Author Archives: brad

Yesterday I visited one of

Yesterday I visited one of my favorite stores – Fred’s Music. I needed some strings and picks for next Sunday’s show. While the guy was ringing me up, I noticed that the two cash registers were both blue iMacs. I asked if the whole system was Mac based and the guy said that the owner was a big Mac guy. I thought that was cool.

Then the bass tech comes up and tells me that Mac is probably going out of business because of this new system they came out with. I knew where the conversation was headed as soon as the guy referred to the corporation as “Mac” instead of Apple. I asked if he meant OS X, and sure enough, he did. I asked why that was going to put them out of business (after all, I think OS X is one of the best things Apple has ever done). He went on to explain that because the new system is based on Linux, you can’t ever do any audio or video work.

I paused, reflected, and said, “It’s not based on Linux.” He persisted. I went into more detail, explaining about BSD and how it’s definitely not Linux. He accepted my assertion Mac OS X is BSD-based, but insisted that that’s the same thing as Linux. But he repeated that that’s why nobody can ever do audio or video work on it. Because it’s Linux.

Even though it’s not.

And you can.

What a hoser.

That was weird. I just

That was weird. I just downloaded the newest beta of Mozilla (I’ve been the alpha and it’s been astonishingly stable) and it quit on me. Mozilla has never done that to me before that I can remember. Hmm.

Active Directory. I can’t wait until I’m done with this beast. What a nightmare. After my NT 4 domains (sniff … my trusty old NT 4 domains that never gave me trouble … well, almost never … OK, I’d be using Samba if it did trusts and BDCs) were upgraded, the new directory somehow became corrupt. The other domain controller stopped replicating and decided that it couldn’t connect to the directory anymore, even though I could run the AD admin tools with no problem. So I had to start over. One of my NT 4 domains is most likely gone forever, so I started fresh with a new installation of Windows2000. Talk about an unforgiving product. Type one character wrong at the beginning, and you’re stuck with it forever.

Windows2000 doesn’t seem to like

Windows2000 doesn’t seem to like me very much. Or at least, Active Directory doesn’t like me. More like despises me. What a pain in the neck to upgrade a multiple domain NT network to 2000. I haven’t even touched my Win95 clients yet; can’t wait to see what’s in store there. Of course, File Services for Macintosh is working perfectly. Yes, even when Windows clients can’t connect to the Windows server, Mac clients are fine. Ha!

At least I found out how to do a bulk import of users, which is good, because I wasn’t about to hand-type almost 2000 student accounts into the directory. I used the NT User Wizard on the old servers, but that’s no longer supported in 2000 and there is no comparable free tool. So I’m stuck with the command line. Funny thing is that I’m more comfortable with the command line than I’ve ever been thanks to Mac OS X.

Quick reminder: August 4, 6:30 PM, Elizabethtown Borough Park. Steve Goss on percussion, me on guitar and vocals, and very likely Jen Rhine on bass. Should be a great time.

Microsoft says Apple isn’t pushing

Microsoft says Apple isn’t pushing OS X, as evidenced by the lower-than-expected sales of Office v.X. Hmmmm. Well, Office v.X costs about $500 and it only runs on OS X. Even though it’s Carbon, it won’t work on OS 9. Maybe that’s sticking point for some people. And even so, it took Microsoft a full year to support OS X with anything other than IE. More here.

Funny that this is on the same day that Microsoft finally releases their Palm conduits for Entourage X.

Dave Winer (author of XML-RPC which makes this website possible) is quitting his smoking habit: “Four weeks — no smokes. 28 days. Still think about them, but less often (in other words, not every waking moment).” Go for it, Dave. Half the stuff you write still makes me think you’re a hoser, but you can be a healthy hoser.

Back from Stone Harbor (actually,

Back from Stone Harbor (actually, I have been for a few days now). Will post more later. Got some of the software upgrades I need to continue serious development on Frequency. I’m finally posting from a built application and it’s pretty cool. We’ll see if the publish option works now.

I am continuing work on

I am continuing work on the Blogger API in REALbasic, and making quite a bit of progress. So far I can send new posts (the most important part of the program, really), get a list of a user’s weblogs, and I wrote a link manager, so if there are certain links you use often, you can store right in the program. The biggest problem I’m having is that sometimes I can send a new post, but it fails to publish. After a look of work on my part, I found out via the BloggerDev mailing list that due to an internal change, publishing from external tools calling to the Blogger API is likely to fail for the next week or so. Kind of annoying, but at least I feel better knowing that my code isn’t the problem.

For what it’s worth, I’m posting this from the 0.1a2 (early alpha 2) version of the program. It should be in beta sometime next week (assuming certain software upgrades on my part). If you would like to help with beta testing, please email me. All you need is a weblog through Blogger with the FTP username and password saved on Blogger’s server.

Hmmmm . . . I just realized, by using the program for this post, that I forgot to add a “Select All” method to the link editor. Back to work . . .