Author Archive

Keyboard Shortcuts for Photoshop CS4 on OSX

I have CS4 MC for 7 and CS3 MC for OSX. Having purchased an Intuos 4 tablet several months ago, I found it very useful binding some of the more popular actions on the tablet. After running across this article, it reinforced the fact that Adobe has done a masterful job of making bindings available for pretty much everything you want to do already. I found the article today through popurls (one of my favorite sites to browse through) and I was happy to see the quality of explanation and ease of reading. There’s a lot of great info about Photoshop bindings for advanced users and beginners alike. Definitely check it out.

Browser Memory Issues With Sholes.info 1.1 ROM

With the release of the Sholes.info 1.1 ROM for the Droid, there’s been some concern over performance issues as the phone’s uptime increases. It seems one problem is that the browser will continue to chew on memory, and with compcache setup in this ROM, it chews through the swap as well. If you are enjoying the features and functionality of the 1.1 ROM, but would like to disable compcache to help limit the browser’s memory consumption and try to keep your phone alive a bit longer, there is a way to disable it:

[root@droid] / # sysrw && mkdir -p /system/etc/rc.d/ && touch /system/etc/rc.d/disable_15_compcache.sh; sysro; sync

Another tip I’ll throw in as a free bonus is to get SetCPU from the Market. Some people (myself included) have seen problems where the phone takes a while to wake from sleep, or respond to an unlock swipe (getting a phone call makes it near impossible to get it to wake up). Enable profiles in SetCPU and only enable the Sleep profile. Edit it and set the max/min CPU to 250. People have said this seems to work helping get the phone to wake up quickly.

As a head’s up, it seems that people have started picking up the OTA updates. Seems a little early, and no one I know directly has a confirmed update. Then again, we’re running 1.1 and it disables OTA so we can work on it before updating.

Stream The Con!

If you haven’t read the news, ShmooCon will be streamed to the Internet live via ustream this year. Tickets sold out almost immediately for 2010, which leaves a lot of people wondering what’s going on. Now everyone can watch the talks from home. What’s even better is that I just noticed a free ustream app in the Android Market! Dare I put two and two together?

I think I’m personally excited because while I’m doing security I might be able to tune in and see some talks that I can’t get to… *grins*

Real Life or CG?

I was graced by Heidi and given a link to quite possibly some of the most amazing CG I’ve seen recently. It is absolutely stunning. I recommend watching it in full-screen.

The Third & The Seventh

Pastebin and Mercurial

I decided to start adding additional functionality to this site. As much as I feel like I’ll benefit from having a place to focus my mental energy, having the tools to assist in that focus would be a huge plus. The first two things I thought of were a personal pastebin, and a revision control system.

Pastebin was fairly easy to get going. Since I’m using Nginx, the only pain was setting up the scripts for FCGI (as noted in my previous post). After that it was quite simple. The one problem I had was the SQL provided for pastebin didn’t work. It bombed on one of the KEYS. I didn’t feel like worrying about it, so I configured it to use files instead. Just as easy.

For a revision control system, I decided to try Mercurial. I’ve heard good things about it, and I know a few people who are running it as well. I also wanted to get a web frontend working. Nothing fancy, just enough to see what’s going on. My main goal for this was to put my rc files in an rcs of some sort so I can continue to modify them and review changes. I’ve been modifying them a lot lately, and found that bouncing back and forth between changes resulted in a lot of commented lines. It’ll also be nice to pull my rc files onto whatever machine I’m on, or if I can’t install hg, I can always just get them off the website. This was a little tougher to install. Most people suggest using Nginx as a proxy and use Apache as the backend server. I wound up going that route after many attempts as getting FCGI in Nginx playing nicely with Mercurial. But hey, now I have a place to house my rc files. Well worth the effort.

Late Night Productivity

For the fifth day in a row I find myself awake at almost 1am, and there’s no sign of being tired in sight. But being a geek has its advantages when this happens. While most people would complain about being awake, try to read a book to coax their body to sleep, or just toss-and-turn in bed, I get to enjoy hacking on stuff. It’s amazing how much more productive I get as the night goes on. This is the sort of schedule I was on in college. I’d spend my days cranking through classes and work, rip through homework as quickly as possible, and then spend the rest of the night learning stuff.

With my late night tonight, I setup this domain, purchased a VPS from Linode, and built the site. I think the biggest pain was configuring nginx with php-fastcgi support. On that note, I find it horribly frustrating that nginx, one of the most lightweight and speedy web servers, causes so much pain to get PHP working. I hardly think that installing spawn-fcgi, and writing a bunch of custom executables and init scripts is an adequate way to go about doing it. But hey, at least it works.

I guess I’ll get back to working on the site. If I can’t get tired soon, I might as well take a shower and go back to work…

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