Bright and Early

Got up at dawn (literally), took a shower, got some work done. I have an appointment with my hairstylist in a little bit and will be heading out to lunch later on.

Damage Control

Major spin control attempt stemming from yesterday's article. "Maya is far from dead on the Mac. The launch of the application is evidence of the commitment Mac users have for the product." Pardon my French, but doesn't that spell BS?

iPod

My feelings exactly, except that "There are bulkier, cheaper alternatives that hold nearly as much music, and work with Windows machines besides." is not quite accurate. As mentioned before, there is at least one unit which holds a lot more music and is right about the same size.

How Microsoft invented open source, by Billg

"the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the bios of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there."

Every great leader (or not so great…) rewrites history to his/her liking.

Five years ago: Sun shines on Microsoft's Java Gallery

On November 9, 1998 A federal judge in New York approved the richest antitrust settlement in U.S. history. A leading brokerage firm was ordered to pay $1.03 billion to investors who had sued over the price rigging of Nasdaq stocks.

Doomed Maya

As much as I hate to admin it, the author may have a valid point… or two. I was in the room when Jobs and Alias|Wavefront made the original announcement (WWDC 2000) and I clearly recall pondering over the exact same issues back then.

Eclipsed

Sounds like IBM's SWT might give Swing a good run for the money.

I discovered a long time ago that designing a truly native UI in Java, without mixing Swing and AWT components, was close to impossible. A native set of widgets would definitely be more than welcome.

Britney Flashes

She's no Cinderella, anymore.

On November 8, 2000 The Secure Digital Music Initiative announced that two of its proposed technologies did not survive being attacked as part of the "Hack SDMI" challenge.

Brit People Rock

People magazine has a review of Britney new self-titled album (released today). They pretty much liked it except for Her feeble cover of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts' 1982 hit "I Love Rock 'n' Roll".

It kinda makes you wonder how good of a music critic Chuck Arnold really is, considering he doesn't even know that the song was actually written and recorded by an obscure 70's English band called The Arrows.

Anybody's a critic nowadays. Nobody goes to critic school anymore. <wink>

Still Needs Tuning

iTunes 2 is quite nice. I really like the new crossfade playback and sound enhancer features. The equalizer is nice too. Too bad they kept most of the annoying bugs.

For examples:

• Double clicking a mp3 file in the Finder automatically plays it, but the next songs are played in alphabetical orders instead of shuffled. The shuffle button simple becomes ineffective. At least until the player is stopped and a different song is highlighted/selected.
• The Full Screen visual mode often closes and/or repositions the Finder's application palette and opened windows. Quite annoying.

And, of course, there still isn't an option to have songs played automatically upon launching… Maybe next version.

Anybody's a QA engineer nowadays. Nobody goes to QA school anymore. <wink2>

10.1

I've finally upgraded my PowerBook. The Finder is indeed quite zippier. The JVM implementation appears to be more compatible, and JARs are now double-clickable.

Applications still take forever and a day to launch. Someone obviously believes I have nothing better to do than staring at bouncing icons.

For some reason, they also expect me to scroll down a list of 1,042 songs in order to select "You Shook Me All Night Long". There simply isn't a way to type-ahead in any of the file open dialog boxes.

I guess "scroll, scroll, scroll again and scroll some more…" is Steve's idea of productivity.

I must think different.

Teaser

On November 6, 1975 The Sex Pistols made their live debut at St. Martin's School of Art in London.

Cena y una Película

On Saturday, we went to see The One and had dinner at Duke's. We've had better food there in the past, but it wasn't bad overall. The clam chowder alone is worth the trip.

QFC

After months of constructions, the QFC next to our apartment complex has finally opened its doors. We went there a couple times already. I'm not too wild about the whole chain in general (high prices, poor produce and meat selection, etc.) but I have to admit that it is very nice to have a store, which is opened 24hrs a day, at a walking distance.

Red & Blue Hat

I've decided to upgrade this server to Red Hat 7.2 next weekend. Updating and installing new packages is just becoming too much of a hassle. 6.2 RPMs are hard to find, and compiling SRPMS often takes too much effort/ time.

My friend John is going to spin a copy of the CDs for me. Hopefully everything will go smoothly. I've installed the latest GNOME, and am using a combination of Red Carpet and GnoRPM to remove or update outdated packages. I'm not taking any chances. Better safe than sorry.

John and I are going to meet next Friday. We're actually having lunch at Red Robin with Seth, as he is leaving Blue World for a new out-of-state job.

Anti Alias

For some reason they decided to preempt Alias last night, not sure why (the Emmys maybe?). And, to top it off, it won't be back for a couple weeks. What a bummer!

iTunes 2

Doesn't work with 10.0.x. I tried… just to be safe. I guess it makes for a pretty good reason to upgrade to 10.1.

It is so pathetic. My PowerBook has become nothing more than an oversized MP3s jukebox. I know what you're thinking… I should get an iPod… I don't think so. If I really wanted a portable player, I'd probably get something like this one.

I kinda laughed when I saw that Apple had to pull the installer out and quickly release a new one. Any self-respecting product manager should know that you never release software on weekends. Unless you're fully prepared to call your engineers back in, and suffer the wrath of your customer service manager.

Why… Oh Why?

Is it that when I just selected debit on the card reader the cashier always asks me "Will this be debit or credit?"

1st2vote

Java XP

It's about damn time.

It should have been ready a week before XP's launch, not days after.

On November 5, 1935 The game "Monopoly" was introduced by Parker Brothers Company.

Behind This Blog

As promised, I've written a story describing my weblog and the technology used to develop it.

Clem

I've also posted more pictures of one our cats.

Back to Basics

I haven't been able to workout for the last couple months due to a sneaky neck/back injury. I just started lifting again this week. Low weight, high reps. So far, so good, no pain.

I'm back to a low calories/carbs diet during the week. I really need to shade the pounds I gained while I couldn't do anything physical.

The older I get the more I hate being sick.

I Scream for Ice Scream

Cold Stone has opened their first location in town. We gave it a try last Sunday, which was well worth the trip.

On November 1, 1936 The Rodeo Cowboy's Association was founded.

A Brand New World

It has taken a while but today we uncovered our new web site. It also sounded like the perfect opportunity to finally unveil my new blog.

I'll post about the technology behing it all very soon.

Happy Halloween!

On October 31, 1952 the U.S. detonated its first hydrogen bomb.