I listen to music just about all day long at work so whatever I use has to work well. Rdio, does not. I first heard about Rdio about 3 years ago when they were still in private beta, I didn’t get in. A year or so later when they opened to the public I wasn’t very interested due to having looked at Spotify and decided the streaming music wasn’t for me. Then about a month ago I got sick of having to constantly download new music that I wanted to listen to and started looking around again. A couple guys at work used Rdio and spoke highly of it so I went ahead and bought the $10/mo plan so I could use it on my phone/desktop/web. I have been using Rdio for about a month and here are the issues … Read More »

This is just a quick little post about a small Alfred extension I put together that lets you easily unmount all of your drives. I take my laptop and one of two of my external drives back and forth with me to work so I am always ejecting them, I wanted a fast and easy way to disconnect them that didn’t require me opening up finder and scrolling down to click the eject buttons.

I bought a small App Store app, unDock ($1), which worked perfectly and even had the ability to set a keyboard shortcut to unmount all your drives. However, I wanted something that would work across all the macs I work on without me having to log into the app store on each one. Yes I am aware they will all need to have Alfred on them but most of … Read More »

A few months ago I wrote a blog post on How to setup growl notifications for Beanstalk Deployments using boxcar and a small script to call out to the API. Since then I have found boxcar to not be to optimal solution so here is the updated way to setup growl notifications for Beanstalk. There are 3 main components to this project: PusherApp, Heroku, and MacGap. This post will walk you through each step to set this up on your own system. This also provides you with an easy way to send Growl notifications to your computer for any reason. Lets get started!

Step one: Install MacGap on your Mac. MacGap is a lightweight wrapper around webkit that exposes some system functions through its javascript library. To install it just open … Read More »

Recently I was trying to track down why a Drupal site that I wrote had such slow loading times on the homepage. The issue wasn’t due to the page needing to download a lot of items, I had already looked into that. It seemed that the server was very slow to serve up the page. At first I wrote it off to being a massive site with hundreds of thousands of images and too many contrib modules, however other sites on the same server were performing fine and the server had actually been scaled up multiple times due to it needing more storage space (Yes, S3, I love it and would have used it except that at the time I did not foresee storage as being an issue and now it wouldn’t be cost effective to spend a ton of time re-writing … Read More »

Over the past few days I have been working on a little side project called dShr.es. It was originally going to be called Drop.Sh/are but after buying that domain name, creating all my graphics, and coding about 90% of it I read the Dropbox branding guide which states: Do not prefix your app name with “Drop.”. So I had to go look for a new domain name. I then found dSha.re and dSh.re were open and not too expensive (I had already dropped $99 on Drop.sh). Unfortunately I do not live in Europe and therefore cannot buy “.re” domain names (Side note: If you do live in Europe I would be happy to pay for the registration fee + 20%  to get those names registered and pointed at my name servers). I finally settled on dShr.es … Read More »

UPDATE: This post is out of date, please check out How to setup growl notifications for Beanstalk Deployments [Updated]

So recently I started playing around with git and pre/post-deployment hooks on Beanstalk (10% off through that link). I have used Beanstalk in the past through work but never really dove into all of it’s features. Beanstalk, for those of you who don’t know, is SVN and GIT repository hosting but it also supports deployments which allow you to easily push code to your servers via FTP/SFTP or SSH commands that it will run on your remote server. I used SSH for deployment because I wanted to just run “git pull” on the remote server.

I had everything set up, branches for dev/staging/live and deployments set up for each so that just by pushing to a certain branch my code would … Read More »

Recently I made the decision to withdraw from the University of Kentucky. I did not make this choice lightly, but rather spent a lot of time pouring over all the possible outcomes of my decision. You might be asking why I titled this “Why I canceled my college subscription” as no one really calls college a “subscription” but I disagree. College is but one more business out there that takes your money and provides something in response and since it is one time fee for “unlimited” access to classes it can best be classified as a subscription.

For the longest time I thought the life consisted of the following Born->Elementary School->Middle School->High School->College->Job->Family->Death. Yes maybe throw in a few different jobs but by and large that is how humans “live”, it’s how my parents did it, how their parents did … Read More »