Category Archives: uncategorized

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….

The show on Sunday night went well. The audience wasn’t very big, but I think that can be expected when you’re an unknown band playing in Elizabethtown, PA, in 98 degree weather. The good news is that the show was recorded, so I should have some new MP3s to post very soon, and not just me on the guitar like the lame ones I have here already! But a real, honest-to-goodness band. Almost.

Since then, things have been frenzied. Monday night was a picnic at my boss’s boss’s house. It was a really nice time, but an hour drive each way, so we got home late. Tuesday was supposed to be en eldership meeting, but that was cancelled due a baby being born that morning (congratulations, Andy & Julie!). So instead I went out and switched to Cingular wireless, which I’m liking a lot. I really like my Ericsson phone. Eventually I want the Bluetooth adaptor for it. Then Wednesday was Worship Team practice, as always. Tonight was an informational meeting about SWAN, Pennsylvania’s Statewide Adoption Network. Jen and I have a lot of thinking to do in the near future. And of course, all of this among the annual mid-August to mid-October school-technology-insanity-fest.

Well, tomorrow is the big day. For the first time since 1998, most of Anonymous Joe will be playing together. I’m excited and nervous. Jen’s very nervous; this is the first non-Worship Team playing she’s done since the band split up in ’98.

If you’re in the Lancaster or Elizabethtown area, I again invite you to attend. 6:30 to 8:30 at the Elizabethtown Borough Park (click here for directions).

We have a good set of songs picked out; about half are originals, either from our Anonymous Joe days or songs I’ve worked on since, a good chunk are covers of some of favorite bands (Weezer, Barenaked Ladies, Sugar Ray, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Jars of Clay, etc.), and the rest are a nice praise and worship set. I’m probably the only person who does “The Heart of Worship” and a Green Day song in the same show, but that’s okay with me.

Carbon Copy Cloner is awesome. Much thanks to Mike Bombich, store the genius behind this wonderful utility.

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 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 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.