I’ve had to use a MacOSX 10.3 laptop for a little while this week, to get it set up to run as a temporary CAREO server. What struck me is that while I was using the laptop, just how much I missed Dashboard and Spotlight. If you’d have asked me, I would have said I didn’t use them much, nor did I care that much about them.
But, take them away, and boy do I notice. I kept hitting command+space to find apps and files, but nothing happened. F12 didn’t do anything. Frustrating :-)
A while back, I was interviewed by FastForward Magazine (a Calgary weekly mag) about podcasting. I missed the issue when it hit the stands (something about being out of town or something…) but it’s in their online archives. They don’t include the somewhat dorky photo of myself and a very artistically sketched iPod in the online version though. Might have to find a dead-trees version and scan that in…
FFWD Weekly - June 16, 2005: Podcasting changes the future of broadcasting From sports commentary to pub conversation, sharing information takes a new form. Once in awhile a technology comes along that is so simple, so accessible and so perfect that it has the potential to change the way certain activities in society are carried out. Podcasting, according to those who use it, is just such a breakthrough.
The Battlestar Galactica Podcast commentary for episode 1 of season 2 just showed up in my iTunes podcast subscriptions! Great to see executive producer Ronald Moore keeping up the podcasts for the next season.
Must… resist… urge to listen… before watching episode…
Can’t wait to watch the season opener!
Update: That was one kick-ass season opener! So, what happened with Tighe and Adama to get them booted out of the fleet years ago? Hmmm….
I’d seen somewhere on the blogosphere (perhaps on John Dowdell’s blog?) that Macromedia was running a public beta of the Flash 8 player, and that it apparently kicked some serious performance ass over the current version.
I just downloaded it on one of my systems, and holy crap is it fast. Why wasn’t flash this fast all along? Loads fast. Almost psychically responsive (things happen instantly, with no lag).
One thing that has been bugging me since moving my blog to GoDaddy for hosting, is the PITA that MySQL backups have become. Back when I was on the Learning Commons’ webserver, I could just create a crontask to dump the MySQL tables every morning. No SSH or shell access to my GoDaddy account means using a web interface to backup, which is less than automatable.
WordPress to the rescue! There’s a WordPress Database Backup Plugin that can easily download or email database backups to you, and when tied with WP-Cron (a cron-like plugin for automating stuff), it’s fully automatable! I now have daily database backups gzipped and emailed to my GMail account for safe keeping.
I’ve got the Live8 Concert(s) [wikipedia] on in the background, and Sir Bob just played a segment from the original Live Aid concert - ending at what I thought was a child that had just died in it’s parent’s arms.
Bob went on to say that the child was probably 10 minutes from death, but that they were able to step in and help, and that the child had just graduated from agricultural school in Ethiopia. Then, he introduced the now-grown child on stage. One of the most powerful moments I can remember. She is now an amazingly vibrant and glowing young woman. Thank god she wasn’t written off 20 years ago! It boggles my mind to think about all of the other kids that didn’t have that one-in-a-billion chance…
I’d seen Autostitch when it was first announced - as a research project by a couple of students at UBC. It’s a really cool app that takes in an arbitrary set of photos that were taken of the same scene, and stitches them together automagically without user intervention.
Very cool software, and it does an amazing job.
But, it’s Windows only. It runs OK in Virtual PC, but it’s slow (as expected). I would really love it if this was somehow included in iPhoto 5 - imagine being able to select a set of photos and say “stitch these together for me” - and have it actually do it…
The Norman family got back into town yesterday afternoon, after what felt like a 24-hour journey home. Checked out of the hotel at 10am Sunday, returned home 3pm Monday… It was sunny and warm in Honolulu, cold and shitty and rainy in Calgary. I want to go back… :-)
There’s a whole bunch I want to blog about, including rants/raves about spending 2 weeks in Honolulu (and some tips for anyone else planning on doing the same).
