Author Archives: brad

Ahhh. My machine has a fresh, clean copy of Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. Freed up quite a bit of hard drive space. Had a few troubles with data migration.

My boss told me that you could just move your OS X user folder from the old machine to the new. Well, I did, and all of my stuff was unusable since it was now all owned by root. Crap. So I went to the Terminal and fixed it, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was a pain.

My iTunes library became hopelessly corrupt somehow, so I had to recreate that. And my Tony Hawk saved games had their permissions all screwed up. But that was easy to fix.

The hardest part was pruning fonts from my old OS 9 folder. I had a lot of dead weight in there.

Check Slashdot’s new Apple section. Nice.

My Titanium has returned from Apple Service. Woohoo! I’m building up a fresh, clean version Mac OS X (actually, 10.1.3 since it was released today). Now I can rid myself of mySQL, FrontBase, OpenBase, and several other databases that I’ve tried. Folks made really nice installers for those databases, but no uninstall facility whatsoever.

After working with the various databases and how they work with REALbasic, I decided on PostgreSQL, but I couldn’t remove any of the others!

What’s the difference between Carbon and Cocoa and why should I care? Great article by Geoff Perlman, CEO of REAL Software, Inc. They make REALbasic.

The Anti-Bloggies. Check out the sponsors and prizes.

I’ve completed my first REALbasic app! It’s based on a GPL’d AppleScript called BlogScript by WebEntourage. I doubt I’ll release it anytime soon, but I’m using it right now to post this text. Mac OS X only, though. Next I’d like to figure out XML-RPC so I can do Blog posting from OS 9, OS X, and Windows.

PETC begins today. If you’re at the show, be sure to see Sally Bair’s 3:30 presentation: Using HelpDesk 1.0. I wrote the HelpDesk software she’s presenting on.

John’s not happy with Dan today.

We went to the mall to get my daughter’s Valentine pictures taken tonight. She’ll be three in May. While we waited for the pictures to be developed, we took her to the play area at the mall’s lower level.

Quite honestly, I don’t think most people teach their children anything about manners or behavior anymore. My daughter is no angel, and I’m certainly not a perfect father, but I was really disgusted at the way some of the children there acted. One child in particular — his name was Dominic — was running laps around the play area, knocking over any child in his way. And wouldn’t you know it? He knocked over my daughter.

I picked her up and comforted her the best I could, but I came to a hard realization. Someday, somewhere, somebody’s going to hurt my little girl. And I won’t be there to pick her up again and hold her until she’s all better.

That’s rough. That’s hard for me to take.

I am testing BlogScript. Seems pretty cool. Let’s see if it works.

Microsoft Office X has a security hole. Big surprise, I know. At least there’s a fix already.

PostgreSQL 7.2 is out. Woohoo! PgSQK training is available here.

“Egads, Frodo. You are one remarkable hobbit.” This is the joke in my office now. See the movie and you’ll understand why.

MSNBC: Inside the Taliban Religious Police”. The Taliban banned music and other forms of light entertainment, and the confiscation of audiocassettes and musical instruments took up a good deal of the religious police’s time . . .

Bob Young, via Yahoo: Red Hat CEO says Linux Won’t Rule. If you’re IVI and your machine goes down in your lab, you call Microsoft and you say “There’s a bug in here somewhere”, Microsoft says, “No there isn’t, you’ve done something wrong.” And so your only solution is to take the machine out, decontaminate it, and then do the reverse process, and it’s a huge pain. And of course, the related Slashdot discussion is here.

My PowerBook went back to Apple today. It’s getting a new DVD-ROM drive. The old never really worked right. When it comes back, it’s time for a much needed clean install of Mac OS X. I’ve installed a ton of database engines (OpenBase, FrontBase, mySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) to tinker with in REALbasic. They all came with great OS X installers–but no uninstallers.

Recommended listening: Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, read by Rob Inglis. I’ve been listening for over a week in my car. It’s awesome. And speaking of Lord of the Rings, you have to see this movie. I laughed out loud watching it.

For kicks, check out McSweeney’s True Tech Support Stories. There’s stuff in here I can relate to.