mattbriançon

I know I haven’t been posting but, like I warned you earlier, I have so little time these days. I have a 10 page paper due in 9 hours. I’m on page 1. Yeah, I’m screwed. Then I have to start studying for my finals that are on Thursday and Friday.

There is some good news though. Tomorrow night I’m making the drive up to Detroit with a buddy of mine to go see Ted Leo which is going to be frickin’ sweet!! Bad part: I’m gonna get back this time tomorrow. Yeah, two late nights. Then tons of studying. This weeks sucks a lot.

Wish me luck, I desperately need it.

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I decided that while I’m coming up with a new design I don’t want to accidentally break my current layout. So rather than making changes here, I setup another WP blog at http://mattbriancon.com/tester where I can go crazy and not risk losing anything.

Right now I’m brushing up on my CSS/HTML/PHP skills by creating a wordpress theme based on the New York Times website. All the progress I’ve made was done today which is actually a lot faster than I thought. That being said, I have two tests on Thursday and am going to restrain myself from doing much more until the tests and the paper I have due on Monday are over and done with.

Check back for more progress and I always appreciate constructive criticism. Later.

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There isn’t a whole more to say. I just spent the last 30 minutes upgrading to WP 2.1.3. Half an hour!! I await the day that I can just press the “Upgrade Now” button and everything with will be done for me.

I realize this is very difficult but since the guys over at wordpress.org/.com are so keen on telling everyone how easy it is use and how many people are already using it, I think this this should be their top priority.

Anyway, this is gonna be a horrible few weeks so I don’t guarantee any posting. Later.

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I’m going to be messing (or coming up) with new designs for a while so don’t be surprised if you find yourself looking at a new (possibly ugly) site. Have to fear though: you’ll still have the same content (you can decide whether that’s good or bad…).

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Early last month Mac OSX Hints ran an article that described how to remotely connect to someone’s desktop to offer support to the non-tech-savvy people in your family.

This is just what I’ve looking been for as I get more than a few calls a weeks from family saying that something (they usually don’t have the faintest idea of what…) wasn’t working and that I need to help them fix it. What usually ensues is fairly easy instructions getting way too complicated, then a lot of yelling, then me explaining that they need to stop talking so that I can help, and finally after half an hour, a somewhat apologetic “Oh…I just restarted and it seems to be working…”

So it goes :’-(

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I set up an account over at tumblr.com a couple days ago and am really starting to like it. You can see my tumblog at mattbriancon.tumblr.com.

If you’ve never heard of it, tumblr is a blogging platform but it’s really slimmed down. Rather than just having a generic editor for posts, it gives you a few “template” posts. For instance, if you choose to add a video all you have to do it copy and paste the URL from Youtube, GoogleVideo, etc., add a caption, and click post.

There is an option to add “regular” posts (I guess like this one…) but I don’t intend to use it. From checking out other people’s tumblr blogs, it seems like tumblr is just the “quick and lite” version of people’s blog. You know, the place where you can just throw anything and everything without having to write a long post. As of now that’s all I’m gonna use it for.

Check it out for yourself. It’s free.

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The other day, Ze Frank of “The Show”, zefrank.com, and zefrank.org released most of this songs on iTunes. Obviously iTunes isn’t the best medium for release because of the DRM that comes with it but it’s better than nothing.

Also, if you hate DRM (like most do) then after you download it, burn it to a CD and then rip it back to your computer. Tada! No more DRM! For an iTunes link head over to Ze’s post on his blog.

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If you go back a couple pages in the archives you’ll see that I’ve been trying to learn Cocoa for a while but until now haven’t found a good tutorial.

This changed a couple days ago when I saw a cool story on the front page of digg. This guy (username: Masna360) made a quick screencast on how to connect a button to an action in Xcode and Interface Builder. This was just what I had been looking for. I watched the video on Youtube and saw that he had also made a second video outlining how to set the text of labels and text fields on the UI.

This is all very basic but it was exactly what I hadn’t been able to find. Anyway, it turns out he’s on Revver too (which is nice because you can upload longer, higher quality videos) and you can find him (he tells us his real name is Anthony) over here.

If you’re trying to learn the basics of Xcode and Interface Builder you should definitely check this out.

Hopefully these aren’t the last of the videos he’s going to make.

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Well that would have been nice to know when tried setting it up over the weekend…

AMD/ATi Knowledge Base

One of the coolest features of Linux and ATi doesn’t officially support it. This is lame. I guess there is a reason AMD sucks these days.

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I’ve been using Quicksilver for a while now but have only just recently started looking into the more advanced (read: unknown) features of QS.

I did some searching and found an article over at 43 Folders going over some cool tricks you can do in QS.

I particularly like the clipboard history one. I’ll definitely be using that.

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