Pete's Eats

I’ve started taking photo’s of that most beautiful of things, the first coffee of the day. I like the idea of challenging myself to taking a photo of the same subject every day for a year but the ‘norm’ of photographing yourself just isn’t me… This way, I get to share my morning coffee and show you just how special it is as well as try and keep my photography interesting given the same subject.

At the time of writing, I’m 4 days in…

Here’s the Flickr set; and here’s the tag on Twitter…

My wife Nete is running the Race for Life 5k on 5th July 2009 in Brighton. This won’t be the easiest thing for her (read here why) but nevertheless she’s hoping to raise a decent amount for Cancer Research UK.

I’d love it if you’d consider sponsoring her for taking this on. Click here to sponsor her online!

I’ve decided to use Dan’s new Tails product in order to monitor and track Storyplanet bugs. So, if you’re a Storyplanet user and have caught some bugs then please head over here and let us know.

Having a bug tracking service like Tails is brilliant for startups like us and hats off to Dan for putting out such an amazing product.

Now we need to decide on the best way of offering support beyond the tutorials, FAQ’s and forums that we’ve already lined up…

So, it’s been a tough slog getting to this point (I’m planning on writing some more about this schlep soon – stay tuned) but we just pushed a V 0.51 of the Storyplanet editing app…

The release notes for today’s push are:

Bug Fixes:

Player UI: Some graphic elements were incorrectly aliasing and making it difficult to read. These elements now display correctly.

Adding components on the main stage: Dragging a new component to the main stage caused it to lose size information and display at 1 x 1 pixels. All graphical elements now retain their dimensions and display correctly.

Logged in status Clicking ‘keep me logged in’ did not work as intended: Selecting ‘keep me logged in’ now works as it should across multiple sessions.

Chapters An unnamed chapter was added by default to every story: Chapters must be added intentionally now.

Exchange View When viewing elements inside the ‘Exchange’ screen, a ‘publish’ button was present and caused confusion: This ‘publish’ button has been removed.

Components Vs Widgets The naming of components and widgets was confusing in places: Some elements have been renamed in order to be easier to understand.

Resource conversion: The server responsible for converting the files as they were uploaded was suffering intermittent failures. This service has been restored and monitoring is now in place.

Automated Email: The server email functionality sometimes would not send automated responses and instead displayed an SMTP error. The server email functionality has been restored completely and automated responses are now sent as normal.

Exchange refresh: When you deleted a piece of content (story or widget etc) from your exchange view, there was a bug where the list was not refreshed accordingly. Deleting content from exchange view now refreshes to reflect the changes.

Features added:

File import: When importing new files the original filename was not kept. The original filename is now retained and displayed.

Save As: Until now, you could ‘Save’ and ‘Publish’ only. You can now choose to ‘Save As’ your story and save a copy under a new filename. Note: ‘Save As’ is also working on widgets.

We’re anticipating following through after this push with a V0.52 release pretty quickly and that will deliver a similarly sized list of bug fixes and even more added new features. So, if you haven’t already then head over to Storyplanet to sign up.

Shhh! But we’ll be releasing a new set of beta invites this week…

This post is mainly to test the embed code from Storyplanet and how it can integrate into WP.

We’re getting pretty close to a decent early beta release so if you do go and check us out (Storyplanet) then feel free to sign up because we’ll be firing out some invitations very soon.

I’ve just migrated to a new 17″ MBP from an AIR and given that the migration process is very slow and very prone to errors because everything has to be done via wifi (no firewire on the AIR) I decided to install this machine from scratch.

There are lots of benefits to doing this but two weeks later I’m still finding things I’ve missed and need to install/retrieve from my fileserver etc…

I have encountered some issues though and the one that stumped me the most for a while was being unable to install my 3 3g dongle. Well, more precisely, not being able to install the management software for it. I had it running and connecting through the network prefpane pretty easily, but the official software also allows you to monitor and therefore keep a track of the amount of data you’re using and as it was a bulk payg account this was pretty useful.

Three’s website is pointless when it comes to support, and Huawei’s isn’t much better unfortunately and their both even more rubbish at identifying error codes when you have no other information to go on.

When installing my modem’s software, I kept receiving a “Error 5370″ dialog box with no other warning. So, I copied, manually, all of the files (plists and preferences etc) from my old machine and put them onto my new machine in the right place. From that point, the 3Connect app could see my usb stick and tell me what network was available/strength etc. But, it still could not connect and informed me that the profile had no location information. Upon opening the profile manager (Tools > HSDPA/UMTS/GPRS Options > Manage Profiles) it would ask me to select a profile and then I could apply the settings, unfortunately the app then gave a bbd for a few seconds and crashed without altering anything.

I figured that it was something to do with files not being written, therefore a permissions error. Running disk utility and verifying the permissions a few times didn’t make a difference and the web was strangely devoid of references to this error. So, the only option open to me was to try and install the app as ‘root’ and see if that enabled the files to be written.

To do this, I opened a new terminal window and navigated to the 3Connect folder. Then I typed ’sudo open “3Connect Setup Installer”; the system asked for me to confirm my password and then opened the app. I assumed that I was now running as root and continued to install.

It didn’t work.

For the last week I’ve mulled this over trying to figure out why I can’t get this damn thing running and this morning figured it out. Running the app as root like that actually doesn’t run the app as root… The app is actually contained within the ‘app’ reference. If you go to any OSX app and right click you’ll see a “Show Package Contents” option and if you go further into that you’ll find all of the resources and images etc that the app uses.

So, to cut an even longer story short, if you are having the same problem as described above then you need to do the following:

1. 1. Open a terminal and navigate your way to the “3Connect Setup Assistant” whether you have a copy in your ‘Applications/3Connect/’ folder or on the usb stick drive itself doesn’t matter as far as I can tell
2. 2. Type (with the quotes intact): sudo “/Applications/3Connect/3Connect Setup Assistant.app/Contents/MacOS/MobileManager Setup Assistant”
3. 3. Follow the UI as normal; this should be now running as the root user and be able to write the necessary files without any further problems

Just running the ‘3Connect Setup Assistant’ as root won’t work.

Happy surfing.

I have a pretty crappy cold at the moment and my throat is so scratchy it’s driving me to distraction but I managed to get out for a walk in the park with Pip this morning thinking that the fresh air would do me some good. I’m so glad I made the effort, it’s too easy to just decide to stay indoors and perpetuate the misery you’re feeling I guess. With the beautiful sunshine we’ve had all week it was the perfect remedy and even though the cold is still there I feel much better inside.

I saw one single bush that had the prettiest blossom (see photo), and it made me think about being in Japan; made me smile inside.

I came across a pretty cool group on Flickr the other day called ‘Urban Acid!‘ when I saw a photograph from it in the explore section. I’m a fairly big fan of high saturation images and the cross processing on that image really caught my eye. It turned out that it was done by a fairly well known Photoshop plugin called, you guessed in, ‘Urban Acid!’ that was written in 2005 by Steven Almas.

It took me a while to find the action itself and along the way I found that someone (Evil4blue) had also done a Lightroom preset that gives very similar results so I thought I’d mirror them here and give people another option to download. I was checking out so many sources that I failed to take note of where I eventually did get them so apologies for the lack of location credits here (if I do find out again then I’ll edit this accordingly). So here they are for you to download and play with yourself:

Here’s an example of an image before and after the process:

Before:

After:

I have some more examples in my Flickr stream too. I’d love to see your results as well, so let me know via Twitter, the comments here or comments in Flickr as well.

Late comments on the recent Flash Camp event in London…

So, back in February Adobe and FlashGen worked together to bring us a new event here in the UK called Flash Camp. I never went, but I’m assuming that it followed the format of the Flex Camps that ran sometime last year (I think).

The venue was fairly out of the way for anyone coming from the south, being in Hoxton. I know there are lots of agencies based around there but I can’t understand why to be honest – may as well be in Slough The actual building was also pretty shabby and fairly uncomfortable for more than an hour of sitting. But, these are minor points when talking about an event like this of course because it’s the presentations that most folks are there for.

Overall, the content itself was disappointingly basic. Not lacking in quality by any means, but just a little bit low level and pretty much aimed at beginners in my opinion. But, as an introduction to the Flash Platform, it would have been a perfect day I suspect.

I also wasn’t a huge fan of the late start (1pm) and late(ish) finish (9pm). Being from out of town, this meant that the ride home to Brighton was a bit of a drag especially as the trains were a little messed up after someone had unfortunately committed suicide on the line around Balcombe. Thankfully, I had company in the form of Seb and Niqui and that made for a seemingly shorter journey.

So, sketchy notes and a little late I guess but never mind. The day was a brilliant start to what I hope becomes a regular event. Awesome work by Mike, Andrew, Robin and team(s).

Great to see Anthony, Lee, Mike, Grant, John and everyone else!

I just took the plunge and installed Tweetdeck (despite some serious misgivings about having yet another AIR app that is not signed with unrestricted system access) and found it enables an easy way to see the tweets I’d marked as favourites over the months… Looking through them, I still think some of them are complete gems and I wanted to share:

hrheingold – “I first learned to play squash on acid. Forty years later, playing squash in only four dimensions is a breeze”

loic – “@joi has just been called a ‘venture communist’ on stage at Fortune Brainstorm as he promotes openess into the internet”

antimega – “you’re like the oyster of N****a, filtering out all the rubbish ideas and occasionally shitting a pearl”

moleitau – “When you yanqui wander home drunk you cannot possibly hope to pee on a 2000 year old bit of wall like I just did. So there.”

peterelst – “Light travels faster than sound. That’s why some people appear bright until you hear them speak”

adamgreenfield – “Cursing Apple and their software installation process. When did they get so very Redmondian? Fuck them in the eye”

I love having such a diverse range of friends as this, seeing them post on blogs, twitter, flickr etc etc over the course of a working day means I feel very much ‘in touch’ with them despite us being scattered across the globe. Ahh, hugs all round