Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Erling Ellingsen has written an awesome toolset for smacking your Mac to switch desktops. Here’s a modified version for those of us who are using Exposé instead of virtual desktops. You can smack the MacBook Pro to trigger Exposé. Because all I’m doing is firing up Exposé, you only need this script and Amit Singh’s AMSTracker.

Update: A slightly simpler version is available here. The only difference is that it lets you put AMSTracker and smaxpose.command in the same directory rather than having to put AMSTracker in your PATH.

Note that if you are using something other than F9 for Expose, you’ll need to change the key code from 101 to whatever works.

Wednesday, May 17th from 5:30pm to 8pm and maybe beyond at AS220 (115 Empire Street, Providence). Read all about it and RSVP here.

I did a video on the Vectrex and one on the Hasbro Zoombox for Make this week. 

When I decided to move to WordPress, Yahoo Hosting seemed like a good choice. Unfortunately, it was not. This site is frequently unresponsive, the web control panel is often very slow and no substitute for a shell. But the worst problem of all is that the support is not so hot. I’ve had a problem with my MySQL database (”Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’”) and an open trouble ticket for over a week, and they haven’t fixed it.

After they sent me canned responses a couple of times claiming they don’t support WordPress, I finally got them to treat it as a MySQL problem (my mistake, really–I was phrasing it as a WP problem). Five days ago, they asked me to set my MySQL password and send it to them, which is roughly when they stopped answering my emails.

Of course, they’ll eventually fix it, and I’ll stop whining. But the reality has set in: I’m not comfortable without shell access (It’s not you, Yahoo… it’s me).

As soon as I get enough time, I plan to install WordPress on AS220.org, which will also make it easier for our users to blog, and I’ll move my stuff over there. I figure if I announce my intention publicly, it will make me more likely to follow through!

Update: Well, it’s fixed, and not only was it easy enough, but it was something I should have found on my own. I made the mistake of assuming it was deep enough under the hood that I couldn’t fix it without help (as I said, not having a shell makes me uncomfortable). So now I need something else to kick me in the ass and get me to set up WordPress at AS220. Even if I don’t need to switch over there ASAP, I need to do my part make it easier for Providence artists to blog!