AT&T Broadband came out and installed my new cable based Internet access this morning. It went surprisingly well(so far), and they came out only three days after I called to place the order. For the time being, that means I have two active high speed connections in my home. Later this week, I expect that the other connection will just disappear, that company won it’s case in court last week to shut down.
Frontier for OS X. I hadn’t linked to this yet, but I have this up and running on my home server now. There is some really really interesting stuff going on here. The integration with the shell that they have built into this first UNIX version of Frontier opens things up on the interoperability front quite a bit. I’ve been able to do some interesting things already just calling the shell from some Frontier scripts.
There’s a craigslist: atlanta now.
‘Hitchhiker’ author Adams dies. He was a really nice guy (even to a nobody like me), and he brought some amazing, humorous and inventive books into existence. I wish his family the best in what must be a trying time.
I’m working on a Cold Fusion/ MySQL project right now. Just a little server migration from one hosting provider to another. It was made much much easier by the existence phpMyAdmin, which is a web based administrator for MySQL databases.
Plua is a scripting language that runs on the Palm OS.
Bush Orders Agencies to Save Power in California. According to this article, Bush has ordered agencies to conserve power by “cutting back on email.” I’d love for someone to explain to me how cutting back on email, versus other computer activity, is going to save additional power. I’m constantly confused by our nation’s leadership’s lack of savvy with basic computer ideas, and the logic behind technology. I don’t just mean Mr. Bush, but also our judges, legislators, and local governments.
When did Webmonkey redesign their front page and incorporate one of those new “huge” ads? While I’m sure that a lot of work went into the redesign, I have to say that I’m not a fan.
O’Reilly Network: An Introduction to Extreme Programming
For those of you learning Mac OS X who want to learn the command line for the first time, I highly recommend Using csh & tcsh by Paul DuBois. It gives you great insight into how to more effectively use tcsh, which is the shell that Apple ships installed. Despite having used Unix OSes in several different flavors over the last five years of my life, I’m learning quite a bit about customizing things and speeding things up.
From Apple’s developer documentation, I present: The Classic Environment and Your Application. I found this while trying to figure out what the problem I have been experiencing with the clipboard between Classic apps and Mac OS X native apps. The answer? It doesn’t work and that is how things are supposed to work. It’s as if they didn’t understand how important the clipboard is to getting work done. I’m still about twenty apps away from ditching Classic, so I’m stuck with the problem for now.
Not surfing and bloggin today. Instead, I went for a three mile jog and finished reading Watership Down again. I hadn’t read it in a few years, and it’s one of those books I seem to return to every once in a while. If you haven’t read it, even if you don’t enjoy the fantasy genre normally, I highly recommend it.
I'm constantly amazed by the imagination of fantasy and science fiction authors. They have the added burden of making up a new world as a stage for their story. If you have never done it, try the exercise of trying to think one up for yourself. It's challenging to come up with something original and compelling.
Finally, I've made a lot of headway over the last year in terms of the whole exercise routine. It's become a regular part of my life now, making it much easier to maintain. Now some stats, I started out weighing around 230-235. Today, I weigh 185, and my waist is 8 inches smaller than it was before. None of my clothes from a year ago fit me now. To be honest, I've weighed 185 since January, and in the months since then, I've been lowering my body fat at an average of 1.5% a month. It feels good, and once you get going, it gets a lot easier. Now if I could just stop being such an idiot all the time....
Looking for Quick and Dirty Web Development? This article talks at a non-technical level about where Macromedia is going with Flash and Cold Fusion. As someone who has used Cold Fusion on a large chunk of projects, what’s coming down the pike really excites me.
Study: Sushi May Cut Smokers' Lung Cancer Risk. I knew I was eating sushi several times a week for some reason.
Slashdot | Open Source Is Bad. Some great stuff here.
New York Times: Microsoft Is Set to Be Top Foe of Free Code. How shocking that Microsoft is now attempting the same tactics they have against commercial opponents against Open Source software. The GPL is not all of Open Source, and Microsoft is the enemy of innovation, not Open Source software. The real problem here is that the Open Source community doesn’t have a PR department and Microsoft does. The amazing thing here is that Microsoft has been driven to improve their software by the existence of Open Source competition and they have actually used Open Source software as a part of some of their products.
O’Reilly Network: The Disaster-Free Upgrade to Mac OS X (Part One)
Looks like I will have to find another way of getting high speed access in my apartment soon. Grrr.