UPDATE: It took me almost three months to realize that last year was a leap year. My apologies to 02/29!

January started the year off nicely, I purchased my Mac mini and then my Pioneer plasma TV. My home theater had never been more excited! At the time I used Front Row + Sapphire for watching TV shows in HD since my complex’s cable provider is pretty crummy.

February was kind of a blur that mostly involved our puppy, Bella, peeing everywhere. She was potty-trained at that point but she had a bit of a bladder infection that would not go away. We were worried about her for a while but she, like a champ, overcame.

In March I joined the real (internet) world and activated an account with Twitter. Unfortunately for the internet my personal life is now all over the place! I actually really enjoy Twitter; and, as a result I have met many talented people which I would have never known otherwise.

The following month, April, is when I started this site. At the genesis of aron cares the site was unattractive and I didn’t even own my domain! Since then I have learned a lot and even purchased my domain name. I still like hosting my own site because, honestly, it’s fun.

In May our economy was [not] in a “recession,” so the government sent everyone “economic stimulus” money; because I’m a good American I spent that money rather than saving it. I ended up purchasing a Playstation 3 for use as a Blu-ray player; it was a great decision and I don’t know why I waited as long as I did.

June rolled around and I went to Florida for my yearly vacation to Navarre Beach. It was incredible weather every day (except for one), and it was extremely relaxing. During that week iPhone 3G was announced for release in July; it was a very exciting announcement. This was also the month in which I overhauled the site’s PHP and CSS so that everything was standards-compliant.

Beginning early July I started working on Project SelliPhonesOnEBay in which I unlocked and sold 1st-gen. iPhones for all of my family members. The resulting revenues were used to purchase previously mentioned iPhone 3Gs when released on July 11. The project was a success with every member able to purchase a 16 GB iPhone 3G — we actually netted about $100 profit! On the 25th of July I was in my best man’s wedding. It was a lot of fun and very tiring. It wasn’t until that day that I really appreciated my groomsmen.

In August I was supposed to go to another friend’s wedding but I ended up missing it entirely. As it turns out going to the rifle range the same day you are supposed to go to a wedding is not a good idea.

In September iTunes 8 landed and brought with it HD TV shows and HD movie rentals for Apple TV owners. Of greater significance is the hurricane that hit Houston. Ike affected many people in bad ways; my family evacuated to San Antonio. Luckily, it did not affect my friend’s wedding for which I flew to Kentucky. I was a groomsmen and good times were had by all.

Weezer came to town in October and my awesome wife took me to the show for my birthday. I left work early to get in line 6 hours before the doors opened; I had general admission, standing room only tickets. It was a huge success, I was at the very front in the middle of the stage!

I turned 23 in November and it was fan-freaking-tastic! This was also the month that we put an offer on a house; it was scary but exciting. In November I also began blogging over at TUAW, that has been such a blast! Thanksgiving was enjoyable and stressful, being with family is always bittersweet. I love them though and count each one of them a blessing.

The jingle bells had been ringing since October but it wasn’t until December that it really felt like Christmas. It snowed in Houston, which was crazy! I went on a business trip to Sacramento and had a relatively good time. Immediately after that I drove to Austin for family Christmas #1of4. The end of December featured 6 days of vacation + 3 company holidays which totaled 2 weeks off of work. During those 2 weeks my wife and I closed on our house which we’re very excited to move into in the coming weeks in January.

2008 has been a blast and sure there were some negatives in there too but overall it was very positive. I’m looking forward to being a homeowner in 2009, my wife graduating, and continuing to blog for TUAW.

First I would like to begin by explaining the problems I had that needed resolution:

1. My Dyndns Dashboard widget is supposed to automatically update Dyndns with the public IP address at home where my Mac mini lives.  Sometimes (rarely [only once]) the widget will hang and Dyndns will not get my latest IP address resulting in 404 when I try to access the various sites running on the mini.
2. I have an applescript application that will remotely update my Plex library as well as a cron job on the mini that will do the same thing locally.  Occasionally running this script, either remotely or as a cron job, will cause Plex to crash - no idea why.
3. Sometimes I just need the blasted thing to restart.  It’s OS X, not God.

I’m going to go through these in order of the easiest to tackle to the most difficult.  Also, I’m only going to cover the scripts I created themselves, you can read Cory’s article for setting up the mail rules; he does a lot better job than I at explaining it.

Here is the script I used to call up Plex.  It’s incredibly simple and really speaks to the ease of Applescript.

tell application “Plex”
activate
end tell

Yup, that’s it.  Simple, yet powerful.  All I have to do is send off an email and boom Plex launches.  Definitely quicker than loading up VNC and doing it through the GUI remotely.  This is especially true given that VNC is somewhat bandwidth heavy and can be slow to respond if the client or server have a lot of network traffic with which to compete.

The article I referenced above has a script for restarting a remote Mac; however, things can go haywire if you have an app that won’t quit.  Some people commented on Cory’s article and mentioned his script would not work if Safari was open with multiple tabs, and they are correct.  In my case I have Transmission running and it wants the user to confirm a “quit” before complying.  I had to find a way around that as it was preventing the script from being useful.  Without further adieu here is the script:

set pwd to “YourPassw0rd”
set cmd to “shutdown -r NOW”
do shell script cmd password pwd with administrator privileges

Pretty cool, only three lines for this piece of magic.  The first line creates a variable “pwd” for storing your password.  This is necessary because OS X only allows a user with administrative privileges to run the shutdown command.  The next line creates a veriable “cmd” that stores the Termainal (UNIX shell) script we will run in line 3.  If you open up Terminal.app and type in “shutdown -r NOW” you will be told the command cannot complete because you aren’t a super user (sorry mate).  Luckily, though, in the terminal you can append “sudo” to the beginning of the shutdown command to run it as an administrator.  The result is that the shutdown command will reboot (-r flag) the Mac at a specified time (NOW).  For information on sudo and shutdown check out here and here, respectively.  The last line is a whirlwind of coding genius; actually, not really.  It basically runs “sudo shutdown -r NOW” and passes in the password we used on the first line.  Thanks go to Cory for helping me to figure out passing in the password for another script I have.

The last problem, getting my IP address e-mailed back to me, was the hardest to figure out and is the “kludgiest” of the three.  The short version is that an Applescript calls another Applescript, fancy.  Actually, it’s Leopard’s fault; Mail 3 does not process mail rules with Applescripts the way it did previously in Tiger and earlier versions of OS X.  It used to be that the Applescript that gets called could actually reply to the message which triggered the rule; however, that is no longer the case and Mail limits what can and cannot be done in the Applescript.  Unfortunately, I don’t know what these limits are sufficed to say that what I need to do is not permitted.

OK, here we go; the Mail rule calls a script which looks like this:

do shell script “osascript /Users/Aron/Scripts/HomeIP.scpt”

That script says run the Applescript found at this location.  The script it calls, the one that gets the IP address and emails it, is here:

set cmd to “curl -s http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp”
set my_ip to (do shell script cmd)
set my_dest to “youraddress@somedomain.com”
set my_subj to “My IP at home”

tell application “Mail”
activate
GetURL (”mailto:” & my_dest & “?subject=” & my_subj & “&body=” & my_ip)
tell application “System Events” to keystroke “D” using command down
end tell

So this one is a little meatier, but if you’ve made it this far I would be remiss to not go further.  The first line is fairly obvious, it stores a Terminal command we’re going to use later; if you copy that command into the terminal and run it the output will be you current public IP address.  It atually took me awhile to find out whatismyip.com provided that neat little service.  Before I finished the script I was using a combination of sed and awk to format my curl output.  Anyways, my loss is your gain.  The next line takes the standard output from the command that we called “cmd” in line 1 and stores it as a variable called “my_ip”.  Next, we initialize and set two more variables - “my_dest” gets the e-mail address to which you want your IP address sent and “my_subj” stores the subject of e-mail which will be sent.  I could have used my_ip as the subject of the email, but for my purposes I prefer a pretty subject with the IP address in the body of the message.

The next part of this script launches Mail (if it is not already launched) and has it load a “mailto:” URL.  The URL gets dynamically created based on the variables we used above so the URL actually ends up looking like this:

“mailtoo:youraddress@somedomain.com?subject=”My IP at home”&body=someIPaddress“.

When Mail loads that URL it actually creates a new mail message with the properties (recipient, subject, body) we specified.  After that it uses Universal Access to automagically press “shift+command+D” to send the message we just created.

All in all, a pretty useful set of scripts if I do say so myself.  Hopefully someone will find this helpful to them.  If you know of a better way to make Mail send an e-mail any way other than my kludge-tastic Universal Access method feel free to let me know!

I plan on doing some further testing of this to verify, hopefully the dire warning is all smoke and mirrors.  If there is a true limit I may need to go ape on somebody’s face.

UPDATE: News of iTunes 8 ridiculous hardware requirements were greatly exaggerated.  I tested HD TV shows on a 1.83ghz Core 2 Duo Mac mini and a 2.0ghz Core Duo MacBook Pro and in both cases the episode played without issues.

One hurdle I have had to overcome is being able to use pretty permalinks to make my site more friendly.  Permalinks (short for permanent link, get it?) is a static URL to some content on a site.  That content can be a specific page, a particular article/post, or a collection of posts within a certain category.  

By default Wordpress’s permalinks follow this format: http://somesite.com/index.php?p=1 and unfortunately that format is just plain ugly.  Having a pretty permalink like this: http://somesite.com/2008/01/01/sample-post/ means hyperlinks on your site and around the web will be more attractive and usable to others.

Read on if you want to know my story about the trouble and success I had with getting pretty permalinks working on my site.

For those of you with nice hosts that integrate well with Wordpress and have fancy one-click installers chances are that all you have to do to enable pretty permalinks is choose your format and turn them on under settings.  I hate you.

When I tried to enable them the first problem I received was that the directory was not writable.  An FAQ entry I found at Laughing Squid Web Hosting is where I started my search for a solution.  It turns out Wordpress needed to change my .htaccess file and the permissions on my server wouldn’t allow it.  Well, because my level of knowledge was basically non-existent on the subject I started fiddling around and doing research on permissions.

One of the best articles I found was one over at elated.com and introduced to me by Google (thanks!); the article is here and if you are curious about permissions in a UNIX-based operating system it’s a very good read. Besides being written in fairly plain english it even provides a handy chart so you can know what permissions will be set when you “chmod 755 directory“.

Armed with enough knowledge to be dangerous I created a blank .htaccess file in my site’s root folder (pro tip: in Leopard, the root folder for Apache is /Library/WebServer/Documents, for your server this may be different and it is entirely possible to change it as well).  Lastly I set its permissions to 666 (scary, I know) so Wordpress could edit the file.

touch .htaccess

chmod 666 .htaccess

Once this was done I went to settings and enabled permalinks; then I went to the main page and tested it out by excitedly selecting a post.  404. Not exciting at all.  There was clearly a problem.  Besides being flustered I had to disable permalinks so my readers reader (Hi Dad!) could actually access content on the site without a confrontation with the aforementioned 404.

Stumped and discouraged, I gave up for awhile… Until recently, as it turns out there was an email I had received from the famous Christina Warren that mentioned the vast amount of help articles available in the Wordpress Community.  

I scoured them and quickly found this article hepfully titled “Using Permalinks”.  Reading through the article I came across some points that seemed relevant but were far over my head; they mentioned something about “FollowSymLinks” and “Directives”.  Down but not out I pressed on and learned that my httpd.conf file, Apache’s configuration file, needed some work.

In Leopard, this file is located at /etc/apache2/httpd.conf - and you’re welcome because it took me awhile to realize it had moved from its old location in Tiger.  The first thing I had to do was to check to ensure that mod_rewrite was enabled; according to Wordpress mod_rewrite is an extension module of the Apache web server software which allows for “rewriting” of URLs on-the-fly.  This, simply put, is what makes it possible for the server to translate and understand a pretty permalink.

To enable this you have to uncomment the following, which can be found at line 112:

LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so

and then restart Apache.

sudo apachectl graceful

This will probably ask you for your password, so type it in and hit <enter>.  Once you have done that Apache will gracefully shutdown and restart with mod_rewrite enabled.  At this point I was not done, but you are free to go ahead and try to enable permalinks and see if you don’t get a 404; if you do then you are probably in the same boat I was and need to make some more changes to your httpd.conf file.

According to my handy, dandy permalinks help article I needed to enable a directive that would tell Apache to look at my .htaccess file that was created earlier and then edited by Wordpress when permalinks were enabled.  Here is an example of the AllowOverride directive enabled in httpd.conf in Leopard, it is at line 173:

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</Directory>

It was also necessary to enable the override in Apache’s root folder.  In Leopard’s default httpd.conf file the directives for Apache’s root folder have lots of comments around them unlike the directives for the OS root “/”.  In httpd.conf scroll down to line 210 and change it to be “AllowOverride All”.

When you have finished editing the httpd.conf file restart Apache like we did above.  At this point, with fingers crossed, I re-enabled pretty permalinks; Wordpress said it was successful but history dictated otherwise.  I pulled up the main page, selected a blog entry and Boom!  Ugly permalinks were a thing of the past!  I discovered that this effected not just my blog posts but my pages, category view, and tag view as well.

This site and its underpinnings are continually changing and, in my opinion, improving.  I am learning a lot every time I dig into it.  I hope this helps somebody because I know I couldn’t find one resource that had all of this information anywhere!  If you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments or get a hold of me directly via Twitter or email.

Ameoma.com has posted what seems to be the first set of unboxing pictures featuring TWO iPhones 3G of differing color.  Impressive, somebody is doing very well for themselves!  And since I am still unsure with what color I am going to go (you don’t know either!) I thought it would be good to point this out.  Oh, and props to Ameo for taking some cool photos - I need to find out what his(her) setup is.

Update: It looks like Ameo is having some trouble so I am going to help out and mirror the files here.  Check them out after the break.

If you want more information or just to be part of something special go visit the Fail Whale fan club site here or peep the banner to the right.  Also don’t forget to give some love to Yiying Lu, the famed creator of the comforting whale; you can peep the original illustration along with some other great work here.

Well, today, I finally passed another milestone; one which I have been tinkering with for quite some time.  My site is now valid W3C XHTML (transitional) and CSS!!  This is something I really wanted and because of my limited knowledge has been slow in coming.  I’m very glad that I have reached this milestone as interoperability is extremely important to me.  I don’t want to learn/use code that only works correctly in some environments, instead I want to learn things the right way!

If you want to run the test yourself and celebrate along with me you can scroll to the bottom of my page.  I have placed links to both the XHTML and CSS validation tests in the footer as a trophy to remind myself of this amazing (to me at least) feat!

I will start by saying I like my windows to be as small as possible so I can have as many open apps visible at a time; but here are a few things I ran into…

1) The quotation marks are not copying correctly from the site into script editor so you will have to replace them manually prior to compiling.

2) The format of the bounds for the windows is also useful to know. First notice that the very top of the desktop (just below the menu bar) is y=0 and the very left the desktop is x=0. The window bounds follow this format (dist x left, dist y top, dist x right, dist y bottom). Distance from x(y)=0 to [window side]. If that doesn’t make sense I’ll try to make a visual diagram.

3) You can quickly find the values of distances using CMD+SHIFT+3 and looking at the coordinates as you drag the selector around the screen.

4) Because of how I like my windows I found it easier to do all of the resizing within two if-statements. ie. If Width = 1920 size the windows this way, If Width = 1440 size the windows that way.

View the full entry to see my script.

tell application “Finder”
set _b to bounds of window of desktop
set _width to item 3 of _b
set _height to item 4 of _b
end tell

if _width is equal to 1920 then

try
tell application “Safari”
activate
set the bounds of the first window to {940, 0, 1790, 1200}
end tell
end try

try
tell application “NetNewsWire”
activate
set the bounds of the first window to {90, 0, 1240, 624}
end tell
end try

try
tell application “Mail”
activate
set the bounds of the first window to {90, 658, 926, 1200}
end tell
end try
end if

if _width is equal to 1440 then

try
tell application “Safari”
activate
set the bounds of the first window to {450, 0, 1300, 900}
end tell
end try

try
tell application “NetNewsWire”
activate
set the bounds of the first window to {80, 0, 1230, 624}
end tell
end try

try
tell application “Mail”
activate
set the bounds of the first window to {80, 315, 915, 857}
end tell
end try
end if

The general idea is that all devices will use a truly universal AC adapter and that this will cut down on waste.  Green Plug takes this idea further by making their plugs “smart”.  Essentially, a Green Plug would feature an LCD status display and when paired with a compatible device provide information about the charge status.  Further, because the Green Plug-enabled device would also be “smart” the Green Plug would cut the flow of power when the battery was fully charged and thus resulting in a reduction of power usage.

Currently there is a movement to standardize mini-USB as a power plug for many devices.  An unfortunate limitation of this tech is that USB simply cannot handle the load required by most devices larger than a cell phone.  Green Plug-enabled devices would be able to notify the Green Plug of its specific power requirements and in this way it is more intelligent and more capable than the USB-powered counterparts.

Green Plug is versatile and wants to be integrated into hubs, shops, offices and even homes.  Aftermarket AC adapter providers like Targus could use Green Plug to create hubs capable of powering multiple devices at a time.  The LCD read-out would provide status information for each connected device.  Retail locations and offices could implement Green Plug to save energy and allow anyone with a Green Plug device to sip some juice from the power grid.

A big benefit that seems to be over-looked is integration with Smart Grid technology.  Smart Grid is an idea being implemented by many major power companies to provide transparency to end-users regarding real-time pricing and usage of power.  In other words, Smart Grid aims to have a household’s appliances use more power when the price of electricity is low and use less power when the price of electricity is high.  Green Plug is smart too and could be integrated with Smart Grid to reduce load based on the information provided by the user’s power company.  Some devices can be charged less quickly by limiting the amount of power that is provided.  In this way it would be possible to charge a device and specify whether charging speed or energy savings are a priority.

While Green Plug has a lot to over come it has the right idea with its focus on energy savings and universal access for the end-user.  Green Plug’s Earth first principles have come at a great time when energy prices are constantly on the rise.