Here's a link to the pics I took while in San Francisco for the January 2004 Pachyderm planning meeting.

Some redundancy, but I decided not to remove shots. If anyone wants higher res. versions, I have the 1600x1200 source files.

After much pulling of (what's left of my) hair, the CVS server on commons.ucalgary.ca is running again. Turns out that Panther handles password differently than 10.1.5 did (yes, our server was that out of date...), so the pserver barfed on authentication attempts.

Connecting to the CVS server via SSH works like a charm.

It's a trivial change to make on the client side. Change your to

:ext:username@commons.ucalgary.ca:/Library/CVS

Really should have been running under SSH all along - pserver is a gaping security hole, with the plaintext passwords passed through the pipe...

This is a test post to show Peter Samis how to use ecto.

This image was taken from the meeting room on the 36th floor of the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, overlooking Union Square, Macy's, etc... That's a loooong way down.

Thanks to Bill Bumgarner for the heads up. Looks like Apple really gets the whole syndication thing.

They've got a cool interface to generate a custom RSS feed of new releases in the iTMS. Now THAT's a way to keep people buying new stuff... Send reminders into their news aggregators (or websites, or whatever).

In San Francisco for a few days for the Pachyderm meeting. It's weird having green stuff around in January. That just ain't right.

About to head into the first session of a 3-day planning marathon. Should be fun. We'll be spending a bunch of time working on requirements for the current software and for the new build, as well as some Bigger Picture Stuff.

Mike and I just went for a walk, hitting CompUSA to score a copy of iLife '04 - except they're completely sold out. No copies for another week. Got to play with Garage Band on a shiny new G5 with a 23" display. Cool stuff. Scary that a hack with negative musical talent can create finished-sounding music. Brace for the clip-music revolution. Flashbacks of the "Desktop Publishing" era. Oy.

I had to ignore my unwritten rule about never ever installing MacOSX as an "Upgrade Install". I have always used either "Erase and Install" or "Archive and Install" to avoid issues wrt versions, overwriting etc...

When I upgraded the OS on commons.ucalgary.ca, I didn't have a spare drive to use (well, I have the drive, and it's sitting in the server - it just isn't hooked up) so I did an upgrade. Big. Mistake.

I just came across OSXPlanet via MacUpdate.com. One of the reviews there mention that it's an app written by 15 year old Gabriel Ott.

It takes the NASA "cloudless earth" and "earth at night" images, projects them into whatever global projection suits your tastes, and can also overlay current cloud coverage. It also shows the day/night areas of the globe, showing either "cloudless earth" or "earth at night" as appropriate. VERY cool.

Boy, was Alan right... Don't use the version of MySQL (4.0.16) that comes prepackaged in MacOSX 10.3 Server. Man, does it stink.

Update to 4.0.17, using the handy dandy installer provided on MySQL.com/downloads - it works great, and even starts on boot (unlike the version that comes with panther...) Just bit the bullet and updated versions on careo.ucalgary.ca, and the weird database behaviour has apparently disappeared.

Alan's writing about what he calls "repository folly," where people get so hung up on the "R-word" that they forget about what's important. Metadata becomes king, content and users fall through the cracks.

I couldn't agree more. Metadata, and the "R-Word" should be merely tools, serving specific roles, building to a well defined goal. They shouldn't be the whole widget. Nobody in their right mind would care about either.

I think it's got to be all about getting compelling content created and used. Everything else becomes means to that end. Including CAREO, Pachyderm, the iApps, etc...

Almost done updating the Learning Commons webserver to MacOSX 10.3 Server. Process went ok. Not as smoothly as I'd hoped, but better than I'd feared. The installer wouldn't let me do an "Archive and Install" so all I had to choose from was "Erase and Install" and "Update" - 2 options I never use when installing MacOSX. I chose "Update".

It kept all settings, accounts, etc... and the whole process was pretty painless.

We finally had to upgrade CAREO to MacOSX 10.3 Server (it was still running 10.1.5 before that!). Over the Christmas break, we had a nearly catastrophic failure of the hard drive in the CAREO server. Not a good thing. We've got everything backed up, so I just slapped in a new 75GB drive (well, it's old - inherited from a previous project).

The installation of Panther was dead easy. Configuring WebObjects was more trouble that it needed to be (permissions on the /Library/WebObjects/Configuration directory were too strict, and the app_server user couldn't write the config there, so wotaskd bailed. not good).

It just struck me that the fancy Expose Blob on MacOSX 10.3 is really quite useless. It's not that convenient to mouse over to it and click the button. Much easier to just hit F9 or whatever you've set your Expose Key to...

It would be MUCH more useful if you've got a touch screen. Like, say, a SMART Board, or, say, a tablet. Newton could have used the Expose Blob.