Author Archives: brad

… to one and all! Be thankful and loud about it.

Unless, of course, you’re a turkey. In which case, you’re probably better off just keeping your beak shut.

Frequency is the program of the day at Jumbo.

I am, as the title of this post suggests, majorly bummed.

“Why?” you may ask.

I will not be attending the Lord of the Rings marathon in Harrisburg on December 16 as I had originally planned. I had already purchased my ticket and taken half a personal day at work in preparation. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

My daughter’s preschool’s Christmas program is that night. And Tolkien simply can’t compete with Gracie.

Nevertheless, I remain bummed. I really wanted to see all three movies in their entirety, back to back. But hope remains. Black Friday of 2004, the day after Thanksgiving, there will be a viewing of all three Lord of the Rings movies, back to back, each the Special Extended Edition. I figure if we start at noon, we can wrap it up by midnight.

Jen, who suggested I go to the movie and skip the Christmas program if that’s what I really wanted to do, was sweet. I called her to let her know that I was coming home from the theater, where I had just had my purchase refunded, and she said that she would go with me to see Return of the King the weekend after the marathon. Considering that she A) dislikes going to the movies, B) dislikes movies in general, and C) loathed Fellowship of the Ring (although she grudgingly admitted that The Two Towers was enjoyable), this is a nice gesture from her.

I wonder if Gracie’s Christmas program will have any Orcs in it…

Frequency 1.5 has been released. More information can be found here. Months of effort went into this release, and even though I haven’t hardly advertised anything yet (seeing as it’s Sunday evening), I’ve already received a purchase notice. Cool!

The obvious question will be, “Why version 1.5? Shouldn’t it be 1.2?”

The answer is quite simple: I believe there’s enough new and improved stuff in here to warrant a point-5 version number. I went from supporting one weblog system to supporting six weblog systems – no small feat. This involved not only beefing up my routines for the Blogger API, but adding new routines for the metaWeblog API (which is very nice, by the way). I went from being able to edit only cached posts (those posts you’ve done since you last launched the app) to retrieving a much longer list of recent posts (twenty posts, I think). HTML previewing is improved, and I think it’s faster, too. I added support for titles and categories in metaWeblog systems, and even found a way to fake it for Blogger API systems (since the Blogger folks won’t let us have access to the real titles in the API).

And then there’s the price increase. Frequency was $6, now it’s $9. I’ll honor the $6 price until December 12, when it officially goes up to $9. And of course, already registered users get a free upgrade. But I think I’ve crammed more than three bucks worth of new stuff in there.

Now that fun part (the coding) is over, I get to start the part I truly dislike. The marketing. I am a horrible marketer. I try very hard to be a humble person, and there’s something so anti-humility about marketing your own stuff. “Hey, look at me!” But to honest, and this sounds far from humble, I think I’ve written one of the best, cleanest, easiest to use weblog clients around. I really believe that.

But since I hate marketing, would you mind helping me spread the word? Thanks.

I can’t tell you how much I love this kid. She makes me laugh, she makes me smile, she makes me crazy, she makes me angry. I wouldn’t trade her for the world.

She’s my little princess. This was her Halloween costume this year. She wanted to be a princess. In fact, up until recently, if you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, the answer was always: “A princess and an artist.” Now, she wants to be a veterinarian.

She’s already a little teenager. This is Gracie talking to Nana one evening. She reminds of us of her Aunt Ali.

A few weeks ago, Jen and I found her in her bedroom, singing along with her Barbie boombox to Chris Tomlin’s “The Famous One” and playing her homemade drum.

Gracie rocks. This kid knows how to approach the mic. Either it’s in the blood, or she’s spent way too much time watching me up front. I don’t know which, but bear in mind that while Jen was pregnant with her, we were playing and practing at least weekly in Anonymous Joe. She earned this guitar by not waking us up in the middle of the night (or, more accurately, not waking Jen up) for 25 nights. Small price to pay. She jammed for about a half hour last night.

Well, 40 Days of Purpose is over, at least for Westwood. I learned a lot by reading The Purpose Driven Life again. I had already read it earlier this year, but this time I got so much more out of it by participating in a small group and doing the readings with Jen.

Re-reading reminded me just how far I still have to go. It reminded just how weak I really am. But that’s where I’m supposed to be. My strength doesn’t come from within me; I’d be in trouble if it did.

If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. It’s quite excellent. If you can’t afford it, let me know; you can borrow my copy.

They say mean, but funny things. Like Andy Rooney: All I can say is it’s a good thing Bill Gates didn’t invent television. If it took as long to start up a television set as it takes to start up a computer, you’d need two hours to watch 60 Minutes.

Here are some pictures from California. These were taken in July, well before the fires began, when Jen and I went to Saddleback Church with our pastor and his family for the Purpose Driven Worship Conference and Festival, which was great.

I’ve been fooling around with a very nice program called Galerie that grabs pictures from iPhoto and makes very nice looking web galleries automagically. Slick. And it’s freeware!

Tom Yager: People who prefer OS X don’t say they have a specific admiration for alpha-blended shadows and anti-aliased text. I doubt most users can name the individual elements that draw them to the Apple GUI. Instead, users say they say they like the Mac. They like Apple for making it for them, and it does feel as if it’s made just for them. You know you’re using the right software when, night after night, you have that “oh crap, I was supposed to be home an hour ago” moment. OS X engages me that way without obviously working at it, just by respecting the fact that humans use their software. I constantly feel this way about Mac OS X. It just gets out of my way and lets me work. I don’t feel like that when I’m using Windows. I feel like I’m constantly at odds with Windows. For example, tonight I went to check a PDF that I had posted to my church’s website. I wanted to make sure it looked right under Windows, since we used some funky fonts on it. But whenever Adobe Reader tries to launch, it tries to install Microsoft Journal Viewer. Why? Well, I haven’t figured that out yet. So I hit cancel, so it won’t let me install because I don’t have the Office XP CD with my anyway. It backs out of the installation, only to start all over again. It does this several dozen times before allowing Adobe Reader to launch. Tonight I left Adobe Reader running to save time.

Chad Dickerson: I used the Mac running OS X to replace a PC client and Linux server; the level of functionality was raised; and I did more with less. All the GNU and Unix tools I’ve used for years were right there in OS X: ps (process status), rsync, top, SSH (secure shell), Apache, Samba, and various Unix shells. I was able to access Windows file systems, and I easily shared Mac files to the Windows machine on my network via Samba, the open source file-sharing stalwart. I hardly struggled even for a second. I love it when hardcore Mac bashers try OS X for the first time. It’s like an epiphany. I remember even back in the days of the original Mac OS X Server (the one that looked entirely too much like OpenStep), I showed it to a high school kid who was always telling me that Macs were for sissies. I showed him that it was based on BSD and what it could do. He put the machine through some paces and came away rather impressed. Of course, the Mac OS X situation has improved considerably in the four years since that happened.

Bill Fenstermaker: I’m liking an Apple Product. Granted, Bill is only talking about iTunes here, but it’s a big step for him.

Kevin Mitnick: This weekend I’m going to try to figure out how to migrate my Windows apps. I have certain security applications that work under Windows so I’m trying to figure out how to do that. I know there is an application where you can run Win apps under OS X. I plan to get pretty familiar with the Mac. Come on, even Mitnick likes the Mac! It was given to him as a gift by none other than Wozniak himself upon his release.

PC Magazine: The G5 performed significantly better than any previous Mac—and equaled or bettered the performance of Intel-platform machines—on our all-important graphics and content creation tests. As a 64-bit operating system and applications emerge, users will enjoy the dual 1-GHz front-side buses and rapid access to up to 8 gigabytes of RAM. The G5 is an important step forward in desktop computer technology and a vital cornerstone of Apple’s future. OK, this is PC Magazine, the magazine that hates Macs. Mike and I found all sorts of examples of bias in one of their latest issues, featuring some round-up of systems. And they rate the G5 as best of the best.

TIME Magazine: It’s a disarmingly simple concept: sell songs in digital format for less than a buck and let buyers play them whenever and wherever they like—as long as it’s on an Apple iPod. Jobs had proved the idea back in April when he launched the Music Store for Mac users, who represent only 3% of the computer world but promptly gobbled up a million tracks in the first week of business. By October he was ready to set the Music Store aloft in the 97% of the world that uses Windows PCs, and the prospect of converting millions of music pirates into credit-card wielding music buyers was enough to make even the most jaded rock stars take notice. Invention of the Year! You’re not alone, Bill. You’re not alone.

Jen and I went to see The Matrix Revolutions on Saturday, along with Dan and Dave. I’ve put a lot of thought into the movie since then, and here is my review, kinda.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. If you want to be surprised when you see the movie, don’t read this. Click here instead. You’ve been warned.

I’ll start off by saying that the movie left me wholly and completely unsatisfied. We do not know if Neo is dead or alive (although I suspect the former). We do not know how Neo was ever able to stop the sentinels in the real world. We do not know if the real world is actually another Matrix.

There were some high points, and some surprises. I was very surprised that Trinity died. Not when it happened, but that it happened at all. When it happened, after they crash landed in the Machine City, it was pretty obvious she was breathing her last. Then they panned back and showed all the spikes piercing her. Yep, I though. I was right.

The battle for Zion was interesting, although as has been pointed out many times before, the sentinels could have been way more effective had they not clung to that stupid swarming pattern. Sure, it looks ominous and everything, but it makes for incredibly ineffective combat. Same for those big mech suits. Nice job: a fully armored giant robot body with a weak and puny human adorning the tippy top. Not too hard to find the weak spot there.

Don’t get me wrong: I liked the movie, I really did. I didn’t like it as much as Reloaded, or as much as the original Matrix, but I liked it. It didn’t ask as many probing questions as either of the first two; unfortunately, neither did it answer many of those same questions.

I’m still trying to muddle through the ending, through various conversations with Jen, Dan, and Dave. I know this much: Smith had the eyes of the Oracle (which is what the Merovingian was also after), and it was the Oracle-Smith fighting Neo at the end. This much is revealed to us. And we know that Smith, using the Oracle’s eyes, foresaw the end of the fight. As had been hammered into us, you can’t see past the choices you don’t understand. Smith chose to assimilate Neo; apparently he didn’t understand that choice, or at least its implications. He certainly didn’t foresee that it would bring about his own destruction. The question is: how did Neo know? Did he something in Oracle-Smith’s eyes that told him the Oracle was still inside, telling him that he would still be Neo once assimilated, able to break out and defeat Smith from within? Or did he just give up, hoping the machines he was jacked into would help (after all, he was saving their butts as well)? And was he alive or dead afterward? We don’t know. I think he’s dead. But I think the machines have a copy of his brain and personality, just in case (shouldn’t have been too hard to make an image of the guy’s brain). I also think he’s dead because of the equation balancing that the Oracle talked about.

And here’s the most daunting question of all: why didn’t the machines just build a giant tower with a solar panel on top, for crying out loud? That would have solved their energy needs a lot better than trying to use humans as batteries, since we require more energy than we put out. Perhaps the machines were using us for something else? Maybe a Beowulf cluster? I don’t know. I’m probably overthinking this part. I’m sure the Brothers Wachowski just want me to accept that, for some reason, we’re trapped.

Now, having said all that, the fight between Neo and Bane was pretty tense. We’re in the real world, now, and Neo has no superpowers (at least, apparently not against humans). But Bane is possessed by Smith, who is by this point totally psychotic, and unconcerned for his own welfare, which makes him an enemy to be reckoned with.

I also enjoyed the scene where Smith assimilated the Oracle. I loved how she sat calmly while Smith went nuts. “The great and powerful Oracle. We meet at last. I suppose you’ve been expecting me, right? The all-knowing Oracle is never surprised. How can she be, she knows everything. But If that’s true, then why is she here? If she knew I was coming, why didn’t she leave?” Here, he flings the plate of cookies against the wall. “Maybe you knew I was going to do that, maybe you didn’t. If you did, that means you baked those cookies and set that plate right there deliberately, purposefully. Which means you’re sitting there also deliberately, purposefully.” That was my favorite Smith speech in this one.

And now, since I’ve rambled too long, without really saying much of value, I close this post. Because I choose to.