May, 2005

Im trying to figure out how / if it is possible to access a forum via a remote application. I remember a few weeks ago reading about an app that did something similar but i cant remember now what it was.
I’ve done a little searching with google, but as yet i haven’t found anything. I figure its got something to do with xml / rss / xmlrpc /etc, its just a matter of getting up to speed with them and working it out.

Back to searching i guess, seems blog software like ecto use the xmlrpc file on blogs to post, so maybe ill see if forums support something similar.

Im usually more then willing to take phone surveys, heck i usually dont have a problem with people ringing and trying to sell stuff but theres one exception.

The last few times someone had rang the flat they have been downright rude.

Example 1
Phone rings, i pick up and am instantly put on hold. Around 2 seconds later a female answers swith THE worse accent in the world. It was hard tryingot understand her. Anyway, she is querying me about my telephone service. I tell her its with AAPT and she says she can save me money. I ask which compnay she is from but she just replied with ‘a telecom company’. This seemed weird but i let it slide.
She goes on to ask me how much i spend on phone calls per month. I tell her that its not a great amount, i make the odd call at night then rest of the time the phone line is used for internet. She starts getting pushy around now so i tell her im not really interested and am happy with AAPT. *clunk* She hangs up on me. Yep, no “Well thanks for your time” she just plain ol hung up on me.
I wish i knew where she was calling from, i would have made a complaint, the more i think about it though the more it seems to be a bit dodgy.

Example 2.
Phone rings last night, i pickup and yet again im placed straight on to hold. Couple of seconds later a lady picks up and tells me she can give me $5000 worth of food and stuff for just $99 for some childrens charity. Normally i would have at least listened, but the fact that i was whacked on hold was too much. I told her i wasnt interested and she thanked me and hung up.

So, for anyone out there that is planning on calling me to do surveys or sell me stuff, DONT ring the phone and put me straight on hold. I realise its probably a computer dialer that calls numbers then dispatches to people to receive the call, but i still think its wrong and rude. They want to call me and then expect me to hold? WTF.

At least have a human answer the phone and ask if its ok for me to hold.

I wonder how many people actually put up with it? Seems a fair few must since they do it that way now and it seems to be more common. I guess ill be taking more calls where i just hang up as soon as im put on hold. *shrugs*

So i havnt yet fully nutted out a project to do as part of the AUC student scholarship. At first i was going to do something access grid related, but since a mac version is already being worked on i figure ill take a step back and find something else to do.

Ive asked around here at uni and sent messages to a few mailing lists asking mac users what they think is missing but as yet i havnt got any response.

Ive got a few ideas, and im sure ill get one sorted soon enough.

Ive done some work with tiger and core data, i think spending time learning the new technologies is a good part of the scholorship. It can only make my final app better. Ive decided to use the tiger technologies which means it wont work on systems lower then 10.4, but the cool new stuff in tiger is too good to leave out.

So yeah, thats basically what i wwrote in my progress report. I feel good about my progress so far

Got to work today and did up my progress report that we have to do as part of the student scholarships.

Also gave me a chance to play around with making stuff look pretty using pages. It was fun. I got a bit frustrated at the start but once i figured out how to use the layout options it went ok.

Just got a few things to fix up and ill mail it off

The climb was really fun. Theres a kind of rough walking track all the way up, but it gets rough in some places and you do actually have to climb.

The other cool thing is there are multiple paths up, so you could pick which way to go depending on how game you were.

All up it was great fun.

It annoyed me that the weather dashboard widget only seemed to work with Australian capitols, so i found a way around it.

The widget itself uses the weather info from AccuWeather.com. If you go to the page manually and do a search there is actually a LOT of other weather info sources that arnt listed by default in the weather dashboard widget.

So, to make the dashboard weather widget work, just do a manual search on the webpage and bring up the details. Then look at the URL and at the very end is something like zipcode=AU;QU;ROCKHAMPTON%20AIRPORT;

Copy the part after zipcode= (without the last semi-colon) and paste it in the dashboard weather config where it asks for a zip code and it should update itself to show the weather.

So for Rockhampton, You pick the Rockhampton Airport location and the string to copy is AU;QU;ROCKHAMPTON%20AIRPORT, paste that in the zipcode of the dashboard widget and away you go

For the past few weeks ive been having some DNS related problems with my blog/website. The host and myself arnt sure exactly whats going on but it seems somewhat random.

Yesterday i could access my site at all form uni – kept telling me the host was unknown, yet other people outside of uni could see it fine. Today – its working fine again. Chances are tomorrow it will be down. Weird.

But yeah, thats why theres been a general lack of updates.

So a group of us are going to scale Mount Jim Crow this sunday. Should be good.

Its basically a bigish hill on the way to yepoon that has a walking track up it. Ive heard from others that the climb is tough – but doable and ive been meaning to actually do it for years now.

Ill probably take my digital camera and take some happy snaps. Ive gotta work out a good automater workflow for updating pictures to my blog

Only about 4 weeks till i head to WWDC again. Id have to say im probably more excited then the other two times ive been and i think it has to do with the fact that ive been doing developer type stuff recently and i think i can make the most of it this year.

Also, A mac dev center article kinda got me thinking and by the soundd of it the conference this year will be bigger and better then ever.

The recent release of tiger means that there will be a LOT of new things to learn, its exciting being on the crest of the mac development wave.

Id never really understood the whole ‘core data’ idea until yesterday. Previously id read about it and watched the WWDC presentations from last year but it just didnt click.

Anyway, yesterday i went through a tutorial from CocoaDevCentral and it kindd of just clicked.

Its amazing how powerful and awesome Core Data is from a developer point of view. By simply defining and drawing an ER diagram, core data basically lets us write a HUGE chucnk of an application without actually typing a single line of code.

I was blown away at how simple yet powerful the whole thing is, i cant wait to start using it more. WWDC this year should be great

Got Tiger up and running and so far ive had no problems at all with it.

The new mail buttons dont do a lot for me, they just dont seem right. Although they do look more ‘buttony’ i guess.
Dashboard is nice, ive used the widget things a fair bit, the temperature one seems dodgy. I looked up the webpage that it gets the info from and it has an entry for ‘Rockhampton Aiport’ yet when i type that in as the place to use in the widget it does nothing.

Ive fiddled with automator, theres some basic things i wanna do but just cant figure it out. e.g. Theres an action that lets you create a new folder, which is fine, and then theres another action that lets you copy items to a folder. How do i tell it to copy the items to the folder that gets created in a previous step?

It lets me browse for a ‘copy to’ location, but the folder i want to copy to hasnt been created yet, and i dont know the name of the folder cause it gets done when the script is run. *sigh* Maybe im trying to do too much, it just seems like its a pretty basic thing that i should be able to do.

Overall though, its a decent upgrade. All the new stuff underneath is awesome from a developer perspective. I cant wait to get my hands dirty with core image, core data, spotlight, etc etc etc