Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Here’s my current rsync command, posted here so I can find it again in case I ever lose my bash history.

nice -n -20 rsync -aE –stats –progress –delete ~/ /Volumes/Firewire\ Disk/Backup/

To summarize, this copies all the files from my home directory to my firewire hard drive, ignoring files which haven’t changed since the last time [...]

I read an interesting article from Steve Yegge today about agile development methodologies, and how things are done at Google. It’s interesting stuff, and tells a lot about why Google is a great place to work besides the usual “it’s that place place with the food and the swimming pools.”

I purchased Mint a week or two ago, and I have to say that for $30 it’s a steal. I’ve used a few other statistical packages over the years, and the only things they seem to be good at are the tools I don’t need. I know there are people out there who care, maybe [...]

Besides Roxio Toast (expensive) or Finder.app (limited), I haven’t heard of many good CD burning applications for OSX. Today I came across Burn, which seems like decent, free alternative. It’s not perfect, but it manages to fit most of the features of Toast into a simple, lightweight interface. More importantly, it didn’t give me any [...]

In OSX you can switch between U.S. and Metric units by opening up the International preferences in System Preferences. Accessing this value from your Cocoa application isn’t well documented, but it’s actually stored right in [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] along with a lot of other localization info. It’s a boolean value with the key “AppleMetricUnits”, and as [...]

I started using del.icio.us a few months ago to keep bookmarks in sync across several computers at work and home, and it’s been my default home page ever since. Tonight I decided to change the “Home” button in Safari’s toolbar to something a bit more suitable. This might be old hat for some OSX users, [...]

I started a new project at work this morning. It’s a client-server helpdesk application, that allows users to fill out a request form on our intranet site, which puts an entry in our database and notifies me and my boss at our desks via a system tray application. I know there’s a lot of free [...]

And so after a solid week of coding and futzing around in Photoshop, I finally put the new Downtown Software House design up. I still might end up changing one or two things, but it works, and what’s important is that it looks much, much better than the old website. Good visual design is more [...]

Continuing my first post on the subject, here are a few more useful web design resources:

PHP5 Exception Handling
SimpleXML
Classes and Objects (PHP5)

PHP5 has been around for a while, but since I was never able to get it working on my old host I’m just now beginning to use it. These articles cover some of the big [...]

Short answer: you can’t. In my experience it’s easier to just use 8bit PNGs when you absolutely need transparency (a nav menu for instance, where the background color changes depending on the context), and fake alpha transparency by layering the image over the background in photoshop. Of course, this can have plenty of problems by [...]