Simply create an event titled Sprint 3 meeting from 2 to 4 pm and it will create the event Sprint 3 meeting and assign it the right information. I thought this was awesome and wondered how Apple came up with this feature and why they took the time to focus on this. Then, I saw the iOS 5 keynote and met Siri. Now it all makes sense and I am eager to hire my virtual personal assistant.

Steve Jobs was a visionary. The respect he got from the tech industry is well deserved.

Just a quick note on how to achieve the following purpose. Say you have a 3 months old baby and your mother sends you a 3 month old birthday ecard. Say you wish to download the animation of that ecard and share it on the blog you keep for your family and close friends. I suppose this is “everyday computing” for the rest of them.

Anyway, here is how it is done :

1. In firefox, you can find the swf animation easily. simply type about:cache in the address bar and locate the swf. Copy it on your desktop or somewhere accessible.
   Warning: if you have NO CACHE at all showing when you type about:cache, you might be a web developer using web developer tools with cache disabled. Re-enabled it, re-watch your animation, now it will be in the cache.
2. In WordPress, upload the swf by using the add media button. Obtain the attachement location by clicking the “Link to Media” button and, in “HTML” view, paste the following code (replace http://url/to/my.swf with the link to your media – twice) :

The problem :

The problem is famous : how to keep multiple computers in sync in order to have access to our data no matter where we are, no matter which computer we are using. It isn’t the first time I wonder about how to improve this aspect of my computer setup and I must say that Dropbox, Evernote, Google Calendar, GMail and a lot of other “cloud” solutions as they are called have helped tremendously over the years. Still, this week iMac incident once again brought the problem to the surface.

A little background :

My primary computer is an iMac based at home. I work as a software engineer so I also have a work computer. At the moment, this is a brand new MacBookPro. I also own a three year old MacBook which I use when we are away from home (unload photos, check emails, simple things like that).

When my iMac broke down earlier this week, I wasn’t without a computer. I had two more. Still, I felt left out because my various emails accounts were not setup on either MacBooks (my work computer doesn’t carry any of my personal data), my iCal wasn’t setup on any of these machines to track my appointments. My on-going projects on the iMac (personal development, Lightroom work, etc) was also stuck on the iMac’s hard drive.

A possible solution, making my Mac User portable :

The problem is known and a lot of people have solved it many different ways.

Apple tries to answer it with MobileMe, Microsoft created LiveMesh, etc. The problem is different for each of us as we all have a different setup. Some might decide to simply sync (using rsync for example) two computers to be exact replicas of each others. With today’s bandwidth, this is a solution just as valid as any other.Of course, the problem also depends on your setup : do you have several personal computers ? Do they all run the same OS ? Are they on the same network, etc ?

My situation has the following characteristics

• I am the only person using these three computers (boyfriend is allergic to Mac somehow, he might launch Opera to check his emails on the MacBook when we’re away from home but that is an effort for him)
• All three machines are running Mac OS X Snow Leopard
• I usually do not use two of these computers at the same time. I work on the MacBook Pro in the daytime, turn it down in the evening and use iMac for personal stuff. If we’re going away, I’ll update the MacBook (load music and stuff on it) and pack it while I’ll switch off the iMac.

Because of my situation, it seems to me that I can carry my Mac User around without taking too much risks in terms of file conflicts.

Testing

While I had my iMac repaired, I went and shopped for a 1TB 2.5 external hard drive. I ended up with a Western Digital Element SE (80 euros).

Here’s the idea :

Using Carbon Copy Cloner, I will periodically sync my iMac’s Home Folder on the Western Digital Element. That simply means that my main Mac user will be available on this external drive with all my personal data (Music, Photos) and profile (Mail.app configuration, iCal configuration, etc).

On the MacBookPro, I renamed my user from samo (which I had used across all computers) to samowork. Then, I created another user called samo whose Home Folder is the Western Digital Element. I logged in with that user, fired Mail. It works, all my personal emails were there and the work emails were left out. So, from now on, if my iMac gets sick again, I can use another computer as a temporary replacement. Better yet, that will not leave any trace on that other computer (it’s all kept on the external drive).

On the MacBook, same procedure. I renamed my user to samobook and created another samo user whose Home Folder is the Western Digital. Now, when we are on the move, I don’t only have a Mac with me (which is cool) but I have MY Mac with all my stuff and that’s WAY COOL.

Also, the Western Digital Element also acts as an extra backup of my personal data (in addition to the Time Machine backup I make weekly)

I just completed this setup (doing a manual copy for now, not a CCC backup) of my Home folder and didn’t encounter a problem yet.

What’s left to do ?

• Automating the sync (with CCC) or rsync and a cron
• Making sure that, when running my profile on a different computer, I can sync my iPhone and not loose my media or apps (see also my article about having 1 phone and multiple macs)

Going all the way ?

I suppose, to go all the way, I should use the Western Digital drive as my Home Folder on the iMac as well. No need to sync anymore but that would mean always having that drive hooked up and not using it as a backup anymore. Also, if there is ever a conflict somewhere, I’d rather just be able to consider the iMac the master Home folder and the rest as a slave. For now, I’ll experiment that way.

What you need to know :

• If you wish to use your main account on the other computers (in my case, on the laptops), I would recommend pluging the external drive BEFORE logging in your account. I do not know what would happen if I was to login and my Home Folder wasn’t found.
• You SHOULD only use your main account on what computer at a time. If I am using my account on a MacBook, I’d better sync the WD back with the iMac before using my iMac (to avoid conflicts between files)
• Changing account’s shortnames and home folder is possible (and seems to be very well handled by OS X). Still there are dangerous operations. Check out the following pages of the Apple support site before proceeding
  How to change the shortname or home folder name
  How to move the home folder
• This setup doesn’t not synchronize the installed Applications. Now I can see my photos on the work MacBookPro but I would need to install my Lightroom there to work on them (which I probably won’t do) but I could easily edit a personal project on my work computer since Textmate is installed across all my machines (and setup exactly the same way every where thanks to DropBox)

Anyway, I thought the idea was worth sharing as it might really answer the problem for me for now (still wondering how MobileMe will evolve).

Procedure :

Source machine :

Here is how to setup the backup from the imac’s home folder to the WD external drive using CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner)

1. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner, launch the software
2. On the left, select your Macintosh HD and browse to Users > <yourUser> (ie samo)
   
3. On the right, select your external hard drive (I formatted the volume and named it samo)
4. Click on Save Task button
5. In the following screen, name your task and schedule it
   
6. To run and test it immediately, press Run
   
7. This will take a while…
8. Check the content of your external hard drive, you should find all the files you have in your Home Folder
9. Note that, next time, the backup will take a lot less time as only modified/added files will be transfered (CCC uses rsync which backups incrementally)

Some my prefer to use rsync manually and be more in control of their backup.

Here’s a working code sample to get your started :

Sync the whole samo Home Folder (dry-run mode + verbose move, will only list what rsync would have done)

Actually launch the command

Delete the files that are on the external HD if there aren’t on the source computer anymore

Do not delete the files on the external HD, do not touch the ones that were modified on the external HD

A lot more options and information about using rsync can be found in posts such as 15 rsync command examples.

Target machines :

Here is the procedure I followed on the two laptops to move my current user “samo” and create the main one (with its exterrnal data).

1. Go to System Preferences and go to the Accounts section
2. Create a new administrator user (ie login admin, password admin). We will delete it when we’re done, it’s just a user I create in case something goes wrong I can always log back with him as Administrator and solve the problem
3. OPTIONAL: if you already have an user on this computer named like your main user, you need to edit its name and Home Folder name…
   Launch Terminal.
   Navigate to /Users (cd /Users)
   Rename your user’s Home Folder (ie mv samo samobook)
   Back in the Accounts management, click on the lock to allow changes (if necessary)
   Right click on your user’s name in the list on the left and enter the Advanced Options
   Change your user’s shortname (ie from samo to samobook)
   Change your user’s home directory (ie from /Users/samo to /Users/samobook)
   Restart or Logout and Log back in to make sure your user still works…
4. Return to the System Preferences > Accounts section and create yet a new user. Enter the account name of your main user (ie samo)
5. Right click this new user in the list on the left, edit the home directory and select the Home Folder you copied on an external drive
6. At this point, you can delete the temporary admin user (created at step 2), then logout and back in as your main user to see if everything worked for you

Last but not Least

Once your Mac user is following you everywhere, you can sync your iPhone/iPad (including the media ie apps, music, etc) from any of your computers without loosing data on your device.
Note: you still need to authorize each of the computers you use for purchased items so this trick won’t enable you to bypass the 5 computer limitation.

I hope this setup will work for me and hopefully help other multi-mac users out there…

This is a follow up to my most active post ever about connecting my Yamaha DTXPlorer kit to Rock Band and Guitar Hero running on XBox 360. About a year after this post was published, I finally got Rock Band 3 but it took me until recently to get my hands on the Mad Catz Midi Adapter for Xbox here in France (stocks were scarce).

Once you have the Midi Adapter, you can play Rock Band 3 in Pro Mode using your drum kit and that is the ultimate experience. Rock Band 3 is all about learning to play music “for real”. I have yet to test the keyword and guitar mode but on drums, it’s wonderful. The whole kit comes alive as songs are mapped in full including snare, kick pedal, all three toms, crash, ride, hi hat and even hi had pedal. Now this is getting serious. Playing a song in pro mode at expert level really is playing the song.

As you can see in the above picture, this is the symbol to hit the blue cymbal as opposed to the blue tom (the blue cymbal actually is the crash). Jumping from Rock Band II/Guitar Hero World Tour to Rock Band III in Pro-Mode I actually had a lot more to handle : the cymbals and the hi-hat control. I didn’t start learning the hi-hat control yet but the jump to the cymbals was surprisingly easy. In my first session, I could play the easiest songs at expert level. And that felt pretty cool.

How does it work ?

If you are coming from my previous setup using a computer and a GH:WT module, you know that the GH:WT module was needed to send the signal to the console while the computer was used to map the midi signal sent from the drumkit to the midi signal expected by the GH:WT module. The Rock band 3 Mad Catz Midi Adapter pretty much acts as a all-in-one-box GH:WT + Computer. It receives the midi signal from the drum kit, maps it to the known midi notes of the game and send the signal (via USB) to the console.

Because the Mad Catz Midi Adapter is more advanced than the GH:WT module, it enables the mapping of several more notes enabling the use of snare, toms and all three cymbals. Somthing one could not do with the old setup since we had to map all of our cymbals to play and register as one of the recognized pads in the game.

What will you need ?

1. Mad Catz Midi Pro Adapter for Xbox 360
2. Midi cable

Connecting it all together

Using the Mad Caz adapter is very simple. All You’ll need to connect your DTXPlorer kit is a Midi to Midi cable. I grabbed one from Amazon myself. Connect your kit’s module Midi port to the Mad Catz Adapter Midi port. Connect the Mad Catz adapter to your XBox USB port. Finally, on the Midi Adapter itself, place the instrument selector on D for drums. Turn on your console and everything is ready.

The mapping

This time, the mapping of the midi notes is dictated by the Midi Adapter and you can not change it.

Here are the values of the implemented mapping :

Luckily for DTXplorer owners, our kit has been tested with the adapter and is known to work.

Here is the result for us of this mapping in the game :

As it shows in the table above, the Mad Catz Midi Adapter maps the blue cymbal to the ride, the green cymbal to the crash. Personally, and it seems from the image above that Yamaha’ default setup matches my expectation, I placed the crash on the left and the ride on the right.

Here are the midi notes sent out by our DTXplorer

The crash sends out the 49 and 57 notes, the ride sends the 51 and 52 (depending on whether they’re hit in the center or on the edge). Using these values and comparing them to the table above, we can see three problems :

1. the 49 and 57 (crash) is mapped to the game crash pad (green) although I would like it to be the ride pad (blue)
2. the 51 (ride) is mapped to the game ride (blue) although I’d like to the be the green
3. MORE IMPORTANTLY the 52 (ride edge) is mapped to the game crash (green). That means that the ride is mapped to blue but the ride edge is mapped to green. Conclusion, do not hit your ride edge or your hit won’t be registered !

So here is a more precise view of the default mapping :

There is nothing I could think of doing to fix the problem of the ride’s edge but I really wanted to reverse the position of the crash and ride as I got used to playing the other way around.

The solution is both “quick” and “dirty” as it simply involves inversing the cables in the DTXPlorer brain module.

Notice how the crash and ride wires are plugged in the “wrong” place.

Once the wires are switched, here is the mapping we finally get in the game :

The ride’s edge problem remains but I am much more comfortable with both green cymbals and tom placed on my far right and both blue cymbals and tom in the center. Anyway, this is just a preference easily achieved by switching the wires.

The sound

When I would play Rock Band 2 or GH:WT with my old, computer-based, setup I would usually turn off the sound of the intrsument in the game and listen to the sound of my drum kit using the headphones (I would bring the rest of the song to my kit’s input using a jack running from the console audio out to the DTX aux plug). That way, if I decided to play a given “color” say green using the ride instead of the tom, I could hear the result of that decision.

Anyway, I do not relay on this anymore in Rock Band 3 since the game truly acknoledges the differences between toms and cymbals.This really makes it simpler to set the whole game up and also makes the sound a lot more balanced altogether.

Awesomeness

Rock band 3 Pro Mode really delivers the ful drumming experience I was hoping for when I started connecting my kit to the game. The Mad Catz Midi Adapter, in addition to unleashing the use of a real kit as opposed to the game’s kit, is the ultimate version of my computer-based setup. The adapter doesn’t go in sleep mode when inactive (okay, that could be fixed by installing caffeine on the MacBook) and, more importantly, it seems to correct the lag issues I was sometimes having on fast drum sequences (like in GH Metallica). And, to really make it better, it’s a whole lot easier to setup. Just connect the kit and the adapter, no need to bring in the computer and a trillion of extra cables.

Questions ?

Can I use the old computer-based setup in RB3 ?

Yes, it works. Also, since I realized now with the release of the midi adapter that my original mapping was more GH:WT/Metallica oriented, I made an alternative one to be used with the Rock Band games which is exactly the one showed above (except of course than in RB2, there is no distinction between toms and cymbals)

Can I use the old computer-based setup in RB3 ProMode ?

No. RB3 detects the presence of the Mad Catz Adapter or the Mad Catz cymbals kit to enable pro mode. So, when using the old computer based setup (and the GH:WT module) you can not enable this mode. And yes, this is a shame as I would have loved to be able to use my Mad Catz Adapter on the guitar for a guest while using the old setup on the drums. Now I know I will need to get another Midi Adapter as soon as my kid brother moves near by

Can I use the Mad Catz Midi Adapter with Rock Band 2 / Beatles ?

Yes.

Can I use the Mad Catz Midi Adapter with Guitar Hero : World Tour / Metallica ?

Short answer : yes but it’s not as good.

Long answer soon to be published.

In order to accomplish this, I studied WordPress hooks. WordPress hooks are small functions customizable in one’s WordPress theme which will be called by WordPress core code. The reason behind hooks is to enable some custom code to be called in a given theme, plugin or widget, without modifying the WordPress core code which will be erased every time we upgrade our blog to the newest version of WordPress.

Hiding a category from the post metadata:

The post category at the end of a post are displayed using the following method : the_category(). This method is defined in wp-includes/category-template.php. This method calls get_the_category_list(), itself defined in the same file. This function gets the category list by calling get_the_category() also defined in this category-template.php file. Now, the important part is that this method get_the_category calls a custom filter named get_the_categories.

Let’s enable the filter get_the_categories and use it to skip the “Editorial” category. We will do that by editing (or creating) the functions.php file of the blog’s theme file.

Notice that we will not skip the category if we are logged in as super admin (that is to let the category appear in the administration panel)

Hiding a category from the category widget :

The same solution applies to the category widget. After identifying the method used by the category widget which is Walker_CategoryDropdown in the same wp-includes/category-templates.php file, it is clear it calls the list_cats filter somehwere down the road (in start_el). The only problem was, if the category was filtered out in the apply_filter method, it would display an empty line. Therefore, I submitted the following patch to the wordpress team.

In functions.php (in our blog’s theme folder)

If you wish to use this code, download and apply the patch (tested on WordPress 3.1) I hope the patch will make into the later versions by the WordPress dev team.

I hope this example of use of hooks and filters will enable you to create your own custom code for WordPress. Happy coding

References:

Below are great articles about WordPress development in general and WordPress hooks in particular

• Best practices for WordPress coding
• Hooks, Actions and Filters (WordPress codex)
• How to Use Hooks on your WordPress Blog (Smashing Magazine)

Over a year ago, for Christmas, I got a DTXPlorer Yamaha DrumKit just because I enjoyed playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band so much. I got very interested in drumming and wanted to experience the real thing. The first challenge was to connect a real Midi drumkit to the game, since I couldn’t play anything without the games guidance. Throught the comments I realized I was not the only one who discovered drumming though these video games. I think I’m not the only one who soon wanted to, in addition to playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero, tried to learn to play “for real”. I picked a few drum lessons DVD and trained with that but what I really enjoy is playing along the songs I like in the game… without the game. That way, I can improvise and see what I really learned to do without the guidance of the console. The problem is : drumless tracks (that is songs with all the instruments and voice playing but no drummer) are hard to get by. There is actually one great source of drumless tracks for us and it is the library of songs included in Guitar Hero and Rock Band games!

So, how to get a drumless track from the game ?

The process is simple : plug the audio output of your console to the line in of your computer (or any other recording device) and start the game as a drummer in “no fail mode” or “practice mode” just so that the song won’t stop playing even if you miss notes. Start the recording. Launch the song in the game. DO NOT PLAY, do not hit a single note, just let the song play itself out. That’s it, you get the guitar, the bass, the singer, every other instrument but the drums.

How to set the game(s) ?

In Rock band, select  a song and then, during the song, hit start and enter the Options Menu. Enable the no fail mode and restart the song.

In Guitar Hero, I just head over to the practice room, select the entire song at full speed.

Either method will work with most of the games. I tested Rock Band 2, Rock band 3 and Rock Band the beatles as well as Guitar Hero World Tour and Guitar Hero Metallica.

Recorded a song, now what ?

Now, the fun begins. You can play back the drumless track on your computer or any other player (I use my iPhone) and hook up the sound output of your device to the line in of your drumkit. There you go, you can play along on your favorite songs. Over time, I found that to be a nice alternative to seting up the game (which I only do on weekends). Setting up the game with the real kit, with the computer connection is quite an organization but I can quickly get to play along a couple of tracks in the evening using my iPhone drumless tracks playlist. It’s a nice way to realize how it is possible to actually learn something about Music playing Video Games.

Rock on’

On Monday morning, I received an email from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that my WordPress blog had been hacked and was temporarily blacklisted. Users accessing my blog using Google Chrome or Firefox were advised to stay away for safety. I appreciate Google’s notification of this problem as well as their concern (and Mozilla’s) to protect my visitors.

Why was my WordPress blog hacked ? I don’t believe it was individually targeted, I believe it was hacked because it was vulnerable. Two reasons :

1.  I hadn’t updated my blog to the latest version of WordPress. As a matter of fact, I was not even running WordPress 3.0 yet.
2. Also, I believe the file permissions I was required to use on the server by my host provider were not safe enough thought I could not change them without breaking the whole blog (Access Denied error). I largely blame my hosting provider architecture for that.
So, what did the malware look like ? It was a php code which was added to every .php file in my main wordpress folder and read something like eval(base64_decode(XXXXXXXXXXX)). Once this was decoded and evaluated, it would check whether the referrer was Bing, Yahoo or Google and if so, redirect my visitor to a malware sharing site of some kind (I didn’t go to it…). This hack has been used recently on several GoDaddy hosted wordpress blogs and other CMS. With some help from @fdevillamil and Google, I found information about the problem and started working on it.

Finally, I finally got the problem sorted thanks to several blogs posts I’d like to point to here.

1. Here is a detailed explanation of the attack
2. I downloaded and modified Peter’s fixfiles.php script in order to clean my PHP code of the malicious PHP script.
3. Sucuri Research offers a console command (requires SSH access to your server) to clean your WordPress, too. They also detailed how to fix a hacked blog intended for GoDaddy users.
4. Before resubmitting my blog for validation by Google, I made sure everything was okay using Sucuri’s malware scanner service (free for limited use) . A very useful tool.
5. I quickly searched for similar tools I could use in the future and found the following articles though I didn’t test these services yet.
6. I moved my blog to another host where I was able to set the permission more restrictively
7. I disabled several of my plugins and updated my WordPress hoping to secure my blog from too many security flaws that could lay in third party code
8. Next, I read up about a few ways to fix security holes in WordPress in these posts :

• Monitor Malicious File Changes in WordPress Blog
• Secure a WordPress Blog
• The best way to handle file permissions for Apache www-data (ServerFault discussion)
• Avoid users uploading malware

9. Finally, I updated my blog which was no luxury. It can quickly be done in a few steps which are detailed right here

Hope this helps out someone else in a similar situation and that Google reconsiders my website soon.

Since I got the iMac for Christmas, I only use my 3 year old MacBook when traveling. My Music and Movies collections are on the iMac and so are my apps. The problem is, when I’m traveling, I can’t sue the MacBook to synchronize my media or I loose all the existing content on my iPhone. So, this week end, I set out to find a way to do just that and I came up with the following:

#1 I can not sync all of my music to my iPhone or I can just forget about using it to record in HD, the hard drive would constantly be full. So I created a playlist for the music I wanted to send to the iPhone later.

#2 I need to keep both computer libraries in sync so that, whether I sync from the iMac or from the MacBook, I have the same content to pick from. I can add a track to the iPhone playlist and remove another and the rest will remain untouched.
The same applies to the apps, movies or books.

#3 I need to make the phone act as if iMac and MacBook were the same media libraries so that, syncing to one, wil not erased the content transferred by the other.

Here is how I proceeded to accomplish each of these steps:

#1 is straightforward enough. If you use iTunes and your iPhone at all, you know how to create a playlist and to sync it with your device. You also need to plug your iPhone, select it on the left barre in iTunes and go to the Summary tab and check (toward the bottom) “manually manage music and video”. This is an important step…

#2 is done using Home Sharing which Apple rolled out with iTunes 9. It’s very easy to use (drag & drop) and sets up in instants. Once you have Home Sharing running, simply copy over your music library so that you have the same tracks on both machines. The only trick is to transfer your iPhone playlist in order to sync it from both computers. On the first computer, click on the playlist on the left and right click in order to get the context menu. Click on export and select the xml format. Transfer the file you just saved on the second computer. On the second computer, open iTunes and import the playlist. Now, using Home Share, I simply need to remember to sync my library from iMac to MacBook before traveling and from MacBook to iMac on return. Hopefully, soon, a better solution will come along to automate that part…

#3 is the trickiest part. In order for the iPhone to sync from either computer without erasing the content that was previously transferred by the other, the device must act as if both libraries (on each computer) were the same. This is done by hacking the iTunes Music Library.xml file and the iTunes Music file. All the instruction can be found on Shiny Things. You’ll need a Hex Editor to complete the operation, I downloaded and used Hex Friend (free).

It took some figuring and a lot of attempts but it finally works!

First, I must confess that I like trying software out. That’s probably how I ended up having some many accounts with so many services and having a Tumblelog AND a WordPress blog. Since this blog is not running on wordpress.com, it is for me to remember and backup my database and files from time to time in case of a problem with my server. For my Tumblr, it is different. The data is on Tumblr server(s) and there are no features I know of in the admin to download them and store them locally. After a year of publishing a daily list of the movies I watch and books I read, this tumblelog became a Journal of my cultural activities and I grew attached to it. Recently I decided it had to be backedup in case something happened to my tumblr account or whatever. As usual, someone had the idea before me and a tool is available. It is called – appropriately enough – Tumblrbackup. It couldn’t be easier to use, enter your credentials, select the tumblelog to backup and the destination on your computer. A folder is created which contains your posts, images, avatar and even your custom style. A index.html file is generated allowing you to browse your own content on your local hard drive. The index.html doesnt include your custom style so it looks pretty plain but everything you wrote and uploaded is there… Now I just need to remember and rerun the backup from time to time. Cool!

What I was coming to were the Thomas Jefferson’s ten rules which I read at the National Archives Store in Washington D.C.

1. Never put off tomorrow what you can do today.
2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
3. Never spend your money before you have earned it.
4. Never buy what you don’t want because it is cheap.
5. Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold.
6. We seldom repent of having eaten too little.
7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
8. How much pain the evils have cost us that never happened.
9. Take things always by the smooth handle.
10. When angry, count ten before you speak, if very angry, count a hundred.

Smart guidelines there…