RasterWeb!

In the process of attempting to finally install the iLife ’05 (why oh why is it not 2005?) suite I managed to have it fail, but still fill my drive, so I attempted to clean things up and make more space and that failed and the system got a little hosed and so I ended up finally installing that new larger hard drive I’ve had sitting in a box for the last few months so I could do the Mac OS X 10.4 upgrade…

Installing Tiger was not a huge deal. It failed twice until I cleaned the DVD real nice, then it went pretty darn smooth, and the install process managed to pull the data from my old 10.3.9 system which was on old hard drive #1. Yay for Apple. The G4 is a nice machine to work on, so swapping in a new drive is pretty painless. I used ditto to copy old hard drive #1 onto new hard drive, then pulled out old hard drive #1 and put in old hard drive #2. I still have to wipe and reformat old hard drive #2 into a single partition for nothing but media files (podcasts, videoblogs, music, etc.) but that should be painless. (old hard drive #1 is going into the kitchen iMac.)

Installing iLife ’05 was simple, and I can finally play with Garageband a bit. (Whee!) Other than that, I’ve still got the under the hood stuff to do, like install Fink and all the *nix tools and utils I need.

Luckily, I moved almost all of my web apps over to my Linux box running XAMPP a while back so those are not affected. Best of all, I can now let my aggregators download at will without worrying about disk space on a daily basis. (Well, for a few months anyway…)

As for the Little Sleep? I got about 4 hours…

Oh sure, first it was the Zombies, and now it’s the Santas…

Sadly, I can’t make it to Madison to videotape this Ho Ho Holiday Event, but I’m hoping someone can…

(Note: I may have to revise my plan of moving to Madison in 2017.)

We were working on an application that dealt with dates, and in the database, I asked what we should use for the expiration date, and someone suggested some time in the year 2050.

I wish I could laugh at that, or think it’s a good idea, but it worries me. I mean, this seems to presume a few things:

• We won’t be around, so it’ll be someone else’s problem
• The code won’t be running by then and will have been replaced

The first one bothered me because I don’t really like to leave problems behind for other people to deal with. I mean, that’s what happened last time right? I’m sure the guys writing code in the 1970’s were like “Hey man, this code won’t be around by the year 2000, so just use 2 digits to store the year! Groovy!” or something like that… But I’m here to say that I did fix code that broke in the year 2000, and it wasn’t fun…

The second one bothered me because it’s sad to think that the code we work on today will probablty be useless in a few years. In fact, within 5 years I’m sure people will be complaining about how crappy it is, and keep asing when it can all be moved to a new system. I say that because I’ve seen it happen before, and that’s how we got here in the first place…

You just can’t win, can you? Oh well, I suppose we won’t have to worry about it after 2038…

I finally upgraded the old Quicksilver. Sure, it used to run at 733 MHz but after discussing with Mr. Barrett the merits of upgrade cards, I choose the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4 1.6 GHz.

We’ve now got a somewhat respectable G4 Mac. This was much cheaper than a new/replacement Mac (which I can’t afford anyway) and since the Intel-based Macs will probably be out by mid-2006, why bother replacing it now? Not to mention the fact that it’s got 1.5 Gig of ram, a DVD drive, multiple hard drives, a second video card, and an extra USB card…

Any downsides? Well, the install was not simple. Luckly, I had stumbled upon a nice write-up recently, so it wasn’t a total nightmare. (I did take about a dozen attempts though, involving putting the card it, taking it out, messing with the open firmware, and installing software…) In the end, I think it was well worth it.