Author Archives: brad

Well, I’ll be. I didn’t expect this. At least, not yet.

Apple stands alone against DRM.

Crazy Apple Rumors Site: iPod means something dirty in French.

Today I installed a Red Hat Linux 8 system. Wow! Linux has come a long way in the last couple years. The last time I tried to use Linux on the desktop was about two years ago, and despite my best efforts, it just sucked too much to use. I installed RH8 on a test server today and my first thought was, “This is nice enough to use as a desktop now.” Nice graphics, bundled OpenOffice.org, and Ximian Evolution is awesome.

But I’ll stick with OS X.

but we have to add value.”

Unicron

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….