I’m popping up for air, and seeing that a whole lot of stuff has been going on…
I’ve been under a heavy load of artificial urgency - and just recently realized that things are actually progressing quite well despite it all. Lately, I’m finding it harder and harder to keep this artificial urgency in perspective - things seem so darned important and demand immediate attention. Whether they deserve it or not - that filter has apparently been disabled. I wonder if there’s some kind of Bayesian filter for external (meaning “outside of my skull”) demands ;-) A friend pointed out that I’ve been in a dark, dark place lately. Time to fix that.
Yesterday, something extremely cool happened. Evan was sitting at the desk in my home office. He grabbed a marker, and started doodling on the pad of paper that was sorta nearby. Coolest. Thing. Ever. His first drawing. Now, he’s going nuts on his blackboard at home, and drawing all over his easel.
If only we can convince him to keep the doodling on designated areas…
We’re in the midst of reworking the Learning Commons website, and one of the changes is dropping to static files for most of the site (rather than the dynamically generated site we use now). One major thing we change by doing this is the software to search the site.
I’ve just installed ht://Dig on commons, and it seems to work quite well. I had to compile from source, which I couldn’t do on commons itself for some reason (no dev. tools installed on MacOSX Server 10.3?) - I compiled on my TiBook and moved the binaries etc. to commons after testing that it worked.
Doh. I just fired up iTunes, and my tunes were gone. The tracks are still all on my hard drive, but the playlists and songs in iTunes are missing in action. I’ve been using iTunes since before it was iTunes (I was a registered owner of SoundJam MP, which was purchased from Casady & Greene by Apple to become iTunes 1.0). This is the first time I’ve lost data in any of my SoundJam/iTunes libraries, in something like 8 years (roughly 8 major OS updates, over several computers).
An image is worth a thousand words. This is the single reason why Garage Band is so cool:
Garage Band isn’t great because of new technology, or ease of use, or interface design (perhaps in spite of wood grain…). It’s great because it gives me a chance/reason to break of the rut of being just a consumer of music. I can dabble on the creative side, even though I couldn’t play in instrument to save my life.
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.
