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This winner, hands-down, is Mac OS X Hints, who for a brief time this morning, became Mac OS 9 Hints. They even redid the site theme with a Mac OS 9 platinum-esque look (which was actually really good). They’ve since come back to the present, but not before posting a slew of hints related to OS 9. Wow, OS 9 seems like so long ago now. Anyway, major kudos to Rob Griffiths and crew for a prank well done. Check out a PNG of the full spread.

Tomorrow is April 1. My favorite holiday. Frivolity awaits!

As the title says, I pick on David. A lot. Probably more than I should.

For those who don’t know, David has been my boss on and off since 1999. He’s also one of my closest and dearest friends. I often compare him to the older brother I never had. I’ve been very blessed in my life to work with someone with whom I get along so well. David is easy going and good natured, which are great qualities in a boss.

But, partly because he’s so easy going and good natured, I pick on him more than I should.

I love a good prank. And David sets himself up for pranks pretty regularly. Yesterday, for example, he left his laptop in my office while logged into Twitterific. So added something to his Twitter feed: I think Ted is crazy hot. Ted is our network administrator.

Now you have to understand something about my pranks. It’s never my goal to hurt, only to amuse and occasionally embarrass. But even then, not in a big way. So, when you think about it, I could have posted something far, far worse on his Twitter feed.

Today, I posted to his Twitter feed again: “Tom may be even hotter than Ted.” Tom, of course, being another co-worker. Dave deleted that one and wasn’t very happy with me. Rightfully so. Once was funny, twice was just being mean.

So this is my public apology to David. I’m sorry, my friend. I really am. I know I pick on you a lot, but it’s all honestly in good fun.

Having said that, here’s an abridged history of the pranks I’ve played on David.

– Changed his time and date settings to Swiss French and Catalan.
– Took a screenshot of his computer with many open windows then set that picture as his wallpaper. He actually re-installed his operating system because of that one.
– Wrote a program to play the mosquito sound at random intervals and installed it on his computer. I didn’t realize at the time that he would be using his laptop to demonstrate something for the scouts that evening. Oops.
– Same as above, only with a Sam Kinison scream instead of the mosquito sound.
– Rotated his iMac’s display by 180 degrees. I was actually unable to set it back, and it took some serious finagling (mostly by Mike) to fix it.
– Repeatedly set his wallpaper to a “Bisexual and Proud” picture prominently featuring a rainbow.
– Intercepted the replacement iPod hard drive he had ordered and switched with a standard 3.5 inch ATA drive.
– Stuffed a beach towel into the ductwork leading into his office. This was in the middle of a very hot summer.
– Disconnected his peripherals and ran dummy cables to his computer. He couldn’t figure out why his iPod wouldn’t synch.
– Made a modern art arrangement of iMac “hockey puck” mice and hung it from his vent (this was actually Ted, and not me).
– Sent him a before-and-after video of his office challenging him to find ten (non-existant) differences while he was out of the office (this was mostly Tom and Ted).

There were more, but you get the idea.

David, all of us in the tech department love you. We wouldn’t trade you for any other boss.

Except maybe Ted.

As much as I always enjoy attending REAL World (and this year was no exception), it’s always good to be back home again.

Today was a good day. We woke up early so the kids could find their Easter baskets, then headed to church for an early worship team practice (couldn’t practice earlier in the week since I was in Texas). Then lunch at Jen’s parents’ house followed by dinner at my sister’s, with all the requisite egg hunts and gift-giving therein.

After we got home, our realtor stopped by so we could sign the papers to finalize the sale of our current home. What a weird feeling. I always thought I’d be in this house for the rest of my life, but I guess that wasn’t in the cards.

Yep, it’s official: the Rhines are moving. Not far, only about fifteen minutes away, but it’ll be a different town and a different school district, so there will definitely be some adjustments to be made. We’ve been looking on and off for a couple years now, but never found the house that really just “grabbed” us until a couple weeks ago. It’s a half acre out in the country, but just a few minutes away from civilization. There are horses in the field behind our new home. And we’ll have a lot more space, which we need.

Now that the adoption’s done, I guess we just needed something else to fill the stress-void that was left.

Well, this was an interesting day.

As mentioned yesterday, the morning began with a meeting to discuss the creation of the Association of REALbasic Professionals. The response was overwhelming and more than anyone expected. The meeting was almost standing room only. Those present voted to create the association. After that, it was time to nominate and vote on the board of directors. I am proud, shocked, and honestly somewhat horrified to say that I was nominated and elected to the board.

Anyway, the first session I attended today was Enterprise Web Development, but Brad Weber and Joe Strout, the minds behind Inspiring Applications. They talked about Yuma, which I mentioned the other day. It’s really, really cool. I can’t wait to get back to the office and kick the tires a bit.

After that, I attended two sessions about the community around REALbasic: The REALbasic Community by Paul Lefebvre and Expanding REALbasic via 3rd Party Developers by Christian Miller. Both were interesting and well presented.

Following another excellent lunch, I attended Build Engineering: The Art of Version Control, Scripting, and Process by Nathan Regener, REAL Software’s new build engineer. I have to say, I have high hopes for what Nathan wants to accomplish there. I think he’ll bring REAL Software’s beta testing and releases to a new level of quality. Here’s hoping.

At the end of the day was the annual feedback session, which is always an interesting time. To be honest, this year I kind of wandered in and out a couple times and didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. I was pretty tired by then.

To wrap things up, I went out to dinner with some of the other board members to make some plans for the association. We have some exciting things coming up, but more on that later.

The shuttle will be here to pick us up tomorrow morning at seven, so I need to wrap it up and get some rest. But I would be remiss if I didn’t say a great big thank you to Dana Mason and Alyssa Foley of REAL Software for all the hard work they did putting REAL World 2008 together.

After another good breakfast, I started the day by attending Designing Client Server Applications by Charles Yeomans, which was very informative. Since I mostly do database work, I haven’t had much experience with designing client-server solutions, but I have done some work with XML-RPC and other web services, so it wasn’t totally foreign. I’m just not used to designing the server.

From there I sat in on Understanding REAL SQL Server, taught by none other than Marco Bambini himself, the primary developer of REAL SQL Server. And really, who better to teach the session? It was the first of three REAL SQL Server sessions that I attended, along with Packaging REAL SQL Server in Your Application and What’s New in the Upcoming REAL SQL Server 2008r2. So you could say that the bulk of my day was spent hearing and thinking about REAL SQL Server. It’s an amazing piece of technology. It’s built on SQLite, the most widely deployed database in the world. SQLite is also public domain, which is rather amazing in and of itself when you think about it. Anyway, I was pretty excited to hear about some of the upcoming features, some of which I’d heard during yesterday’s keynote. The big news was that REAL SQL Server 2008r2 will be able to handle over 10,000 simultaneous connections (Marco said he got 12,000 on his iMac). I can’t wait to get back to the office to test that out. That would open up a lot of possibilities for me.

During the third session slot of the day, I actually played hookey and stood around chatting with Christian Miller, Dave Wooldridge, Bob Keeney, Marc Zeedar, and Joe Strout.

In the afternoon, I taught my third and last session, All About Toolbars. After that, I was really tired, and so was David, so we headed up to the hotel room and just hung out until dinner time.

Dinner was a hoot. Aside from some great food and conversation (we lucked into sitting with several members of the REAL Software staff), there was a trivia contest, which was a lot of fun. REAL Software’s Nathan Regener was the emcee, and he did a great job keeping us entertained (and giving us lots of prizes – I even won a book!).

Tomorrow morning there’s a meeting to discuss the formation of the Association of REALbasic Professionals, spearheaded by Bob Keeney and some co-conspirators. I’ll definitely be there.

Today started off with a nice breakfast, followed by the REAL World 2008 Keynote. Right off the bat, the projector was causing trouble. After a few moments of watching the Omni staff fuss with the set up, Geoff quipped, “If I was Steve Jobs, people would be getting fired right now.”

Once the equipment was up and running, Geoff began by talking about the past year. He said that their platform distribution is evening out, with Mac users still commanding 44% of their sales, followed by Windows at 34%, and Linux at 23%. Both Mac and Linux sales are growing, though. In particular, their Linux user base is up 48%. That’s pretty impressive. In addition, their revenue is up by 43%. That’s encouraging news to hear about a company to whose fate you have hitched your proverbial wagon.

I did get some Cocoa news, but only as much as this: the Cocoa transition plan has resumed and will be worked on this year. Here’s hoping.

Then Geoff gave us some statistics from their surveys. 99% of their users are male. No great surprise there, at least judging from the demographics I see at REAL World each year. The number one reason for using REALbasic that people listed was developing cross-platform applications. Number two was building database applications. A full 66% do both. Perhaps not coincidentally, my two sessions today were on Cross-Platform Interface Tips and Understanding SQL.

Next up was REAL SQL Server news. Some great new features coming up include LifeSaver (which is essentially Time Machine for REAL SQL Server), client messaging (which can be server-to-client, client-to-server, or client-to-client), server plug-ins (which allows you to put your business logic in the database itself), and multi-version concurrency control (which you have to be a database nerd to understand, so I’ll just link to a description). Cool stuff.

As Paul surmised, 2008 looks like it will be the Year of the Database for REALbasic, which tickles me pink, or at least peach. Geoff showed off some upcoming database features that will be rolled into REALbasic. The first was connection sets for databases: connecting to different databases for development, testing, and production. The second was more exciting: automatic data models, based on the schema of your database. In other words, REALbasic looks at your tables and creates classes for each one, with properties representing the table’s columns. Very, very cool.

After a short break, Inspiring Applications (comprised of Brad Weber and Joe Strout) took the stage and announced Yuma. I’m so freaking excited about Yuma that I can barely write about it. It’s an HTML preprocessor like PHP, but with REALbasic syntax. This is good because PHP is nasty. It’s powerful and ubiquitous, but it looks like someone with a mouthful of punctuation sneezed all over my screen. Yuma appears to be powerful, flexible, and reasonably priced. Kudos to Inspiring Applications on this one. I think I heard Swordfish die, only to be reborn in a new form.

Lastly, the three keynote contest winners gave their talks. First up was Paul Lefebvre, who gave us all a much appreciated reminder on the value of simplicity. Paul is the Community Evangelist for REALbasic, and I was glad to hear him speak on simplicity. I’d heard one of his sessions at REAL World before, so I knew I’d enjoy his talk. Next was my boss and friend David Mancuso, who talked about how REALbasic has transformed how we do things at Etown. David is a great presenter and spent a lot of time talking about how awesome I am, so two thumbs up! Lastly was Jay Jennings, the man with the mohawk, who gave me a much needed kick in the pants about marketing my stuff. His best line: “I went to get a PCjr in 1984 but went to the wrong store and ended up buying an Apple II by accident.” Hehe.

After the morning keynote a nice lunch, we began with the breakout sessions. I attended Version Control and Team Development by Jon Johnson and then Internet Classes by Andrew Bredow. Both were very good. Then I taught my two sessions, which I think went pretty well.

And then there was dinner. Wow. They took us to the Alamo Drafthouse, which is a movie theater and a restaurant. They bring you the food right in the theater seats. Then they showed Back To The Future complete with MST3k-style commentary from Master Pancake Theater, three very funny guys. I mean very funny. My face still hurts from laughing. The food was good, too.

Another year, another REAL World. David picked me up just after six o’clock this morning. We headed to Philadelphia, and from there we flew to Chicago. Our connecting flight was delayed due to weather conditions in Chicago, but we eventually got on our flight to Austin. Our flight to Austin took longer than anticipated because of a storm in Austin. The pilot suggested we might have to land in San Antonio instead, but the weather broke, and we made it to Austin.

All in all, not bad. I could have done with the delays, but it could have been so much worse.

After checking into the hotel, David and I went down to Stubb’s for a quick dinner, then we headed back to the hotel so we could pre-register for the conference. They gave us some really nice stuff this year, including a 1 Gb flash drive with PDF versions of all of the conference sessions. They used to give out CDs, but I think the flash drives are much more practical. No shirt this year, though. Oh well, I have four REALbasic shirts in my collection already.

Apparently Bud Cort, who played Harold in Harold and Maude, was in the hotel at this time. Pretty random, eh?

While David did his sound check for his part of tomorrow’s keynote, I chatted briefly with Marco Bambini about REAL SQL Server, and I must say I’m looking forward to his sessions, especially the one about packaging REAL SQL Server into your application. That should be really interesting.

Then I had to find a drugstore, because I’m an idiot. I forgot toothpaste and I forgot my Zyrtec and I brought along a razor blade that I’m afraid will shred my scalp if I try to use it (note to other folks at REAL World 2008: if you see me bleeding profusely from the head, I’m probably okay). Also, my deodorant exploded en route.

So tomorrow kicks off with the keynote, which is part Geoff Perlman, part Jay Jennings, part Paul Lefebvre, and part David Mancuso. It should be a very interesting and entertaining keynote. Personally, I’m really hoping for some information on Cocoa or on Swordfish, but I’m not holding my breath this year.

I would imagine there will be some sort of group-edited play by play of the keynote. If that happens, I’ll do my best to save it and post it here.

I also teach two sessions tomorrow: Understanding SQL and Cross-Platform Interface Tips and Tricks. Understanding SQL is a slimmed down version of the database session I did last year, which will focus just on the SQL language itself. Cross-Platform Interface Tips and Tricks is mostly the same as the session I did last year, but updated to reflect some changes in REALbasic since then. I teach one more session, All About Toolbars, on Thursday.

Here’s Paul’s rundown on Day Zero.

This is my son, Jonathan.

We adopted him today at the Lancaster County Courthouse.

He moved in with us a little more than a year ago, but since he was still in foster care, I couldn’t say anything about him. But now he’s all mine and I can say whatever I want, so here he is!

Handsome fellow, isn’t he? Takes after his old man, I guess.

I’ll write some more about the adoption itself soon (I had no idea the hearing itself would be so involved yet simultaneously so anti-climactic), but I just wanted to make sure everyone out there knows that this is my son.