Month: August 2006

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The end of a long week

I’m not sure what it is about conferences, but I can really only handle about 3 days of them. About Wednesday evening, I was ready to go home from WWDC. There is so much content, that my head can’t handle it all. If I’m going to get more information out of it, I think that shorter sessions (so I can learn about more topics), starting earlier, and a shorter lunch would let me get more info. The days will feel a bit longer, but we could get done sooner. There seems to be a ton of downtime with one session I was in lasted 21 minutes (scheduled for over an hour). I doubt anything will change, but next year I’ll have to consider if I really want to stay the whole time; it will depend on the sessions at the end of the week.

Tomorrow I return home and it is none too soon. I miss our dog and our house (someone is probably wondering why I didn’t say my wife…due to planning coincidences, she had training in Oakland the first part of the week and then came to San Francisco at the end of the week).

It’s going to be hard getting back into the swing of things next week. I’m not sure where I left off with any of the projects on my plate.

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Geeks unite!

This morning, I got up early (couldn’t sleep) and got down to Moscone Center West to pick up my badge for Apple’s WWDC. I got there around 7 am and people were lined up for the 10 am keynote. After I got my badge, I went back to the hotel and then met people for breakfast. Maybe I’m just an old fart, but I don’t see the big deal in waiting in line for 3 hours to get a good seat to see Steve Jobs speak. I did get a seat and could see the keynote clearly on a large screen (I could see the stage a little bit, but who cares). Others must be more fanatical than I am to want to sit in the front; last year I got VIP seating which meant I was closer to the stage. My world didn’t change because I could see the stage.

To me, the keynote was uneventful. I saw the new machines coming and the key features of Leopard had some nice eye candy, but not a whole lot of meat. One feature I really like (as an end user) is the Time Machine backup. While I’m one of the 4% that does backup, any easier backup strategy is music to my ears.

Other than that, I can’t talk about the rest of the week as all the content is covered under NDA; however, I’m sure there will be leaks. The leaks won’t come from me.

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Traveling, is there an easy way?

Every time I have to travel and pack, it seems to consume me for a few days no matter how short the trip. Today I left for San Francisco to attend Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference and I spent the last day or so packing (just for a one week trip), figuring out what I’m going to take, and getting anxious about the flight and trip. Granted, the trip to Oakland is about 1.25 hours which isn’t a huge deal, but it always makes be antsy.

I’m sure people that travel often have it down pat, but I don’t and frankly, I don’t want to travel even that it becomes second nature.

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Learning new computer technologies

There are so many computer technologies that I need to/want to learn, that I have no idea where to start. I learn all the time, but never really have the time to spend to sit down and learn something new unless I’m going to use it immediately. My current list of technologies/programs/whatever I want to learn include:

  • MySQL (how to make queries, create new databases, etc.)
  • Core Data
  • Sync Services (actually how to program it)
  • php
  • perl

I’m sure there are other things I want to learn, but I can’t think of them now. If I had tons of time and didn’t have to move forward developing with what I already know, I’d have plenty of time.

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I won!

Today I ran the Chron’s and Colitis Foundation‘s Guts & Glory 5K Run/Walk to raise money for the foundation. 5K was pretty easy for me, but I started out using way too much energy as I tried to keep up with the young kids who must have been on their high school track team. Turns out, I didn’t do so poorly. I finished first in my age group (30-39) with a time of about 21:30. As usual, I wore my Garmin Forerunner 305. I felt pretty good and was pleased with my performance; yes, there were a few people there, so I wasn’t 1 out of 1! Unfortunately the foundation isn’t one of the largest charities, so the turnout wasn’t huge.

MotionBased

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Updated car kit photos

In a recent post, I wrote about the Bluetooth car kit I installed. Well, I finally finished installing it with a little bit of a twist. I ended up getting a 4″ external speaker for a CB radio and installing it under my center console and I cleaned up the routing of the wires a bit. It works quite well and am extremely pleased with the setup.

Car kit 2Car kit 1

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AOL for free; still costs too much

So after reading that AOL is now offering their service for free, I decided to try it out as I’ve never used it before (that’s right, I’ve never used it). So I went to their website and picked a username; harder than it sounds as the millions of users already have the cool ones, so I managed to get scottgrubyrules. I logged in and must say that I’m underwhelmed. First off, it isn’t a universal binary, so it can’t run natively on my Mac. Second, the interface is straight out of user interface hell. There are modal dialogs everywhere and reminds me of the few times I used eWorld back in 1997. The Mac software doesn’t seem to let me do 2 things at once, so while it is off munching on a web page, I can’t click the other ugly icons on the menu bar. The email interface is poor at best and it wasn’t a great experience for the 10 minutes I played with it. I’m not sure what AOL really has to offer for anyone that already has broadband. I clicked on the Calendar button in the toolbar and got a web page saying that it wasn’t compatible with my browser. Then the fan on my machine came on as the app pegged the CPU. All in all, probably not a product I’ll fire up again. However, I now have a super cool new email address (OK, not really).

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Cool developer tip of the day

If you’re like me, you only test certain software you’re developing on your main user account. For me, anything that involves syncing, I use a second account or machine for testing. As my second machine is a 6 year old G4 tower that sounds like an airplane, I don’t like firing it up. Today I discovered a really cool trick to make testing with a second user account more efficient. Tiger has support for VNC built in, however, it appears to only allow you to control the user that is at the console, in other words, the user that is using the machine. This creates a problem (fun things happen if you try it) as I want to control a second account.

A program called OSXvnc to the rescue. This program starts up a VNC server in each user account that you run it in (use fast user switching to login to the other accounts and launch this app; make sure you set a password). Then use a VNC viewer, I use Chicken of the VNC, to connect to the other OS X user accounts. This allows me to test from secondary user accounts, while still being logging into AIM, able to check my email, and develop from my main account. Performance is pretty good on my MacBook Pro. This will definitely save me a ton of time.