...more recent posts
I haven't had as much time lately for posting here. Things are very busy on the home front plus my recent venture into OS X fanaticism is taking a lot of my time. I think I will be swallowed by the project builder monster if I'm not careful. It's much to Apple's credit that I would find myself with the courage to even open up such a program. But this introduction to Applescript on OSX was just too tempting. "You mean I can make cocoa programs with Applescript?" That's something even a not so sophisticated PHP scripting philosophy major can probably deal with.
Doc Searls: "Hotel California Lists, or HCLs, are my new label for email lists you can check out of, but never leave."
Wow, this is going well. OSX has restored some of the excitement I remember from my beginning days on the web. Two thumbs up. Proselytizing will now begin in earnest, so watch out if you have to spend any time with me in the near future.
It turns out I didn't have the latest (10.1.1) version of X. I grabbed that this morning after Chris, from the on hiatus mors.ante.servitium, reminded me.
I'm running this on a 400 mhz G3 iMac and speed is not too bad. But it is slow at times, especially when resizing windows. I only have 128 megs of RAM in this machine, so perhaps bumping that will help. I'm sure a G4 would do better, but this is what I have for the moment. In any case, I use Mozilla as my main browser, so I must not care too much about blindingly fast user interfaces. It's funny how if I like a technology on a theoretical (philosophical? ethical?) level I am willing to cut it a lot of slack. Probably there is some loose thinking in there, but that's how it is. On the other hand, the first time I was annoyed by Microsoft or Real I banished them from my world forever.
Back upstairs on the dialup now. Seems to work fine. This is what I had problems with in the public beta. I could never get PPP to stay connected. Needless to say, they've come a long way from the pb to 10.1. Nice work. Cheapest new computer I've ever gotten.
Long day of downloading. For no good reason I'll say what I did.
Backed up a couple of gigs off my home machine (graphite iMac) onto one of the Mac towers in the office. Did some actual math and discovered we only get about 5.5 Mb/sec over the LAN. I'll have to look into that.
Wiped the single partition on the iMac. Made two new partitions.
Installed 9.0.4 (off CD) onto the smaller partition.
Downloaded 9.1 updater from Apple. Installed over 9.0.4.
Downloaded 9.2 updater from Apple. Tried to install - corrupt. Couldn't go back.
Installed 9.0.4 again off CD. Updated again to 9.1.
Downloaded 9.2 updater from Apple again. Installed sucessfully.
Downloaded 9.2.2 updater from Apple. Installed.
Installed 10.1 (off CD) onto the larger partition.
Downloaded developer tools (200+ Megs!) and installed.
Writing this from mozilla 0.9.6 running on OS 10.1. Feels good so far. I got a consistent 60 K/sec from Apple on the DSL. Still, that's not so fast for over half a gig of downloads. Started around noon and am just finishing up now.
I've meant to make this upgrade for some time, but I suspected it would turn into an all day adventure and so I had been putting it off. Glad I finally got it done. I traded emails a few weeks ago with mors.ante.servitium and his OS X enthusiasm sort of shamed me into finally doing it. Thanks. Everything is working well so far. I'll keep you informed on how it goes.
My guilty conscience will not let me rest until I expose the extremely unamerican way I behaved today: I failed to conduct all my affairs under the highest level of security. Also, I made no efforts to observe, not to mention report, any evil doings. And as for smoking people out of their holes, I'm sad to say I'm not even sure what that means. Sorry. I'll try harder tomorrow.
Rageboy on fire.
Mac in red plastic jug conversion photos. No, I don't know why.
Google groups now has a full 20 years of usenet history on line. That's over 700 million messages. Aaron Swartz pointed to some fun old ones, like Tim Berners-Lee's first post and this first "executive summary" of the world wide web project. More links on Aaron's page.
update: Here's a timeline from google with many of these early interesting threads. Wow.
MB has been working on a project lately that involves a childrens television personality I grew up watching on the magic screen. I met her last week here at the apartment. We were introduced, and shook hands, and I pretended there was nothing strange with meeting someone in real life who comes from my TV fueled childhood imagination. "Oh hi, nice to meet you." Last night we all ate at the bar at Fresh Foods and I was trying to see if Dennis, the bartender, recognized her. I mean, she looks exactly the same. But he didn't know what I was talking about. I guess you have to be of a certain age.