The Juice Journal

We’ll have more to write about this soon, but right now I just want to point you to a fun new site we’ve just launched for one of our favorite clients: MudPuddles Toys & Books.

This was one of our most ambitious projects to date, and we handled every last detail. We created some new techniques and made some innovative choices along the way, giving a small independent business a cutting-edge and easy-to-use online tool.

More to come.

{love},
{ryan}

Fake Steve Jobs (a satirical parody blogger) often has incisive points, and he’s one of the few who’s willing to state them as baldly as they deserve. Recently, a 25-year-old employee at Foxconn, the Chinese company that manufactures Apple’s iPhone, jumped off a building after being mistreated for losing an iPhone prototype. Fake Steve, on our way of life:

“We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.”

Fake Steve Jobs

{love},
{ryan}

I just ran into a baffling problem with one of my Mac minis. It’s unclear when this error began, but probably after a recent upgrade to Mac OS 10.5.7. I found myself unable to update, add, or remove printers, even with my admin user account, because I mysteriously did not belong to the group “lpadmin”.

If you’re experiencing this problem, then read on. I’ll give the solution first, for you time-constrained, impatient people just trying to fix the problem, then I’ll describe the background.

The problem is that your user account is no longer in the lpadmin group, which is the group of users who can administer printers. When trying to add or change a printer, you get the standard OS X administrator password dialog, but can’t authorize, and get a “client-error-not-authorized” error. To add yourself back to the lpadmin group, open up Terminal (Utilities › Terminal), and type this command:

sudo dscl . -append /Groups/lpadmin GroupMembership yourusername

You’ll need to type your administrator password and hit return, then you should be back in the lpadmin group.

I sincerely hope that solves your problem if you’ve been experiencing this one.

Background

In Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, Apple eliminated Netinfo Manager and its Netinfo database, replacing it with the dslocal database. This is huge for administrators, as that used to be the fundamental tool for managing users and groups at a nitty-gritty, manual-editing level. As far as I know, no single GUI tool exists to directly replace Netinfo Manager (I only use regular Mac OS X, so I have no idea if OS X Server has such a tool).

Instead of a GUI tool, we have dscl, dseditgroup, and a handful of other command line tools I don’t understand and am (probably rightly) afraid to touch. These handle the dslocal database, which is a bunch of XML located in /var/db/dslocal/.

Of course the primary point of interaction with the dslocal database is System Preferences, in the Accounts pane. Adding, changing, and removing users is one aspect of dealing with dslocal. By right-clicking on a user in Accounts, you can choose “Advanced Options…”, where you can change nitty-gritty properties like a short username and UUID.

However, as far as I can find there is no GUI to manage the system’s built-in groups and their memberships. This is important if, for example, you have somehow lost your membership in the “lpadmin” group, the users who can manage printers.

Let’s get into the terminal command I pasted earlier. First is sudo, which lets you run the command as an administrator (it stands for “super-user do”, get it?). dscl is the general dslocal management tool, used for reading and editing any (I think) part of the dslocal database. . represents the domain, in this case local which is equal to . for some reason. -append means we’re appending the value to the XML database row in question, not replacing it. /Groups/lpadmin is the database table, the lpadmin group table. GroupMembership is the row we’re editing (appending, in this case), and yourusername (please insert your own username) is the value we’re appending. Thus we have added “yourusername” to the lpadmin group, and you can manage printers again.

Notes

Although I used to work in IT, I no longer am in charge of large quantities of Macs, and so I’m not the most up-to-date, well-informed, or knowledgeable person on this subject. I experienced this problem and had a difficult time finding a solution online.

If you’ve read this far, you must be at least a little interested in Mac OS X internals, so I recommend you read John C. Welch’s write-up, “Analysis: the end of Netinfo”. Also, for a fun and brief read, have a look at the Wikipedia entry for Netinfo Manager. Please don’t make fun of me for calling that reading fun.

{love},
{ryan}

On the ubiquitous font Comic Sans, and the widespread hatred of it:

“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography. If you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”

Vincent Connare, creator of Comic Sans

{love},
{ryan}

“I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

Joe Solmonese, for the Human Rights Campaign

I don’t think much more needs to be said.

{love},
{ryan}

{love},
{ryan}

{love},
{ryan}

Dear Skype,

I do love you. I really do. But I’ll be honest: we’re on rocky grounds right now.

When I broke up with Gizmo, you seemed like a big step up, Skype. You had better software, a sweet wifi phone, better voicemail management, and you actually worked most of the time. I quickly realized you didn’t properly send a caller ID, so people had no idea who was calling them (it’s typically either +000000 or +0123456 or something). Also no receiving text messages, and no text messages or chat at all on my Netgear handset. But those were the days of optimism and hope, and simple joy over a $6/month phone bill, so everything was excused with the assumption that you were working on these issues.

It turns out I misunderstood your priorities. You weren’t working on caller ID for US callers; you weren’t working on simplifying your bloody confusing array of payment and subscription options; you weren’t working on breaking the stranglehold of oppressive, expensive, technologically-backward telcos; no, you were working on shitty cell phone compromise add-ons that just admit people should carry expensive, crappy mobile phones and use you as a third-party. You may not want to admit it, Skype, but you’re becoming the telcos’ bitch.

What happened to the revolutionary Skype? Skype the game-changer? Skype, the little Estonian P2P communication company that made calling free and set the telcos’ knees trembling? Do you still care about shaking things up?

I still care.

You’ve changed my unlimited calling plan again. I bought “Skype Unlimited” a year-and-a-half ago or so. Then that got cancelled, and replaced with Skype Pro (never mind that, if I recall, the name “Skype Pro” used to refer to something totally different, and at the very least it’s somewhat confusingly-similar to “Skype for Business” and various other boring names). Now it’s just Skype Subscriptions. All of these have been almost identical, but with minor little differences that left me wondering if I was still going to be able to do what I had been doing. Also, each change has required me to cancel my then-current plan and sign-up for the new one. A time-wasting hassle, with literally no gain, other than the fact that this unlimited calling thing should probably have been called a subscription from the beginning.

I say all this because really, I do love you, Skype. You’re cheap, you’re easy to use, and you’re a hell of a lot better than those cell phone companies. And you have potential, lots of potential. When popular mindset comes around and embraces the internet as the single necessary network of communication, with all its advantages of price and innovation, you’ll be in the best place to take advantage of it.

I just hope for both our sakes’, Skype, that you don’t muck this up. I want us to have a long and happy future filled with many happy hours of free calling.

And give me freaking caller ID, dammit!

UPDATE: They gave me freaking caller ID!

{love},
{ryan}

I attended my first BarCamp this past weekend, and I have to say I had a blast. Being around so many intelligent, erudite, open-minded people is always a high.

For those not in the know, BarCamp is an “unconference”, an open gathering of people who themselves decide the topics of panels and discussions. The attendees are largely from the various nerd communities, but the format is very open and appropriate for anyone with ideas. I think that’s most people.

I think my favorite discussion was an open-ended gathering with the topic “The Social Sciences of Technology”. We discussed differences and similarities between online interactions and “analog” interactions; wiki ideas applied to government, decision-making, and societal structuring (with enthusiastic and enlightening thoughts from Mark Dilley); the troubles with binary mindsets; and hope for community self-determination through intelligent use of technology and self-activism. And much much more!

I also loved meeting and chatting with other clever minds and fun folks, some sharing my field of web work. George Huff and Todd Quackenbush of We the Media were great to talk with after a delightfully confusingingly-named session on design and nerdery. I look forward to bumping into these two again. Bram Pitoyo and I enjoyed an intense conversation about design, freelancing, web browsers & word processors, and all manner of fun typophile crap. I also just noticed somewhere on his website that he is a “elevator music enthusiast”, a topic we did not discuss but I’d love to bring up with him sometime. Finally, I met someone I consider a big shot, Rael Dornfest, former CTO of O’Reilly Media and current wizard at Values of n (which I asininely called “Powers of n” when I first approached him).

I could talk about the ideas and the people I experienced at BarCamp for a bit longer, but I’m tired and blog entries are supposed to be short and sexy I’m told, so I’ll just let the rest be.

Join the community: go to a BarCamp near you!

{love},
{ryan}

Now you see my site’s underpants… no, you now see it totally naked. What do I mean?

Today is CSS Naked Day

Today, standards-based sites around the world have voluntarily stripped their pages of the CSS that makes them pretty.

The funny thing, and the point of the whole exercise, is to see that what’s left, the content, is still pretty because it’s semantic. The headers show up as headers, lists have bullet points, emphatic text shows up emphatically! Everything is still totally usable, on any device that browses the web.

Please read more about all this at the official CSS Naked Day website. No pretty styles there, either. Sorry.

UPDATE: CSS Naked Day is passed, and the styles are back! Yay!

{love},
{ryan}