Author Archives: brad

Oi! Some days I really enjoy my job. This wasn’t one of them. Started the day by finding out that we had a power failure over the weekend, so I spent the first half hour or so removing AppleTalk and re-installing it on my Windows 2000 Servers to get them to advertise themselves properly again. Why? Because of a huge bug in Windows 2000 File Server for Macintosh when you’re running dual processors and Intel NIC. Fun stuff.

Oh, yeah, and my boss was out sick today, while my other co-workers were either on vacation or at her new job. So it was just the intern and I today. Fortunately, the intern, DW, is an incredibly hard worker.

Watched Monsters, Inc. and Swordfish over the weekend. Both very good movies. I’m sure I’ll be watching Monsters many more times in the near future, because when Grace finds a movie she likes, we watch it constantly. She also has the new Larry Boy video, so we’ll probably alternate for a while.

I’ll have some pictures from the beach up soon.

Back from Ocean City, and taking a sick day. I woke up with some pretty impressive congestion in my chest, and no amount of coughing seems to help. So, I’m bagging work today.

Older, but interesting article: What is the difference between Carbon and Cocoa and should I even care? Written by Geoff Perlman, CEO of REAL Software, Inc. We need more informed and reasoned articles like this. I’m so sick and tired of the attitude that Cocoa is somehow “more native” than Carbon. What does “more native” even mean? You can’t be “more native”. That’s like being “more dead” or “more married”. You’re either native, or you’re not. And, while Cocoa is cool and everything, I’m tired of it being hailed by the ignorant as the greatest thing that’s ever happened to anyone, anywhere. It’s just an API. And let’s not forget that Carbon, which allows Mac programs to run on UNIX, is a pretty big engineering feat in and of itself.

Tom Waits: Don Henley is willing to get a haircut and go to Washington. I’m all for that.

This is so tempting, but I think I’ll forego it and knuckle down with SQL.

Tomorrow I’m off to Ocean City, NJ, for the weekend. Once there and settled in, I plan to take a long nap, after which I’m going to spend some quality time with my daughter, my wife, and my PowerBook.

There are some in things in life money can’t buy. This is one of them.

We slept in the tent in the backyard last night. We were thinking of going to a real campground, but we figured we’d better give it a try on a small scale before going all the way, since Grace is only three. I don’t think we’ll be going to a real campground until late next spring, maybe.

And today I feel like crap. My throat is raw and I’m stiff and sore. I’ve been feeling like I’m on the verge of being sick for a few weeks, but last night in the tent did me in.

Jaguar is pretty nice. Installation on my TiBook was a little over an hour; a bit long, but worth the results. The system is noticably faster and more responsive, except for the venerable QuickMail Pro, which bounces, then stops, then appears out of nowhere two and a half minutes later. I don’t know it’s doing for those two and a half minutes, and I probably don’t know want to know.

Tonight I met Grace’s preschool teacher at Meet the Teacher night. I feel so old.

Late August is a lousy time to be in educational technology. Lousy.

So, click what do you think of the new look?

Cool. The official history of the dogcow.

Seems as though Microsoft removed some features in the transition from NT to 2000 as well as adding some. For example, the I-can’t-tell-how-useful-this-is NT User Wizard, which allowed you take an Excel spreadsheet of user information and flow it directly into the server, is gone. I used it to create student accounts. I got the tab-delimited file from our SIS system, brought it into FileMaker to assign passwords and check account lengths and such, then export it to Excel. From there, the User Wizard created each account, assigned the password, and even created the user’s home directory with the correct permissions. But it’s gone. Instead, I’ve noticed several packes that claim to do the same for 2000, each costing around $1000 and up. I suppose that’s a “developer opportunity” provided by Microsoft.

So today I dug out my copy of Programming Active Directory, which I got for free (!) for attending an Active Directory seminar for K12 at Microsoft’s regional office. And yes, it did feel somewhat like going into Mordor.

Anyway, the book not only the information I needed to write some scripts to do the work for me, it had a script for setting the password. So with a nice combination of Windows Scripting Host, BBEdit, FileMaker Pro, CSVDE, and Excel, I did everything I needed to do without spending a dime. Took me all day, but I saved $1000.

You know what? The Blogger API, while awesome and elegant, is flaky. I don’t think I can create a product based on it. It hasn’t been publishing correctly for about two months. While I don’t doubt Pyra’s ability to get it working, I don’t know if I want to create and support software that depends on it.

For that reason, I’m thinking about taking Frequency in a different direction. Think of it as Blogger on the desktop. Radio meets iTools. Your template, your posts, and your pages all live on your computer. The publishing engine is on your computer. Your archives are on your computer. You can publish to any web server you can get to over FTP. There’s no reliance at all on anything other than your computer and your web server. I think this could be a big hit in schools.

Now I’m excited. Of course, it means a complete rewrite, but it’s more in line with my eventual goals for Frequency anyway.

Hmmmmmm….

The show on Sunday night went well. The audience wasn’t very big, but I think that can be expected when you’re an unknown band playing in Elizabethtown, PA, in 98 degree weather. The good news is that the show was recorded, so I should have some new MP3s to post very soon, and not just me on the guitar like the lame ones I have here already! But a real, honest-to-goodness band. Almost.

Since then, things have been frenzied. Monday night was a picnic at my boss’s boss’s house. It was a really nice time, but an hour drive each way, so we got home late. Tuesday was supposed to be en eldership meeting, but that was cancelled due a baby being born that morning (congratulations, Andy & Julie!). So instead I went out and switched to Cingular wireless, which I’m liking a lot. I really like my Ericsson phone. Eventually I want the Bluetooth adaptor for it. Then Wednesday was Worship Team practice, as always. Tonight was an informational meeting about SWAN, Pennsylvania’s Statewide Adoption Network. Jen and I have a lot of thinking to do in the near future. And of course, all of this among the annual mid-August to mid-October school-technology-insanity-fest.

Well, tomorrow is the big day. For the first time since 1998, most of Anonymous Joe will be playing together. I’m excited and nervous. Jen’s very nervous; this is the first non-Worship Team playing she’s done since the band split up in ’98.

If you’re in the Lancaster or Elizabethtown area, I again invite you to attend. 6:30 to 8:30 at the Elizabethtown Borough Park (click here for directions).

We have a good set of songs picked out; about half are originals, either from our Anonymous Joe days or songs I’ve worked on since, a good chunk are covers of some of favorite bands (Weezer, Barenaked Ladies, Sugar Ray, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Jars of Clay, etc.), and the rest are a nice praise and worship set. I’m probably the only person who does “The Heart of Worship” and a Green Day song in the same show, but that’s okay with me.