tail -f carlo.log

Pleasant Memories Of Times Past

Trying to keep track of the last one or two weeks…

• Running again! Avoiding tarmac, thank God there are many forest roads around. Using light weights on my hands now, too. Fun. The most interesting part of the down period was that I was actually missing my runs, and that I was looking forward to start running again. I think it’s official: I like it.

• Found out I can watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & The Colbert Report freely and legally on the web, OMG. Thank you, Comedy Central. Too bad there isn’t an RSS feed. Or is there?

• Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo! – and so is JR Conlin. Bummer, two of my personal heroes gone. Well, I guess ~9 years at the same company is enough for anyone. All the best, guys!

• Using FriendFeed now. It’s not bad, really; then again, I mostly use it to have a single place where all my loose threads come together. I really like the stalking helper imaginary friends feature. Makes it easy to keep track of pals who don’t use FriendFeed themselves.
  I’ve tried subscribing to the combined feed of all the people I’ve subscribed to on the site, but it’s like being fed by a firehose. Unusable, sorry. As I’ve said before, the idea to build a social network on top of peoples’ lifestreams is a bit too meta for me.

• Discovered Goodreads. Nice.

• I love GTA IV. Incredible game. So many lovingly crafted details, amazing.

• New iPhones! Dope. Want. And a revamped .mac! Let’s hope it works as good as it looks in the presentations. The current .mac web implementation is useless for me. It just doesn’t cut it.

RescueTime Hack: Log your meetings and phone calls (OSX only)

Over the last week I’ve been using RescueTime. It’s a neat little service that’s keeping track of what you are doing all day long on your machine (Mac or PC) by logging which applications are having the focus. On the site you can then tag the different applications with different keywords (for example, my Mail.app times are tagged with “work”, “communications” and “email”).

And, to make it actually useful, you can analyse your time spent, graphs and all! Check the product tour on RescueTime.com for more infos and some screenshots. It’s pretty neat. (Yes, privacy concerns, blah blah blah. It’s not the topic of this article, so please keep it to yourself for the moment. Thanks. :])

So far so good.

My problem, tho, is that I spend quite a bit of time both on the phone and in meetings. Naturally, RT won’t track these times, since these are basically off-screen activities. Uncool.

So after digging around in the RT log files I was amazed to learn they’re just YAML files. Eeeeexcellent. I can work with that!

But I wanted something with a GUI, something a bit “cooler” than just a Ruby script. So I took this as opportunity to get a bit into Applescript. Unfortunately, RescueTime’s Mac doodad doesn’t offer an Applescript API, and I had to improvise.

After two hours of playing around and cursing at Applescript’s syntax (they’re all on crack…), I had something sufficiently cool to show for.

So, what is it? It’s a little application that you run everytime you want to log some off-screen time. Basically, it’s just a dialog that allows you to enter a number (i.e. minutes spent), and has some buttons to either log these minutes as “was on the phone” or “was in a meeting”. If you hit “Cancel”, it won’t do anything. (Surprise.)

Let’s say I’ve just spent 15 minutes on the phone, I’ll run the application, enter “15” and hit the Return key — and the last 15 minutes will be logged as phone call in RT. The app will quit once that’s done. Another meeting, another phone call? Rinse, repeat.

Data-wise, it’ll then create a new file in the right format in RescueTime’s log directory (~/Library/RescueTime/Logs/Pending/). On the next data upload RT will pick up the new file, and it’ll appear in your stats as “manual_phonecall”. Your meetings will appear as “manual_meeting”.

Please note: Neither existing RescueTime files nor the RescueTime application will be touched or tinkered with.

Below you’ll find two downloads. The first one is the actual script in plain text. The second is the script compiled as application bundle. If you’re unsure which to pick, you’ll most likely want the latter. ;)

• RescueTime Log Time.applescript

• RescueTime Log Time application (ZIP file)

Have fun.

DISCLAIMER: I’ll take no responsibility for loss of data, hair or life. I am very, very sure there won’t be any losses, but still. It works for me, and I’m sharing. Use at your own risk.

Post It #20

Right, I remember! Did I ever blog about being interviewed (“mentioned” would probably be the better term) by the guys over at the Yahoo Publisher Network blog? About Planet Yahoo!, of course. Hilarious how I completely forgot about this…

April 30. There’ll be an ARG to stimulate the Collective Intelligence to deal with the idea of an oil crisis starting end of April. I must say, I love the idea. There is apparently such a huge demand for ARGs, why not use this raw potential to do something worthwhile? World Without Oil aims to do that. Kudos.

Mac game development. [via Hendrik] Game developers give the Mac another look — this can only be a good thing. Yay!

Troubled languages. English is degrading each and every day, says Glass Maze’s lapsed cannibal in a amusing, yet angry rant.

I often find myself in meetings where the English language is beaten, burned, shat upon, drawn-and-quartered, and finally twisted into a monstrous parody of itself, then slapped onto a powerpoint slide and projected onto a wall, where its shame and ignominy are visible to all.

And you know what? He might be right, but I believe blood would come out of his ears on a daily basis, if he were a caring German listening to his native language. Don’t know what I mean? Take what he said, double it, and imagine parts of any given sentence being peppered with English/German halfbreeds constantly.

I notice that I, personally, see a decline in the quality of my German — which is my very own tongue, mind you —, due to the fact that I speak English half of the time for a good number of years by now. I switch between the languages without effort, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, and — worst of all — interchange English and German words rather frequently. Shame on me.

But the longer I think about it, the more I wonder whether this is a price we have to pay for globalization… Remember Blade Runner with his “gutter speak”? Just thinking out loud.

His name is Rupert

Friday I finally got my new machine delivered to my doorstep: 24’‘ iMac, Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 7600GT.

First impression: it’s huge. Really huge. “A couple of smaller iMacs are orbiting it!”-huge. But very shiny. My 20” Dell flatscreen is still sitting next to it, looking small.

The transition from the Mac mini to the new box was uneventful, almost too easy, if there is such a thing. Next I moved a few gigabytes of porn data over from my PC, the 250GB drive took it with a mere shrug, as expected.

I also installed World of Warcraft/Burning Crusade, since it’s the only game I have lying around for OSX at the moment. (Which reminds me, I also have Uru and Warcraft III and should probably take them for a spin as well.)

Short verdict: frickin’ sweet. 1920×1200px, all settings cranked to max, glow enabled, 16xAF — I get 30-60fps all the time, no matter where I am. One thing that for some reason doesn’t work, tho, is FSAA. Apparently the 7600GT doesn’t do FSAA in WoW, but it’s a known problem, and I hope they’ll fix it at some point. That said, it’s not like the lack of anti-aliasing is really apparent. :)

Also, the box doesn’t really break a sweat running anything. For example, the CPUs hover around 20% while playing WoW. Even when converting AVI videos to something my iPod can handle it was blazingly fast, yet quiet and still responsive, the way it should be. The difference between a single G4 Mac mini and a Core 2 Duo iMac 24” is nothing short of breathtaking. (If it wasn’t, I’d be seriously disappointed anyways.) It performs admirably.

I named it Rupert.

Sweet Microsoft-related Irony

Today is the day Vista is launched by many happy faces at Microsoft. (The World stood still for a very short moment… it blinked, shrugged, and continued to spin, feeling indifferent.)

Today is the day I placed an order for a new machine. It will be big, and I will be very happy the day it’ll arrive — this Friday, if all goes well.

No real connection between these two fantastic events. By the way, one of them excites me to a degree I can’t really communicate, the other… eh… not so much.