June, 2004

Just finished watching the keynote stream – and its way better then the typed keynote updates on the web.
From a consumer standpoint, I understand how some people might not see it as much – but from a developer standpoint im sitting here drooling and itching to get my hands on the new sdks.

I guess it is a developer conference afterall, it would get boring if they released new laptops or powermacs or other gadgets at every conference.

Seems the developers of Konfabulator arnt too happy about Dashboard which was previewed at WWDC and will be included in the next release of OS X.

I dont get it, why are they chucking a shit? I guess its because it does seem similar to their idea and it may look like apple has just ripped it off without giving them any credit – but who cares?

Its called COMPETITION people, its what drives new ideas and challenges us to do better. The developers of Konfabulator have a much more mature product and its already got A LOT of widgets available for it, so why dont they use that to their advantage and take it to the next level before Tiger comes out?

Im sure there are lots of features they could add to it to make it even better.

I dont understand the legal side of this, im guessing there isnt much that can be done and i havnt heard of any patent on ‘widget’ or anything (not that ive looked). If developers want to cover their butts – im sure there are ways to do it, but in the end is it really worth it?

Personally id take it as a huge compliment and move on. Thats it.

Note to Apple – feel free to rip off my ideas

Inspired by this news item on macnn.com

Theres three brand spanking new displays, 20 / 23 and 30 inch
More info here

The 30inch apparently needs some new kind of display card and a G5 to run it though – woah $$$$$$.

There was also a few tiger updates announced including:

Spotlight
Find anything, anywhere on your computer in no time flat.
Click Me
QuickTime Demo

iChat AV
Video-conference with 3 other people. Audio conference with 10 other people
Click Me

Safari RSS
Browse RSS feeds and search through them in Safari
Click Me
QuickTime Demo

Dashboard
Open fast access widgets with a press of a button.
Click Me
QuickTime Demo

Automator
Automate manual, repetetive tasks with point and click simplicity.
Click Me

Xcode 2.0
Not much was said about this
Click Me

There was also some new developer related stuff announced including Core
Image, Core Audio, and the use of H.264/AVC codec in quicktime.

My Thoughts – Stop here if you don’t want to read my rants
Spotlight:
Personally I think this will be good, seems similar to Launchbar which I actually bought a license for and use every day, but im not sure if it can be used to launch apps or just do searches.

iChat AV:
Finally! Multi person video chat

Safari RSS:
A good thing too – I see myself using this a lot.

DashBoard:
Hrmmm, not sure about this. Personally I cant see myself using it, except maybe for poping up a calendar or something. Looks very similar to an existing product – Konfabulator – , which I
found to be annoying after using it for a while especially on a 12inch powerbook screen. Hopefully there is a developer API for this *fngers crossed*

Automator:
Nice – I want to play with this.

Xcode 2.0:
Probably the thing im looking forward to the most. Keeps getting better.

Ok, ill stop now

It seems there will be no live keynote stream from wwdc 2004
Ive got no idea why, its not like there is anything that cant be released to the public – they let news and media in there for gods sake. I cant see why apple wouldnt proivde a live stream like they have the past years – its a great chance to spruck about how good quicktime is – steve always says somthing like “blah blah broadcast to 5 million worldwide blah blah” – i guess this year he will have to leave that part out.

At this stage i cant see them suddenly making one available, it jsut doesnt make sense for them to hold back announcing it *sigh*

So i guess i could go to bed, but i wont, ill hang around for a while to see if Thomas or Luke pop online, its getting close to 7am in san fran and they should be at the conference soon – i told em to get there early

So yeah – i guess ill wait and see, if all else fails ill either go to bed and read it all tomorrow OR follow some of the forum posts that will happen.

*shrugs*

Melanie dear – your on strike two.

Strike three and you cant pick a movie for us to rent and watch ever again.

I say we go back to watching action movies where people get shot and stuff – at least then we dont get dissapointed.

Rented Wild Orchid on dvd this weekend. I dunno how to put it nicely – so here goes.

This movie is complete and utter crap.

Whats it about? – Well for the life of me i couldnt work that out, the blurb thing on the back says something which kinda sounds interesting, but to be honest its not.
I spent the first 30mins trying to figure out the plot, trying to find some kind of storyline to grab hold of – but no. It seemed to jump all over the place, characters would be talking about thinkgs that didnt make sense and were not mentioned elsewhere.

There is this kid in a red t-shirt that appears throughout the movie – and im yet to see a reason for him even being in it, there just doesnt seem to be any kind of plot.

I could go on and on, but its not worth it. DONT RENT THIS MOVIE.

Its a waste of 1 hour and 50 minutes, and youll feel bad for wasting almost 2 hours of your life.

Setting the Scene:
Friday morning, as usual Brett gets up at 7 and does the usual stuff. Melanie is still sleeping.

At around 8:30am, Brett goes in to wake Melanie up. She rolls over opens her eyes, looks at Brett then closes her eyes again. Brett sits down on the side of the bed and says:
“Are you very sleepy?”

Melanie replies:
“Too sleepy to buy a drink for 50 cents”

Melanie then proceeds to roll back over and Brett says:
“ohhkaaay”

Brett leaves Melanies room and comes back later when melanie is awake, he asks her about her comment and she doesnt remember.

To Summarise:
What the heck was she dreaming about?

3 and a bit days till the keynote…

I hope they have a live stream….

Missed out this year, but Thomas and Luke and Jason all get to go! Thomas and Luke both have blogs, so ill be keeping a close eye on them for any wwdc news – dont worry, i wont tell apple if you metnion anything under NDA

Thomas – Thoms Blog
Luke – Lukes Blog

hrmmm, come to think of it, ill add links to those on my little side bar thingo…

So yeah, ill be at home (or uni) at 3am in the morning Australia time watching the live keynote stream. Hopefully it should stream ok from home now that i have ADSL – reminder – find out the URL to the keynote…

ok, thats all

Gmail is cool – its fast and easy to use.

I was greedy and signed up 3 accounts – you can never have too many email addresses.

I got 12 invites last night in two accounts, but they are all gone already. Chances are ill get some more tomorrow.
If anyone actually reads this and wants one… leave a comment with your email address…

or email me! or somthing! blah

I got this in responce to an email i repleid to about providing documentation about mac support…

Thanks for your reply.
The documentation would include anything that you may have that would
save desktop staff time. Save them reinventing the wheel so to speak.
Even Mac basics like system recovery stuff and diagnostics would be a
help. Their skills have dulled somewhat over the past couple of years
and it will be good to have all our staff Mac compliant

I thought this would be simple – i know about macs and stuff, but ive hit a snag… i cant think of any “system recovery stuff” or “diagnostics” that i do / have done to my mac, apart from repairing the permissions every so often.

Ive never had to recover my system, ive never had to diagnose things like drivers or conflicts or anything…. actually i dont remember the last time i recovered / diagnosed / had problems with my mac.

Wow, i forgot i had this category… hrmmm – books… im still reading the lord of the rings books, bought halfway through them all. Problem is i havnt looked at it in a while and im guessing when i go to start again ill have to read the last few chapters to figure out where im up to…

Also browsing through the Applescript in a nutshell book – havnt actually read much but i flick through it every now and then hoping i get a chance to read it someday.

Same goes for the numerous Cocoa books iv e got, all in various stages of being read.

Thats about it, havnt read any other books really, thats something i dont get much time to do anymore, should make some time to do that – sit and read to myself.

bleh… ok, back to php

“Person with mower, not have to pick up rubbish”

Picture taken at uni, seems that if your screaming around on a ride on mower there is no need to stop and pick up a pizza box – just drive straight over the top of it, the wind will clean up the rest.

mmm, another weekend over. Had a headache today so didnt do a great deal at all. Melanie went ot the markets and done some other stuff – i wasnt very good company this weekend , but she seems to be good at occupying herself which is good.

Been playing around with Skype, its a neat piece of VoIP software, works really well.

Music of the day, The Rasmus – ‘Dead Letters’ album, its catchy.

bleh – shomertime… maybe that will help my head…

*smooch* for melanie for putting up with me when im bad company

Spent this morning polishing the rest of my car – i say ‘the rest’ cause i didnt have to do the bonnet cause of the nice kangaroo that ‘polished it’ eearlier on. So yeah – that took a few hours.

Got the cleaning bug then, decided to clean the shower, but halfway through i noticed that the drain was dirty so i unscrewed it to clean it out – bad move – i unscrewed it too far and the bottom ‘locking’ thing dropped off and slide away. So i spent a bit of time with my fingers down amonst the gunk trying to fish it out, in the end i managed to dig it out with a coathanger.

Scrubbed the dirty shower drain, and the rest of the shower.

From there i thought id wipe the mould off the roof – tip #1 when you build a house – make sure the air vent thing is above the shower – its no bloody good being in the middle of the bathroom when all the msit comes from the shower.

While i was up wiping the mould off the roof, i remembered the dust build up on the windows shelf, so after cleaning the roof i god a bucket of disinfectant and went about cleaning all the window sills.

It was while i was doing this that the topic of this post comes up – gecko poo, the little bastards shit all over the window sills here, its damn annoying. The thing is though – that their crap is big! It would have to be the biggest body size to poo size ratio of most animals. The geckos are only small – yet they are doing craps bigger then mice!. Im sure we dont have mice here, so it must be from them.

Anyway – the geckos annoy me, they ALWAYS get inside somehow, then they run away when i try to help them get out. I saw a little one this morning while i was cleaning and i was sooo tempted to suck the little bugger up with the vacumn – but i didnt, somthing stopped me at the last minute… i hope you realise that little gecko the next time you scare the crap out of me by running along the wall..

*grrr*

So now im buggreed, sitting in front of the tv veging out.

Might play a game a bit later on – havnt had a decent play of a game in a while.

things to do –
* Update this blog – b2 just doesnt cut it anymore and there are a lot of better blogging tools, wordpress, nucleus etc
* Create a photoblog / online photo album, at this stage id like jsut a photoblog, where i can post a picture each day…
* work on C4D stuff
* uni stuff – phd stuff – gotta write a presentation.

bleh