Wire Free Office

As my home office continues its "work in progress" phase. I'm continually looking for ways to declutter it from excessive computer wires. Hence the declutter your desk page.

Quicksilver b54

For some reason at the blacktree stie quicksilver only goes up to b53. I heard the developer had left the project and is working for google, which explains the lack of updates for the application.

Why is this important. Well I wasted about 20 minutes of my day trying to get the famous control-enter (ctrl-enter) to work for quicksilver to set myself a reminder. Eventually I found that this was a bug that had to do with quicksilver and Leopard.

Moral of the story? Download the b54 build from macupdate to handle all those nasty quicksilver/leopard incompatibilities.

For those terminal geeks like me

How freaking awesome is this!

Coding Languages

In my other blog I always tried to address the issue of which programming language is best for bioinformatics. To be bluntly honest, I think most of my assessments were BS for the lack of a better term. How can I suggest which language is best which out trying out all on my own. Which brings me to this Steve Yegge throwback post talking about several different coding languages and why he likes/dislikes them. Why should you/I trust Steve? Well at the time of this post, he claimed to know about 30-40 languages, he maintains a very popular popular blog and he works for google. Your call.

Practice Coding

For the longest time, I've been trying to figure out ways to get better at programming. When I asked professionals they would always suggest, "read other people's code". Which is fine but can be overwhelming to a professionally inexperienced programmer. I mean whose code should I look at? What project am I interested in? How can I tell if its good or not.

Anyways, I decided to finally open up my Google Reader after a month of inactivity and see if there was anything in there to inspire to me. And to my delight, I found the most recent Coding Horror post that covered exactly what I've been trying to figure out on my own for years. Thanks Jeff!

Python Tutorial

I stumbled upon this tutorial covering python and the PDB. Seems like a good link to include on my other blog once I get that a little cleaned up.

Future Dog (Hopefully)

So I had a dog before, but at my own fault was not responsible enough to take care of it. Now that I'm more mature and married, I've been trying to find a dog that both my wife and I like.

I think a boxer is our winner. Now all I got to do is figure out how to find breeders and wait for a mild mannered, female puppy to pop out!

Developing on a Mac

So I've been doing development work on a Mac for a couple years now. Yet, I still don't feel like I've harnessed 100% of the development power it offers. For instance, I have textmate, but I've just used it as a text editor and I know it has so much more to offer.

That's why I was pretty psyched to see this site. Definitely something I plan to check out, amongst many other things!

CVS and Web Development

I've been neglecting both of my sites, ryancastillo.org and biowhat.com, for the past year. Eventually after all this marriage, moving, and job craziness die down I'd like to get back to working/posting on the actual sites.

Unfortunately in the past when working with editing the sites' layout I was working with the "caveman" approach. In an attempt to get myself back to modern day web development I found this pretty good page covering web development and the use of a content versioning system with it.

Security Primer

So I lied. I haven't been posting as frequently as I claimed I was going to. In fact I haven't been posting at all.

This past week I was working on installing Apache Derby on my Mac and decided to take the time to learn more about Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). I found this awesome post that gave me a good overview of the application and how to install/run it in OSX.

UPDATE 11/7/2008: So I followed this primer word for word and had the keys backed up. I've been working on a new computer so I never got the chance to transfer everything over. Decided it was time that I handled this for these keys and went about restoring my public and private keychains. The public one went fine and imported with no problems.

The private one was another story. I banged my head against a wall for an hour before realizing what was going on. In the tutorial linked above, it mentions that when you export your private key "you will also symmetrically encrypt your private key backup with a passphrase and then output it as an ASCII armored file". What I was doing was trying to import the private key without decrypting it. Upon figuring this out, I realized the following command worked (with the use of my passphrase of course):

gpg --decrypt privatekey.pgp.asc | gpg --import

Just a gotcha for anyone that ever reads this blog (mainly me)!