Posted on April 29th, 2007 | 5 Comments »
Like so many fanboys before me, I love new Apple products. I get excited over every new toy that comes out, thinking it will revolutionize something, usually to be slightly let down by launch day. The Apple TV was no different.
I ordered my Apple TV in January, a day or two after they were announced. I was excited about what I thought it could be. I was excited about what I thought it should be. I expected to be able to play all of my music and movies on my Apple TV without any problems. That is, until, I found out that it will only play MP4 video, and is pre-dispositioned to streaming content. I still gave it a chance. I ripped several seasons of South Park with Handbrake, just so I could re-watch them on my Apple TV. It got old. Fast. I hated the idea of needing to re-encode all of my existing video files, to be able to watch them on my television.
There were, of course, the folks who managed to crack open the Apple TV boxes, and coax them into playing Xvid files in pure warranty-voiding bliss. That wasn’t for me, however. I happen to like the idea of keeping the warranty on my Rev A hardware in tact. So, for a few weeks, my Apple TV sat next to my cable box, unplugged, waiting for an opportunity to be properly utilized.
Enter Patchstick.
Patchstick is a simple little disk image that you can expand onto a thumb drive, attach to your Apple TV, and within minutes, have SSH access, as well as a host of codecs installed and willing to be used. I had to give this a shot.
I got the image in place on a 1 GB thumb drive, and then plugged my Apple TV back into an outlet for the first time in a while. After the Apple TV boot sequence was done, I stuck the thumb drive in the back of the box, and held down Menu & ‘-’ on my remote, which apparently tells the Apple TV to boot into some form of recovery mode. The box restarted without any trouble, ran through some scripts, and then told me to unplug/reconnect my Apple TV. I did so, and everything looked/felt identical. A simple portscan later, however, and I discovered that I did indeed have an open port 22, meaning SSH was good to go.
Now that SSH was enabled, and I was connected to the box, a simple command :
sudo /usr/sbin/AppleFileServer turned on file sharing. I could now download multiple plugins for the Apple TV, and simply install them via Finder on my imac. Within minutes, I was happily playing my Xvid collection on my Apple TV. I think now I will finally use the Apple TV for what I had hoped it could do in the first place.
Posted on April 25th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Coda is the latest offering from Panic Inc.. It claims to be “one-window web development.” and that it allows you to “grow beautiful code”. Naturally, this software interested me. I’ve been on the quest for a good web development centric IDE for years, trying many solutions and never being fully satisfied. DreamWeaver was slow, had ugly dialogs, and didn’t play nice with SVN. Zend studio was bulky, and didn’t mirror remote files locally, which made it a pain in the neck when working with any form of version control, and a remote testing server. Admittedly, Coda has no support for version control either, but it’s a native cocoa app, so I was anxious to give it a try.
I’ll clarify what I was expecting. I’m a PHP programmer by trade. I sit down for hours each day, and write lines upon lines of PHP code. I want to have an application that will let me develop, test, and preview an web applications output all from one window. If I can upload my changes to a remote site or commit them to an SVN repository, that’s icing on the cake.
So, I fire up Safari, and head on over to download coda. First off, the site they’ve put together for it looks very nice. Clean, simple, easy to navigate. Find the “download” button, and click. A few minutes later, i’ve dropped it into my applications folder, and i’m ready to roll.
Upon launching Coda for the first time, i’m greeted with the option to sign up for Panic’s “eList”, which I gracefully decline. Ok, now we’re into the meat and potatoes. I apparently have to set up a “Site”, which i’ll assume is a project. Click the “Add Site” button, and i’m presented with 3 sets of fields. One for “Site” which appears to be generic path information for the site, “Connecting” which would be the ftp information for the remote site, and “Terminal” which is just some SSH information. My first experiment is to set the software up for a project i’m working on, that’s located remotely in a subdomain. I configure the FTP client without worry, and appear to configure the local/remote paths properly. All that’s left to do is connect to the remote server, and start having fun.
I hit connect. Error. Apparently Coda cannot chdir to my remote directory. I SSH into the server, and verify that I have my remote path set up correctly. Everything appears to be in order, so I try again. Error. Again. Coda throws the same error, but this time, i’m connected to my remote site. Open a file for editing, and let’s go. “index.php” is my file of choice, for this momentous occasion. Everything seems to open just fine, and within a second i’m editing my remote code. It looks like we’ve got some nice syntax highlighting. I make a quick change, hit Command + S, and click the “Preview” tab. Error. File not found. Ok, no problem, maybe related to the previous config. Control+click index, and download it locally. Switch over to the “Local” view, and edit the file. My changes don’t appear to be here, but they weren’t big changes anyway. I make the same changes, command+s again, and hit preview. Error. File not found. Sheesh. I determine that my odd remote configuration for this site might be the problem. I set up the domain root, and try again.
Now I have a second site, this time, a very vanilla config. Connecting works just fine, downloading, saving, Coda is starting to make me happy. I hit the “Preview” button one more time. Error. This time, Coda is previewing my PHP file as if it were plain text, via the “file://” url in the preview window. I’ve already wasted 20 minutes with this software, and it’s still playing nice. I give up for the night.
Tune in tomorrow for “Second Impression of Coda”