I broke it.
08/25/05, 1:37
OK, so I haven’t blogged since I sold my powerbook last week. I sold my powerbook last week! Not quite as much as I was hoping for, but I think it was quite a fair price for all involved. Problem being, this leaves me with a 266MHz beige g3 desktop as my main computer, that can only run up to Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar”.
Now, last night I got the brilliant idea to hack away at the Quicktime 7 installer to get it to work with 10.2, and got it to install just fine, but when I rebooted, it failed to boot into OS X again. So I spent nearly the entire day today trying to fix it. Process being: Backup (image the drive), repartition (decided to make a small adjustment), restore, delete a f-ton of stuff to make room, archive install 10.2 over the top, restore more data and clean up some small messes left around in various places, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update, update (ran all the updates except the 10.2.8 combo because it wouldn’t succeed, so I ran 10.2.2, then the 10.2.6 combo, then the standalone 10.2.8 update), then there were still 10 more patches to run (mostly security updates and such).
And now it boots and runs fine, while being all up-to-date 
But I still don’t have Quicktime 7 
Ah well.
Mmmm waterskiing, last week I was making my 34mph pass almost consistantly, then this past Tuesday, I couldn’t do it again for some reason. I plan to attack the course again in the morning, goal still being 36mph and consistancy.
Link of the moment: Check out this short film shot with regular Canon EOS 20D SLR camera. It’s quite amazing in my opinion. Credit to Digg.com for enlightening me.
12omgwtfwaterskiing
06/27/05, 15:34
So in the past week, I’ve gone waterskiing last Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (yesterday)! This is crazy! But it has costed me my hands:
Yesterday I could barely hold onto the rope. But the good news (sorta) is I now get a week off from waterskiing, and I can let my hands heal a bit. Also I have the opportunity to get a considerably newer ski for quite a reasonable price. There is a question I have yet to ask the owner of it though before I write a check for it.
Besides waterskiing, I’ve been trying to teach myself some guitar riffs and chords the past few days. I just need to keep on messing with it. I’ve picked up almost one riff a day, and been working on all of them to get the timing better and sounding cleaner.
It’s weird to find out people actually read this site. I often (ok maybe not so often), rant about things, or talk about things that happen in my life, but it feels kinda funny to find out who reads the site, especially the blog.
In other unrelated news (I guess I’m going for the the post most unrelated to itself today), I’ve listed my laptop for sale, and have had 2 people interested so far, but only one has made a somewhat serious offer (quite below my asking price). If I don’t get an offer of something reasonably close to what I’m asking, I may just keep it at least for the summer.
All that and my summer vacation/trip starts soon. Will be very nice to see everyone again! Well, that’s it for now.
11Seminar, Finished, Groovy
05/06/05, 22:54
I got the chance to attend a Mac OS X Tiger/Tiger Server seminar today. Mostly it was an advertisement for the new features in the latest flavor of OS X, but there were a few subtle things I learned about. Mostly what was new to me were the features in Mac OS X Server. I could geek out for a bit here, but being that I probably won’t be running such a server anytime soon, I won’t.
Also today finally marked the conclusion of the journy that was building the math department a new website. The project had been just about complete for a while now, but we had to wait for a few things to happen before moving it over to the permanant server. Then when loaded on the new server, naturally, nothing worked. So after manually editing EVERY php file, twice, I was down to only 2 minor headaches, which could be lived without for a day or so. One, the photo album would load the expanded pictures, this was a simple fix to add _GET[''] to the variable declaration. Two, the random image rotator was seemingly completely broken. Somehow the line endings transformed themselves to DOS format, and a mystery character decided to rear its ugly head. Thanks to help from Hans, this got taken care of today as well.
On May 6, 2005, at 5:15 PM, Jonathan Brundan wrote:
Perfect.I think you’re done…
Thanks for all your work!!!Jon.
Yay! Thanks Jon!
Lastly, I updated my pr0tfolio with a short description of my latest web project, and now I’ll have some free time to put up some of my photography and other art works I’ve been working on. w00tles!
11Good Morning Tiger
05/02/05, 21:50
So Friday night, 6pm, the latest version of Mac OS X came out, version 10.4, codenamed “Tiger.” I got to the bookstore about 5:30pm, and I was about the 3rd or 4th person in line. Shortly after I got there, several of my coworkers got in line (Joey, AJ, and Patrick). My department authorized me to buy a copy for them, so I just brought it home and installed it. (My University has a site license for Mac OS X, so it’s free for affiliated people to use, and costs $15 for the media if you need it) Sure, I don’t own the media, but I don’t need to. Plus I can always get another copy later, or burn a copy at some point.
I installed it when I got home, and I’ve been running it exclusively ever since. I’m running it on both my 667MHz “gigabit” Titanium Powerbook (with 512MB RAM + 16MB RAGE gfx card), and my 1.42GHz Mac Mini (with 512MB RAM + 32MB Radeon gfx card) at work. Now this Mini’s processor is over twice as fast as any Mac I’ve ever used for an extended period of time, but it is noticably faster on my Powerbook [than 10.3 "Panther" was].
I have some issues with Mail.app in Tiger. I have all kinds of rules that sort my mail into folders on the server for me. The settings for which folders these sort into don’t stick for some reason. I’ve talked to another early adopter who has the same types of rules/filters set up who hasn’t had any problems with them. I, on the other hand, am having the same problem on 2 different computers– one of which was upgraded from Panther, the other was a brand new fresh installation. I DON’T GET IT.
What’s the best feature? Why should you upgrade you ask? The answer is simple. Screen shots are now in PNG format, rather than PDF. While PDF is great for sending multiple page documents, it’s one of the worst possible formats for screenshots. Yay it’s worth the retail price for this one feature alone!
Undoing Apple’s meddling.
04/18/04, 11:57
Why I’m compelled to undo things that Apple changes in their UI, I’m not really sure. I like getting new things, rather than having old things rehashed and resold to me. Click this thumb for 2 screenshots of the result.
I don’t really feel like explaining every little step I did, but I will share the links of the references I used I guess.
The Mac OS X Hint - Proof of Concept, and most of the instructions.
Anatomy of a PrefPane - to customize the icons.
Also having a 10.2 machine handy gives you access to the icons from 10.2 when these preferences were seperate. And finally, I don’t think this was mentioned in the hint above, hide the original prefpane by changing permissions by u-r, or to I think 355.
Also, obligatory warning, backup any files you change, and be careful! Whenever altering system files, it’s really easy to hose your system. Enjoy