Wow,
it's past midnight already - the day has just been ripping by. The whirlwind that was work today just never really seemed to stop, and the first breather felt like it was at 10:30pm tonight when Karen and I lured Nathan over to El Diablo for a latte and a discussion.
Karen and I continued the whole "buy more stuff" spree that we started with a sleigh bed by actually picking out a matress and box springs to replace our aging stuff - well, and to fit the new bed. You wouldn't think that 6" would make all that much difference, but let me tell you it does. I'm really looking forward to the time when my feet don't hang off the end of the bed. I guess it's strange that I haven't ever quite gotten the gumption to fix that previously, but there you go. I didn't realize I didn't have any heat in the house this weekend until I tried to turn it up either. I never promised that I was the sharpest pencil in the case.
Finally took some time to update my picture on my "vanity website". Figured that since it (the previous picture) was 2 years old, I might be due for a revamp there. God knows what I'm going to do with the rest of that stuff there - I spend all my time writing here anymore, so the whole website thing has really been languishing for a couple of years. Maybe I ought to just give in and merge the blog and the rest of the site. Hard to say, but it just doesn't quite feel right to do that.
My brain is finally coming back online this evening - after almost two days of needed downtime. I sort of wish that I had another day or three, but Thanksgiving is coming up pretty fast and I can probably eek out some time for my personal projects in between all the family stuff that's required about this time of year.
It's almost amusing that I didn't realize that there wasn't any heat on last night. I like the house chilly in general, although in retrospect it was far chillier than it should have been.
Tonight, however, is not nearly so chilly. It's actually really quite nice inside tonight, and not so bad outside either.
I took in an evening flick with Nathan and Leah - Master and Commander at the Cinerama. We'd planned on the 4pm show, but greatly underestimated the saturday matinee appeal. The 7 show was still packed, but this time we were more prepared.
I really enjoyed the movie, as much for what it was as what it wasn't. I was first interested in it for the naval battles with tallships. I was not disappointed, as they were stunningly well executed. The acting surprised me in the end, simply because it was good and not horrifically overdone. I suppose I shouldn't have expected it to be overdone, but I was.
The end effect was a pretty neat flick that I'm thinking I'd like to purchase to hear what the director's cut has on it and see what he was thinking about various scenes.
I really like Olsen. Part of that, I'm sure, is that I now have heat again flowing through the house. The cats seem appreciative as well.
Turns out the ignition system on our "cadillac" of furnaces wasn't working. The guy working on it was a pretty funny guy, and happily explained what was happening and all. Turns out the new ignition system on the kind of furnace we have isn't all that reliable when compared to the old ones - so he put on the old one. Grinned at me when he did it, said "you've got a service contract..." and happily hooked it up.
It's funny, because I've got no problem at all paying for a service contract, and then an overtime charge for the nice man to come out and make my furnace work on a chilly saturday morning. I get a lot more bitchy about software service contracts. But I suppose if I worked on furnaces, I might be bitchy about those...
Looks like we missed our annual "tune up" as well - so we've gotten on the schedule for that.
Mandy just called from Olsen Energy Service, with whom we have a service contract (they also installed the furnace when our last one was condemned a year and a half (or so) ago). So in the time from when I called to when she called me back, I checked the level of oil in the tank (we have a buried tank in the back yard) - still have 14" of oil. Mandy thought we might be out, but we're just not going through it as fast as previous owners did. That's what happens when you install insulation in the attic...
I've also found the portable electric room heater that I think is Nathan's and that we've more or less permanently borrowed from him. Or maybe we gave his back and bought one - to be honest, I've completely lost track of that. So now it's up and running in the living room. Seemed like the best room to pick - open and fairly central to the house.
It's not like we have a big house either - only 1100 sq ft on the main floor. It wouldn't surprise me if that little thing could make most of the work for us, although electric is a pretty expensive way to heat.
After describing the little green flashing light on the oil pump and what I'd learned, she's dispatching a HVAC technician (or is it engineer?) to swing by the house in an hour or so. He's currently on a call over in Ballard (that's just north of us).
Time to do something about breakfast...
woke up this morning, and the house was way chillier than it should have been. I thought it was chilly last night, but I didn't go looking...
So I guess I lost heat sometime yesterday, as the inside is now hovering around the 50's. Got a call into the furnace folks, as the oil pump appears to be in "lockout". I tried to manually reset it, but it just locked itself out again. Joy, joy.
Well, that's what sweatshirts and wool socks are for, right?
It'll make for an interesting saturday at least. 50 isn't going to kill me, but it is rather uncomfortable... even for me.
I shouldn't diss on the bug, but I guess I am tonight. I feel trashed, mentally - hence the title. The week has been a bear, and I'm just completely wiped out. I barely managed to get the normal stuff done this past week, let alone doing anything useful in the evenings. Any sort of extended concentration continues to elude me, and my motivation for just about anything other than sitting on my butt or eating is eluding me.
I just returned home from a short trip out into the evening (night). Figured the cold air might do me some good - and chilly it definately is. At the moment it's just a tad below freezing (30), so it looks like we're having another evening of rather unseasonally cold weather. Later this coming week looks to warm back up to the more usual 40's.
I guess things have really devolved for you when you're talking about the weather to a blog, huh? Well, sorry - cause just nothing else is cooking in there tonight.
Scanning through my morning reading, I saw an interesting blog entry by Chuq. He's been adding internationalization to some project of his, and basically got bit hard by the performance impacts.
I personally haven't seen this previously, but in reading his entry, it's given me a real eye opener for when I may see other folks attacking the same problem.
I think that some of the unexpected pain is coming from what is normally great: that languages like Perl (or Python, or Ruby, etc.) do a lot of things for you - the dynamic typing is wonderful in most cases. What you expect (or what I expect anyway) is that code works about the same way, and at about the same performance, regardless of the data. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that utf-8 and multibyte character strings would take more work to go through a regex, but it was not my first thought. I would have expected, like Chuq I guess, that it just worked - at the same speed, everything.
It's one of those nights. I'm just completely unable to focus on anything for more than about 5 minutes at the moment. I thought maybe slipping out to El Diablo might be the answer, but apparently it's not the environment - it's just me.
At the moment, I can't help eavesdropping on some fellow spouting and pontificating to what I think is his girlfriend and her mother. The current topic appears to be hydrogen, gas, and the limited supply of oil within the world. He seems to be done with it now, but managed to spend the last five minutes ranting about how distributing hydrogen would be a 3 decade long problem if we started now. Obviously he hadn't heard much about the idea of using bio-fuels (like methane, etc) and busting the hydrogen from that as we need it.
(I personally whine about that solution because it still results in carbon monoxide, which I view as a rather problematic byproduct)
Oooh - oh. We're now on to "The Internet" and how you can find anything on the Internet. In this case, it's some about some poor sod who exploded with a bomb strapped to his chest and it's capture of the video and subsequent release into the Internet. Ah hell, maybe he'll start talking about Paris Hilton's porn video that a lot of folks seem to be excited about finding.
Well that's sort of cool.
I saw from Scoble's blog that OReilly is annotating the Longhorn SDK. Although I know there's been trouble with implementing this concept a dozen plus times in the past, I was personally enthralled with how the folks working the PHP system implemented a sort of comment mechanism into their documentation set (example here).
In some respects, Cocoa coders have that at Steven Frank's CocoaDev Wiki (which is a fantastic resource for anyone interested). The idea of being able to subscribe to some annotation set (in this case, via an RSS feed) is an intriguing solution to the "but I don't want to see the crap from XXX" problem that you get with open annotations. And it doesn't particularly restrict things either. It certainly encourages having a few good sources of information - I mean you wouldn't want to have to subscribe to 50 RSS feeds just to get a decent set, so I could see a few particularly good aggregators happenin' there.
I wonder if we could do something like that with Apple's documentation... hmm...
Read an interesting article in Wired last night that's been sticking with me. The article is entitled "Love Machine", and it's not yet up on Wired's web site, or I'd link to it - supposed to be up November 25th...
Anyway, the article is about affective computing - pretty providing a public-faced layman's overview of the latest research happenin' at MIT's brain-shop. Well, maybe not the latest, but relatively recent.
He (David, the author), sort of pries around the edges of asking how can a computer "feel", seems (to me) to implicitly accept that some level of a computer program "acting" like it feels is ethically OK, and never really veers off into the realm of AI, which I sort of expected he might take.
See, a person I thought he'd make a tie into was Marvin Minsky, who's been doing a follow-on to his Society of Mind entitled "The Emotion Machine" (some draft chapters are available on his home page if you're curious where he's going with it).
Minsky seems to be revolving around in the area of thinking that at least some level of prioperceptive mechanism is needed for the goal of a "thinking" machine. He's not going as far as one of his colleagues - Rodney Brooks in his thinking about situatedness, but he seems to be embracing at least some level of embodiment. I guess you'd really have to read those draft chapters and see what you think yourself (assuming you're curious about AI research that is) - but I think a see a general convergence in the themes that some internal mechanism is needed to help drive intelligence as we know it. Brooks goes into detail about the issues of embodiment and situatedness, but I think the real breakthrough work is happening sort of outside of the physical robots/AI area (admittedly romantic and terribly intriguing to me) - but realistically in the synthetic characters group at the Media lab.
Minsky is taking the idea that some mechanism to replicate emotion is critical to intelligence. The idea was first introduced in literature to me by Steve Grand in his book Cyberlife Research and having a go at physically manifesting the ideas that are running about.
So I guess I don't really have my own thoughts about where this might go, but the continued development in simulation "games" seems to be driving quite a bit of really interesting AI research, especially in the realm of interacting with humans. I don't know that any breakthroughs are immenent, but it's neat to see good research on the issues pounding around in several directions.
When I decided to start coming to these Weblogger Meetup's (there was one tonight), I'd sort of heard about meetup.com and what they did, but it was sort of an express "Hey, you should go" from Anita Rowland that got me moving (ran into her on Joi Ito's IRC chat group). She wasn't there last month because of some health problems, but I got to meet her tonight - and her husband Jack.
Also got to meet Robert Scoble, who was quite interesting. You know nobody ever looks like what you expect, but I'd seen pictures of him previously. Either he's lost some weight recently, or those pictures were poor, because he was thinner than I expected. A neat guy to talk to also.
Oh - and remember that "cold" comment I made earlier today - yeah. It's still cold. And there's pics of the snow at Tara's blog, which was apparently featured in one of the Tacoma papers (the only Tacoma paper?) as well as Stacey's.
Strangely enough, I also met the fellow who had a few moments of fame for getting fired from Microsoft for taking a picture of a pile of G5's on their loading dock.
what I said about it being warmer in Seattle last night?
Scratch that. Snow all over the place this morning. In Seattle.
For those that don't know, that's rare.
Damn cold waiting for the bus this morning.
it was a long drive home. Although at least it warmed up on the way back. Up in Oak Harbor, it was hovering about 41 degrees - and here in downtown Seattle it's 52.
Hey Gus,
Check out the VoodooPad reference at SaladWithSteve.
heh, and I'm still trying to get that japanese text translated for you. But I promise if it says anything really bad, I'll warn you...
I guess I missed writing yesterday, and almost missed tonight.
I'm biding time until I make a late night road trip up to Oak Harbor, where Karen is heading for a 5-day intensive workshop. It's not going to be the fastest trip in the world - especially since we're having a bit of windstorm around here, but I don't think it will be particularly troublesome. I do wish I had someone to ride back with - that could be a long drive. And I have to be in the office fairly early tomorrow morning for an all-day meeting that just wouldn't be terribly wise to miss.
I thought about just spending the night up there and driving back in the morning, but I'm more awake late at night than early morning, and I suspect that driving into Seattle with the traffic tomorrow AM would really suck.
Gus and Michael Wilson are toolin' up an XML-RPC api for Wiki's. I remember seeing something Gus had started when it was version 0.1, and it looks like it's made some really good progress.
Seems like that's a powerful tie - mixing in desktop software that functions perfectly on it's own as a potential client as well. I guess in some ways, that's what iBlog has been doing too. You know a Wiki's going to have a way more complex api though...
I'd made excellent progress on points today, implementing a feature where the output of the data in the document is used as the standard input to a script that resides in the Application Support/application_name directory. Not quite sure how to document that functionality, so I guess now I'll have to start seriously thinking about a help document or two to embed into the application.
I'd started working on a debug menu as well (ultimately for my own use to be honest), and while I was getting confused on which objects needed to be created in which order and linked where (NSMenu and NSMenuItem) I became completely sidetracked.
Turns out there was this sale, you see. Karen's been eyeing this bed at Bon Marche (pronouned "bon mar-shay"), and today was the last day it was on sale. My grandmother may be coming out to visit us for Christmas, which spurred a sudden flurry of "oh my god", and "then we have to" sorts of conversations. In the end, she's been wanting this style of bed for ages and we've just never spent the cash to make it happen. So now we'll have to figure out how to wedge a queen sized bed into our bedroom, which frankly isn't all that large - and already had a dresser and an armoire in it. I took the measurements, and it fits... but it's not cleared for handicapped access if you get my meaning.
Up until this evening, I don't think I really grok'd the idea of nil targeted actions as they're used in Cocoa. That's really pretty funny if you go way back - because the idea matches up beautifully with some of the original core concepts from programming Hypercard stacks (yeah, I did a few of those).
The thing that really drove it home for me was getting into the area of validating menus dynamically from within the application. You can do some pretty cool fine-grained work with that. I really started digging around in that this evening when I got a chance to sit down and work on an idea that Gus and I had been talking about on extending applications. We'll see how well it works out - I stubbed out some of the pieces tonight, but I think the real coding components will wait until tomorrow. I was thinking about coding it up tonight, but I got distracted. While I was digging around in my stacks of books, I found the copy of Programming Ruby that I bought back at OSCON 2003...
I think you've got to admire the effect of Google's Code Jam
It's claimed up free PR on Google's behalf at Slashdot and the SJ Mercury Times - two places that are really common for folks looking to keep up with technology news - albeit perhaps slightly different quality standards.
Ok, so maybe I'm a freak for noticing that this is incredible PR and free publicity for Google, but what probably really stands out to me is the implicit message that's being so casually sent and received: Google's coders are prevented from entering - because they're among the top.
It was once said that Microsoft only hired the best and brightest. Well, I think Google is doing a tremendous job of pointing out that's how they work. And the incredibly flurry of bugs and compromises over the years from Microsoft at least puts forth the idea that their coders "Don't have their shit together". (I think the reality is that Microsoft simply focused on other areas - you make choices there, after all - and you can't refute that they have been successful in those choices)
It's not that the Code Jam is a Google vs. Microsoft thing. It's just that the idea of "The Best and Brightest" is something that a huge number of companies claim, but so very few really follow up on. Microsoft did at one time (I think - hard to really tell if they do today between all the bloodshed and bashing they get in the press and public eye), and Google clearly does - or at least is building their rep to that degree.
Update:
You know, I realize that it is certainly not free publicity for Google - it's just very effective publicity...
Is this normal? I mean, it's in the movies all the darn time, but you don't ever really expect to hear of a raging gun battle between two cars through a relatively large part of your city.
Popped onto the web to check up on a few sites, see what was happening this evening, and I noticed that Slashdot's content was utterly dominated by this truly monstrous ad. Ok, so maybe it wasn't that large physically, but it's shape dwarfed the layout of the rest of the site, so it felt like it dominated it. ThinkGeek has these really tall, thin ads that are sucking up the right hand side. Really weird. But hey, if it keeps 'em going... Course, I sort of think that if Slashdot didn't exist, something else would effectively take it's place for general geek news.
Recently bought Crimson Skies for the Xbox, since it's finally been released. Played it a little the other day, and it looks pretty good - even if the storyline is a bit odd. I was originally hoping for something more "WWI biplane" combat sim, but it's pretty decent - and most importantly it supports heavy multiplayer.
There's a surprisingly few number of games that support multiplayer in the mode that Halo does - 4 Xbox's with 4 people each. Crimson Skies gets added to that list...
but for the life of me I couldn't remember the solution. Phew, thank god for searching lists.
It was just one of those annoying little bugs that you just have to fix right then!
Well, if you're wondering why random garbage text is appearing and disappearing from my blog - it's simple. Testing.
Looks like I have everything working nicely, although I need to refine some components now. Most of the method calls to do blog things are pretty fast, but posting isn't - and it hangs while everything is doing it's thing because I'm calling it all inline and not asynchronously.
So that's the next step in the tuning - learning the tidbits to make these calls in the background and fire 'em off. I just need to figure out how I'm going to handle notifications of progress and the final result (specifically if there's a failure to post)...
Spent the evening wandering about Seattle, sort of blowing time until I picked up Karen from her teaching. While I was doing that, I kept thinking about the AppleScript that I'd whipped up last night to do some "post to blog" functionality. It was ok in that it worked somewhat, but it wasn't really all that great.
Talking about it with Gus some this evening, he reminded me that Cocoa did have built in the web services components built in to the framework. After fiddling around with some code he sent my way, I went out scouring and ran across Brent Simmons XML-RPC demo. That helped illuminate more of the code, and also raised the possibility of using his open source XML-RPC class.
I'm not trying to write another NetNewsWire - I just want to have some "post to a blog" functionality. Well, as it turns out, configuring the bits needed for that are really well set up to take advantage of the XML-RPC blogger API to make that a whole lot easier on the end user. That means I would want to deal with the output of the XML-RPC call. And in the end, that's really leaning me in towards using it straight in Cocoa (either Apple's built-in stuff or Brent's).
Now that I'm back home, I'm feeling pretty comfy with it, although I'm thinking the way I want to deal with this is making an Objective-C class that will proxy the XML-RPC Blogger API for the bits that I need. I'm only going to be using a small subset of the API really, and that would allow me to switch out code underneath later if I decided that I'd gone down the wrong track and should use the other XML-RPC implementation.
Now that's sort of amusing...
I was looking at the recent download traces from just posting points to my blog, and noticed that "QuepasaCreep v0.9.14" was one of the user agents that downloaded the application points (DMG 238k).
The amusing thing is that it only sucked down the first 32k of the file - they got 32768 bytes and quit there. Googling around shows that it's likely a search engine spider that focuses on a spanish speaking audience.
I definitely got more downloads than I expected... 7 (6 if you discount the spider). Only one of them appears to have come from the RSS feed (referpage of MovableType/2.51) of this feedback. Oh - and you all had Panther too... cool!
Is that the mountains, or clouds?
That's what I thought as I rode the bus in to work. Looking over towards the north cascades, the clouds (they were clouds) looked almost exactly like snow capped peaks - pretty much what you might expect to see this time of year. The shading, coloration, everything.
Gus pointed out a wonderful little Terminal preference that's normally hidden on Mac: FocusFollowsMouse
It's a feature I got very used to having with xvterms on Linux, so for those of you who want to use this:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
for a lovely place to spent a sunday morning/afternoon in Seattle, I highly recommend El Diablo, a coffee shop on Queen Anne Avenue on the top of Queen Anne. As one of eight coffee shops, it's my haunt of choice for really interesting drinks (don't think about getting a drip coffee here though), free wifi, and a nice ambience. There's usually some latin/cuban instrumental in the background when there's not live musicians - makes for a great place to sit down and work on some code, read up on your favorite websites, etc.
Oh yeah, and it's the only one of the 8 joints up here that has free wifi.
Clay Shirky posted his latest writing entitled The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview.
I try to keep up with whatever Clay is reading, although to be honest I frequently find myself getting annoyed with it or punching holes in whatever arguments he has. I find his writing stirs me up into a reactionary frenzy, which actually is kind of nice upon occasion. Makes me really think about the subject.
So it comes down to most of the time I don't really agree with Clay's assertions and conclusions. On this latest one, however, I do. At least to some extent. Some folks (as opposed to the inevitable "They" or "Them") have turned up the hype machine on the semantic web, and I can see where Clay is talking about how it's really an old AI promise that was never, and probably can never, be readily fulfilled. I believe Clay really hits the mark with The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning.
I think the point where his arguments break down is the same place that same AI research has been incredibly beneficial: in limited knowledge domains and focused applications. Within that realm, the "world view" of which Clay speaks is very focused - common. The Zargon (as Stephenson is calling it) is known among all those who are involved in whatever interest. Within this realm - and specifically relating to concrete items, a huge amount of benefit can be derived through deductive reasoning.
But not this week.
Jeremy Zawodny has a lovely explanation of how to set up email notifications of CVS commits.
Joi Ito passes along a report that some massive number of warplanes are flying over Scotland, and it's potential implications
Kimbro is talking about Clay Shirky's most recent writing on the Semantic web (note: he's not positive on it, and I actually agree with him to a limited extent this time - more on that later)
And, most stunning of all, Gus added comments to his blog. I didn't think he'd ever do that.
Sneaker net lives!
There's an anecdotal quote from some CS professor that runs something like "Don't ever underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with mag tapes".
Well, today it was just a fellow with a DLT tape in his pocket, but it was none the less a much higher transfer rate than we'd otherwise have between two buildings that are perhaps a quarter mile apart. I think it would have taken 8 or 10 hours to transfer the data, encrypted over SSH, between the locations. This way it takes about 3 hours - with the vast majority of that being the load and unload from DLT tape into the drives.
I guess, strangely, this is sort of about insects.
I watched Matrix: Revolutions this morning (caught a 10am matinee) and really rather enjoyed it. I'd heard it panned by quite a few folks, and revered by others - so I was really unsure of what I'd get when I went in.
I've got to say it's a truly sureal experience when you go to watch that movie after having fought your way through some of the issues and details at hand in Quicksilver, which has a rather heavy underlying current of choice vs. predestination, the individual action vs. the group.
One of the odd things that struck me as I was cleaning the house today was that perhaps it wasn't so odd that many of the robots/machines in The Matrix resembled bugs or insects. I thought of the fellow at MIT who's been experimenting with reproducting the leg motion of cockroaches because it turns out to be incredibly stable platform in an uncertain environment. We've turned to viewing nature to influence a lot of things (genetic programming, swarm search algorithma, etc). So why would it be so inconvceivable that an insect-like form would provide a worse structure than something else.
Of course at the same time, there's a part of our monkey brains which truly fears the insects. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems to be fairly prevelant (at least in western culture) - so I supose it's a fair guess that it might be a left-over hardwired reaction to something in our simian past. That makes it much more enjoyable as the antagonist in a film - that's for sure.
A word to the wise:
When you're cleaning wood floors with lemon oil, don't forget that at it's core it is, after all, oil - and therefore probably has an exceptionally low point of breaking friction.
I seem to have momentarily forgotten that little tidbit, and as such found myself staring at my wool socks and wondering how on earth they managed to move so quickly in front of me. The cats were not as unsure, and had departed the room at a fairly high rate of speed. Fortunately, I'm fine other than feeling a little stupid for having forgotten the floor would be that slick.
It's an odd sort of night. Nothing I can really place my finger on - just feels all sort of out of whack.
This morning started off kinda rough, and the work day was long and not terribly satisfying. The evening was lovely though, with a great dinner down at the Outback on Westlake Ave with Nathan and Leah, who are back from several weeks of wandering about France, Holland and Kansas. (yeah, pretty much three foreign countries).
I've been spending the past couple of nights working on an article that I hope to get published somewhere interesting (it's a technical article on using one of the programming libraries recently released with Panther). Tonight it's just not doing it. Well, for one I need to sort of let it sit and percolate before I attempt to go back and read it and determine what it was that I was trying to say.
It's been days since I've coded any Objective-C (or even anything other than wild-assed hack-it-now-get-it-fixed! perl scripting), and my project appears to have temporarily stalled while I wait to get some final components in line.
I'm tired, but i don't really want to go to bed - even though it's friday and there appears to be a completely enjoyable weekend in front of me. I don't know what's bugging me, but something is.
Well, after far longer than I normally spend reading a book, I've finally finished Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.
It started out particularly slow, but in the end was well done and worth the read. I am upset that one of my favorite characters was left in a terrible state of affairs. I'd be tempted to decry him as dead, but that a bit overmuch considering the Mr. Stephenson has everyone else in his books decrying him as dead - and yet his death wasn't detailed in the book. That makes me think he's got a few more pages left to his story, although when I left him he was in dire straights.
Let's see - Jack Shaftoe had been speared by his love before sailing away on ship, half-mad with syphilis rotting his brain, and most recently captured and chained to the oars on the deck of a barbary pirate in the 17th century. By all accounts, he's a goner. Only Neal usually ends out his characters a little more formally (and colorfully) than that - so I think he's not quite done with that story yet. None the less, I liked Jack the best.
Caught this today and wanted to link around to it because it's exactly the sort of thing I hope to be able to find via Google when I get into a mess.
It turns out the NFS File Locking isn't working quite right with Linux NFS servers. Wes Felter reports that it's because Panther (Darwin) uses 20 byte cookies for the locking, and Linux only allows 8 byte cookies.
In addition, he links to a patch for Linux that resolves this issue.
Eric Buck pointed out the Release notes for AppKit on Panther - showing what's been update and such. I've got to admit, there's a lot of good stuff in there.
Saw a CNet article today on how Apple is pushing to sell more into government and small business. A tidbit that I found sort of interesting was the following:
In fiscal 2000, sales of things other than computers--so-called "beyond the box" sales--made up 13 percent of Apple's revenue. In fiscal 2003, which ended in September, such sales made up 28 percent of Apple sales and accounted for 37 percent of Apple's gross margin dollars.
That's really intriguing (am I sick or what?) as it shows a slow (?) migration away from depending completely on hardware sales for revenue. I'm not saying they're switching anything any time soon, but with this change they're a lot less susceptible to a big hit from a hardware sales falloff.
The other interesting market tidbit is Although the company started its stores with its eye on consumers, it said it has increasingly focused on small business. Such sales now make up 10 percent of retail store sales, up from 2 percent in 2001.
I can't imagine government contracts will fall into the Apple Store venue, but small business certainly has a place there. I'd be curious to know if total small business sales was up or down, and by how much, as an indicator of acceptance or migration into MacOS X. Even though Microsoft really has the lockdown on a lot of that sort of thing, I still think Apple has a compelling case for a more secure and easier to use small office environment.
Although I can't say that I'm surprised that as a group A) you didn't recognize the opportunity and B) when it was pointed out to you, you mostly failed to take advantage of it.
Today?
Yeah, it was a day. Not the best, not the worst. Got some good news, got some bad news - I think it just all sort of evened out. Well maybe it's still a little on the negative side, but I'm about to go curl up on the couch with a couple of cats and a book for a while - and that oughta help the day's score.
never thought I'd see it, but amazon.com ain't functioning right now. I'll bet there will be some really uptight folks come monday... if they're not there right now.
Got up this morning just after 8am to Karen bouncing around the house exclaiming that it was actually snowing outside. Well, that's pretty rare for Seattle, but sure enough - it was actually snowing. At least at an elevation of 425' (top of Queen Anne hill). I got dressed, hopped in the car, and ran a quick errand down towards the Seattle Center, and it most assuredly wasn't snowing there - just drizzle and cold rain. Not even sleet, it was thoroughly melted at the base of the hill.
All that activity didn't really last long though, because after I got home I curled back up in bed under some wool blankets and a cat, and promptly fell right back off to sleep. I didn't actually emerge from my den until after noon, and by the time I crawled out of there (leaving the cat still sleeping) it was sunny outside, the temperatures had crawled back up over 40, and there was little hint of snow having fallen earlier - or even that it did more than heavily mist.
So now it's 2pm after a shower and a coffee, and I'm really just getting started with the day. Of course, I haven't a clue what I'm going to do on this lovely sunday afternoon - but I'm getting started.
Oh - I did install a new carbon monoxide detector in the basement. There - I did something useful today. Eh - maybe I'll go back and do some more programming. I saw on the Cocoa-dev list that Mmalcolm Crawford posted an example of drag and drop with a TableView that I'd been sort of interested in for a while. I haven't created my own custom pasteboard type yet, so it sounds like a fun excercise for a sunday afternoon.
For future reference:
When you're defining classes to be used in Objective-C headers, you should not include the ".h" as if it were an #import statement. You may find yourself getting really weird and confusing errors that take you the better part of 5 hours to figure out what the hell you've done.
For a further note, eating a lovely dinner with a couple glasses of wine helps with such diagnosis, just in case you get yourself into such a pickle.
Stew!
That's dinner tonight, along with some bread, red wine, and a made-from-scratch pumpkin pie still finishing out in the oven.
We bailed completely on Walpurgisnacht festivities last night. Made an apple crumble and invited ourselves over to a friend's house to spend the evening. It made for a great evening, which wasn't really in the cards earlier. Both Karen and I were just exhausted from anything and everything, and that was just the ticket. We didn't have to be excited, extroverted, or nothin. It was really cool - we enjoyed a fire, they gave out some candy to the few kids who ventured up to their front door, and met a friend of thiers who'd done the same thing.
I spent more of today programming and goofing, exploring the various tidbits and new things in Panther. I got stuck in a wierd compile error that I couldn't figure out (I suspect I was just being blind to something obvious) - so the result was "let's find something else to do for a bit".
I spied a pie pumpkin in the pantry, and it's been cooking pretty solid since then. I think the pie will be ready in another 20 minutes or so - I do like making them from scratch, even if it does take a while to get it all done.