I just had my first over-a-distance meeting in iChat today. It worked pretty well… I just started a Chat Room and dragged the other folks’ icons into it. We blabbed on for over an hour planning a presentation for Friday (EduCause LOVCOP - details to follow).
Now, if iChatAV supported multiple video streams, we could have had a virtual meeting… But the text chat worked pretty darned well.
Read MoreI just wrote my first Lingo in over 2 years. DirectorMX looks pretty sweet. It’s amazing how it all comes back. I REALLY miss the instant round-tripping, being able to modify code on the fly and have it kick in without recompiling and restarting an application to see the results…
It took a few minutes for the “sprite(me.spritenum).loc = the mouseloc” stuff to trickle back out of my head, but it was still in there…
I’ve been working on some code to generate GUIDs as part of the suite of services for use in the next version of the software that runs CAREO.
When in doubt, hit Google to see who’s already solved it. Turns out David Newmann did a GUID generator as part of his security stuff, and it’s been rolled into the WOExampleHarness.framework provided at /Developer/Examples/JavaWebObjects/Frameworks/WOExamplesHarness (and specifically in the WXUtilties.java class).
In his sample code, he uses a substring of the generated GUID (the first 10 characters). This kept generating the same GUID for me (going against the whole idea of using a GUID), so I told it to use the entire string, rather than the first 10 characters.
Read MoreJames Gosling recently described 2 types of development tasks. I like the description. I couldn’t see any way to link directly to the post, so I’ll drop it in here as an excerpt.
I’ve had conversations with several folks in the last couple of days about the craft of software engineering. There are all sorts of ways to slice it up, but one that I find useful in some situations is to divide programming tasks rather crudely into two categories: mud slinging and diamond cutting.
Read MoreI put some of my photos from WWDC2003 online. iPhoto insists on sorting photos the wrong way when asked to order by date, so start at the bottom of the page…
Read MoreJust came across iVideo on freshmeat. I downloaded it to see what it does, and lo and behold: it captures DV video from my iSight camera!
I just captured a short (9 second) but huge (180MB) video clip, and it looks like it’s a standard DV file (QT Player opened it - I didn’t try importing it into iMovie, but that shouldn’t be a problem).
With this and evoCam, there are a few options for iSight users to record and publish stuff from the camera.
Read MoreFirst, a little haiku:
conference is over.
brain is full. too much info.
rush now to write code.
It was a completely amazing conference. King and I have been talking about some stuff that is making my head spin a bit. Seriously, this is going to take some time to sink in.
The next version of the repository is going to kick some major ass. Distributed searches. Natural language queries. Automation out the wazoo. Focussed helper apps to, well, help out…
Read MoreWWDC continues to rock. Totally like drinking from a firehose… A LOT of info here. King and I just met with some WO folks about some issues we’ve been facing on the next version of CAREO and they were extremely helpful (thanks Andreas, Bill & Scott!!!)
Some interesting sessions this afternoon, then down to Cupertino for the Campus Bash. Should be fun. I’m bringing my camera so I’ll continue to look like the typical tourist.
Read MoreWe arrived at SFO just fine yesterday. Took the BART from the airport to Powell, and it turns out it was the first day for the airport leg of BART to be open. Celebrations and camera crews everywhere. Weird.
Walked around downtown SF last night. Man. Those hills are one heck of a workout. Climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill, then went to the top of Coitt Tower. Great view, but oy my legs.
Read MoreTim Bray just posted some of his experiences in building a web search engine, and how people use simple vs. advanced search.
It’s a good (and short) read. I’ve noticed a similar pattern of usage, although I don’t have any form of statistics to back it up. Looking through the logs in CAREO, hardly anyone uses the advanced search page. I think I’ve only really used it while building/testing it… Simple search does everything I need.
Read MoreAlan links to a link linked by another link… suggesting that RSS may be the next killer app for education (what was the first/previous one?)
P.S. Hinterlands? ow.
Read MoreI’ve got XStreamDB up and running, storing over 2000 IMS metadata records, as well as a few DublinCore and RSS files to test out multi-schema queries.
It works like a charm. It’s got full text indices on all metadata stores (I’ve created roots for each schema - analogous to tables in RDBMS land). I’ve added a “Meta” root that will store audit-type info for each metadata document (creator, creation date, permissions, …) and have whipped up a simple XQuery statement that will retrieve all metadata documents associated with a given Meta document (using GUIDs to identify assocations - again, analogous to table joins in RDBMS land).
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