Some of you might not be aware that im currently in San Francisco, at WWDC08.

Upon landing yesterday i had a slightly unusual hotel checkin.

Due to another conference, Diabeties America or some such lark hotel rooms were rather hard to come by when i was booking for my trip a month ago, so in the end i managed to get a room at the Handlery Union Square hotel for 2 nights and then the remainder of my stay at the Fusion SF.

Anyway back to the story, so im at the check-in counter and there is one of those moments when you know something isnt quite right, but the guy is still smiling. He goes and gets the manager who then explains that he is extremely sorry, and that they had overbooked the hotel.

In short they booked me into the Nikko Hotel San Francisco for 2 nights, game me the first night free and the second night at the rate of the other room and an envelope with US$50 cash “Spending Money” for my troubles. They have also promised to post me a 50% discount voucher for my next stay with them.

So no im holed up in this fantastic hotel room, with a 60″ plazma tv, Sony surround sound stereo system and 5 CD/DVD changer plus all the luxury trimmings.

I have come to the conclusion that some people just have no idea when it comes to security.

Im sitting on the train atm, laptop out, and this woman is talking loudly on the phone, all of a sudden i hear, “Can i pay by Credit Card”. Im like fair enough, but then she proceeds to read out in a loud voice, 1234 5678 1234 5678, the expiry date and 2 digit check that is on the back of the card.

Now there are possibly 35 people on the train, within hearing range atm. Does that strike you as just slightly idiotic.

I guess some people will just never learn.

The Greatest Prank Call Ever:

You really have to check this one out. Sooo Funny.

-Rich

Well folks, i got back from the San Fran trip, and since then have been flat out with projects so havnt really had a chance to say hi.

So here goes, just a quick note to say that im back and that i am alive, which is a good sign.

-Rich

This article takes a look at what i have been working on recently, integrating OSX clients and OSX server into an existing eDirectory network system.

Our main goals were as follows:

• Users able to log on with there std eDirectory Username and Password.
• Mount there osx home directory on the OSX server, meaning that they have roaming profiles.
• Finally also mounting there Std Novell H:\ Drive (Windows Home Drive) on a novell file share.
• The server running OSX 10.4 also allows us to perform management of the clients and provide other Services like Print management for the machines.
• Last but not least, easy roll-outs with Netboot imaging and the ability to assign preferences to the workstations such as one to sleep the machines at 5pm.

Read on for more details.
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I love exams, they are the best way to show just how much material you are able to remember, learned by rote and only needed for the shortest amount of time.
You see it all the time, most often right before exams where those students are huddled around lecture notes, cramming in as much of the content as they can before walking into the exam room, to recite it onto the paper. Most of it to be forgotten as soon as they leave that room 2 or 3 hours later.

I have come to find that this information is generally stuff that while important in terms of a specific field or situation, one does not need to carry with them for extended periods of time. eg Inserting and deleting nodes in linear and exponential hash tables or B+Trees.

Case in point, if i’m writing that new funky back-end storage structure for my latest coolMcCoolCool app, im likely to refer to a nice big fat reference book in-order to implement the data structure (one of my favourites atm is Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick ) or the internet in general as it also contains a whole wealth of info on great structures. What i try to do as a general rule of thumb, is to not assume that something that i learned in a uni subject is slightly relevant.

This has come about mainly because I’m fairly sure that anything that we learnt in a uni class, while fundamentally correct has been been simplified to such a level that it is in no way an optimal solution. Implementing it would be sure to highlight these limitations in quick step. Instead I’ll refer to the books and hopefully find something that will work well for the given situation and has an execution curve that is less than exponential as the number of objects indexed increases.

I guess i am just really going on about nothing, as exams have been around for atleast 100 or so years. Yet i have to ask myself. Do exams really work for modern subjects, in a world where information is readily available if you just know where to look?

Surely it would make more sense for the majority of a given subjects assessment to be done in terms of using research materials available to ones-self in-order to find solutions to problems independently. rather than sitting exams where we are expected to recite material learned in lectures.
What does having 60% or more of a subjects end score based on a single 2 or 3 hour exam paper have to do with anything other than making it easier for the subject organisers to assess the students enrolled in the subject. Any results given are based not on ones ability to find solutions to problems, but on their ability to remember some semi-relevent fact or method learned by rote that was mentioned in passing 10 weeks ago, in a single 2 hour lecture.

This is the sort of thing that I am finding all to often at the University level. Surely what one should take away from a 3 or 4 year degree, especially in rapidly changing areas such as Computer Science is more than the material taught in the subjects that make up the degree. It really should be about knowing how to find information for an unknown problem 5 years down the track, and the ability to apply ones-self to learn ways of solving problems that didn’t existed back when the degree was being undertaken.

Just a few thoughts that hopefully have an effect on someone in the near to long-term future.

-Rich

Well it looks like my widgets have found there way into an june 2007 apc article, which is rather funky. You can check out the article with also mentions other great aussie widgets over at the apc website.

In other news there are some cool things on the widget front, coming to you soon!.

-Rich

Relevant section from the article follows after the break.
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I love error messages that mention how to fix an issue, however its not so great when what they suggest doesn’t actually solve the problem your having!

Over the last week or so i have had a hell of a time getting the new version of Adobe CS3 installed on my OS X 10.4.9 machine.

I originally had the Photoshop 10 beta installed, and although i uninstalled it before installing the Final version, as well as running the cs3clean script from Adobe i was unable to get the apps to run after installation.

The Installer would run and finish correctly. I would then go to run one of the newly installed apps and it would pop up a message saying “Licensing for this product has stopped working“.

Well i searched and searched on the internet and had no luck in finding how to fix this.

After a week of trying i eventually worked out a solution for this issue after installing and uninstalling CS3 maybe 25 times. (boy o boy is that installer slow.)

You need to delete the folder found here “/Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher”.

After that all the apps should open correctly.
I cant believe how simple it was in the end, and i cant believe that Adobe couldn’t work this out.

Post your success and failure stores in the comments below!

-Richard

This is one utility that will make your whole archive experience more pleasant. With support for almost every archive format known to man, and the ability to rejoin split .rar files as well as natively unzip .Jar files its all the rage on the scene atm.
Best of all you can set it to by default show the files that its just unachieved in the finder, alleviating that whole, wheres that stinking file that i just unzipped.

So my advice, get this cool utility, it will make your day!

Home - The Unarchiver

iStumbler is like this totally cool wifi tool. It lets you see all those pesky invisible networks around you as well as find open access points for you to jump onto and get your groove on! If your ever out and about with your computer this one is for you!

The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free! So go and enjoy this find.

Find a sexy screenshot & link below:
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Chicken of the VNC is a VNC remote desktop viewer for the Mac, its free software which makes me happy and the icon is funky as to! If you have the need for a VNC Client this is the one to get these days. A VNC client allows you to display and interact with a remote computer screen. In other words, you can use Chicken of the VNC to interact with a remote computer as though it’s in front of you.
The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free and OSS! So go and enjoy this find.

CotVNC - Home

I will update everyone with more information once I actually calm myself down a little, but its enough to say that i’m excited!

Looks like ill be jetting off to California in a few months. So Happy!!!

(Well ok in reality those dates arnt free, there smack bang in the middle of my exam period, but im stoked and as if i care about exams being at the same time)

Burn is a really nice, simple CD / DVD burning application that allows you to do all sorts of burns, including: Data, Audio(CD), Video(VCD, SVCD, DVD, XviD) and finally Clone Disks and burn image files.

The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free and OSS! So go and enjoy this find.

Burn - Home

I find it useful to have a local apache server set up for all my web-dev work so that i can see changes to files in real time, which makes it easier to develop server side web apps.

Up till a month or so ago i had been editing the DocumentRoot line in my /etc/httpd/httpd.conf every time i wanted to work on another project. This has slowly been driving me crazy so i decided to use virtual hosts to do all the dirty work for me.

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Hop Theif….. Hop….. :)

Montastic at JamesX

It is good isn’t it, i just stumbled across Monastic while Dreamhost was down.

So the idea behind the Green Page, or in my case the Red Page is that it basically shows red if any of your current sites are unavailable. This allows you to see if any sites are down if you have a machine with that page open in a browser.

I guess its for people that don’t have email or something.

Enough to say that mine was Red for a few hours today. :)

-Rich

Well I have just poured myself a Black Russian to unwind some more, and thought I would take a moment to announce the fact that i have got a new theme running on my blog. If you can’t tell, well you must be stupid!

No! On a serious note, it blends in with the home and other pages much better than the old one ever did, not to mention the dated 2005 look that it also carried.

The current leader-board image is from a shot I took in Melbourne, a rather nice piece of graffiti i thought. Now heres a challenge, if you can find the piece and take a photo of yourself with it i will you $5!(Only the first person to do so i might add, lest i end up going broke from 100,000 hits for free and easy money.)

Yes, this is just the first of many competitions to appear on multimeter v4.00, so stay tuned for more coming to you soon, very very soon! Not to mention more in the way of Mac how-to content and more news to.

-Rich

The Last few days have seen me in Sydney hearing all the latest and greatest developer level features in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard from Apple. To get an idea of some of the consumer level features that will be coming with the next release have a look at Apple’s Leopard Sneak Peak.

Many many cool peaces of kit are to be made available in terms of developing new software for the platform, and i would go further except that i am under NDA in terms of all the pre-release stuff that i have seen so i cant really say much more than what is already available on the web.

While up here in Sydney i had heaps of fun seeing family and friends, and i also took the opportunity to meet some cool people (German Students @ 2am), see some cool stuff (Google AU Office, Leopard) and have a great night out in-between the 2 days of lectures.

I can possibly fill you in a little more if i see you in person, and until then have a good day.

-Rich

Well i’m back from Italy, the land of Pizza and Pasta. It was a long haul to get around the cities and the driving was terrible, with street signs just not making any sense at all especially in places like Piza where there are literally hundreds of one-way streets.

But the Pizza’s on the whole were good, and I managed to take quite a few good photo’s in the week over there. I will have to post some of them some time soon. I visited Piza, Milan and Venice in the space of a week, driving between the places on autoways and generally feeling like a lame tourist! In the end I guess it was a good experience and i don’t think i will be taking anything in Australia for granted in the near future. Its rather scary when the only choice of restaurant you have for the night is Italian or Italian.

It will be good to be back in Aus some time soon, however not to soon, i still have to visit Berlin.

Yesterday evening i went and saw Les Misérables at The Queens Theatre in Londons West End. The staging was fantastic and the use of great scenery and lighting effects made for a spectacular evening. One of the main stage techniques of the production was the use of a revolving stage, where the entire centre section of the stage is able to rotate in a circular motion.

This allows for quick and efficient scene changes by distracting the viewer with motion at the front of the stage while in the dark at one side at the back furniture and props are placed onto the turntable. they in turn come into view and stop at the correct position at the centre of the stage.

It also allows for effective representation of all things timely such as going on a journey and marching to war. All in all another spectacular musical show, well worth seeing if it ever comes to your neck of the woods. For a show that has been running for 21 years it still draws quite a crowd every night.

Ok so its been a few weeks (ahm: months) since my last post. but times have been busy and well get this, im in the UK at the moment. Its not all that cold, although im guessing it will get colder closer to Christmas/NYE. Its good seeing a some of the family that i dont often get to catch up with and im enjoying having a new city to photograph.

i will be posting some more shots in the coming weeks / months both here and over at Pixel. Till next time take care and ill talk to you on msn given half a chance.