Rhonabwy

packed sessions

Well, doggone it. I tried to get into the Cocoa Bindings session, but the room was packed by the time I got there. Okay, so maybe I was a few minutes late - but at least I got a chance to snag an Apple engineer to get some questions answered about Spotlight and gcc under the hood of XCode. Also picked up a preview seed of XCode for Panther, which I've just finished installing - but all that's left me lurking in a different session: the .Mac SDK.

They're doing a really good job with all these API's. I'm really impressed, and I'm also somewhat frustrated. I don't even know how the guys that are shipping current apps deal with all the problems of well, that's only available on 10.3 or later... sorts of problems. To be fair - I know at least how Gus and Brent are dealing with it - but it is still a real pain. If the API's were so darn compelling and useful, it wouldn't be such a problem.

I did manage to get into Session 418: Introduction to Core Data - and wow. It's a perfect example of something that won't be golden until next year, but it's super compelling. Spotlight is much the same.

In between sessions, I've been fiddling with a bunch of build code from work - getting out stuff compiling on MacOS X for the fun of it. I don't have it all happenin' yet, but it's close. I need to just hunker down and make it happen at some point. At the moment, though, I'm more focused on chatting with folks, listening to ideas, and maybe even sharing one or two of my own.

Automation & info

Looking back over my blog, I guess I just repeated myself in the last one. Sorry. I got a more detailed look today at the Automator bits that are to be included in Tiger. I'd originally had a very similiar idea, but I didn't take it nearly as far as they have. There's a pretty good little preview of what the whole effect looks like on the Tiger Preview - Automator page, and I'll hold off on any details beyond what's stated in there. Suffice to say that I was bummed that the release of Tiger is a year out, because there's a lot of stuff in there I'd love to start using right now. I guess I'll just have to stick with shell scripting and Applescripts for my mac-based automation stuff for the near future, huh.

On the topic of other really darn handy tools, Gus was telling me that he has a VoodooPad pad of all the bits from the Cocoa-Dev wiki that Steven Frank runs. That's one handy way to search, scan, and read through all the good stuff that's posted in there - even if you can't easily edit back into that Wiki. I pointed a few folks here at the conference there for tidbits and regular reading to learn about Cocoa/Objective-C development.

talking about stuff at WWDC on your blog

It's darn difficult to figure out what you can talk about while attending WWDC. So difficult, in fact, that it's probably just easier not talking about anything. I'm sure this is what the Apple guys who blog run into, only in spades.

Fortunately, Apple's at least posted a few items on their web site, which in between sessions I'm slowly getting a chance to read and then maybe iterate over. I haven't yet attended any sessions where they've talked in depth about any new additions that will be going into the Search Technologies in Tiger. I'm looking forward to it though. There's some other under-the-covers bits they're adding which should make the combination of technologies really compelling and promising. It's sort of gratifying to hear people say "Search?" and then more than just a few voices around a table say "Yeah, Search!" when it comes to information retrieval and user interfaces.

what the blazes can I talk about anyway?

Not very much at the moment. Mostly because I'm under NDA for the information at the conference. Of course, I need to point out (with my search geek hat on) the updated info at Apple's Tiger Search technology which appears to have been part of the announcements.

Oh - and I lost the bet with Gus. Damnit.

The weblogger dinner that Buzz sponsored was really cool last night. Finally met Buzz, Eric Albert, Lisa (with whom I had a great conversation about medieval welsh), and a pile of others to whom I don't have immediate references. Eh, enough now - back to the session....

ape farts?

One of the examples for the code optimization hands-on was Noble Ape, a simulation. Well, I thought he was saying "Ape Farts will be our measure", but it was actually "Ape Thoughts". Once I figured it out, I mentioned it forward, only to find out I wasn't the only thing thinking that we were optimizing for Ape Farts.

debugging contest

Just spent the past few hours in a debugging competition. We didn't win, but we learned a hell of a lot. Quinn (from Apple DTS) was the one running this "hands-on" lab - and he's clearly got a nice stash of wicked debugging problems to hand out as problems.

Our team was Mike Liback of MacSQL fame, Gus of VoodooPad fame, and me, of no particular coding fame at all. I sat behind Gus and Mike and read over their shoulders as we bounced back and forth working through these bugs.

The second half of this pre-conference session is on optimizing, which we're starting into now, so I should probably pay attention.

(but I gotta say, I got a really short preview of Mike's MacSQL frameworks, and they're freakin' awesome for Cocoa programmers - he's made a lot of stuff really easy - stuff that I used to think "Ah, that's a big pain - just bridge it to Java". Check out his stuff - wait. Better yet, check out his stuff in a few days.

new Unitkit

While I'm sitting in the Programming Cocoa pre-conference session, I checked my mail (network access is spotty again) and noticed that James released UnitKit 0.9. I'm pulling it down and installing it - the intro session this morning is all stuff I've been over a couple of times, so it's super intriguing. I don't think I can easily slip into another session though...

James talked about his plans for WWDC, and mentioned an 'OReilly thing' sunday night. I don't know about O'Reilly, but there's rumor that Gus, Paul, Bill, and I will be heading down to a FreeBSD/Darwin party this evening.

shotguns at midnight

I'm at WWDC. W00T!

Last night, Gus showed up at the hotel about 8:30pm with Paul in tow (who lives only a short bit away - like 6 blocks or something). We took off immediately for some sushi (we ordered WAY too much) and later hoofed over to Paul's place and picked up his room mate Bill. After a quick discussion it was decided that the local joint "Utah" was the place to go, as the other bar of choice (with the preferred beer on draft) was playing hip-hop that night.

So yes, we were trying to avoid that kind of thing.

About midnight:30 we were walking back to Paul and Bill's place, and all of a sudden a couple of cops come streaming around the corner, lights going and pulling over a car decked out and glowing with neon. A few more police cars roll around, also at speed, and then we all universally step back as the last 3 arrive and first guys have gotten out of their cars with shotguns drawn and all aimed at that car. Now we weren't anywhere near the field of fire, but we sure the hell backed up quickly.

So there we were, fascinated by the scene but rather shocked that seven cars with shotguns were after a single car. We were across the street and down some, so we just hunkered down and kept quiet to watch. That's about when "Mr Brilliant" shows up.

This guy is walking fast down the opposite side of the street, clearly drunk off his ass, cell phone in one hand, beer in the other. He's talking very loudly on his cell phone, his girlfriend trailing. He's also heading straight towards the scene. The cops start warning him off, and I hear him say onto his phone (he's like 50 feet away at this point - he's talking really loud - "Dude, I dunno. There's like a bunch of cops here and I've got a beer in my hand!" The cops are using the bullhorn then "Get outa here". This guy is freakin' oblivious. His girlfried is cluing in and falling back. He makes it to about 30 feet away from the car - right in the line of fire from all those shotguns - when he finally stops... somewhat confused.

Now my heart was out to those cops. Those poor guys were trying to take down someone serious, and Mr. "I've a clueless dickwad" is wandering right into their field of fire. One of them hopped in a car, and sped towards the kid. He placed that car right in the way of the field of fire, and started quietly chewing out the drunk. Paul and I agreed that he should have been arrested for terminal stupidity, but they ended up just shoo-ing him off.

They finally started letting traffic go by when we pulled out from our hidey-hole and moved on. During this whole scene, they were taking these two guys down in a pretty serious fashion. Turns out we could see the whole scene from Paul's balcony, so we watched when we were safely inside again. They ended up letting the guys go, "Sorry for the trouble". Paul's said there's been some drive-by shootings nearby downtown SF, and the cops are seriously pissed off. I guess homicides are beating Oakland, which is a pretty serious thing. It's not the area we're staying in, and I don't know the neighborhoods, but it's been getting serious enough that they're laying down heavy patrols and (obviously) some serious effort to put some pressure on the situation.

Never a dull day at Paul's place, eh?

oh damn

Karen and I got home about 10pm, and caught up on messages on the answering machine. A couple of friends had called, and we just completely missed it. We ran out as soon as I got home (7pm) to do some yardwork (mowing and quick weeding), a run to the hardware store to return some un-used bits and purchase a few others (yeah, duh - of course we spent more than we got back), a run by Fred Meyer (even more dangerous) where I picked up a stopwatch for work, and then dinner.

Jeeze, you'd think we'd been keeping busy...

I'm getting really excited about going to WWDC - I'm flying down there this saturday. At the same time, it sort of feels like damnit! Can't it wait a week... - not from the housework (never ending, really), but because of my new job. I'm surprised at how full my days have become, and I'm really into it. I've been going in early-ish (7:30 to 8am) and coming home late-ish (6:30 to 7pm) and still not feeling like I'm getting as much done as I'd like to. I lost two days this week to bizarre makefile and configuration weirdness (running the java-based xalan on cygwin invoked remotely from a linux platform...), and I've got an assignment that I'd hoped to get done this week that basically doesn't have a chance in hell of getting completed before I leave for WWDC... and it's really, really bugging me.

Every day at this place, I'm throwing myself into something new and learning a hell of a lot. It's fantastic, and it'd have to be fantastic to make me whiny about the timing of WWDC, which I've been looking forward to for the better part of the past six months.

By the way, there's an interesting article over at Wired - an interview with Will Smith about I, Robot.

Camino

For those of you interested (and maybe even using) MacOS X, the Mozilla crew released Camino version 0.8 today. With which I am posting this entry.

7am on wednesday morning

Yes, I really am posting at 7am on wednesday morning. We just got back from the airport, dropping off Rudy to catch his "lose an entire day" flight back to Missouri. He was doing a two-leg trip with Southwest, plus having to take a shuttle into Columbia once he gets to Kansas City or St Louis (Kansas City, I think) - so he won't be getting home until 7pm CST (about five-ish here).

The house seems sort of quiet without his energy at the moment, but that could easily be that I'm not used to waking up at 5:00am for anything. In fact, I've been waking up most of the time about now. Ah well.

Hey - coming up, there's I, Robot, about which Wired appears to have an extensive article. And yes, without a doubt I'll be going to see it. I saw a preview that actually disappointmented me - but only because I am an intense fan of the books and the preview really didn't seem to reflect back to me what I felt from reading the books. So when I read the quote (in that article):

"This is the definitive movie about robots," says Proyas. "It's the most faithful cinematic reworking of Asimov's stories to date, true to the spirit and ideas, yet reenvisioned."

Still, I'm ready to see it...

evil spyware

To be honest, I don't have to worry too much about evil spyware for myself. Of course, being the "computer guy" in the family means that everyone asks me for advice when it comes to their various machines. I try to limit my exposure to being the "family technical support", but I still end up doing bits of it here and there. And I'm not afraid to say "yep, haven't a clue!" when it comes to some of the stranger problems.

Even still, it was neat to see the article on purging Adware and Spyware at OReillyNet today. One, I'd never heard of Spybot, only AdAware. I'm always happy to add another tool to the arsenal...

american standard and teflon tape

So the kitchen is mostly re-assembled. Today was really rough on Karen and Rudy - I think everything after about 11am just went wrong for them. Installing the microwave was a sudden "oh shit" moment or three, as they realized they had to both move the power they're already placed in the wall and bolt the microwave vertically to something (like a cupboard bottom)... only there wasn't anything there. So a quickly made box, and a few other trials later...

I helped haul the stove and refridgerator back in there today. The fridge fits in though the doorway with (no shit) 1/4" to spare. Yeah - we were fiddling that damn thing with 1/8" inch on each side and trying really hard not to let too much weight on the tile, just in case.

The sink, though - that was the joy. After everything was said and done, we had a leak. Turns out that the sprayer connection (blech! horrible things) didn't have a good seal with the little brass cap that American Standard had provided - and of course we didn't realize this until the whole damn thing was down and sealed in place. So a basin wrench, teflon tape, and a 5/8" rachet with an extension ultimately came to the rescue to get that cap off and re-sealed with something. I'm glad the teflon tape is doing the trick, because I'd have to custom make some gasket otherwise, and that would sort of suck.

Did you know most faucets and sinks come set with 4 holes these days? 2 for the faucet handles, one for the faucet pipe, and one for the sprayer. We ditched the sprayer (it's still in the box if anyone wants it) and put in that lovely insta-hot water thingy. The installation instructions on it are for crap, but it works well!

I've a few more pics into the camera, but it's almost midnight and I'm taking Rudy to the airport at O-dark:30 tomorrow morning, so I'm hitting the sack now. There will continue to be more updates as we finish the various bits without Rudy's expert guidance and assistance. And hopefully we'll keep up a reasonable amount of momentum with it too...

Course, WWDC is coming up this next week...

pics!

Kitchen pics!

The countertop levelled out with wonderboard, starting to set down the tile (yeah, it's a beautiful green granite tile!)

Marking all the really insane cuts needed to support the bump out. Our old sink was a very non-standard size, and the new sink just didn't quite fit into the old framework...

Check out that awesome counter!

Adding the grout - our very own master tiler... (Rudy!)

Doesn't everyone keep their kitchen appliances in the dining room when they're doing this sort of thing? Karen's smiling, but she's really punch drunk from working 12 hours straight this past weekend as we laid the tile.

Speaking of laying that tile, here's the flooring getting squared and laid out. Not a bad job, huh?

You can just barely see him tiling his way out of the kitchen. That was last night at 10:30pm. We headed to the 5 Spot for dinner, and finally crashed, everyone exhausted, on the couch at midnight.

Today it's grouting the floor tiles. And here's our lovely 2x6 bridge to allow us to use the bathroom without stepping on things. Karen and I crashed in the living room last night - and forgot our clothes in the bedroom. Ooops.

I'm going to stop now and help finish the grouting of the floor tiles - I just got home from work, so I wanted to put up some pics while I had the enthusiasm.

Tile

End of the weekend, and we've been all working our butts off. Pics to come when I'm not so freakin' tired. We worked all weekend, putting in 9 hours yesterday and nearly 13 today. But the floors are all levelled and the majority of the tile laid out and now quietly setting.

lightning in the east

It's not often you see brilliant and actinic light blaring from behind clouds which suddenly appear in the night sky. The eastern sky, over the cascades, it clouded but invisible tonight. Except, that is, when the lightning turns on and creases the sky - lighting things up.

Actually, i thought at first that it was fireworks. It became clear it was something a little more when it covered half the sky though.

Of course I was seeing all this at all because I was walking home at 11pm at night. It's still, somewhat warm, and almost muggy here tonight. I expect that we've got a windstorm or something ready to blow up and move things around. Just a matter of time.

Karen and Rudy made incredible headway on the countertops today, spending a good 12 hours making all the important jigs, cuts, and piecing decisions that are really critical to laying out a tile counter really well.

Me, I worked late. Really late, tonight. We've got a demo rolling up, and one component just really wasn't happening like we wanted it to. So tonight was "bear down and make it work" night. Quite the talented bunch of folks I work with... sort of like working with a cluster of Paul Walmsley's, all lit on fire.

(*#^% insomnia

Of all the bloody nights to get insomnia...

It's quarter till one (AM) and I'd hoped to get some shut eye tonight and get into work super early tomorrow. We've got some really cool stuff on the table, and I wanted to get a head start on things by getting in early. At the rate things are going, it's not looking real positive.

I should have had pics from this evening, but I haven't downloaded them. The surfaces have all been put in place in prep for the tile, with really extensive work all set to level everything, shim it where nessecary, and generally keep it all together for a smooth run of putting the tile into place over the next day or two.

I expect tomorrow night will be a late night at work too - I'm busting to get things done this week so the weekend will be clear. It's solstice, ya know...

no pics today

evening,

I'm bushed from a long (but good) day. It's gettin' about time to do something about dinner, but I'm trying to knock out a problem or two before I leave to get that done.

No pics of the kitchen work tonight. Not too many structural changes that are clearly visible, mostly a lot of work in leveling and routing electrical for the final product. I guess some lunatic (you know who you are!) decided that we should have better microwave than our current little thing, so some electrical changes have been made to accomodate that. It sounds absolutely wonderful, even if I'm a bit stunned.

More leveling to happen tomorrow, along with some initial base work to get in place to support the tile. We have most of the tile at the house now, but there's still some to pick up from the store. It's heavy...

I haven't been reading blogs much lately, but I know that tomorrow is the meetup. I think I'll be missing it this month though - I'm still very focused on getting up to speed with the new job and it's taking a lot of mental energy to get into the groove. It's coming together well - I'm putting together pieces more efficiently now and getting a sense of what's where, even if I don't know where all the bones are buried yet.

I'm getting into the meat of subversion, and piled the pain of doing a merge off a branch onto one of the lead dev's today completely by accident. He was very gracious about it, but it's clear I'll need to fiddle a little more to really get the process nailed down. Subversion is really neat, but it's taking some changes to the mental model I have constructed by default from all the work with CVS.

Action photos (kitchen day 2)

Countertop removal

Working into the backsplash - ah the joys of plaster and lathe...

Look, it's just coming right off!

I didn't say this was delicate work!

End of the day...

nightly vs. continuous builds

Question for all you folks working on various large projects out there - open source or not - where building and testing code is an integral part of life.

What is you opinion on the extra benefits of moving from a nightly build and test to a continous build and test - both with reporting?

Most of the places I've seen to date, when they did regular builds, did a nightly build. But now I've been looking at the their Tinderbox and wondering if the extra work of setting up continous builds, automated testing, and reporting would be worth it...

anonymity and accountability

Gus pointed me to Jens blog where I caught a tidbit on Wiki's and search engine spamming.

I gotta say, he put it pretty succinctly, and I'm right there with the opinion. Open-ness and anonymity isn't a good match. It brings out (in my opinion) the worst in people, by removing all sense of accountability. And if you're reading this thinking that I'm saying that "stifling some social commentary is good", you're damn right I am! I don't want to stop anyone from speaking, but I'd like to see good ole plain social pressures keep you from making severe hate commentary, or telling me about which drugs will increase my libido on my blog, or whatever.

I'm fortunate in that I haven't had too much MT spam, but I've not been immune. The blacklist plugin has been a godsend to be honest.

But back to the point. Remove accountability, and remove the openess. Add accountability, free it to the world if you can keep track of that many people.

pics of the project...

Yep, you're blessed with pictures of the project. It's only fair to start with a few "before" pictures:

The big plumbing project doesn't show all that much change, but here's the kitchen minus a fixture and with the copper run up there where the galvanized used to be.

and of course, then there's the copper itself! Glorious copper plumbing. 60 feet, 51 solder joints. 1 leak. (the picture is a small, but nastily complex, part of the system down there). And that's Rudy - Karen's dad and master of all things house-changin'.

more to come as we move forward...

error with lists.apple.com

Well, dog-gone-it. It seems that the subscription tools at lists.apple.com are throwing a fit when I try to subscribe with my new gmail account. I'm wondering if it's because there's a period in the middle of the "account name", or if I've just inadvertantly hit a little bug.

I sent 'em a message, so I'll hang for a few before I start tracking people down and pestering them. It is the weekend after all...

okay, anyone got a Gmail account invite to spare?

Gus has been regalling me with the coolness of the interface and how it works to scan the technical mailing lists. Now I'm thinking I need to try it out...

Can anyone out there help with out with an invite?

solder report

End of the night plumbing report:

Out of 51 solder joints (elbows, unions, T-joints, etc) we had 1 leak. We ended up breaking two joints in the end and redoing them to sort out a slight deviation in the angle of attack for part of the plumbing. But now the whole system is back on and nothing's spraying or dripping, so we're calling it good for the night.

not dead...

No, I'm not dead and yes, I've been really, really busy. This week finished out beautifully for me, and I really felt like I was putting together a lot of the underpinnings of the technology at work into a more cohesive whole and understanding. That's just an awesome feeling.

I picked up Rudy (Karen's dad) from the airport thursday. After I misread the Southwest Airlines information site, I thought he was arriving a half-hour early. But, that was not the case. His flight was arriving in Salt Lake City at 6:30 - meaning he was running more like two and half hours late. So I bought a book (Darwin's Children) at the airport and got in some reading. It's the sequel to another Greg Bear work: Darwin's Radio, that's only recently arrived out in paperback.

So extensive clanging and banging has been happening the basement, and I'm now the proud owner of a tile saw. The kitchen countertop and flooring project made a slight, but wonderful to me, left turn on friday when Karen and Rudy decided to end the last of the galvanized standing pipe that exists in our basement. Today they've been down there soldering up copper pipe to replace it all (we will still have PVC based feeder lines - the cheap (*^#@( that owned the place before us). At the moment, I'm hearing the hacksaw make work of the galvanized pipe for removal. Oh - and there's no water service right now either - about what you'd expect...

More later, as I think it's about time I went to go help instead of hiding out upstairs or outside doing errands.

python geek tidbits

This is as much for me to find it again as anyone else, but there's an interesting conversation on Fred Sanchez's blog about Stack traces in Python. Bob Ippolito had some really great tidbits hinting at support in Python 2.4 for this kind of thing, and along with Fazal Majid pointed out the ThreadFrame module to help out with that sort of thing right now.

SimWebSite, WIFI extensions

An article in Wired today entitled Website Analysis Isn't a Game caught my eye. It's a neat idea - making a visual representation of the traffic flow on your website and displaying it. I think VisitorVille took it a little too campy, but I'm sure it'll appeal to some folks. I think the idea is neat anyway - although I'd prefer a different representation for websites where I cared about who was traveling where and when they dropped out.

On other geeky news, Gizmodo has an entry about Airport Express potentially extending other wireless networks. Whether or not it does will have to remain until some hackers get their mits on it I suppose, but I thought the idea was interesting.

insta-hot water faucet

In this whole kitchen-redo gig, the coolest thing (in my opinion) is going to be getting rid of those fucking carpet squares. But a really, really fast second is going to be an "insta-hot" faucet!

Nathan has had one of these for ages in his house, and I just love the thing. It gives you 190 degree water as you demand it. It's awesome for rinsing knifes after chopping things, making tea, or even just warming a mug for some other wintery-time drink.

We picked one of those guys up this evening, as well as a new sink, at Home Depot. There's a store of their just a little further south from Carpet Exchange - so that was our destination after fighting our way through Mariner's traffic this evening. The tile's on order - pending availability. Granite tile for the countertop, warm earthy shades of ceramic tile for the flooring and backsplash. It ought to look pretty nice all said and done.

all wound up

I'm all wound up right now, mentally pacing back and forth in a sort of endless loop. There's piles of new things to learn and understand at the new job, and I'm having a hard time concentrating on anything else, even when I've become numb with overload from this topic or that.

Today's mid-day ad-hoc and completely unexpected lecture was on the various and sundries of radio technology. I grok the basics, but some of the stuff these guys are doing is just wild. I got a little bit of a clue on what the packet radio guys were doing with a demonstration of APRS, some practical tidbits on UHF versus VHF, a quickspotters guide to identifying what kind of radio was installed by looking at the antenna of vehicles as they drove past, etc. I completely missed a group lunch at Peso's during the whole of it.

It's raining outside now - lightly, the usual Seattle style stuff - which is chilling me out a bit. I digressed from writing here to read about Subversion. Yeah, like I said - all sorts of new learning here.

impressive

Someone went to a lot of trouble with this tin foil prank, it's pretty darned impressive. Of course, I never did anything like that...

salon on agile programming

Heh, yeah - I'm in the software industry. The myth of sisyphus seems more like a familiar background song than a myth. I picked that up from the end of Salon's article on Miltary software, where they made some mentions of various government contractors getting into agile programming to simply attempt to "keep up".

I thought the little graphic on the Sisyphus page was neat too.

Tile

Karen and I have been wandering about the past few weeks, looking at hardware stores and everything else, trying to figure out what we're going to do about the flooring and countertops in our kitchen.

You see, right now the counter top in there is old hexagonal road tile. Worn down, grout probably hideously unsanitary, chipped, etc. In short, it's the sort of thing that I love and Karen absolutely hates. Now the flooring - we both easily agree on that - we both hate it: carpet squares. If some schmuck ever suggests putting in carpet squares in your kitchen, just shoot them.

What this is all boiling down to is we've decided to (finally) redo that nasty flooring (it's only been three years here, after all). Karen's dad is coming out to help us with the icky bits, but it's still up to us to do the shopping. We tried Home Depot and Lowes, and while Home Depot had a reasonable selection, they were completely and utterly full of shit when it came to be honest about how long it would take to get in samples, let alone full orders. (grumble, grumble).

So we ended up wandering down to Carpet Exchange this evening - down in the SoDo. This wasn't the brightest thing we've ever done - as it's right across the street from Safeco Field, and there was a Mariner's game starting. Blech. But they had private parking, and we won out with luck.

I'm here to report that they're very friendly people (even if the store does smell rather nasty from the carpet outgassing) with some great tile choices and very reasonable prices. They basically kick butt on the big guys (that would be Lowes and Home Depot if you didn't catch it). Haven't made our final decision, but it looks like we're going with a warm toned brownish-umber-earthy tile for the flooring, some nearby color for accept in the backsplash, and maybe even granite tile (in some variation of green) for the countertop.

If you're in the Seattle area, and looking to lay down some tile, it's worth checking these tile guys out.

damn, that's cool

With so many Mac geeks at the office, I'm hardly the first to notice anything right now. I'm sure some of that has to do with the fact that I've got my nose in all our internal documentation, still absorbing as fast as I can. So it wasn't until almost noon when Div held up his powerbook to show me Airport Express on the Apple front page. Damn, but that things cool. I think Div needs a kickback, cause he had to have sold three of the darn things right there to my fellow coworkers.

I'm going to have to see if I can swing by an Apple store some time soon and check one out in person. Heh, and I noticed that JDD has his iChat notice set to Airport Express Ordered.

Impressive.

Thanks Byron!

Byron pointed me towards KernelThread's Optimizations page, where they describe 10 things Apple did to make MacOS X faster. Item 2 describes the mkext files as a multi-kernel extension cache file. There's a lot of other neat tidbits in there too, if you're in to OS optimizations.

feelin' it today

About what you'd expect - I'm definitely feeling the yardwork today. Lots of squatting and rending of plants from the earth is definitely work. It's been a pretty good sunday so far. Got some light cleaning down in the house, went grocery shopping, did some of the computer work that's been pending for quite some time, and even snuck in a little Halo at "Legendary" level. (damn, that's tough!)

Leah introduced Nathan and I to an organic chocolate that's really low in carbs yesterday. So if you're doing the low-carb thing, you might be interested in checking this out: Dagoba Organic Chocolate. It's way high in Caceo (74%) and the carb count is 13grams for the whole bar. Snap that sucker in half for a wonderful little desert treat. If you're in Seattle, you can find them at Larry's Market.

Rum and Coke

It's a rum and coke evening. Quiet now, mostly. Listening to Irish music and scouring the internet for a wide variety of tidbits and details. Cross compiling, Cringely had some interesting comments on this just a week or two ago, and SeattleWireless ain't no slouch either) and how Mozilla is building their code across a large number of platforms. They've got a particularly nice little thing called the "Configurator" which helps generate build scripts - really impressive, and a nice example of code writing code with a pretty decent (not amazing, just decent) user interface.

Heh, for that matter, I'm beginning to realize what a feat the Mozilla Tinderbox really is! I mean, jesus - they're really actively tracking multiple products in simulataneous and continous builds on like six different platforms.

Eh, nough of that for now. The cats are wanting attention, so it's time to move myself to the couch and work with the laptop for a while. I've some analysis to get done and reports to generate.

reel mowers

In case you're curious, procrastinating cutting the grass for a month in Seattle (during the wet/growing season) and then attempting to cut it with a reel mower is an incredible example of karmic payback.

The blasted yard is now cut, and I've also managed to successfully rip out all the nasty dandelions that had the audacity to attempt to grow in my front yard. (The back yard is still dandelion sanctuary - maybe next year I'll annex that area). What I thought would be maybe 90 minutes of work has gone on for nearly five hours. I'm exhausted, beat, and quite dirty.

The day's been good for yardwork though - mostly cloudy, around 67 degrees, and a good breeze. Occasional dark clouds rolled over and dropped some really, really brief rain too. It's wonderful when it's just enough to cool you off but not soak you to the skin.

I've a pile of stuff left to do today, some of which I've already decided is just dropping off the priority list. House cleaning, for example. I'll bloody well live in my pig sty. It's my sty after all. (Actually, it's not that dirty so much as a cluttered with paper, books, yard/gardening tools and cat toys). The computer work I can't blow off, because it's been pending for about 5 days now, so that's on the list for this evening and part of tomorrow.

firewire pain, and recovery

After I updated my desktop G4 to MacOS X 10.3.4, I found that my iPod wasn't mounting properly there anymore. I was a little concerned, to be honest, but went ahead and worked around with my iBook in firewire target mode, only to find out that wasn't working either. A little more fiddling verified that the cabling was all good (the iPod mounted on the iBook just fine) - so I resorted to Apple's Support Discussion boards.

It turns out I didn't get the help in exactly the way I expected, but I did get assistance, and it was fantastic. So, for the benefit of the Googlin' public out there:

To get my firewire devices mounting properly, I removed the files /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache and /System/Library/Extensions.mkext, followed by rebooting the whole kit. Whammo - that was the magic. I'm not 100% sure what the .mkext file is (or was), but that along with the cache allowed things to get rolling again without a blink. Darned nice.

blogging late...

It goes without saying, if you look at the timestamps anyway, that I'm blogging pretty late these past few days.

It's the end of the week, and what a week it's been. I've been deeply engaged in my new position, and loving it. Today some of that learning I've been doing all week was put to "the test", and I think I passed pretty reasonably well.

Digging around in python has been fun, and fairly quick to read and understand. It's been messing around in make files that has my mind all twisted around, although (frighteningly?) I think I'm starting to finally get a good grasp of all the components of the build environment as it stands today.

The fellow I was pair programming with yesterday wasn't available today, so it was solo work. I really liked my first exposure to pair coding, and it was made tremendously effective with the use of SubEthaEdit, which just rocks! For the pair coding, it allows both of us to be editing the same file, but if one of us gets a gander to look back through some methods, the other person isn't nessecarily blocked from typing or reading. The syntax highlighting for Python, C, XML, and X++ has been a godsend as well. I know the new version does command-line completion, but if I could wish for anything more it would be something akin to intellisense in Visual Studio.

I've since been telling at least one coworker about all the tidbits that can be done with MacOS X. He's been a linux geek for years, and is just now working into MacOS X. There's a surprising number of folks at work doing the MacOS X thing - and I can't tell you how absolutely wonderful it has been to get a brand new 12" Powerbook on my first day. I've seen a few folks with an external flat-panel display running alongside the powerbooks, and I'm thinking about requesting that as well - but for now it's all fitting in pretty nicely.

I have some backlogged work to get knocked out this weekend, so I figure I'll sleep in a touch tomorrow and then spend at least half the day getting things done. Somewhere in there, I really need to mow the lawn too. All the things...

damn, missed thursday altogether

One thing to say about the new job, it's keeping me really well occupied. I worked until 6:30pm or so last night, and then headed over to Nate and Leah's for dinner, chattin' about usability on websites, and watching a little TV (funny cartoon called The Family Guy). Didn't wander home until after midnight, so I'm feeling a tad stunned this morning - but I'm heading right back into the game after I get done feeding the cats.

Had my first experience with really pair programming yesterday, and it was pretty cool. I'll write more on it later I spect.

airplane ticket!

I'm a little slower than Gus at gettin' all this stuff done, but I've nailed down my ticket to San Francisco for WWDC. The cheap flight had me leaving SF kinda late on Saturday evening on the return flight, but I figure that'll be just fine - I'll have Tiger to play with and a very full brain.

Speaking of full brains, I'm currently in overload and loving it. I wish now that I'd spent a tad more time getting a sense of how hardhat worked with the Chandler codebase - I'm in the throes of learning a fairly complex python-based build environment right now. We have some unique requirements that don't match all the bits that OSAF is doing, but it would be interesting to compare and contrast the concepts.

I'm back in the world of make files, cross compilers, and such - and I'm stumbling about, but it's really good so far.

fuzzy eyes

Closing on the end of the day, my eyes are fuzzy.

I have had a great "first day" at my new position, and I capped it off by staying late on the first day to read, followed by some furious yardwork and dinner at Pete's Pizza (I really like their greek salads there).

I joined John for coffee at El Diablo later this evening to play catch up and generally chat. Aaron stopped by, so I got to introduce a couple of folks together too.

The coolest thing from today is that I brought home with me a 12" powerbook - my new "office workstation". Sweet! Brand spankin' new, with a copy of Office 2004 for the Mac. Somewhere in the past three years I'd forgotten that small companies could actually do things like purchase hardware and software without a freakin' nightmare of paperwork. New guy = new desktop, table at which to sit, etc. What a concept, huh? And that's the reason that my eyes are fuzzy. I didn't just bring home the laptop to play with it, but because I have a pile of reading that I wanted to start to work on. That pile of reading has led me to the Subversion Book, as well as a pile of internal documents and even a little source code.

I have a handle on what I want to accomplish by the end of this week, and it's not going to be a cakewalk, but that's a lot of what's cool about all this. It ain't easy, it is definitely not boring, and it's stretching me into some new areas that I'd been interested in previously but never really looked into before either. Oh - and I should definitely put in a major thank you to Fred Sanchez for his pre-packaged subversion bits on his iDisk. That's a hell of a time saver!

quicktime 3d from halo...

Gus sent me a link to a really impressive Quicktime3D "screenshot" from Halo2. It's hosted on Microsoft's Bungie.net site, and boy is that something! If you've got a little time (or you're on a high-speed connection), check it out. It's... it's wow.