Monthly Archives: June 2011

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone

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My 2010 MBA just started showing some unhappiness a few weeks ago. First there was the corrupt cursor, then there was the fact the fans didn’t seem to turn on even when the computer was under heavy load, and scrolling operations started going really really slowly—sometimes things would stutter, other times I could watch the screen repaint. So I just copied my work from the MBA to the old 2007 MacBook Pro. And my world has started to move at a snail’s pace.

The old MBP isn’t sluggish. No, it has a 2.33 GHz dual core Intel CPU and 3 GB of RAM. But it has that darned rusty spinning platter array…the HDD. 250 GB is nice, but after getting used to everything starting up after clicking its application icon or double-clicking a file, it’s painful. You don’t realize how fast the SSD is until you try to do everything you used to do and there are long pauses between clicking something to when something else happens. Even waking from sleep is slow.

The way of the future is clearly some kind of rapid storage mechanism like the SSDs or at least a hybrid approach to keep the most-used applications and documents in a quick-load cache.

Have your custom Paperclip Processors gone missing?

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I’ve been converting a Rails 2.3.8 app into a Rails 3 app and one snafu was figuring out what happened to Paperclip. I use it to actually post-process audio files after upload, in this case slowing them down. I was getting this error:

uninitialized constant Paperclip::SlowerAudioFile:

Which is weird because I checked the readme and it still says to put them in the lib/paperclip_processors. I moved things around, I tried a bunch of little changes to the processor code, but nothing.

It seems the larger problem is just that the lib directory wasn’t being automatically loaded at all. (Turns out someone blogged this.) But by the time I had read that I had already taken the advice of a StackOverflow conversation and had just moved my processor to config/initializers/paperclip/slower_audio_file.rb, the beginning of the code looking like:

module Paperclip
  class SlowerAudioFile < Processor
    def initialize file, options = {}, attachment = nil
      ...
    end
    ...
  end
end

Deleting photos from an iPhone/iPad without importing

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I’ve always been irked that iPhone photos can only seemingly be removed from the device by iTunes. The iPhone doesn’t show up like a normal camera device in Finder and you can’t get to it even through navigating with Terminal. Thanks to a post that came up during a little searching, it turns out the Image Capture app on Macs can do exactly that—I don’t know how to do this on a Win PC.

Yup, right in your Applications folder it turns out that there’s the Image Capture app:

If your iOS device is connected up you’ll see it on the left and then you can select any number of images and click the Delete button at the bottom of the window.