webmages

There are a lot of changes going on around here.

First, you might notice that going to webmages.com now takes you straight to my page. A seperate index really isn’t required anymore.

Secondly, I’ve added a bunch of links from the old index to my links page.

Also you’ll note there’s no more email link. I’ve removed this in hopes that it may help stem the tide of spam I receive. In it’s place will be a form that will allow you to send me an email through the site if you don’t already know my email address.

Lastly, an update on the progress towards a source code release. I realize that I’ve been really, really bad about this in the past. And I’m being bad about it again. It’s really hard to justify taking the time to pull out my passwords, dump the database structures, and write the documentation for a release — especially considering that the site isn’t finished yet. But rest assured, it will be finished in the not too distant future. I only have 2 things left — my own image gallery, which I have already made great progress on, and a comments system that will work for both the blog and image gallery.

Bonnie and I had a very fun (and busy) weekend. On Friday we went out for a drive around the Westcreek Office Park. It looks like it’s going to be really nice, and there’s a small chance I could wind up working there. Which would be really great since the building I would be in is less that 10 minutes from the townhouse! It would be so awesome to go home for lunch.

On Saturday we did a bunch of shopping, and went for a walk on the Canal Walk, and even took the little historical boat ride on the Kanawa Canal. Afterwards we had supper at Sine, and Irish pub in Shockoe Slip. It was a really great day, not too hot, not too cold, a bit humid but tolerable.

Today (Sunday), after church, we picked up my friend Kelley and went out to the wine festival at the Boulders over on SouthSide. It was ok, and Bonnie bought me a Aussie leather hat… it’s very cool. It was a bit too warm and sunny though, and the massive throngs of people in attendance combined with the stench of horse manure everywhere (we couldn’t find where it came from, but boy did it sure stink) did make it less than ideal.

All-in-all a fun and active weekend. Next weekend we’re planning on going to the Cinco de Mayo festival out on Brown’s Island on Saturday, and on Sunday I’m flying to Dallas for a few days for work.

On the plus side, I’ll get to visit my soon-to-be inlaws since they live in the Dallas area! They really are terrific people, and I can’t wait to see them!

My mother had major back surgery today. I’m pleased to report that she made it out of surgery just fine. She seems to be doing well, and first indications are that the surgery was a success. She’s got a long road ahead, but hopefully this will relieve her pain and she’ll be able to get about better.

Thanks to everyone for your prayers and support!

After many, many, days my old apartment is finally cleaned out, and cleaned up. It was a lot of work and took forever. I still have to drop off the key, but that’s about it.

One of the last things I did was bottle the Strawberry White Merlot that I made for Bonnie. It’s not the best wine ever, but it’s light and fruity which is the kind of thing she likes.
I needed some bottles and stuff, so a trip to the weekend brewer for supplies was in order.

Judging from my previous bottling experience I assumed this was going to take about 3 hours to complete (it took about 2 hours with 2 people the first time I bottled).

I was soooo wrong. And in a good way! With my supplies I also got one of the new Buon Vino Super Automatic Bottle Fillers. Let me tell you, it worked like a dream. I was able to bottle and cork at the same time (it shuts off automatically when the bottle is full), and I didn’t spill a drop (it has an overflow tube that conveniently goes into another bottle)! It only took me about 45 minutes to bottle and cork the whole 6 gal. carboy! (not including santization time).

Another nifty gadget I picked up is a CO₂ cartridge gun, and a 2 liter bottle topper from Liquid Bread, the Cabonator. It allows you to carbonate any liquid in a 2 liter bottle (it apparently works with even 20oz bottles too!), so Bonnie can have her Strawberry Mist in sparkling fashion if she wants. It also means no more flat sodas!!

With OSX Jaguar, it’s pretty easy to take a screenshot using the screencapture command line utility, for example:

screencapture -x desktop.pdf

The only problem is that it’s in pdf format. In previous versions of OSX it was possible to change this format, but it appears that this functionality is lost in Jaguar. Ok. So I want to display this on the web. We need to get it into a more common compressed format that will load directly in a browser.

I’ve been familiar with and used the ImageMagick convert program for some time, so I decided to download their Darwin binaries and give them a shot. It took a bit of hassel, but it worked.

First I tried expanding the archive under /usr/local/. No matter what I did with setting environment variables it kept saying it couldn’t find files in /ImageMagick-5.5.6/lib/. Ok, I gave up and moved it from /usr/local/ to /. I set the PATH to include /ImageMagick-5.5.6/bin, and set MAGICK_HOME to /ImageMagick-5.5.6/. The convert command line utility now actually responds usefully.

Yay! ….. Not.

I try and run “convert desktop.pdf desktop.png”. Arg! No! It doesn’t work!

Unrecoverable error: rangecheck in .putdeviceprops
convert: Postscript delegate failed

What to do. I check out pdf* on my system and notice that there’s a pdf2ps program, which converts the pdf document to a postscript document. It works, and produces desktop.ps. Will convert work on the postscript file?

Yes! “convert desktop.ps desktop.png” results in a valid png file!! Yay!

Now all that’s needed is a script to put it all together right? WRONG. The size of the file that was output was way too small. It turns out that when the display is dimmed in sleep mode, you get a solid black image. I stumbled upon a simple program, undim that can take care of this for you on the command line. I put mine in /usr/local/bin

Lastly, you probably don’t want a screenshot of your screen saver, so you’ll need a tidbit of a command line to turn it off:

kill `ps -caxwwopid,command | grep ScreenSaverEngin | cut -b 1-6`

Finally we come to the script:

#!/bin/bash
PATH=$PATH:/ImageMagick-5.5.6/bin:/usr/local/bin
MAGICK_HOME=/ImageMagick-5.5.6/
export PATH
export MAGICK_HOME
cd ~/Sites
undim > /dev/null
kill `ps -caxwwopid,command | grep ScreenSaverEngin | cut -b 1-6`
screencapture -x desktop.pdf
pdf2ps desktop.pdf
convert desktop.ps desktop.png
rm desktop.pdf
rm desktop.ps

Almost anyway. I now have an administrative backend for my blog! It’s pretty simple to use and allows me to add/delete/hide/modify entries quickly and easily. I do have some HTML clean-up work to do on it, as well as some code modularization to do. I should be able to get it done this week.

Although I still have some things left to do, like an admin for the poetry and links sections, rss feed, and my own custom image gallery, I think I’ll be doing my first source code release this weekend, probably 0.01.