Once seen, this cannot be unseen. Well, at least it gives an interesting picture. Would be probably better in worse weather though.

This bridge's cables are held by a lion cub, or so it seems.

Today we are cooking a spinoff of spaghetti (or whatever, all pasta tastes the same) carbonara.

Ingredients

You should always have these around in your house anyways, but maybe you will have to add 10 minutes for shopping

1. Pasta (I use spaghetti or penne)
2. Sliced bacon
3. Liquid cream (or any other, actually)
4. Parmesan cheese
5. Emmental cheese
6. Canned sliced mushrooms
7. Egg
8. Onion
9. Bonus: White Wine

Preparation of ingredients

Nada. Well, open the can of mushrooms at least. Oh, and dice the onion.

Cooking

Depending on your pasta you will have to start cooking it at some random moment during the cooking of the sauce. Or you can just cook it after sauce is ready, it can wait, the pasta can not.

Start by frying the onions in a pan. Once they are ready put in the bacon. Cook until the bacon changes colour and add sliced mushrooms. Cook for like a minute and then add some cream. Afterwards add some cheese (either or both), not too much, and cook until it disolves. If you are rich enough add a spoonful or two of white wine into the mix now. Repeat the previous step until you think you have enough cheese in the mix. Cook for a bit. Now put in the egg and stirr furiously.

Voilà! Dinner is ready.

Luckily there IS a solution for this. The extension keyconfig will fix half of the problem get the keyconfing extension here and disable the incriminating keys. Many thanks to the author.

Now you have working command keys. As for the home and end key, I fixed my problem in vimperator, since it is an extension I use on all of my firefoxes. Basically the idea is to remap home and end (along with +shift variants) so they fire off the command+arrow commands.

Here is the code, enjoy :

imap <Home> <M-Left>
imap <End> <M-Right>
imap <S-End> <M-S-Right>
imap <S-Home> <M-S-Left>

Either run it in the vimperator command line and do a :mkvimperatorrc! or put it directly into your configuration file.

Thing is, I really like working with libraries rather than the filesystem itself. It is much more convenient, but also brings a lot of crap to the house. You can not really move a library, if it is in a binary form you will have hard way synchronizing it over several computers (YES! I want my files in Dropbox).

I have decided to make a document management system on my own. I have currently no idea how will it look in the end, because I do not know yet about what I want it to do. Nevertheless I will rant here for a while and maybe some day I will find out on how to do this thing right.

What should a good document management system do?

There are many things a document management system should do, but there are even more things it should not. There lies the problem with most of the applications.

As an example of a good library manager I would cite Amarok, Quodlibet and iTunes (the latter only for the music collection).

• While using the application you do not have to worry about where the files are, what is their format and stuff like that. When you are not using the application you can, however, navigate in the files easily.
• The metadata is actually saved in the documents (id3 tags, for example) so even if you lose your library (the database), it is very easy to reconstruct. (quodlibet does not use any database whatsoever)

As examples of bad document managers, let us have a look at iPhoto or Evernote.

• The files are saved “somewhere”, there is no way of poking into the file structure of the application database without breaking something.
• They provide a lot of features, which is good, but there is no way of adding some. If you use an external application to edit a photo in iPhoto library you are losing most of the features : the new version is not linked to the original, no way to revert back no nothing.
• If you lose your library then reconstructing it all over again from the originals is a huge pain in the ass.
• Some things you would be able to do with vanilla files are no longer an option.

Basically what I am trying to say is that while a good management system should not require you to use the filesystem in any way, it should use it in order to get things done. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here.

Fear not, however, for there is a solution for every problem.

Push notification application

First, you will need an application to get any push notification to your phone. There are several of them, I would recommend using the Push4. There is a free version if you want to test it first.

Once you have installed it and created an account go to your account settings on your website and go to My Account -> Settings -> Profile to get your API key. You can also make the application send you an e-mail with the key.

Some scripting

You will need to make two scripts to send the notifications. (You could manage with less, of course, but I am too lazy). First one is a bash script which uses curl to send a notification to your phone.

Here it is :

curl -d "user_credentials=YOUR_API_KEY" \
-d "notification[message]=$1" \
-d "notification[long_message]=$2" \
-d "notification[title]=New irssi notification" \
-d "notification[subtitle]=irssi message" \
-d "notification[long_message_preview]=$1" \
-d "notification[message_level]=2" \
-d "notification[silent]=0" \
-d "notification[action_loc_key]=OK" \
-d "notification[sound]=1" https://www.appnotifications.com/account/notifications.json

Do not forget to replace the YOUR_API_KEY by your real API key. You can test the script immediately, although it might not work for a few hours just after your Push4 account creation. Basically this script sends you a notifications with first parameter as short text preview and second as a long text (which can use HTML markup).

A second script is needed to parse the awaylog and send notifications using the first script.

#!/usr/bin/perl -n

use HTML::Entities;

if (/(\d+:\d+) (?:([#&][^ ]+)+:)?.*?\/.*?\/(.*?).g.8.*?e(yoz-y: )?(.*)/)
{
    $time = $1;
    $channel = $2;
    $sender = $3;
    $message = $5;

    $message =~ s/\\/:/g;
    $message =~ s/"/\\"/g;
    $message =~ s/[;&]/:/g;
    print `./irssi_notify.sh "$sender : $message at $time" "Message from <b>$sender</b> (<i>$channel</i>) at <b>$time</b> : $message"\n`;
}

Now, to clarify things a bit. What this script does is that it takes some input, and if it is in some format, /(\d+:\d+) (?:([#&][^ ]+)+:)?.*?\/.*?\/(.*?).g.8.*?e(YOURNICK: )?(.*)/, to be precise, it will parse it and send it via a notification. Note that this works if you did not play with your irssi theme too much, as the awaylog basically copies the format of public and highlight messages.

The (YOURNICK: )? part is optional, and it helps to remove the usual prefix of highlight messages.

I can not help you much with the regex, you have to find one on your own or you can use this script which basically takes anything in awaylog and sends it as it is (it works well and everywhere).

#!/usr/bin/perl -n

use HTML::Entities;

$message = encode_entities($_);
$message =~ s/\\/:/g;
$message =~ s/"/\\"/g;
$message =~ s/[;&]/:/g;
print `./irssi_notify.sh "$message" "$message"\n`;

Making it all work

Let us run the machine now. You will need to start another screen to run this (if somebody will help me with making a nohup version of the command I will gladly have it).

Run a terminal on your shell and run

screen bash
tailf ~/.irssi/away.log | perl irssi_notify.pl

Now detach the screen and you are on the roll.

My contribution is that this script also invokes a Growl message (thus, you will need Growl installed) also, the # character is replaced by %23 (because Dropbox does not like it much)

Here goes the script :

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
	try
		set the item_count to the number of items in the added_items
		if the item_count is equal to 1 then
			set theFile to item 1 of added_items
			set theRawFilename to ("" & theFile)

			set tid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ":"
			set theFileName to (text item 6 of theRawFilename) as text
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid

			set theWebSafeFileName to switchText from theFileName to "%20" instead of " "
			set theWebSafeFileName to switchText from theWebSafeFileName to "%23" instead of "#"

			set theURL to "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/YOUR_DROPBOX_ID/" & theWebSafeFileName
			set the clipboard to theURL as text

			tell application "GrowlHelperApp"

				set the allNotificationsList to ¬
					{"Public URL"}

				set the enabledNotificationsList to allNotificationsList

				register as application ¬
					"CopyDropboxURL" all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
					default notifications enabledNotificationsList ¬
					icon of application "Dropbox"

				notify with name ¬
					"Public URL" title ¬
					"Dropbox Public Folder Updated" description ¬
					(theURL & " copied to clipboard.") application name "CopyDropboxURL"

			end tell
		end if
	end try
end adding folder items to

to switchText from t to r instead of s
	set d to text item delimiters
	set text item delimiters to s
	set t to t's text items
	set text item delimiters to r
	tell t to set t to item 1 & ({""} & rest)
	set text item delimiters to d
	t
end switchText

How to use this

First of allyou have to know your Dropbox user ID and change the YOUR_DROPBOX_ID to it. This is the number that appears after /u/ in your public Dropbox links.

Now open the apple script editor and save this script into Macintosh HD/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts as CopyDropboxURL.scpt.

Next navigate to your Dropbox public folder in finder, right click (or ⌘-click) it. Choose Services->Folder Actions Setup… from the menu. In the menu that opens choose the CopyDropboxURL.scpt.

Ingredients

1. One whole chicken
2. Shiitake mushrooms (dried)
3. Black mushrooms (dried)
4. A carrot
5. Bamboo sprouts
6. Two eggs
7. Soy sauce
8. Rice vinegar
9. Sambala sauce
10. Tapioca starch
11. Salt
12. Whole black pepper
13. Chicken bouillon cube

Preparation of ingredients

Hint : I recommend reading the whole recipe first as some of the steps can be done at the same time.

It is best to begin by dipping the mushrooms in warm water (shiitake and black mushrooms separately) as it takes about 30 minutes for them to soak well. The longer the better. After they have soaked cut the shiitake to small pieces.

Cut off the legs and breasts of the chicken, put them aside we will not be needing them for this meal.

Clean the carrot and cut it to small pieces. Cut the bamboo sprouts as well.

Crack the two eggs into a bowl and scramble them.

Cooking

Heat about 1.5L of water, salt it, put in a dozen of grains of the whole pepper and put the chicken inside. Cook for about 45 minutes.

Take the chicken out and put the bouillon cube as well as the mushrooms (both), carrots and bamboo sprouts inside.

Cut off all of the meat from the bones of the chicken and put it back into the soup (the meat, not the bones).

Cook for about ten minutes, then add two table spoons of vinegar, three table spoons of soy sauce and two spoonfuls of Sambala sauce (or more, if you wish the soup to be more spicy).

Cook for another 10 minutes, afterwards add in the eggs and stir well. Finally prepare two spoons of tapioca starch in a bowl – add a bit of water and mix until all of the starch has diluted. Then add the mix to the soup. Cook for about 10 minutes and you are done.

Afterword

The soup is to be eaten very hot. If you do not have chicken you can use more bouillon cubes instead (still, it is much better with real meat).

Since I did not bring a wide-angle I had to do a little trespassing to get a shot at the cathedral. No big deal, by the amount of beer bottles on the ground it must have been a fine spot for parties.

It would seem that Hate is quite free in this part of France (translation "Die Artist")

Cathedral in Marseille

I have snapped this picture while walking back home. I really enjoy the shadow play on this house’s roof, hopefuly you will too.

House and its shadows

This particular problem is due to lack of dedicated drivers made by Creative. It seems that they only make OS X drivers for cards specially targeted at Macs.

Luckily there is a way to work around this limitation using a piece of software called Soundflower. The procedure is very simple, just follow the four steps here:

1. Download and install SoundFlower (this might require a restart)
2. Set Soundflower (2ch) as your audio output device (hint: you can option (⌥)-click your volume control icon in the menu)
3. Launch Soundflowerbed (it was installed along with Soundflower)
4. In the 2 channel device output options select your USB card.

And it is done, you can happily use your volume control buttons once again.

Set system output to Soundflower (2ch)

Set Soundflower output to your USB card