The opening reception last night was pretty cool. Got to touch base with a bunch of folks that I hadn’t seen since last year’s conference, and got to meet a whole bunch of new folks. I didn’t win the iPod Shuffle, but that’s OK… :-)
I had one of the coolest experiences though. I just had a picture taken with Tim Wang, and as I look up, there is someone standing in front of me, noticing my nametag badge. All of a sudden, she breaks into this gorgeous smile, and says “Are you D’Arcy Norman?”
Evan was absofreaking amazing on the flights from Calgary –> Phoenix –> Honolulu. Wow. I mean, I would have bet a million bajillion dollars against the poor lad. And I would have lost. He was the Perfect Child. Amazing.
Honolulu is pretty nice. Awfully busy, and quite touristy. But, what did I expect? I’ve posted some quick photos to my Flickr Account.
Thanks to everyone who sent positive karma/whuffie/wishes our way. Totally worked!
I intentionally refuse to set an email autoreply (those annoying “I’m out of the office, but your email is very important to me” messages that get spewed onto mailing lists).
Autorepliers are too dump to not spam lists, and I generally check email regardless of where I am, so it’s not like important messages get dropped. Sure, less important messages might get neglected, but that should be the rule rather than an exception…
Since I’ve moved to Safari as my RSS reader, I’ve lost the easy way of updating the blogroll/links section of my blog. I used to just export my subscriptions from NetNewsWire as OPML, which was then easily ingested by WordPress.
I’m realizing that my blogroll/links are now woefully out of date, and would like to bring them into sync with my current subscriptions - but am not about to start manually syncing them.
I just got back from the Apple Campus Bash. Wow. The band this year was The Wallflowers. The freaking WALLFLOWERS played the Apple Campus Bash! Awesome. They did a full set, too, not just a cheap 20-minute gig. A full hour-long set. And I think they were having fun, too… Questions thrown to the audience about how to get blackberries working… Heckling jugglers… Very cool.
Update: Added some details of the build settings for converting an existing WebObjects Application project to a tidy servlet deployment package.
King, Josh and I spent the morning in the WebObjects lab trying to figure out a way to get Pachyderm deployed on non-MacOSX boxes under the new regime. We’ve now got a spanky new Tomcat-enabled build, that sucks in all of the supporting WebObjects, APOLLO, and Pachyderm jars into a single .war - topping 112MB of compiled goodness.
I’d never tried deploying a WebObjects app under Tomcat (or JBoss, or any other J2EE container) before. I’d always just stuck with the built-in WebObjects appserver, and did the config/management in JavaMonitor. Well, it’s now a Really Good Idea™ to make sure any app you want to deploy on non-MacOSX boxes will work in the servlet engines.
So, I did a quick RTFM. (twice, because it’s taking longer for it to soak in after midnight after a busy day of WWDC) Then I twiddled the appropriate bits in my XCode project build settings. Built the .war bundle. Downloaded Tomcat (for servlet spec 2.2), copied the .war into the webapps directory, and lit it up. It just worked. Mostly. Except for funky CSS stuff (because I don’t have any freaking idea how to deploy a Tomcat/WO app, and stuff that’s normally vended via Apache is now just firing 404s).
The demo of the iTunes implementation of podcasting was pretty sweet. Totally simple to find/subscribe to podcasts from a directory (like the Radio Stations section), and you can subscribe to any feed you want, outside of the directory.
Probably the coolest thing was the support for chapters within the podcasts - both for navigation, and for display of artwork. You can break a podcast into multiple chapters, each with their own image that changes the “cover art” when that part of the podcast is being played. Could make for quite powerful walking tours (coughSFMOMAahem) or lecture recordings (slides of PPT/Keynote in sync with audio).
OK. So, I was wrong… MacOSX 10.4.1 runs on Pentium 4 chips. The whole Stevenote was done on a Pentium 4, and nobody knew until he opened “About This Mac”.
Holy. Shit.
So Apple has a lot of work to do, undoing all the anti-Intel/Pentium marketing.
Questions:
What about Altivec code?
64-bit code?
Does this mean a Red Box windows compatibility layer is more feasible now?
Just registered. Nobody in line ahead of me (surprisingly). The bag is a cool backpack this year, which I think will get a lot of use… There’s a nice little nalgene water bottle in the bag, and a cool little caribiner pen - like the one from 2003, but black of course. I’ll be losing the ‘beener from the pen before I actually write with it, though… The conference schedule dealies are smart - at-a-glance overview booklet, and each day has it’s own separate booklet for marking up etc… No notebook this year, which is odd… Actually, now that I think about it, the conference bag is surprisingly devoid of goodies… no demo CDs, no packages from 3rd parties… makes you go ‘hmmmm…..’
I’m sitting at Gate C25 at the Calgary Airport, waiting for the flight to San Francisco. Evan and Janice came to the airport as well, as a dry-run for our trip next week. Evan loved the airport. The hardest part will be reigning him in, since he wants to go exploring everything.
This was the fastest security checkin I’ve ever experienced. I planned on an hour to get through security, prior to boarding time. It took maybe 5 minutes, from customs declaration/eval to security clearance, to sitting at the gate typing this. The place was deserted. One other couple was passing through.
It seems as though everyone’s all in a huff over the “news” article posted on cnet.news.news.com.com.com, which suggests that the WWDC Stevenote may reveal a switch from IBM/Power-based CPUs to Intel-based CPUs. That’s a load of hooey. Apple’s been publicly crapping on Intel’s CPUs in all of its presentations, marketing, website info for the last several years.
Megahertz Myth? Pipelines? Etc… Apple’s been talking some serious trash about Intel. I’m not a CPU-head, so I wouldn’t know one way or another. But, for Apple to suddenly pull up stakes and say “Wait, we were wrong all along - Power sucks, and Intel rocks. We’re going to transition the whole product line over to the Pentium line.” Sorry. Doesn’t make sense.
