...more recent posts
My sister and her husband and my little niece Mary are coming for the weekend. Lots of eating planned. It will be fun to see them. I love when people come to visit NYC and I can show it off. Fun starts tonight at Alias.
[yeah, I moved this entry.]
Holy cow! Looks like you can now build 100% native Cocoa applications for OS X 10.2 written entirely in Python.
What does that mean? Well, it might mean that someone like me, who's not a "real" programmer, but is quite comfortable in scripting languages like Perl, PHP, (and given a weeekend to get up to speed) Python, could write a "real" program that runs right on your desktop (and not in your browser.) Traditional Cocoa applications, on the other hand, are usually written in Objective C. That's a "real" language. Definitely more than a weekend for me to learn enough about that to do anything. And possibly out of my range all together.
This is the dream, it seems, that many people have for OS X. Including myself. Make the insides accessible to mere mortals. Let us build stuff with our machines, not just consume what's coming down the wire. And make the building process easy. Python looks like the way to go. If I'm understanding this correctly I'm very excited.
The new Beck album Sea Change is really nice. Meeeeelllllloooow. Thanks Dave.
Lots of meetings this week for the Oct. 26th DC trip. I can see why I've never done anything political before. I really like everyone involved, but it's pretty boring hashing out political differences (and this is inside the group where we all pretty much agree.) It takes a really long time to come to the most simple decisions. Of course I'm no help at all. Luckily we have some folks who really know what they are doing.
Lessig argued today. Kottke has a nice paragraph and some links including Matt "metafilter" Haughey's thoughts, as well as some news links and first hand reports.
I've lost the power cord to my Canon camera (some time ago.) Any chance anyone here has seen it?
Working like mad on Washington DC protest trip organization. Being so (un)wired is incredibly useful for trying to put something like this together. More info soon. Websites should be live by Monday.
Makes me think of Howard Reingold's new book Smart Mobs (good intro at that link.) The front page of the site is a weblog, of course.
Insanely detailed (and footnoted) 9-11 timeline. Leans toward the conspiracy side if that interests or outrages you. Either way, the depth is amazing.
If everything were this easy...
My friends second generation iMac had a severe crash that rendered the machine unbootable. They took it to Tek Serve where they were told the problem was a hard disk hardware failure, with no chance of recovery. One night, in a (most likely) drunken state I was boasting that they should let me take a crack at it. Although I do know a lot about Macs, I also know that Tek Serve is very good. So if they couldn't rescue it, I probably couldn't either.
But, I figured it would at least give me a chance to try the Mr. Barrett hard drive in the freezer trick. I've been dying to wow someone with that. Of course I'd only try it if all other avenues had been exhausted.
So first I put the drive into a blue & white g3 tower and tried to boot it. No luck, and worse, the drive was making some scary sounds as it spun up. So I popped Disk Warrior into the CD tray and rebooted from that. It couldn't mount the drive, but it was seeing it. So I let DW repair the directory structure. 10 seconds later the drive mounts on the desktop. I copied all the data onto my other drive without incident (although I don't know how much data was originally on the drive, so possibly some things were still lost - although it really doesn't look that way.)
So the obvious question is: why doesn't Tek Serve run Disk Warrior in every case like this? I really can't believe they don't. Maybe the drive "fixed itself" slightly by just sitting for a few days? Seems unlikely too. I wonder what the real story is.
I'll be at the Central Park anti-war rally today in the East Meadow. I'll report from the scene in the comment thread below.