Nicholas Pike

I have to admit, I am becoming a fan of Nissan.  Solid cars so far.  This is my best rental yet, this sporty little guy is quite a bit fun to drive around!

Chrome and Safari has this nifty feature enabled by default… as you start typing in the Location bar entries from your history and bookmarks are autocompleted into the field.

Apparently you can also do this in Firefox 3.5, but it is disabled and hidden away in about:config.

To enable this, pop over to “about:config” in Firefox, and toggle the key “browser.urlbar.autoFill” to true.

Work now pays for a rental for me to use while I am on Domestic Assignment in the “desert”.  My first rental?  A dark blue Toyota Prius.  I don’t care if you think the car is lame, but you have to admit that its quite the geek ride..

Despite all of its buttons and gadgets in the cockpit, driving the Prius is basically like driving a fridge.  There’s no roar of an engine.  There’s not much feedback when driving.

The gas mileage is of course fantastic which makes it great for all the driving I have to do, but I think my next rental car will be something else.

This is something that always bothered me while designing an iPhone UI in Interface Builder: When making a “Tab Bar Application”, my child/tab views were always messed up, and not rendered the same as what I would make in Interface Builder.

Of course the whole thing was a big neophyte mistake on my part, but I figured I would share my findings for others that have such a problem.

For the sake of this post, I am building an application called “DemoApp”, from the “Tab Bar Application” template in XCode.  My UI design in Interface Builder looks like this:

For the sake of this demo, I have also thrown away the default “SecondView” that comes with the template, in favor of using my own custom one as an example.

So how does this render on the iPhone?  Not at all how it looks in Interface Builder…

It took me FOREVER to figure out why my Views were getting clipped, and generally rendered incorrectly whenever I made a custom view to go inside of a TabBarController.  The secret?  On your custom view, enable the bottom bar!

So now your interface should look like this in InterfaceBuilder:

Which makes it MUCH easier to arrange your UI to render correctly inside of a TabBarController.  This little checkbox and my own carelessness caused me much stress and anger towards Interface Builder – hopefully this post will help someone resolve the problem more quickly than it took me!

Did a little work on my Jeep this weekend. Nothing complicated, but improved (IMO) the look of the jeep front, and cabling in the cab area.

• Painted the chrome headlight bezels to be satin black
• Fixed the USB support in my car stereo, and ran an iPod cable to the back of it for my iphone
• Ran the power cable (cigarette lighter -> mini USB cable) through the bottom of my dashboard, and up out of the defroster vent.

Before:

After:

Here’s a shot from above of my GPS (mounted to the windshield), and the power cable snaking into the defroster vent:

.. and then a shot of the stereo playing from the iPhone and displaying the current track:

Rattle canning the bezels was a blast:

I’ve been here in Southern California for two weeks now.  Two weeks! I don’t know if I will ever believe that I live here..

I spent the first week getting familiar with the area, and waiting for my personal belongings to finish their cross country journey.

My apartment is roughly two blocks from the beach.  The beach is incredible!

A few blocks down the street from me is the Santa Monica Promenade.  Something I have never experience before, but is basically a massive out door mall.  Complete with food, an apple store, and street performers. (belly dancers? yes!)

I started my new job this week, working for Northrop Grumman in the Aerospace Systems division.  I spent Monday and Tuesday at the HQ in El Segundo doing orientation/indoc stuff, then was promptly shipped off to the desert town of Palmdale to meet my actual team.

It’s pretty crazy so far.  I get to work on two airforce bases, including Edwards Airforce Base (massive).  I have seen some incredible, incredible things.  The urge to take pictures while on base is incredible… but as you may understand, is not allowed.

Edwards AB does have an old airplane meuseam that allows photograph though, so here’s a picture of an A1 Warthog:

Tonight I return back to the desert to check in to my (paid by NGC) hotel, and start a very long week of work.  Last week was 6 days, for a total of 59 hours.  This week will be considerably higher (60+?) – but thats great, because its overtime pay! (straight pay, not time and a half.. but still, thats a lot of money to pay off my student and jeep loans ;-)  )

I am going to hold off on saying if I like California, my new job, or my new life.  I’ll let everything simmer for a little longer before sayin if I truely like it or not… but it’s really looking good ;-)

I have accepted a position with Northrop Grumman Corporation as an Aerospace System Test Engineer and will be moving to LA next week.

Goodbye Rochester.  We’ve had some good times, and a lot of bad times (that I am looking forward to forgetting)  I won’t miss you.

I use KeePass for all of my password/account management – and it really has made life incredibly simple (and secure).

For just about every online service I use, I now have a unique strong password.  Having so many strong passwords makes it incredibly difficult (impossible) to remember even a handful of them.

There are a few downsides to relying on software to manage your digital account security – and I won’t list out the safety implications.

During my brief trip to California the last week I realized that I no longer know the strong password to my professional email account (npike@npike.net) – and thats BAD!  This password is of course stored in my KeePass Database (which is synced to all my computers via an AES-256 encrypted db file) – but I was on the West Coast with no computer, only my iPhone.

Due to KeePass being opensource, it exists for most flavors of operating systems out there – theres even a project to port it to the iPhone (that seems dead :( ).

My life would have been so much easier if I was able to look at my KeePass database from my phone while away from my computers.

I spent the evening today trying to port some of the KeePass C++ to Objective-C without much luck.  For now I cobbled together a crappy solution that should work in a pinch in the future.

1. Export KeePass Database as an XML file
2. Encrypt resulting XML file with openssl (AES 256bit)
   

   openssl enc -aes-256-ecb -in kp.xml -out kp

3. (Make sure to have a strong but memorable passphrase for the encrypted file).
4. Delete original unencrypted XML file.
5. Write stupid script to decrypt encrypted file (pain in the ass to type out the whole command on iPhone)
   
6. Add my iPhone’s unique SSH key to the authorized key list for my linux box. (See Send your SSH Public Key to each host you use)
7. Write a lazymans script on the iPhone to SSH to linux box by typing a single letter (Saved as “S” on my path)
   #!/bin/bash
   ssh staging.npike.net -l npike
8. Profit!

Being the lazy, but creative geek that I am – I now only have to launch the terminal application on my iphone, type “s” – navigate to where my encrypted keepass export is saved, and run the decrypt script above.

Granted, this file will be stale all the time unless I manually re-export it everytime I make a change in KeePass… but should hold me in a pinch until KeePass is ported to the iPhone.

Moral of the story? Make your email account have a strong, but memorable password thats different from all of your other passwords.

Safari just might have won itself the spot as my web browser for “personal use”.  (I keep a pretty lean Firefox on my home computer… not even Firebug installed!)

Safari 4 Beta OS X 10.5.6

Safari 4 Beta Windows

I ordered my 2.5″ suspension lift kit this week, should be here next week!  The list of parts im getting:

• front and rear Performance 2.2 shocks
• transfer case spacers
• Front and rear progressive coil springs

Can’t wait!

I likely won’t be able to get the kit installed for a week or two, as I will be going to CA this coming weekend for Erik’s wedding (go erik!).  First time on an airplane and all… that’s enough excitement for me.

… and I will leave you with a picture of my parking spot at BlueTie.  My snow banking is melting away =(