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Seminar, Finished, Groovy

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!

Good Morning Tiger

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! 🙂

I dig Mac OS X

So today I wore my O’reilly “I dig Mac OS X” shirt to work. Also this evening we had a build party, all the people in the program we have jobs through get new PC’s (fairly spec’ed out, I might add– though I don’t know the exact specs off the top of my head– Some sort of 64bit AMD something with 1GB of DDR RAM), and Mac Mini’s (1.42GHz model + extra RAM). Anyhow, while punching out the bezel to slide the optical drive into, something bit me. My finger got a pretty good sized gouge in it. I bled pretty bad, but I finished the build and my PC “postulated” (though we couldn’t actually load anything on them because my boss didn’t buy any SATA power cables), so I get to have “fun” getting it running on Friday.

If the weather holds up until tomorrow morning, I get to spend another 3 hours running around outside (just like last Thursday). This time the first bout of activity will be ultimate frisbee, followed by more grass volleyball. I should get some sleep tonight.

Big shouts out to my cousin Courtney and Erik who just had a really cute baby girl, and my cousin Joel and Ang who will be having a little one running around by the end of the year. And to Pete and Jill who will be having another little one at the end of the summer. So many little ones.

Oh yea, only 42 hours left until OS X 10.4 Tiger comes out!