romej.com - the feed still burns

When your Mac won't sleep

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Sometimes my iMac won't sleep. I've tried closing various applications as well as logging out of my account before entering sleep mode, but I still hear it humming quietly when I come back minutes later. It happened to me last year with Snow Leopard but went away after a reboot. Lately, using OS X Lion 10.7.3, it's happening again.

If this is happening to your iMac or MacBook, try running pmset, a command-line tool to manipulate power management settings. Open the Terminal app and type the following:

pmset -g assertions

Roughly translated, this reads get me a list of the power management assertions, or reasons the computer might not be able to enter sleep mode. The first time I ran this, I noticed the CUPS printing system was preventing sleep. The screenshot doesn't reflect that. I killed that process (you can use the Activity Monitor app to do this).

I noticed another assertion from the audio system. I did not kill that process as it was related to PreventUserIdleSystemSleep. If you're listening to music, this shows up to keep you from having to touch your trackpad/keyboard to keep your system awake and playing.

I opened System Preferences > Energy Saver and restored defaults for good measure.

Circles

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

It's fun to look for design trends you're accustomed to seeing on the web in everyday products. You've seen circles for profile pictures in Google+ Circles.

The new Basecamp also uses them, as well as OS X Lion's login screen.

They're also used on boxes of Lipton tea.

I'm sure the iOS linen background that originated as the background behind pages in mobile Safari will one day feel like Aqua buttons, but I like them, and variants of the pattern are probably all over your house.

Bound journal for iOS

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Michelle built a Bound journal for my birthday. We first saw these at the SHU box.

For what I do every day, mine's ideal. I'm currently sketching some screens for Chronicle and Meetings for iPad.

The bag in bag

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the 10,000-hour rule in his book, Outliers. While I doubt I've spent 10,000 hours on any one topic, between my undergraduate years, MBA, and almost 3/4 (!) of medical school I have spent 10,000 studying. And like his examples, I've gone through several iterations of how I like to study.

I've had my notecard phase which consisted of buying paper drill (I ended up getting a modestly priced McGill) and calling Mead about the possibility of wholesale ordering their half-sized colored index cards after exhausting the local office store supply as well as Amazon's (btw - the paper drill was so I could use a book ring to hold them together).

I tried recopying all of my notes from class and texts into a single 3-ring notebook.

For the past year or so I've settled into a highlighter scheme where diseases are red, pharmacology is green, risk factors yellow, diagnostic tests blue, pathophys purple, and sequelae pink. There are also lighter colors that are associated with 2nd line drugs, tests, etc. I also make notes in my books (something my college freshman self would never have done) with ink pens of the corresponding color (most often Hi-Tec-C). While this has worked well, there have been some issues. Rather than carrying one highlighter, I need almost 10. I also need a similar number of pens. I also need a ruler so I don't write too off line in my books. In the end, I study with around $50 of highlighters/pens/etc. Rather than duplicating these items for all the places I study - desk, sunroom, school, couch, I use my bag-in-bag from invite.L.

It has 10 pockets that fit all of my writing instruments and are sturdy enough that I can store them in the tip up (for highlighters) or tip down (for pen) position. It has a handle built into the top which is nice. Other bags with handles on the outside tend to change the weight of the bag and can cause it to tip over. The bag-in-bag also has two button snap closures at the top which gives my inside pens a little more protection from jostling when I'm traveling. It's also large enough to fit a book or two and stands nicely in the bottom of my bookbag.

All in all, I think the bag-in-bag, though a more recent addition to my study style, will be here to stay.

Countdown to match day

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Match Day for the class of 2012 was Friday. It's been especially fun to see the pictures, videos, and posts this weekend because we know some of these people and because Michelle's next. By this time next year we'll know where we're headed for residency.

The match list for Match Day 2012 at MCG (GHSU).

A sunny Saturday sandwich

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Today we were making lunch together, trying as we could to do preparation and cleanup in parallel so that as we sat down to eat there would be nothing left to do in the kitchen. I grabbed the chips, she finished making the sandwiches. I went to put something on the Roku and, as I was walking back to the kitchen, she passed with a plate in each hand, smiling. Cute I thought. I put some things up, grabbed a drink, and went to join her. As I settled onto the couch and started to eat I noticed my sandwich was flimsy, light, a pile of cardboard boxes falling all over my plate. We both started laughing, and I realized I misread the smile a minute earlier. Then I stared at her. Everything was wrapped, put up, the tuna fork already washed. She sabotaged the parallelized process, created rework...and made me laugh more.

Back to static with Jekyll

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

A return to simpler times

The last version of my site was far from complex, consisting of a few custom php files and a MySQL database. It served its purpose for a few years and worked well for the short posts I tended to write. Last year something happened to the MySQL database the posts were stored in during some kind of Dreamhost migration. It was enough to get me thinking about moving the blog back to a statically-generated site. At this time I had been using Jekyll for a couple years at slide to rock. I liked it because it was simple, let me manage posts as markdown files, and made it easy to keep the site backed up. It also reminded me of the C# program I wrote to generate my website years ago while learning Mono.

I recently got around to redoing the site.

Migrating old blog posts

I used the YAML export feature of phpMyAdmin to download my old posts. I then set out to parse the file into a bunch of separate Markdown files to drop into the _posts directory using Ruby but became frustrated when I couldn't remember any of the string parsing and file IO methods off-hand. Rather than look them up I wrote the program in Objective C and soon had a few hundred post files.

Mapping old URLs

On my old site, I used Apache's rewrite rules for permalinks like:

http://romej.com/archives/717/visiting-boston

I wanted to maintain the same link structure for old posts on the migrated site and started by setting the YAML front matter of the generated posts to:

---
layout: post
title: "Visiting Boston"
permalink: /archives/717/visiting-boston
---

This was close to what I needed, but Jekyll generates, as it should, the actual HTML at:

_site/archives/717/visiting-boston/index.html

I forked Jekyll and added some settings to help with generating URLs without the trailing slash, essentially making the last path component a file and not a directory. Sticking with the example above, the --noslash option generates a file at the following path:

_site/archives/717/visiting-boston.html

I added noslash: true to the site's _config.yml instead of passing it via command line all the time. My plan was to rely on Nginx's rewrite rules to handle mapping the extensionless URLs to the actual .html files.

One issue I ran into was testing locally using Jekyll's built-in WEBrick server. My generated pages were referencing posts that looked like directories (links that would work fine when rewritten on the server). I added a --prewrite option for local testing that simply generates the full path to each HTML file in the permalink.

You can see the commit with these changes at GitHub.

Rewriting URLs with Nginx

My Nginx configuration got a little funky because I had some paths that I wanted to behave as usual (eg, /iphone resolves to /iphone/index.html) Here's most of my nginx.conf. If you see anything below that makes you go dude, no let me know.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name www.romej.com;
  rewrite ^ http://romej.com$uri permanent;
}

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name romej.com;
  autoindex on;
  #rewrite_log on;
  root html/romej.com/;
  location / {
    index index.html;
    rewrite ^/rss/blog$ /rss/blog.xml break;
  }

  #
  # The following locations add .html to urls, while also
  # making sure direct requests to a-post.html or /a-post/
  # are redirected to /a-post
  # 
  # By specifying locations can avoid doing if (-f) tests.
  #

  # new permalinks look like /2012/03/some-post
  # uggh, not sure how to match [\d]+ or [\d]{4}
  location /20 {
    rewrite ^(.+)/$ $1 permanent;
    rewrite ^(.+).html$ $1 permanent;
    rewrite ^(.+)$ $1.html break;
  }
  
  # old permalinks and /archives page
  location /archives {
    rewrite ^(.+)/$ $1 permanent;
    rewrite ^(.+).html$ $1 permanent;
    rewrite ^(.+)$ $1.html break;
  }
}

The first two rewrite lines in the location blocks make sure that any references to /some-post/ or /some-post.html are 301 redirected to /some-post, the canonical URL.

One more thing: the archives

My old site had a simple archives page that listed every post, grouped by month, most recent first. I wrote a Jekyll plugin to handle grouping the posts by date so that I could use them in my archives layout file. To do this I maintained a list of dates normalized by year and month in months. Each month served as a key in the posts_by_month dictionary; the value was a list of posts written that month.

   def group_by_month(posts)
    months = []
    posts_by_month = {}
    posts.reverse.each do |post|
      key = Time.utc(post.date.year, post.date.month)
      if posts_by_month.has_key?(key)
        posts_by_month[key] << post
      else
        posts_by_month[key] = [post]
        months << key
      end
    end
    return [months,posts_by_month]
  end

Finally, I used the generator output in my _layouts/archives.html layout template.

You can see the result on the archives page of this site.

Post and deploy

My site has about 600 pages and takes 4.2 seconds to generate. That's probably close to a best-case scenario, as I don't use any plugins for tags or related posts, etc.

I created a Rakefile in my site's root directory so that I could run some common tasks more easily. Here are some common Jekyll Rake tasks to base your own on. The rsync one, in particular, makes deploying your site easy. After the initial site copy, only changed files get updated every time you deploy.

Conclusion

It took me longer to do all of this than I expected, but it got addictingly fun as it progressed. After enduring the Slicehost to Rackspace migration this year for another site I wanted to make sure my personal site would be easy to migrate should something similar occur again. Another benefit is the natural redundancy you get from this setup: I have full copies of my site on Dropbox, on my local computer, and, of course, on the web server.

Resize a Google+ photo

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

One of Google App Engine's features includes dynamic image resizing. You can store an image and simply modify the URL to request resized or cropped versions of the photo. On App Engine this can be done efficiently.

From the image transformation docs (scroll down on that page to see it), the arguments for resizing and cropping:

The available arguments are: =sxx where xx is an integer from 0–1600 representing the length, in pixels, of the image's longest side. For example, adding =s32 resizes the image so its longest dimension is 32 pixels. =sxx-c where xx is an integer from 0–1600 representing the cropped image size in pixels, and -c tells the system to crop the image.

This same technique and syntax appear to apply to any photos you have on Google+. Hover over an photo from one of your albums and copy or open the image URL in a new tab. Look for the /sXXX/ portion of the URL.

Resized to be 500px on longest side (s500)

https://.../-Jx2qq-eCAFs/TvnlNyr0tUI/AAAAAAAABBA/qSWT4_RXX4s/s500/IMG_2157.JPG

Resized to be 100px, cropped square (s100-c)

https://.../-Jx2qq-eCAFs/TvnlNyr0tUI/AAAAAAAABBA/qSWT4_RXX4s/s100-c/IMG_2157.JPG

This makes it easy to resize an image for posting or using elsewhere.

The wind in our harms

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Yesterday was bright and nothing like the rainy, humid day that preceded it. We felt compelled to enjoy it for that reason but also because Michelle had to go on-call at 1:00. We ran some errands and took the dogs to a grassy area off Wheeler where we could let them off leash. Michelle and I took off in different directions and the dogs bounced between us as we ran. They try so hard to be, on average, with both of us.

Afterwards, a little Tutti Frutti.

Wanted

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

WiFi dropping in OS X Lion

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I have a late 2010 iMac. After upgrading to OS X Lion last year I started having issues with the WiFi reconnecting after I put the computer to sleep. I tried a lot of the suggestions I saw in forum posts to fix it but the problem persisted. I eventually sought out my router and ended up adjusting its DNS settings to use Google's Public DNS servers. My iMac was already using this but setting this on the router itself seems to have helped with my issues.

update The latest OS X Lion update has an official fix for this issue.

Spider buddy

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Years ago we came home after a night out and parked outside the house. Michelle passed through a web on the way in and I quickly urged her don't worry, they usually aren't in the center. As we were pulling the web off she felt something. She lifted her arm from her side, from shadow into light. Sure enough a big black and yellow argiope was trekking across her bare forearm. Flip out ensued. Mostly she was annoyed that I was so sure nothing would be on her.

More recently Bingley came into the bathroom while she was getting ready. She noticed a leaf on his side and plucked it from his body to throw in the trash.

Then it started to move in her fingers.

She wiggled her hand but a bit of web made it stick to the fingertips for two seconds too long.

Last night she caught a small one in her glass of water. It made a raft out of its legs which was impressive. After asking if she picked it up by hand and placed it in the glass I took it outside and gently dumped it.

Cold Saturday

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Just dropped Michelle off at the hospital for her 30-hour shift. The air around Augusta stinks this morning and dampens optimism (you can't take fresh-smelling mornings for granted here). Enjoyed some Krispy Kreme donuts for the first time in about a year though!

Bingley

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

How to fix a dripping faucet

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The general idea is the same for any faucet model; water is slipping past a seal. At the very least you probably need to replace some rubber rings or seals in the handle assemblies. This Price Pfister model has cartridges that slide into each faucet body (one for hot flow, one for cold). Watch this video to see each step of the repair.

On call

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I dropped Michelle off at the hospital before 6 today, like usual. The difference today is that she won't be coming back home until tomorrow around noon. Hopefully it'll go well for her. I imagine the sleeping quarters aren't any better than a hostel, and the fear of not waking up for a page has to take a toll on your ability to sleep.

Fitz and I are going to go stir crazy. I might cook him some dinner, tell him about my day, and watch a TV show with him on the couch.

The early days

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Michelle's now on the wards. She just started her third rotation in surgery (ortho, urology, and now oncology). For the first time since our days at the Air Force, we're getting up around 5am. It's rough. Fitz stays in bed when we get up this early, occasionally lifting his head to look at us and then letting it fall back on the pillow with a soft thud.

I get to come home and make coffee and wake up at my own pace. Meanwhile, she's running between patient rooms, waking people up and asking how they're doing. Her white coat is eight pounds heavier than she'd like, so she shuffles up and down the halls, her little shoes tapping out a hurried rhythm. She loves working with the patients and seeing them go home.

As for me, I can usually have a good amount of work done before 9am. If I held myself to an 8-hour day, I could probably stop working around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. It's strange to think about it that way.

I usually keep working because I like it, but also because Michelle usually gets off sometime between 6 and 9pm. She's supposed to come home and study hard for several hours after that. The curriculum in med school reminds me of Aragorn's "I give hope to men. I keep none for myself." - the system is structured against giving time to sleep or eat or, you know, be healthy.

(we still go to the gym on days she gets out before 7pm, but this schedule is nothing like the first two years)

Third year started with anxiety. She was concerned about the rotations as anyone would be, but also awaiting Step 1 scores. You simply can't plan your life and career until you know your score, unfortunately.

The entire June pool of tests was held so that the NBME could make adjustments after some test changes. For some reason they released her scores (and everyone who took it towards the end of June) one very long week after everyone else in the batch.

On nights where there weren't many hours to sleep, the anxiety of waiting made sleep even more difficult. So the days were long.

When the release day rolled around - a week after others had come to terms with their scores and had thrown themselves into third year fully - I waited for her to send me news. I had a hard time focusing on work. Then she texted me.

I had some cupcakes waiting at home to celebrate her hard work, the results, and the close of the first half of med school. Observing this preparation process - which extends back over the past two years - has been a ride. I can't imagine actually going through it and I'm really proud of her. Some people go to extremes: no movies, no nights out, no time for the gym, no time to talk, blank stares when you mention the name of a TV show. She did well and we had fun doing it.

Reaching this point was something we talked about on evening walks around the neighborhood back in Crestview, nearly five years ago. Now we can get back to planning.

Running the Peachtree Road Race

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Yesterday we ran the Peachtree Road Race for the first time. As Miley Cyrus says, it was pretty cool.

We signed up as a group and didn't submit any race times. As a result we were in the W starting group, set to start at 8:55 am.

We found plenty of parking near the Arts Center station (try the lots between 10th and 14th around W. Peachtree). We waited 20 minutes to pay at the parking meter then split a bagel at Einsteins.

There were a lot of police officers and Marta employees helping people figure things out. Marta was packed and I ended up resting my tired head on some guy's supremely hairy arm. Not really. It was there though and the bumps in the track brought the two things in close proximity. He doled out advice on not going through the water (blisters on your feet) and steering clear of Moe's (crowds getting t-shirts) and had been running it since '78.

We got off at Lenox station and walked.

The lines at the port-a-potties were deep. Even if you don't have to go when you see the toilets, hop in line. You'll have to go by the time it's your turn.

We met up with the W wave and someone holding a large STOP/WALK sign led us down Peachtree towards the starting line.

It's quite a walk; the race starts down by the American flag visible on the horizon.

While people around us squeezed power gels into their mouths, Michelle tidied her hydration of choice. I laughed but really wanted one during the second half of the race.

An announcer pumped us up as we neared the starting line and soon people were shuffling off.

Michelle yelled out asking where the Moe's shirts were when she ran past. That got some of the people behind her riled up and soon a few were demanding shirts. One guy fired and expletive.

Her Capri Sun didn't spill. Meanwhile, a little ways ahead, I was sloshing warm water all over my face trying to drink.

I enjoyed being cheered by the people on the sidewalk. It adds a lot to the event and helps you keep going when you're tired. Kids held out their hands to get high fives.

Towards the end of the race I realized people were recoiling when I went past. I must have looked ghastly.

An hour passes. Cups are grabbed awkwardly. Walkers are dodged, breathing is labored. Sweat doesn't cool as it should, too humid. The sun burns and the shade feels nice. You notice hills on Peachtree you don't even think about in your car.

Here's the finish area in Piedmont Park. I sat down desperate to cool off and waited for Michelle (not long). She came across looking much more composed than I did and headed straight for a banana. She ran knowing she'd be standing around in the hospital all day Tuesday. She posted a great time and was less sore than me the next day.

Here we are walking through the park back to the car. This was great.

You can search the 2011 Peachtree Road Race results if you know anyone that was in it. The finishers breakdown statistics are fun to look at too.

Moving

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

We're mostly settled in the house next door now. It was one of the easier moves we've ever done. Two Men and a Truck helped with the heavy stuff and I spent too much time (more than I estimated, anyway) ferrying smaller loads after they left.

Fitz has spent much of the past two years here in this house playing with Henry, so he knows it better than we do. He's still pretty nervous though after having seen his furniture go from one place to another. He watches me from the window when I run next door, afraid, apparently, that I'll just stay over there.

Michelle's been studying hard the past couple months and having a pretty good time doing it. After all the reading and quizzing and practice tests she'll take Step 1 tomorrow. I'm really proud of how much she's learned in the past two years. Medicine is heavily fact-based, so there's no getting around memorizing vast quantities of information. It's nearly the opposite of the kind of learning you're expected to do at Georgia Tech, so she's verily versatile.

It's weird how you settle into new routines. After classes and the NBME exams wrapped up six weeks ago, we committed to waking up early (Step 1 starts at 7am and we normally wake up at 7:40). TLC has been playing The Little Couple in the morning, so that's our go-to wake-up show. We're out of the house before the Today show starts.

Michelle spent most of the summer in one (well, a couple) of the small group rooms. Things worked out nicely and she was able to keep a room to herself the entire time. A couple weeks into studying they kicked her out of the room she had "decorated" (and cleaned) so that they could do some summer seminar. She moved three doors down and settled in.

She kept a small candied apple candle from Bath and Bodyworks in her room and had the best-smelling room. Food, dust, and who knows what else left some of the other rooms stale. I liked walking in with a bag of lunch and getting a breath of the Purell + candy combo.

After sitting for eight hours a day she wanted to stand. I found a door at Lowe's for $5 and brought that in along with two plastic crates so that she could have a big standing desk. We ate a few Mellow Mushroom pizzas standing at that.

I snuck Fitz into her room one day so he could see where she was going. He's a good dog and didn't try to get out of the backpack. It wasn't meant to carry him but he trusts in the choices we make for him. He poked his nose out as I neared her hallway to get a whiff of the surroundings.

In the afternoons when I went to pick her up I'd often bring him and let him run in the courtyard between Pav III and the parking deck. He started running to the sliding doors to wait. He's quick with things like that.

We've been eating a lot of Moe's (the new salsa has revived our interest) and pizza. In this new house, we're also cooking with gas again. We went a year without it (even during the winter months) and used space heaters. The AGL pass-through charge is a rip-off, keeping our bills last year at minimum $35 (event with near-zero gas usage).

One of my new favorite things is a Cuisinart espresso maker Michelle found for me on Foundary. It's sturdy and makes real espresso. It cost $20 more than the steam-pressure one I was going to buy last year.

I should mention that the tree in this yard recently fell across the fence into our old yard. Thankfully the car was moved from its usual spot, else it would have been crushed.

Inverted Friday

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

We had a buy-one-get-two Fandango deal that was nearing expiration. We put it to good use at the Regal Augusta Exchange, X-Men First Class at noon. It's hard for Michelle to take any time off, and she knows I love summer movies, so it was nice (much like my birthday). The nacho cheese machine was busted. Sad. We switched to another obscenely priced classic - popcorn - and didn't look back.

We had some delicious spicy chicken burritos afterward. Somebody in line was on fire for Jesus (his words) and was being encouraged to join some effort.