The latest switcher: Pixar… (Ok, it’s more of a ‘migration’ than a ’switch’ but you get the idea…)
See also: The Secret World of Nerds.
But wait! There’s more! See an actual slide show created by Pixar on the subject of migrating from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X.
It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, due to being busy, and some weird networking problems we’ve had to deal with. Nonetheless, we present this random sampling of thingies:
There… I feel much better.
You know, the great thing about the interweb is that it serves as a great resource for people who share similar interests, or who bought the same product that eventually got forgotten in the back of most people’s junk drawer.
Welcome to RioWorld! The perfect place for people who happen to own one of those Rio Digital Audio players. There’s links to firmware updates, 3rd party software, and a forum full of helpful people. What could be better?
I’ve been enjoying the Rio, mainly listening in the car. I even went as far as creating a dash-mounted holder (ok, it’s 3 screws and 2 rubberbands, but you get the ideas…)
I got one of those Rio 500’s from a chap on ebay, and now I am totally cool. Well, I would be if I travelled back in time a few years, before the iPod existed, when the Rio roamed the earth freely instead of getting lost in people’s junk drawers.
Anyway, I’m quite excited about this newfangled digital gadget that plays the MP3’s the kids are always talking about. I’ve been using it in the car to listen to web-based radio shows like Your Mac Life and The Linux Show. I showed it to the female and she asked if it would work for running. I said “Yes” and she asked if it would skip and I said “No” and then I tried to determine at what point I might have to try to get another Rio 500 from ebay…
I didn’t get an instruction manual (damn you ebay!) but I’ve figured out most everything so far, even bookmarks, which from what I hear, the iPod does not have. I was saddeded to learn that when you add a memory card it doesn’t work as one contiguous chunk, so I’ve got 64 MB of space, and another separate 8 MB of space. I can see that I’ll probably be ordering another 64 MB SmartMedia card at some point. (Luckily the digital camera uses these as well, so it’s not quite as painful buying one of these.)
That concludes today’s update of digital music players. Goodnight!
Another move… Check the archives and you’ll see mentions of many other moves. This time we moved about 25 feet to the right of our old desk. This desk is a bit smaller, and looks a little odd with 4 monitors on it. (There would be 5, but that’s getting a little out of hand.) everything is switched around as well, the PC is on the left side and the phone is on the right, I keep picking up the mouse and saying “Hello?”
This is all temporary, and I will quickly adapt to my new surroundings. Any second now my productivity will start to soar, and then… well, watch out!
I really should have given out a nice ‘thank you’ to bill at brilliantcorners.org who answered almost all of my ASP questions for the last few weeks…
I’m even tempted to downgrade ASP from ‘hate’ to ‘extreme dislike’ on my list…
Ok, well, I won’t go quite that far…
I’ve used a poor combination of dos2unix, unix2dos, mac2unix, and unix2mac for far too long, due mainly to lazyness. Well, flip is here now, and working quite fine. (Thanks Mac OS X Hints!)
Gizmodo points out that controlling TV’s is fun. And who can disagree? But let’s not forget history here…
If I rememeber correctly, woz was the first to resort to this type of trickery. Woz being the practical sort of joker used to use a TV jammer to mess with people. Read all about woz’s TV jamming (find the part that mentions “TV jammer”)
Say what you want about Steve Jobs, but the other Steve just plain rules…
A while back I mentioned Windows uptime, and we actually put it to use today. I alerted our server admin to one of our IIS servers that had puked on us. He usually kicks it and it gets going again. This time no good. So, as I often suggest when Windows is involved, I say “reboot?” and he is reluctant, but says “sure” but not before wondering about uptime. So I ran the uptime.pl script for Windows, and lo and behold, it had this to say: up 49 days 16:50 (since Wed Aug 27 22:33:24 2003)
Wow! Alert the media! Call those Guiness folks! I did mention this was a Windows server, right?
Oh BTW, the reboot solved whatever was ailing the poor box.
I feel sorry for people who have to deal with the sad and pathetic tag soup that makes up much of the web. Really, those old sites, or heck, even these new sites, that are built using the methods of yesteryear: single pixel gifs, tables for layout (nested who knows how many deep) and code that would only validate if there was an HTML 4.0 TotalMess DOCTYPE.
On top of that, I feel sorry for people who day after day of using their tools of the trade (computer, OS, editors, browsers) are not extremely proficient at using them. It hurts me to see people stumble through simple tasks like find & replace, or have no idea what a “regular expression” is.
Sigh… don’t even get me started on file formats…
If you were wondering if you could put an IMS Twin Turbo 128 PCI video card from a desktop beige G3 into a PowerMac G4 Quicksilver and use it for a second monitor, say an NEC XV14 running at 800×600, yes you can. (Oh, put it in the top slot if possible.)
I offer this advice to the next person trying to confirm this by searching the web and finding no useful information in that regard.
You know, if you store a record in a SQL database, it’s fairly easy to store the date and time, as sort of a timestamp, if you will. Perhaps you’d want to store the time a record was created, and maybe even the time it was modified…
These are all just suggestions of course. You don’t have to do any of these things.
But keep in mind this…
If you ever create an application that stores data where the date and/or time might be important in some way, and at some point someone else has to maintain the thing after you’re out of the picture, they just might curse your existence to the ends of the earth, and wish great bodily harm to come to you…
I’m just saying… Knowing when something happened might prove useful in the future. I think they even have a word for that, they call it ‘history’ I do believe…
I’m looking for a good Apple Tech in Chicago. Obviously, in New York, Damien is the guy, but what about the Windy City, does anyone have recommendations? Please let me know…
I find that lately I’ve been much more meticulous in my code formatting, making sure that programs have some sort of docs within them, making sure all whitespace is properly aligned with code, having a consistent number of blank lines between pieces of code… Things that would probably be normal (if not required) were I writing large scale apps in Python, but being that I’m sort of the lone Perl hacker around here, I will attribute it to one of two things, either my compulsive personality, of the realization that even though much of what I do is write one off things, on the chance that something I write isn’t a one off thing, or has pieces that I can reuse, it makes sense to make them more readable when I do have to go back to them.
And it just feels good to make the code look good, even if it doesn’t run that good. On second hand, maybe it’s all due to my compulsive personality…
I had forgot to mention DesktopManager, a virtual desktop application for Mac OS X. (This MacSlash thread reminded me to mention it.) It’s much closer to what I want in virtual desktops than Space.app, which hasn’t been updated for quite a while, and while I hear CodeTek’s VirtualDesktop is very nice, I can’t justify buying a copy for each of the 3 Mac OS X machines I regularly use…
If you think it’s a worthwhile project, consider making a donation. The money will go to the developer’s girlfriend, which for some reason, I find highly amusing…
