume and then:

touch .metadata_never_index

This tip compliments of Cro Magnon on the Ars technica Mac forum, and Mac OS X Hints, from whence it came.

A New Member of the Household

2009-04-29

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It seems that a cat has adopted us. It is at least a mutual love affair between Lily and a calico kitten that has begun to haunt our carport. Yesterday, it got a name: Laten.

The New Kitchen Window Begins

2009-04-29

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At some point we realized that the best compromise solution for our current living space was to put a window above the washer and dryer, which sit on the south wall of our kitchen. Our kitchen is quite large — one can imagine a real estate agent using something like “farm-style” to describe its size — but it is also fairly dark. In its current state, there is a window over the sink and a window cut into the door, but both of those give onto the carport, which means they will always bring in a fairly subdued light.

In other words, our kitchen is a large cave.

So the first thing the new window does is bring the hope of lightening the cave. The second thing it does is give us a view of the backyard from the kitchen, which is important when you have a growing girl in the house who, as summer approaches, wants to spend more and more time outside. And with our improvements to the backyard, we do too. The new window will, we hope, give us more communication between the backyard and the kitchen.

We also hope to put a counter in over the washer and dryer, simultaneously closing them in and removing them from view and giving us additional counter space — not, mind you, because we really, really need more counter space.

But before you get to the dream, you have to do a little destruction. Here is an image from the current work: