Tylor Sherman

Isosceles

tylor — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:12:59 -0700

One of my all time favourite hip hop groups is a small trio out of Saskatchewan called Isosceles. Their timeless album 'Face the Music', released in 1998 under their independent label Thick 'N Thin, still gets played a couple times a month in my iTunes. To me, it embraces west coast living and has the most down-to-earth, chill feeling I've ever encountered in hip hop. I learned a lot from their songs.

But there's one thing I've always been frustrated with: I could never buy their album. By the time I realized that music wasn't just for taking, and that it's good to give back to artists, they had vacated their North Vancouver recording studio in lieu of opportunities in Japan. Their original webpage (isoceles.tv) went stagnate and for a period of time they seemed to have disappeared from the internet. Luckily, I found a couple of bio snippets and I've added my own tracklistings:

I would love to get my hands on an original copy of their CD, and if anyone with a copy finds this entry, please let me know.

Also, while researching this article I found that they have a rejuvenated myspace account. Listen to 'Sign Language' on their myspace... real hip hop! I also found the host for their original website, which is here: http://members.shaw.ca/isosceles/ Finally, their label has a new myspace account at: http://www.myspace.com/thicknthinrecordings

Maybe there is hope they'll create some new music!

OS X desktop organization

tylor — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:52:55 -0700

Last night I created a new desktop wallpaper style that I think I'm going to stick with. Essentially you divide your important icons/items up using vertically striped wallpaper the width of each column. Here's a visual so that it all makes sense:

I was inspired by a tip at the Action Method website. While the tip is used to support their own system for getting things done, I think the basic idea is very good. I added labels just to be clear: work, personal dev, and personal fun. Work is for files that come to me for work. Personal dev is for items that are for personal development or personal projects; things like my updated resume, blogs ideas, todo, and web designs. Personal fun is for items that are just for fun. For me this includes photography ideas, music to download, music sent to me, and fun photos. Also, the far right column that contains my drives serves as kind of an inbox for newly downloaded files that aren't sorted yet.

The text at the left of the screen is what is contained in my todo file. While it's kind of nerdy to have text on your desktop, I find it is a more accessible way of actually realizing what is in my todo file. The program that creates this text is called GeekTool.

For icons in the top right taskbar, from left to right, iScrobbler, iBiz, Twitterific, and Caffeine. iScrobbler is for Last.fm integration with iTunes. iBiz is for time tracking. Twitterific is for desktop notifications from twitter (which I will probably remove soon as it drives me crazy). Caffeine is probably the most useful. It lets you turn off your screensaver and screen dim, and that may sound like a small thing, but it's nice for when youtube videos are playing.

For those interested in pursuing this further, here is a PSD of the wallpaper.

Drupal module list currently in use on this website

tylor — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:53:48 -0700

I've heard before that one of the easiest ways to contribute to the Drupal community is to write up a big ol' list of the modules you use in Drupal. So I'm going to do some more meta-blogging and list the modules currently used to power this site and why.

Two common modules that are missing from my install are TinyMCE and CCK. TinyMCE just outputs awful HTML and for me it's not worth the wrangling. I wish there was a better way but I currently edit all of my content as raw HTML. On my list of things to do is to integrate CodePress, which is a nice little syntax highlighter for textareas. I'd love to pair up a syntax highlighter with some simple autocompletion... that to me would be perfect for advanced content editing. There's a stub here, so maybe that can built on. Also missing is CCK. This module is a part of most Drupal installations but so far I haven't needed it. Any custom content types I have were defined in their own module.

Without further ado, here is my module list:

Core

Blog — provides simple blog functionality
Comment — provides commenting
Menu — provides menu items, primarily used for admin navigation but also holds custom menus for 'People' and 'Sources' in the footer of each page.
Statistics — provides the number of reads found in the info for each post, I used Google Analytics for real site statistics
Taxonomy — provides tagging for each post. I only have one vocabulary for freetagging of every piece of content.

Bookmarklet

This is a series of custom modules that allow me to publish using a 'bookmarklet' (a link from you bookmarks toolbar). I am hoping to one day wrap this into a tumblr-like install profile and integrate with CCK.

Bookmarklet — bookmarklet functionality
Bookmarklet Link — defines a custom content type for links
Bookmarklet Quote — defines a custom content type for quotes

Image

Image — for handling images within Drupal, mostly default settings
Image Import — comes bundled with image module for importing batches from FTP, only used this once but it worked well
Image assist — inserting images into content is still tricky in Drupal and for me this is the easiest solution. Another drop-in solution to the same problem would be IMCE.

Other

Akismet — wouldn't leave home without this one monitoring spam
Comment Notify — allows for follow up emails to users who leave comments
Comment Mail — sends me an email when a comment is posted to the site, probably could handle this with actions but this works fine for now
Google Analytics — simple Google Analytics integration for the site.
Open ID — trying to embrace the future with Open ID. Still working on integrating this module since I would like the login form to show up inline with comments. This site is mostly for blogging and not community so that would probably make most sense. Excited to see this module eventually work as an Open ID server.
Theme Settings API — to take advantage of some of the Zen theme's advanced doings
Trackback — this is to ping blogs that I have linked to in an attempt to build some SEO
Tylor Helper — just a custom helper module to do form alters. It currently adds some extra CSS classes to the comment form.

SimpleFeed

I've used this for a while to import my flickr, delicious, and twitter feeds. This module works great but I will eventually move to the much more powerful FeedAPI module.

SimpleFeed — defines the SimpleFeed engine
SimpleFeed Item — defines the feed item content type

Views

I use views to create my custom front page and tumblog page by restricting what types of content can appear on what page.

Views — main Views module
Views RSS — creates RSS feeds for my custom views
Views UI — default UI bundled with the module

And that's it! I'd like to see what other modules people are using, so leave me a comment if I missed anything good or if you compiled your own list. Also, if anyone has time to work on a CodePress module, I'd like to collaborate. I think having an extra set of hands would help bring some focus.

Embracing consumerism!

tylor — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:59:11 -0700

I've been lucky enough to do some shopping recently and I thought I would highlight/discuss some of the things I've bought. Here's some of my loot:

First up, new shoes: I've been looking for a good pair of Nike Air Max 90s for a little while now. This is one of my favourite styles and this pair was just the right mix of value and color. They were the last pair at the Nike store on Robson St, which is lucky considering I have size 13 feet... total came to $107 with tax, not bad considering they often retail at $150.

Next is my new Holga 135. I'm almost done shooting a second roll of Ilford HP5 b&w film and am getting excited to develop. The camera itself is awesome; $40.50 for a camera with a hotshoe? Not bad at all. Super simple operation and it really forces you to think about what you're shooting. I'm trying to get back into film so this is the perfect starter. I also just signed up at the UBC PhotoSoc giving me access to chemicals and enlargers to do some printing.

I just ran out of space on my computer and external hard drive, so another terabyte should go a long way. I guess shooting RAW photos at ~13Mb/shot adds up pretty fast. The HDD itself is a Seagate Barracuda SATA2 to match my first 320Gb, just to be foolproof in case I plug them into an NAS, Raid 0 setup, or Mac Pro some day. Still waiting on the enclosure, which is a Vantec Nexstar 3 with USB2.0 and Firewire. It was important to get the Firewire cable this time as it's likely that both drives will be plugged in at the same time (leaving an extra USB port on my Macbook).

I also bought Helvetica, which is an great film on the famous font. My take away quote from the film is by Erik Spiekermann: when asked why Helvetica is so widely used he slowly answers, "Why is... bad taste ubiquitous." Perfect.

Some other items: some t-shirts at American Apparel ($15 each), a pair of shorts from American Eagle on sale ($30), a gigantic mixing bowl, a box cheese grater, and some Moo cards came in the mail.

Pretty happy with everything!

What news! and my theme inspiration

tylor — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:42:22 -0700

I have a text file started on my desktop called "Blog" where I just jot down ideas for posts; this week's idea is simple:

- Blog post how I created my design
	- taxo links inspired by we-make-money-not-art
	- post format inspired by coolhunting.com

But before I get to that, I wanted to celebrate a little. At Northern Voice I decided that I'm going to try and do one blog post a week. I figured it would be a small enough goal to get going and I wanted to see what this blogging thing was about. This is post 5, the end of my first month, and I'm right on track!

Anyway, I thought I'd go over where some of the inspiration for this theme comes from as well as give some direction as to where it is going.

The taxonomy links were heavily inspired from we-make-money-not-art.com. Let's compare:

vs.

I really like how the text goes off the background, similar to a rough highlighting job. For we-make-money-not-art, the position of this information helps solve two problems: makes it really obvious that this is tagging/titling (especially by breaking tags into discrete blocks) and saves space. I decided not to do this over top of images as I wasn't sure how many posts would include them. I also didn't want images as a required piece of content.

Enter my inspiration from coolhunting.com:

Here they've seemingly solved all of my problems! Now I don't have to put information over images and this gives a good place for taxonomy/tags, service links, read more link, and comment info. It doesn't interfere with the content and is positioned so that it is really obvious which info belongs to which piece of content.

You might also notice that both of these sites are fixed width and have a lot of content to throw at you.

Now for the future. The most important piece that is missing right now is my blogroll. I think it's important to give what little link love I can and hopefully I can think up an elegant way to integrate this into the footer. This seems like the best place and it might leave some room for links to my web places (eg. flickr, twitter, facebook...).

My next thought for visual improvement is rounded corners on the top and bottom green blocks. I've also looked into stretching the green banner across the top.

I hope this gives some insight and I would be interested to hear where other people get their design ideas! Design suggestions are definitely welcome.

Oh, and I've added OpenID support which you can currently find here. Need to find a way to make this inline with comments where it's far more relevant.

Broadcasting a VNC server to Mac OS X Leopard from Ubuntu

tylor — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:35:50 -0700

I'm going to cover how I very simply got a vanilla Ubuntu install to broadcast a VNC server to my Macbook. Why would I do this? Well, I have an extra computer hanging around and I wanted to use it to remotely download torrents. This way it won't get in my way while I'm working and I can manage torrents while I'm away from home.

So here's how I did it!

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 using all the default settings and opened up Multiverse and Universe repositories. This might not be necessary, but you will probably want to do it eventually.

After that I opened a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and installed and configured x11vnc using the following commands:
$ sudo apt-get install x11vnc $ x11vnc -storepasswd

Then I added x11vnc to start with my Ubuntu session. To do this I added the following to System > Preferences > Sesssions:

The command 'x11vnc -forever -usepw -avahi' does the following:

forever makes the session stick after logging out
usepw lets you use the password created earlier by 'x11vnc -storepasswd'
avahi is for magically broadcasting the VNC server for discovery by OS X

We're done configuring Ubuntu, so restart your X11 session or logout and login again.

Now for the fun part!

Open up Finder in Mac OS X Leopard and you should see computername:0 under shared in the window. Click on the computer and you'll see a nice little button to 'Share Screen...'. You will probably get a warning about keystrokes not being encrypted which you can ignore.

Leopard has a hidden application called Screen Sharing which works really great. If you want to put the Screen Sharing application on your dock, you can find it in /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing. The application is intended for easy sharing of Mac screens but it works great for Linux as well. Instead of using the built in screen sharing with Leopard, another great VNC application is Chicken of the VNC. Despite its sketchy name it works really well.

Other tips:

If you want to access the server remotely you will need to forward port 5900 to you Ubuntu box. I also configured a dynamic DNS with my router and I can easily login from anywhere
If you want to speed up VNC, change your colour depth to 16bit and lower the screen size
Install a better bittorrent client. The default Ubuntu client is really barebones and I would recommend using either Azureus or Transmission (both of these clients are also available for OS X)

And that's it! Another thing that you might also want to install is SMB or AFP file sharing in Ubuntu, this way you can get your files off of the box.

Here are some resources I used:
http://lifehacker.com/software/how-to/set-up-vnc-on-ubuntu-in-four-steps...
http://www.sanityinc.com/articles/mac-screen-sharing-with-linux

New Theme!

tylor — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:23:59 -0800

I've finally created a custom theme for this site and I'll try and give you some insight into how I did it. It took me 1 hour 51 minutes and although I was actually aiming to finish within an hour I'm happy with the time. I know theming probably shouldn't be a race, but why not test yourself! Also, my main goal was to get something original up as quickly as I could so I can make tweaks in the coming months.

I've based my theme on the new Zen template, which is becoming one of the most powerful ways to build a themes in Drupal. This is the first time I've used Zen as a base and it's a great way to go. In the spirit of CSS Zen Garden, Zen is designed to be exclusively programmed using stylesheets. The only tweaks I had to make elsewhere were in node.tpl.php where I changed the default ‘Submitted by...’ text and removed the ‘in..’ text before the taxonomy.

Here's a video of the first 30 minutes of work (my screen capture program lost the rest...):

There are some limitations to my new theme though. It looks great Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari 2, Safari 3 and Opera 9, however it currently fails in IE7 and IE8. Didn't get a chance to look in IE6 yet but I imagine it's not good. When I get some time I'll fix this up, with the biggest problem created by absolutely positioning the mission statement into the head.

One other limitation that will need fixing is that I used Myriad Pro in the header. This is a nonstandard font and I should use an image replacement to be sure I get the look I want. The only other font used is Trebuchet MS, which should be fine across most platforms. In both cases I've set Arial as my second font.

Because this is based on Zen, it passes validation for XHTML 1.0 Strict. I only get CSS validation warnings for having one CSS3 property used (word-wrap: break-word;) and having background color the same as color, which is visually fine.

Overall I'm happy with my new theme and it will only take a little bit longer to make it cross browser compliant and good to go.

Cleaning the scrollball on an Apple Mighty Mouse

tylor — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:38:36 -0800

I love my Mighty Mouse but the scrollball gets dirty every so often. Today I got fed up with cleaning it from the outside and took it apart again. This is the second time I've done it, but the first time I did this was kind of scary. I didn't really know what I was getting into, it's $70 that I didn't want to spend at the time, and I would rather it just worked. However, after some googling, I found this website and off I went. Following are my steps for taking apart a Mighty Mouse. I've posted these with the intention of helping others in their own little spring cleaning project!

First Blog Entry

tylor — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:45:57 -0800

Northern Voice has invigorated a new perspective on blogging for me. Because of that, I'm making this my very first blog post.

There is already a lot of content on this site, over 450 nodes, but it's mostly just the random bits and pieces of my web life. Disorganized, unfiltered, unflattering, and without value. I'd like to bring some more meaning to the content I'm producing and here are two ideas I'm going to start with:

thought processes in photography — how I did this, why did I choose this lighting, pre/post processing shots
Drupal magic — I'd like to focus on test cases for building Drupal sites, especially with an emphasis towards beginners

Other projects that I'm starting to think more about are finally building up my tumblr-like install into a generic install profile for Drupal. Also I'd like to eventually release my bookmarklet module, with a rewrite so that it can plug into any CCK content type. Interface-wise I'm still trying to wrap my head around that...

For now, I'm going to keep refreshing the old stream here, so let me know if it's useful. If there is anyone following with RSS (Ariane??), if you keep the old feed, you're still going to get everything.

Oh, and expect a new theme coming soon. I really need to ditch this prefab theme.