Something I’ve been working on doing for a little while is getting my 500gb (300 of it partitioned for this) Time Machine drive moved to a new 1tb drive for this purpose. Well, it took forever and a few tries but I have finally completed a backup on the new drive!

I was first told to use the Restore feature in Disk Utility by dragging the drives into the restore tab… but that didn’t work. It gave me “Operation not permitted” errors — which prompted me to turn off Time Machine itself which I had forgot! Unfortunately, that didn’t fix the problem so I was forced to look for alternative solutions.

The next thing I tried was SuperDuper. It’s a file copier that apparently supports doing moving Time Machine backups. At least, that’s what I read on their and other websites. A few hours after trying that I got the files copied, but the permissions were all off so it made the Time Machine drive unusable. Frustrating!

Finally… I did it the long way. I had enough free disk space to make a dmg of the entire drive. I made one by selecting the original TM partition and hitting “New Image” in Disk Utility. After finishing that, I indexed the image by going to “Scan Image for Restore”. About 2 hours later, I was ready to do the block level copy by using the Restore tab and checking the “Erase destination” box. Thankfully, it worked! I had one thing left to try but I’m really happy that I didn’t have to waste more time getting it running.

Now to get RAID0 striping working on my 2 500gb drives…

Over the last few months, tons of things have happened:

• Shipped 2 iPhone apps, working on shipping another
• Bought a new computer!
• Spent xmas in Arizona, went skiing.
• Gone all over the place visiting people
• Spent 15 hours a week commuting on New Jersey Transit
• Collaborated on Latest Chatty, an iPhone application for Shacknews.com
• Signed on a lease for an apartment in NYC!

I’m going to attempt to start making posts on the programming and things that I’m doing, but with all the stuff going on it’s pretty difficult. Hopefully when things settle down (and I’m moved in) I’ll be able to provide some more documentation of what’s going on with things.

At the very least, here’s some links to the stuff that I’ve worked on at Apple’s AppStore:

LatestChatty - Chat and News Browser for Shacknews.com - I use this every day on the train… makes those 3 hours seem a little less depressing.
Cinsay Movies and Originals Video player for cinsay.com. We also did their website which came out pretty great.
The Grateful Dead This project was really interesting — it required a lot of development expertise (There’s Flex, CocoaOSX and Cocoa iPhone involved) and lots of memory and cpu conservation to get it done. I’m rather proud of this project as it took pretty much all the knowledge I had at the time to complete it.

At the moment, I’m in the middle of setting up git repositories on elrepositorio, and getting my 350gb TimeMachine backup over to a shiny new 1TB drive that will be single-purposed to that duty. TM saved my ass a few days ago — I had one of the bad Seagate hard drives so all of my data was unrecoverable. However, my Time Machine backup brought back everything, and I mean everything to exactly the same state it was before the hard drive died. I can’t recommend it more.

-Jeff

A quick test of the mobile upload feature of wordpress iPhone.

Since this is what I do for a living, I thought I’d start posting some tips for iPhone development. Most of the time, these will be cross-posted (or asked by me) on http://www.stackoverflow.com since I participate in the Q/A there. The site is a fantastic resource — check it out.

Without further adieu, tip #1. This is a pretty important thing to do in a lot of cases and not easily understood by looking at the documentation in the SDK. Funnily enough, it can be boiled down to a few short lines:

UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(self.view.frame.size); //size of your screenshot

//render the view you want in the new image context
[[self.view layer] renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];
UIImage* image = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
[image retain]; //this is an unretained UIImage, so let's save it
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

That’s it. There’s a lot more to be said about CGContexts and the like, but a lot of the difficulty of working with these are simplified with the UIGraphics*() functions. Search for them in the XCode documentation.

Tune in next time for another helpful tip!

Sup.

So, things have been pretty busy around here, which generally means no blogging or site updates. While that won’t change in the future, it is worth dropping a few things of note:

• SliceHost.com is totally completely 100% awesome. I have been with them for a while now and have had no downtime, no problems with CPU and Memory hogging from other VHosts (because there aren’t any!) and the price is extremely reasonable for the service that you get. I am running apache2, git, svn, irc, ftp, mail, mysql, and ssh servers without any problems whatsoever. Additionally, for LatestChatty.app that I have majorly contributed to I run an API server that takes considerable CPU which continues to chug along on every request I make of it. It’s pretty awesome.
• iPhone Development is pretty sweet. While I’ve been working on a lot of things for work, I still have found a little time to work on LatestChatty.app, which I’ll write a blog post on eventually. It was on the Staff Favorites section of the appstore! I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done in making the application stable. I can use it on the train without any significant problems… however the app has some issues with lots of data in UIWebViews which will be rectified shortly through various means.

Continue Reading »

It’s about time I finally update this blog with something. A lot has happened in the last couple months, from going to Europe, interviewing at some places (including Apple), and getting a pretty sweet job in NYC. In the next couple weeks, you’ll see some posts about Europe, about some programming stuff (including iPhone SDK posts because it’s not under NDA anymore!) and possibly some things about my impending move to NYC! 

I’ve also uploaded and categorized my Europe photos which are available in their own little gallery right here: http://www.elrepositorio.com/gallery. Enjoy!

Update: Yosemite pictures I found also added! http://www.elrepositorio.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=6782

Everyone already knows this, but I thought I’d throw up a post while I’m an actual internet cafe. So far since May 19th we’ve been the following countries:

• UK (Britain)
• France
• Spain
• Morocco
• Italy

We’re in Rome now, and headed off to Pompeii for a few days, then off to Greece. If I have time, I’ll add a bit more of a reflection on each of those places, but I don’t really have much expectation of that happening until I get back in early August. Ciao!

I managed to finish a few sections of the site, and get a simple unified look for the site.

It’s also pretty bad. I’d be lying to myself to say that it’s going to get any better anytime soon — I just don’t have the time as I’m getting ready to go to Europe and I have a few things to tie up in the meantime. So, after I get the Projects page up I’ll probably be done for a little while. Oh, I also need to set up Spamassassin and get some links into the blog CSS. Those things will also get done. Then it’s all coding until it’s time to go!

It’s 4:30am and I’m supposed to start driving to Rochester at noon today. Will it happen? Will I sleep through the alarm? Only time will tell!

UPDATE (4/28): Did a bit more work today. I have to say I do miss working in the RIT library the most of pretty much anything related to this place. I’m pretty productive and Java’s is right downstairs Oh and now we’re up to WP 2.5.1, wee.

So, I just finished up the front page. Go look at it: http://www.elrepositorio.com

I put a decent amount of work into it. It wouldn’t really show — I ended up iterating through to this version. I had a complete from-scratch design in mind that really didn’t pan out, so I went to what I am the most comfortable with - designing UI! I’m somewhat concerned about the layout and spacing of everything inside my little web window (I probably wouldn’t design a real UI this way) but since I’m willing to accept that there are huge fundamental differences between the design of a website and an actual client-side app, I’ll deal.

That said, it’s probably going to change a lot. Additionally I need to finish up the rest of the site; This includes my resume, and a project page(s). So, there’s still plenty to do. Regardless I am quite relieved that I managed to get something up in a relatively short amount of time. It was a good, productive distraction. Now I can get back to making my iPhone game!

Finally, I’d like to say that designing websites is most definitely not my thing. It’s not particularly enjoyable to me (mostly because it relies heavily on graphic design which is… not my thing) but overall I learned a ton about CSS,HTML, and basic image manipulation using the GIMP. I think I can improve a ton and time willing I most likely will.

Oh, and also, screw IE. I have absolutely no desire to support that browser. Support your standards, jerks.