Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: software

  • Plex + Roku = TV

    Plex + Roku = TV

    I’m really trying not to add new devices to my life. I picked up a Roku last year so that I could watch CBS’ internet TV on my regular TV. I chose that instead of the Amazon or Apple TV because the Roku also let you add ‘apps’ for regular TV channels (SyFy, Freeform, PBS) and if I missed a TV episode due to travel, I could watch it on the big television.

    Then I wanted to play some shows that I’d saved as MP4s from my laptop to my TV, without a new device like a Chromecast.

    The solution was Plex

    Plex is a media server you can run on your computer that lets you add all your media, even things that don’t exist in iTunes, and organize them sanely. You can manage it in your web browser (or command line) and while you do have to have an account with Plex the service, you don’t have to pay or sign up for any of the services.

    If you have an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire you can use those too, but I used my Roku, added my media, and boom. Watching videos I own from my laptop on my TV.

    A couple caveats:

    1. If you download MP4s from cough torrent cough places, you’ll need to get their subtitles too.
    2. TV show files need to named SHOWNAME - S##E## - EPISODENAME.EXT to work properly.

    It’s not perfect, but it’s better than trying to watch TV on your computer.

  • Software Death Isn’t New

    Software Death Isn’t New

    The answer, Jeff, is yes. But they’re weird and hard to find.

    Back around 2008 or so, my father published a paper on the death of Lisa Norris.

    Don’t know who she is? Don’t worry. Most people don’t. Norris died of radiation overexposure that was determined to be caused by a software issue. People hadn’t fully tested software changes. I only know who she is because I maintain my father’s website and converted all his PDF articles to posts. In doing so, I read them all.

    I’m not a mathematician like my father, and luckily he and I share a fantastic trait. We’re both used to explaining technical things to non-technical people. Or rather, we can explain the technical things to people who are cleverly technical in other arenas. Yes, that’s where I learned it.

    When I saw Jeff’s tweet, I asked if he was serious (as opposed to just ruminating on Twitter) and then directed him to two of my father’s articles. First I pulled up the one about Lisa Norris, since that stuck in my memory. But then I remembered he’d written an article for the Nikkei Asian Review that was more non-mathematician readable. Knowing that he’s written the first paper gives a little more credence to the statements he makes when he talks about Death by Software.

    The part that has always stuck in my mind is this quote:

    As Dr. Nancy Leveson wrote in her Therac-25 investigation report: “Most accidents are system accidents; that is, they stem from complex interactions between various components and activities. To attribute a single cause to an accident is usually a serious mistake. We want to emphasize the complex nature of accidents and the need to investigate all aspects of system development and operation to understand what has happened and to prevent future accidents.”

    When we talk about how software can (and will continue to) kill people, we get stymied by the considerably complexity of the question. Did Lisa Norris die because no human thought “This looks weird?” That is also why it’s hard to say “Give me the statistics on all people who died because of software failure.” We have to define what, specifically, is a software failure.

    In the book (and the movies) “Fail-Safe,” we face nuclear war because a light burns out causing a false-positive alert resulting in American bombers heading to the USSR. It’s very similar to the boom “Red Alert” (and of course the movie “Dr. Stranglove”). The failure is that our fail-safe measures, the steps we take to make sure that a machine (or computer) cannot make the situation worse is nothing more than a pipe dream.

    At its crux, the deaths by software are often the result of failure of imagination. I first learned of the phrase when reading about the Apollo 1 fire back in 1967. Astronaut Frank Borman spoke at the post-mortem hearings of how the deaths, the fire was born from our failure to imagine how things could go wrong.

    Why don’t we have statistics? We would have to be very specific in what we ask for. How many people have died because their GPS was wrong? How many people died because the software to handle Anti-Lock Brakes failed? We do not lump all software failures together, making the research mystifying and bewildering. This is not meant as an excuse, though even to me it feels like one. We should be more transparent in how our software kills.

    And rest assured. Software kills.

  • NUX: Setting Up Ghost (Self Hosted)

    NUX: Setting Up Ghost (Self Hosted)

    Once I used Ghost Pro, I thought about self hosting. I have a WP site that’s basically wasted as a WP site. It’s small, it’s static, and it rarely changes. I thought it would be perfect for Node. There are also a couple of small, basically HTML, sites I run in the back of things. This would be fine to manage that.

    But first I had to address a major misconception.

    You Install Ghost on Your Server

    For some reason in my head I had this working like Jekyll, which I would install on my computer and push up to my server. No, I’m not so much installing Ghost as Deploying Ghost.

    But I Installed Ghost On Your Computer

    I decided to do this anyway, just to see what I was getting into.

    To install Ghost you must install Node.js first. Since I have Homebrew, this is two commands:

    $ brew unlink node
$ brew install node

    I had an older version of Node.js installed for whatever reason.

    Sadly I can’t install Ghost this way.

    My Brew output for installing node.js and not Ghost

    Next you download Ghost (I was download 564,730) and at this point I hesitated. The directions don’t tell you where to put the files. It just says this:

    Next, grab the newly extracted ‘ghost-#.#.#’ folder and drag it onto the tab bar of your open terminal window, this will make a new terminal tab which is open at the correct location.

    Since I know that upgrading involves replacing the files, I’m no fool, and I made a new folder setup: ~/Sites/ghost/sitename.com/ That’s where I ran node commands:

    $ npm install --production
$ npm start

    Done. Now I have Ghost up and running locally.

    Install Ghost on My Server

    In a word? Ow.

    The main issue is Node.js and Apache both want to use the same ports. That’s impossible. And I want to keep Apache running port 80 because this VPS runs… well… WordPress. This is where I stopped the first time I tried to do all this and tossed this post into a long draft.

    There are directions on How to Host Ghost on an Apache Subdomain, which luckily is what I wanted to do. Except it was complicated and messy and required root.

    So the NUX here? Absolute crap. It’s just not something a new user would want to do, be able to do, or be able to maintain.

    And that sucks.

    Ghost’s got a great interface, one that I like better than WordPress for blogs and simple sites. It’s nailed simple in a way we crave. But it came at a cost. WordPress’s simple to install is fraught by it’s IDIC complex. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, with the themes and plugins, lends WordPress amazing abilities but a pretty insane learning curve. Ghost I could sort out in a couple hours but you really can’t do too much with. I wouldn’t use it for a store. I might use it for a blog if I had to start over.

    Except I can’t (easily) self host it because of stupid Node.js.

    If they can sort that out, make it so I can easily, without root, install and manage Ghost, I’ll be back.

    Until then, Managed Ghost Hosting is the way to go. Or WordPress. Take your pick.

  • WordPress iOS App: Good for Bloggers

    WordPress iOS App: Good for Bloggers

    This is a big distinction.

    The app is great. I love using it to write a blog post when I’m on the go, and save for my annoyance that it wants to default to publish and even if I move it to draft, it saves the date and time that moment in time, it’s a good app.

    But it’s not great for non-bloggers.

    Let me step back. I run a little database site on WordPress. It’s a listing of TV shows and characters and while it has a blog, it has a bunch of custom post types. Want to know what you can’t write on the iOS app? Pages and CPTs. You also can’t add new users or plugins or anything like that. All I can do is write up a blog post about things. Sure, I can upload pictures but I can’t add them to the library in general, just to posts (and yes, I care about that sometimes). Uploading and setting a featured image is also more complicated than it should be. I often end up with the image uploaded twice.

    Realistically, I look at the iOS app and I’m not sure who the target audience is. It’s very easy to add my WordPress.com account and view my reader there, but that’s a different group of people than the ones who want to blog. Then there’s the thought of actually blogging. If you’re on WordPress.com, you can’t add custom post types, so that issue is null, but you still can’t edit pages or Portfolios (which comes with all .com blogs now).

    It makes you start to wonder if there should be separate apps, for WordPress.com and self-hosted people, and to that I think not. I’m always going to be logged in to WordPress.com on my iPad because of Jetpack and a desire to see my stats. But at the same time, I really don’t care as much about my WordPress.com blogs. I should, but over time I’ve merged them all into my self-hosted sites because it’s easier for me to go to one place. It’s with that in mind I think we should just have one place for all our WordPress iOS/app needs.

    Then you have to consider what the use-case is of a WordPress app. For me, it’s that I want to work on a draft post while on the go and save it offline, only to have it magically get tossed up onto my blog when I’m online. I think of it like Numbers and iCloud. I can edit my archery spreadsheet on my iPhone while I’m at the range and it’s automagically updated on my laptop when I next open Numbers there. Of course, WordPress blogs don’t really work that way.

    But at this point, that’s all the iOS app is good for, because I can’t administer my site from it. This isn’t so bad, since people like Boren are rabid mobile-first devs for the WordPress admin dashboard. At the same time, we’ve only had it be mobile responsive since 3.8 or so, and it’s been spotty for doing ‘everything’ due to OS limitations, which makes it imperfect. As much as I’m a fan of using WordPress to WordPress, it’s the simple things that make me look at Desk for my laptop. Someplace to write.

    Except for that, the iOS app still fails because I can only write a blog post, and most WordPress sites are more than just blogging now.

    At WordCamp San Francisco 2014, I heard more and more people refer to their sites as ‘A WordPress’ than ‘A WordPress blog.’ Every day at work I hear people asked if they would like to setup a WordPress on their site. We’ve verbified the word, but we haven’t verbified the app yet.

  • TotalSpaces

    TotalSpaces

    For everyone at WCSF who asked “How did you get your Spaces on Mac to have names?” here’s the answer.

    TotalSpaces 2, by Binary Rage, is “the ultimate grid spaces manager for your Mac” and they’re not wrong. It took me a long time to agree that I needed to utilize spaces on my Mac, but as I started to want to isolate windows to concentrate (and turned off a lot of notifications), I realized that everything in one ‘space’ wasn’t a great idea.

    I sat down and broke out my spaces into what I frequently do:

    • WordPress
    • DreamHost
    • coding
    • writing
    • being social
    • watching movies

    There is some overlap of apps, but in order to make my life easier, I use Chrome for DreamHost and Chromium for ‘WordPress’ (i.e. me) with separate user accounts in Chrome(ium). That way they can sync between users. I made eight spaces and assigned various apps to only open in those spaces, which is why my screen bounces between spaces when I boot up my laptop. This works fine for me, I just don’t look at it for the 4 seconds it takes for an SSD to boot.

    Allocating what apps open where

    The only issue that remains is that sometimes I want multiple apps in multiple spaces, like a web browser. I have Chromium set to ‘Ipstenu’ but I also want it over in my IRC/Slack window, so I can poke things while I talk in meetings. Right now I just tossed one browser window over there, but I wish I could designate an app to be in only two specific spaces at a time.

    I do keep some apps, like BBEdit, set to ‘all spaces’ for that, but that makes it a little weird as it means that window is open in all spaces. The alternative to that is ‘none’ which I use for iTerm2 to have an SSH window for each space.

    TotalSpaces2 has a free trial, so I advocate people test it and use it to see if it helps their flow. It made mine perfect for my brain, which was the most important thing for me.

  • It’s Not Beer It’s Homebrew

    It’s Not Beer It’s Homebrew

    If you’re a rookie getting your hands around all this webdev stuff, and you’re on a Mac, you may have already come to a rude awakening when you find out that, for reasons unknown to man, Mac decided we didn’t need wget.

    Beer bottlesThat’s how I was introduced to Homebrew.

    I love wget, because it’s a super simple and fast way to download something. wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip is the fastest way for me to download a zip, and I use it regularly. So one day, when deving code, I realized I needed a plugin. I went to wget it and got a horrible message.

    -bash: wget: command not found

    After searching around, I was about to download, compile, and install wget when a comment on StackExchange said “Try Homebrew.”

    Everyone’s dersive comments aside about how ‘real’ programers don’t install packages (seriously people), I said to myself “Ipstenovich,” I said. Yes, I call myself that sometimes. “You use yum to install packages on your server because it’s easier and safer. Why wouldn’t you use the same thing here?” Over to http://brew.sh/ I went and stared at the installer command like a fish.

    ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

    The call ‘ruby -e’ means “run Ruby and tell it to call this URL externally…” And then it clearly was calling github for an installer. It’s tough to decide to trust a new program but after some serious banging around, I trust the Homebrew.

    Homebrew Logo

    Once installed, which doesn’t take long at all, I ran the check brew doctor which told me a couple things:

    1. I’d installed SVN and Git on my own (truth) so I needed to change my .profile (with directions how)
    2. I had a half-baked attempt at installing ImageMagick that needed cleaning (with suggestions how)
    3. I had MacPorts still in my /opt/ folder, that needed removing (with directions how)
    4. I needed to install xcode command line tools (with directions how)
    5. xQuartz was out of date
    6. I hadn’t updated my brew list in a bajillion years

    Most people won’t have that last one. I did once have an older install of Homebrew that I’d never really cleaned up. However the other ones took me about an hour to clean up properly, because I was watching Fargo (the movie) at the time. Once installed and set up, I was able to install wget and upgrade it. Ditto OpenSSL (because Heartbleed, you know). It’s great.

    Homebrew is pre-1.0 which means there can and will be issues. Don’t panic, for most of what anyone needs, this is perfect. It’s also good at upgrading when you need to:

    Output of Homebrew, upgrading a few items at once

    The little beer mug is awesome.

    One of the nice things about Homebrew is that it doesn’t use (nor advocate the use of) sudo. This is really good for security and makes me feel much safer.

    Go forth, rookies, and install Homebrew! It will make your development much happier!