Category Archives: uncategorized

Wow. GData. This is cool stuff.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t read the spec in its entirity yet, but I gotta say, this had the potential to be very, very big. Especially this part: the Calendar Data API. Check this out:

Google Calendar allows client applications to view and update calendar events in the form of Google data API (“GData”) feeds. Your client application can use the Google Calendar data API to create new events, edit or delete existing events, and query for events that match particular criteria.

There are many possible uses for the Calendar data API. For example, you can create a web front end for your group’s calendar that uses Google Calendar as a back end. Or you can generate a public calendar for Google Calendar to display, based on your organization’s event database. Or you can search relevant calendars to display a list of upcoming events on those calendars.

I’m thinking that this could be the elusive shared calendar solution we’ve been searching for at work. If multiple people can edit it remotely, plus people can use iCal to enable synchronizing (at least on the Mac), then this has huge potential. Time to dive into web services again, I suppose.

Via Gadgetopia.

This is one of those things that if you get it, it’s really, really funny. And if you don’t, no amount of explaining will help.

From David Weiss’s blog. Good stuff. And the obligatory joke:

Q: What do rocket scientists say when they want to describe a portion of their work as easy?
A: “This bit isn’t exactly brain surgery.”

Subject: Gouranga
From: Neateye
Call out Gouranga be happy
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga!
That which brings the highest happiness…

Wow! Not just any happiness, but the highest happiness! Rock on!

Initially, I figured Gouranga was a made-up word. I suppose this shows a certain level of cultural ignorance on my part, but I get a lot of weird spam that borders on beatnik poetry written in Esperanto. If you want to know what it means, WikiPedia can hook you up: Gouranga, or Gauranga, is said to originate in the Hare Krishna religious movement, whose founding father, Shri Krishna Caitanya Mahaprabhu, was also called Gaura, or Gauranga. In popular culture it is accepted generally as a word meaning simply ‘be happy’, although the literal Sanskrit translation is ‘light/golden-limbed’. Ummmm… okay.

This was weird enough for me to do a little bit of Googling. Turns out, I’m not that special: other people have gotten this same message. I guess that shouldn’t bother me. I mean, really, once I have the highest happiness, I’m sure I’ll want to share it with everyone possible.

I guess.

Is Dr. Pepper the Lando Calrissian of Sodas?

From Stuffo.com:

It was an ordinary Sunday night. Maybe a little rainy. It had been a long day. On the way home from the charity center I stopped at a gas station convenience store to quench my thirst. My hands were gnarled from long hours with a spoon and toothpicks, and my haggard frame barely held up my suit. I didn’t need much, just a little pick-me-up to take the edge off. I instinctively reached for something from the cold case, but as I grabbed for my usual can of Diet Coke my eyes came to rest on a strange new something. That something had 25 letters and red and yellow stripes. It had three flavors in its name and sported the title of a professional — a physician no less. I’m not one to take chances in life, but something about this stocky, stripy stranger and her erudite airs was giving me the spins. I fell for her, and I fell hard.

So it’s not just me, then. That’s good to know. I am hooked on this stuff. And the new Diet Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper, too. The stuff is like liquid crack.

This is really good Flash simulation of Mac System 7.1 (click the image for the link).

Takes me back to my first Mac, in 1991. Of course, I hadn’t upgraded to System 7 yet; I was still using System 6.0.7, which was lean and fast, even on my 8 MHz Macintosh Classic with 2 MB RAM. And a whopping 40 MB hard drive. Man, I thought that computer rocked. I’d stay up late at night using ResEdit to poke through every file I could get my hands on.

But anyway, the simulation is great. Very realistic. I love the Netscape icon on the desktop. I wonder if the simulated extensions folder has a simulated copy of Netscape Defrost in there?

You’re not going to Adam and believe this…

In journalism class, I learned that 030 means “end of story.” I’ve recently reached my own 030 in one area of my life. I’m not going into details here, though. You want to know, you come and ask me, because I’m not falling for that again.

Anyway, I’m back and publishing again. Thanks to everyone who contacted me to find out what was up. Things are fine, now, and mostly back to normal. Let’s just say that I’m constantly amazed by the people of this world.

If you’re reading this, you know that I’ve moved my weblog off of truetech.org. I’ve turned that into a WordPress weblog that I’m sharing with Tom and Dave. So we’ll see where that goes.

Well, it’s getting late, and I’ve been working on my new template for a while now, so I’ll leave you with this: Youth minister smites dodgeball opponent. Discuss.

Performed by Tripod. I was laughing out loud at this.

And we’re outta here… that’s all she wrote, folks. REAL World 2006 is is over and done.

I started off this morning by attending RBScript 101 by David Grogono. I must make a confession: this was the third time I attended a REAL World session on RBScript. In 2004, it went right over my head. In 2005, I figured a repeat of the session would cause it to sink into my head, but instead, it went right over again. This year was the first I’ve heard David present it, and it finally clicked. And it’s way cool.

The second session I attended was Database Reporting by Burke Squires. Burke did a nice job with the presentation, but I guess I was hoping for something more in-depth. But then again, I’ve been using On-Target Reports and rolling my own for a couple years now, so this session probably wasn’t aimed at me.

The morning wrapped up with Aaron Ballman’s Windows User Interface Design, which isn’t as much of an oxymoron as some might think. The session was very detailed and informative, and the participants were asking some great questions, which led the session to run over by a fair amount. But it was lunchtime, so that was cool, and most of us stayed quite willingly.

Following another great meal (not BBQ, but oh well), I finished up with REALbasic Fundamentals 201 with William Yu. A lot of was review for me, but I got some good ideas for exception handling.

Most of us sat in on the Feedback Session at the end of the conference. One of the things I really love about REAL Software is how open and responsive they are. Geoff Perlman and most of the REAL Software team gather in front of everyone to listen to what we all had to say about the conference. There were some good suggestions, like a day of hands-on pre-conference workshops next year, but all in all, the suggestions were for pretty small things, which I think speaks to high quality of the conference. We also got to watch the results of the code competitions and the impromptu bridge-building competition.

After the Feedback Session, a bunch of us (and I mean a bunch!) went to Stubb’s for some BBQ. Finally! We all managed to squeeze around four or five tables. I sat with Geoff, Dave, Dave, Christian, Gerard, and Will, and I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we had great food and a great time.

Thanks to REAL Software, especially Janet, for another great conference. It’s nice to be part of such a friendly and helpful community, and I think a large part of that can be attributed to REAL Software and their team.

I’m looking forward to REAL World 2007.

The second day is at its close, and it was good.

The first session I attended this morning was Technical Q&A, featuring Jon Johnson, David Grogono, Aaron Ballman, and Mike Bailey. After a slow start, during which it seemed no one had any questions of their own, but were rather expecting just to listen to everyone else’s questions, which was my own plan, David said that no question was too easy, and that even Aaron learned something new about REALbasic this week and was still very excited about it.

So I raised my hand and asked Aaron what he had learned about REALbasic this week. He replied, “Sort with.” And then he talked for a few moments about some of the cool things you can do with it, like sorting dictionaries. Very cool indeed. Something to try when I get a chance.

My second session was Using RB in a K12 Support Setting, which was the session I was presenting. I was really nervous going into the session, because it was completely non-technical, and I wasn’t sure what kind of audience it would attract or what kind of reception I would get. As it turned out, the session went pretty well. I got some great questions and we had some very interesting discussions, some of which continued even through lunch and dinner. I ended with a live demo of Kodiak, which seemed to go pretty well.

After that, I attended Design Patterns in REALbasic with Aaron Ballman. I had attended Joe Strout’s session on the same topic two years ago (or maybe it was last year?), but I was curious to see what spin Aaron would put on it. He did a great job and gave some excellent examples, not just of how to use various patterns, but why.

Lunch was wraps. I don’t like wraps. I simply can’t abide the things. So I had chips and a cookie. Lunch of champions.

After lunch I sat in on Mars Saxman’s Debugging Principles and Techniques. No one is more qualified to teach about using the REALbasic debugger, since he wrote it. It was a great reminder of some down to earth, common sense techniques.

I then attended two non-technical sessions: A Practical Approach to the Perfect Product Launch by Gwen Palmer and Sales 101 for Developers by Matt Quagliana. Gwen does marketing for REAL Software, and Matt does sales, so these guys know what they’re talking about. They were both very good, and very enlightening. I came away from each of them with some new ideas on ways to promote Tangelo.

And now I have to be honest. I was disappointed in dinner. It was good enough, but there was no big Texas BBQ. I nearly wept.

For more insights on REAL World 2006, check out some weblog posts from Aaron and Ian (whom I was able to meet in person). I’m trying to convince Dave to write something up, too.

Oh, I did find out that when the hotel says the rooftop hot tub closes at 11:00 PM, they mean it.