Hat tip: Neven Mrgan

I had to partition my MacBook Pro's hard drive to use Boot Camp, but lost everything on the drive. I figured that would happen because every attempt to partition my drive (yes, even after defragging it, using iDefrag) would fail, though without any data loss... until I tried booting off my Leopard Install DVD and used Disk Utility. I wasn't worried as I had, minutes before, just had Apple's Time Machine back everything up.

However, with Boot Camp if I wanted to run Windows, I'd have to restart my machine². On top of that, what if the web site or app that I'm testing lives on my Mac? Enter: Parallels.

Parallels 4 can indeed boot a virtual machine off your Boot Camp partition. That is, however, it can, but not without some cajoling. I tried setting up a virtual machine using the Windows 7 (experimental) settings, but was hit with this error:

Failed to configure the Boot Camp partition's hard disk.

A disk configuration error has occurred. Make sure that you have read/write permissions for the disk.

I thought perhaps it couldn't read/write NTFS partitions, but then I realized how silly that would be. So I tried, counter intuitively, to go through the setup as if my Boot Camp partition were a different OS — in my case, Windows Vista (I figured it was close enough). Success! (or in the interwebs vernacular: WIN!)

Parallels proceeded to set up the machine, which warned me several times that the OS was not officially supported and that I would need to reactivate my OS and Office registration. I'm not worried about Office, since I don't have that, but we'll see what happens with Windows 7. I just got a pop up saying it detected a change in hardware and I should reactivate in the next 2 days if I want to keep using all of Windows 7's features. I went to check the notices, but the note to reactivate wasn't there.

Behold, Windows 7 and Mac OS X, running side by side (I have Windows 7 full screen in my a secondary display):

Sadly, Aero does not work in Parallels, but other than that, I don't seem to be missing much else. Of course, I wouldn't use this virtual machine for gaming, but it runs Internet Explorer 8, and can browse my local machine's development server and it seems to me that Windows 7 runs much better than any of my previous virtual machines. It could be that this time it has a dedicated partition... or it could be that Windows 7 is handles much better with less resources than XP, either way, I'm pleasantly surprised.

I'm using one of the wallpapers in this Aurora Borealis Wallpaper Pack and here's my Aerora.themepack, if you were so inclined.

svn add svn status | grep ? | awk '{print $2}'

... but I eventually grew tired of looking that up every time. I tried to make that into an alias, but because of the shell escaping it didn't work as is. I did a bit of digging around and found a non-shell escaped version then added these lines to the bottom of my ~/.profile (I'm sure it would also work in ~/.bash_profile):

alias svnadderall="svn status | grep '^?' | cut -b 8- | xargs svn add" alias svnridallin="svn status | grep '^!' | cut -b 8- | xargs svn remove --keep-local"

A quick breakdown of how this works:

• alias svnadderall =
  this is the command that tells bash what will happen when you type svnadderall. You can change that to whatever you'd be more comfortable with. I used "adderall" and "ridallin" because I'm clever like that (I'll eventually get sick of the puns, but the ADHD mnemonic will help me get in the habit of using them (yes, I know they're not spelled correctly; they're phonetic mnemonics)).
• svn status |
  prints out the status of all your files and passes it to
• grep '^?' |
  finds each line beginning with ? and passes it along to
• cut -b 8- |
  trims off the first eight characters and returns the rest of the lines and passes it to
• xargs svn add
  captures everything and runs svn add [whatever it was passed]

It's the same for the svn remove except the grep is matching for lines that begin with ! and I'm using a --keep-local flag to prevent svn from trying to remove the file¹ (which won't exist, since it's missing, remember?).

I tried changing the cut -b 8- to sed 's/^?[ ]+//' and even awk {print $2} but neither worked properly for some reason; the awk based version tried to svn add ? and the sed version sat there waiting for input.

On further consideration, I think cut -b 8- will be the safest. The file name won't always be the second item in the svn status output. I can't imagine any situation where that would be the case for non-versioned files, though there might be true for missing versioned files would have a secondary (or tertiary) flag.

If you're editing your bash_profile or profile be sure to run source ~/.profile (or source ~/.bash_profile) if you want your shell to pick up your changes. You can also logout and log back in (or open a new Terminal.app tab or window) as well.

Connecting to server...
Looking for someone you can chat with. Hang on.
You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: hi
You: oh
You: you again.
Stranger: ?
Stranger: asl?
You: sorry, i was hoping for someone else.
Stranger: what?
Stranger: fuck

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Seattle P-I to publish last edition Tuesday

Don't listen to self-proclaimed "social media industry experts", they'll see social media as the duct tape that fixes all your problems. They'll tell you that you need comments and discussion threads! a Facebook account! FriendFeed and a shiny new Twitter account! Don't cheapen yourself with that. You're journalists, not school kids trying to hook up. Authority and reputation are the currency of the internet. Don't blow it all for one last good run.

The lack of an interactive community isn't what is hurting you. It's your distribution model. Print and distribution is crazy expensive. What you need is the newspaper equivalent of TiVo¹. Let the readers to choose what they want to read and when. Keep your writers writing and you'll keep your readers reading².

Let some other site handle the community management. Sites like Reddit, Digg and Slashdot specialize in discussion, and you specialize in content creation. Would you let Digg write your articles? Content and Community³ are two different fields, and you won't be able to master both.

You might think you still need those print numbers for advertising, but you're wrong. Your readership number was never tied to the number of runs across the press. Sure, back in the beginning, that was the only number that mattered, but we're a couple centuries removed from that now. Think about that. Your readers can now get to your content from anywhere at anytime. Why do you still think the number of rolls of broadsheet you use daily is a valid indicator of reach?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is about is either going to be sold to a new owner or become an online only publication⁴. The way they see it Option 2 is the equivalent to death. I'd say they're wrong unless they continue doing the web the way they're doing it now.

This is not about the death of journalism, this is about the death of your centuries-old distribution model⁵.

Addendum

I started writing this about two weeks ago, and recently came across Clay Shirky's incredibly long winded Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable and I particularly loved this salient bit:

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

I don't agree with Clay that we're all in the dark ages. "So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?" That's almost like asking "Who will write the songs if the record labels go under?"

One thing he does is explain the complex relationships between the newsroom, advertising department, and production that I basically glossed over here. If that's the sort of thing you're interested in, it might be worth slogging over.

Google Voice

Log in to GrandCentral and check in your inbox. You might have a message at the top saying one of two things:

Your account is not yet ready to be upgraded. Please check back shortly.

or

[blahblahblah]
Yes, Upgrade me

When you get a chance, be sure to check out the Google Voice Suggestions and be sure to vote for the iPhone app. I also recommend suggesting the Play and sort voicemails directly in Gmail as well as the Receive calls on Google Talk option.

Also, at the bottom of that page, suggest that they bring back outbound call recording. I was a bit upset when they changed that.

Naturally, I've upgraded. I don't know if they imported my GrandCentral address book or not, but that was basically just a copy of my OS X Address Book which is now currently synced with my contact list on Google and my iPhone.

Is this marketing for G.I. Joe? or Nick Fury / S.H.E.I.L.D. ?

Should I totally steal that octopus for my logo?

The first of these to go live is a post about John McCain's "The One" ad from September. The ad was published a few weeks before Wall Street melted down. Was 6 months enough time for us to come down from the hysteria that was the 2008 Election Cycle? Are we looking back at this high on a completely different hysteria?

The Google SEO Starter Guide (.PDF) recommends using the <h1> - <h6> tags to structure your content. Typically, Front End Developers use <h1> to wrap the website's name. That seems to be an abuse of the most important heading tag, all for the hope that Google will index your site name, especially when it is the content that should be indexed.

So how can we do better? A friend of mine mentioned the <dl> tag when I lamented the demise of the <lh> tag. Using the <dt> tag for the site name and the <dd> tags for the navigation, you cut the amount of tags, and marry the site name and navigation semantically.

Compare the following block:

<div id="header"> <h1><a href="/" title="site name - home">Site Name</a></h1> <ul id="navigation"> <li><a href="pagename" title="page name">page name</a></li> <li><a href="pagename2" title="page name 2">page name 2</a></li> </ul> </div>

to this:

<dl id="header"> <dt><a href="/" title="site name - home">Site Name</a></dt> <dd><a href="pagename" title="page name">page name</a></dd> <dd><a href="pagename2" title="page name 2">page name 2</a></dd> </dl>

Ah, the elegance!

Using this markup frees up the exalted <h1> tag for the main heading of the content, as it should be. In the context of WordPress, the <h1> would be the post title (or the page title).

Now styling this new markup is going to be the next challenge (especially considering the myriad ways the various browsers render them), but one I'm looking forward to tackling.

An augur¹ is, historically, "a religious official who observed natural signs, esp. the behavior of birds, interpreting these as an indication of divine approval or disapproval of a proposed action." That sounds completely unrelated until you realize what usually happens at inaugural events - the release of birds, usually doves. Technically speaking, the release of doves isn't something that happens at an inauguration; it is the inauguration. This casts the Inaugural Bible in a humorous and ironic light, made deliciously ironic by those who claimed Obama wouldn't use the Inaugural Bible.

On January 20th, 2009 The United States of America will be taking part in an ancient Roman custom of releasing birds to predict her future under the leadership of Barack Obama². It's almost like an inside joke that you all are now part of, having read this.