items from the mind of an idiot savant

not fit for print

When Google announced their IM service, they also announced that it was their intention to connect their IM service to all the other popular services. This intent was further solidified when they made a large equity acquisition of AOL. A little blurb in the press release about the AOL deal mention that Google and AOL would link their IM services sometime this summer.

This idealistic goal to unite the IM services took another step forward today when Google linked their service to the open network of Jabber servers. They also give instructions on how anyone can connect their local Jabber based server to Google’s

So now I can IM myself from my google talk to my jabber.org account.

As soon as AOL and Google are linked up, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before AOL releases Apple of their assumed exclusivity agreement and .mac and Google Talk will be linked up. Unless Microsoft try’s to bully this alliance, they will be forced to join in. Hopefully .mac, AOL, and Google Talk can all agree on some VOIP protoccol that will emerge as a standard. Hey Skype, are you listening? Is anyone listening?

Eh, it’s only a matter of times before things get a lot better and we’re part of one big happy IM family.

I posted this last night, and this morning they put another notch in their bedpost. Looks like things happen quickly.

This article offers some great insight. It really illustrates how this is a small step for IMs, but a giant leap for IMkind.[I know, sometimes I try Too hard.]

Apple Computer announced several new software and hardware products this week at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and her is my take on the new offerings.

Apple Retails Stores
Basically Steve thanked us all for spending our money there. They made a ton of money. I used to make a point of making purchases from the Apple Store as my way of showing support for Apple. They were there for me when I needed them, and I thought I should show my support in return. Now that they are making money hand over fist, I guess it would be appropriate for me to go back to my cheap bargain hunting ways.

iPod & iTunes
They’re doing well, they’re great, everyone loves them, yadda yadda yadda. Now that prices of music and videos seem to be going up a bit, its probably more cost effective to actually go out an buy CDs again since CD prices have dropped a bit, and you get the higher quality audio. I guess the money you spend on audio video from the store s a convenience charge since its so easy to use and you don’t have to invest any time in encoding your stuff.

Mac OS X 10.4.4
We Mac OS X 10.4 users have suffered long enough with a bunch of bugs. Most of these bugs are just things that should have worked form the get go. I’m actually rather disappointed with 10.4 in general. I like that it is more stable and generally less to worry about. I just don’t feel there are any new features that I care enough about to have spent the money on an upgrade, but in the name of progress I upgraded. I had hoped that the 10.4.3 update was going to fix all the issues I was having. The update was hyped in a way that I believed everything would be solved by it, but they were not. I hope 10.4.4 fixes the bugs that 10.4.3 should have, and bugs that should have never been there to begin with. I’m really not bitter about it at all. I have always used a mac since I felt like the UI and system never seemed to get in my way the Windows does. It’s just that with 10.4 the Mac seemed to get in my way and slow me down just enough for me to bother me a bit.

iLife ‘06
The updates to iPhoto look great. I really like the Full Screen editing. It’s like Aperature for simple folks. I started to notice the trend in iPhoto 5 that it seemed much more like an adult application that software for kids. It’s a nice mix of great powerful features that are really easy to use. After all, that’s Apple’s strong suit.

The new podcast studio feature of Garageband makes things easy. It is the missing link in podcast production. Why would you want to use anything else.

Now I don’t use iLife all that much. I tend to use the more professional grade applications. There is the rare occasion that I use iMovie or iDVD for quickly getting small projects done. I love the new templates and features here. I can’t wait to get a copy for my folks and see what they do with it.

I’d like to get them a copy of iWeb too. I think my folks would really make some beautiful sites about their grandkids.

All in all iLife ‘06 brings all the best and most practical features of their professional software and make it so extremely easy to use. I think it’s really interesting the way Apple’s professional applications learn from how people use their consumer grade applications, and in turn then their consumer grade applications inherit some of the great features that stem from the powerful core technology that’s developed for the pro apps.

iWork ‘06
Honestly, I don’t care. iWork is nice, it’s pretty, and easy to use. I don’t think anyone should pay for it though. I’d love it more if it were free with every Mac. But I just don’t see the market for it. Who needs something that easy to use, but needs to make presentations or newsletters?

.mac
The only real update here is compatibility with iLife & iWork ‘06, and the Photocasting thing. Photocasting sounds like Flickr for .mac. No rocket science going on here. However, I don’t think .mac is a waste of time/money. I use it. I like it. It makes my life easier. I just wish that there were tools available for implementing sync on non .mac servers to give people a choice.

iMac (with Intel Core Duo)
Basically the same old iMac with a whole new brain. I wonder if someone will do benchmark comparisons of this iMac to the current low end PowerMac to see if the cheaper of the two is actually the better buy. The new x1600 graphics card struck my interest. That’s actually a whopper of a card for a laptop. The interesting thing to me is how ATI has been working towards offloading H.264 encoding onto their x1000 series cards, and how everyone seems to be complaining about H.264 encoding times. There’s no doubt that H.264 is the future, especially for video and the Mac. This card and the Mac just seem like the perfect marriage. I can’t wait for Apple to update the OS so it uses the GPU to encode H.264.

MacBook Pro
What’s with this cooky name? My guess is that the PowerMac/PowerBook name stems from the PowerPC processor, and since they’re not using that chip anymore, they should change the name.

Finally a laptop that isn’t severely underpowered in comparison to their desktops. Unless you’re a pro user with steep requirements, a laptop is really the way to go these days. At this point, there’s very little difference between a laptop and a consumer grade desktop. THey both have a hard drive and optical drive, keyboard, basic USB/FireWire/etc., and they both have LCD screens. Granted a laptop my have less expandability, but if you’re the average user, you’re probably going to replace before you outgrow the expandability.

The MacBook Pro comes with Front Row. BFD. Who hasn’t hacked Front Row to run on their mac yet. My guess is that we’ll see Front Row, with or without the remote, on every Mac within the next 6 months. The funny thing is the little IR port. When I had on old PowerBook G3 a long while back, I had an IR port. I rarely used it, but I loved that it just another tool at my fingertips for when I needed it. I used it sync my Palm and phone at the time. I even used to it to communicate with cell phone and use my cell as a modem a couple of times. It was sort of the precursor to BlueTooth. It never made sense to me why they would remove the IR port since it was so cheap and fairly handy. Oh well, it’s back.

The iSight camera probably costs them about a buck to include. It’s just like the IR port. Not necessary, but handy.

There are a few new ports and few missing ports. The new magnetic power cable is a great idea. I’ve tripped on my power cable a ton of times, and this small change is a huge benefit. There’s no FireWire 800 port, and I don’t care. I never used it anyway. I actually use a 800 to 400 adapter so I can plug 400 devices into the 800 port. It just sucks that they went from two FireWire ports to one. Um Hello, WFT is a ExpressCard/34 slot? What was wrong with the PC card slot? This seems like a really bad decision. Do you have any idea how many PC cards on the market Apple is alienating with this decision? On the bright side, the 15″ finally has an optical audio out. I’ve been waiting for that. I actually expected this feature quite sometime ago, but was previously only available on the 17″ PowerBook, iMac, and PowerMac.

Like the new Intel based iMac, the new MacBook Pro has the x1600 graphics card. If Apple starts offering a way to offload H.264 encoding to the GPU, they will have delivered the same feature to mobile users in one swift move. I just hope that they don’t make us all wait until 10.5 before they do this, and make people have to pay for an upgrade to get the H.264 encoding times we should have received in 10.4.

All in all the MacBook Pro is what PowerBook users have been dying for. It’s somewhat future proof and has al the power and flexibility anyone would want. Hopefully it will not be too little too late, and the MacBook Pro will evolve nicely and in a timely manner to meet the current needs of users.

So Tutorial 5 went smoothly for you? FUCK YOU MAN!

I thought everything was going smoothly. I actually was starting to understand all the concepts and thought I was running on all cylinders. That was until I got to the very last part.

I implemented the changes in order to paginate my list of questions. In fact I was rather astounded that symfony has such constructs built in. After making my changes, it didn’t work. I noticed that I backtracked just one step to the point were the number of questions on a page was a hardcoded integer, it worked fine. There was something up with that aplication variable thingy. I tried clearing the symfony cache with $ symfony cc. No luck.

Like the retard that I am I start flailing and doing anything I can think of. I run all the symfony init-app and init-module command and deleted files and removed changes. By the end of it all, My askeet installation was totally fucked up and didn’t work at all. It wasn’t even accessing the DB properly. A total disaster really.

I was forced to go back a day and check out day 4 from subversion and redo day 5. After all that spazzing out and redoing work, I was right back were I started. I had paginataion that only worked with a hardcoded number and not the application variable.

I did some reading and found that other people were having the same problem. After talking to Jon[the coworker who turned me on to symfony] I figured out that I did in fact have to clear the symfony cache. But that alone still wasn’t working. I also learned that the app.yml file generates a file in the cache folder. I found the corresponding cache file, but it was empty. After clearing the cache and making some changes to app.yml, it was still empty.

FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!

I starting messing with the spaces, tabs, and returns in the app.yml file thinking that I might be having some more of those silly copy/paste funky characters like the ones I was dealing with in day 4. I found that I wasn’t have the same problem, but a new one. My guess it that the YAML parser that converts app.yml into the cahced php file is finicky about where you put tabs/spaces, and how many you use. I found that you should only spaces, and that you should only use consistent spacing per indent.

The bottom line is that the tutorial doesn’t tell you to clear the cache, and on top of that you need to be careful with your spacing. OK, time to commit my changes to subversion and move on.

Tutorial 4 went fine. I kept having all these question marks show up on the reulsting page, and I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Since The tutorial didn’t take me much time, I decide to troubleshoot and figure it out.

It took no time at all to find the code around the question marks was, but it wasn’t immediately apparent where the mysterious question marks were. Right where I expected to find question marks, I found nothing! It turns out that the question marks were in the whitespace. I guess when I was copying and pasting from my web browser to my text editor there as some funky character encoding mismatch. All I had to do was delete the tabs and return and replace them to my liking.

AN EPIHPNAY
I’m really disappointed with myself for not seeing this sooner. I have a category of blog post called Ask Rick for all the random questions I get. I’m working on a question/answer database project called Askeet! Perhaps I should port all my Ask Rick blog posts to the the Askeet app. I’m sure you were able to draw this conclusion far sooner than stupid old me.

OK, Its questions like this that were really the motivation for Ask Rick!. Sure people ask me technical questions, and that makes sense. After all I’m a programmer. I have a good understanding of technical things. But I often get questions were my initial response is “Why the fuck are you asking me?”

Hey Rick, I want to get rid of an old fridge, who should I call? Can’t I just dump it in the nearest dumpster?

Um sure you could, but that’s probably illegal. Besides, for the sake of Pete, try to be a little more friendly towards the environment. Try calling you local power company. Often times they have recycling or buy-back programs on older less energy efficient appliances. Try a recycling center. If all else fails, you can call you local city’s bulky item pick-up and they’ll haul it away. It the city of Los Angeles, you can call the Bureau of Sanitation Bulky Item Pick-Up hotline at (800) 773-2489.

P.S. Thanks for the submission Mike! I love you.

I somehow managed to find the motivation to go to the grocery store. My lack of experience posed a bit of an obstacle. I didn’t really know where to find everything, and I must have walked past the garlic about 12 times before I noticed it.

I got home and got to work on Meat and Cheese Lasagna.

DO NOT FOLLOW THIS RECIPE.

Did I say not to follow this recipe, I meant DON’T YOU EVEN DARE FUCKING FOLLOW THIS RECIPE.

Let’s overlook the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing for just 1 second. I don’t like spinach, so I just left that part out. Maybe that’s what fucked things up, but I doubt it. Is this guy fucking nuts with:
2 tablespoons roughly chopped fresh oregano leaves
2 tablespoons roughly chopped fresh Italian parsley leaves
2 tablespoons roughly chopped fresh thyme leaves

You might as well just stick that in your mouth and chew on those alone. That’s way too much! I should have known better. Besides being over spiced, I had a few fiascos of my own.

I didn’t have the proper pan so, I used a brownie pan. It worked out fine.
I should have payed more attention to what I was doing and covered the top layer of pasta with sauce so it wouldn’t have gotten too dry and crispy.
Other than that, It actually turned out OK.

The big success was the mincing of the garlic. I just turned a knife on it’s side and bashed it just like in the cooking shows.

I guess the other big success is that since my enthusiasm is infectious, I may have accidentally started a cooking club. A neighbor of mine has a friend who loves to cook, and really wanted to help us learn our way around the kitchen. My neighbor is first in the rotation. We’ll have to see how Thursday Night’s dinner turns out.

It’s about time I get my act together. I don’t eat very well or often. I never cook. I’ve been meaning to cook a bit more often, and there’s no time to start like now. The only problem I have is I have is I hard a time finding the motivation to cook for just myself. I’m going to try to entertain more often, and cook.

I’ve wanted to start a supper club were we take turns cooking for each other. In the meantime, I should practice my cooking.

I pulled 6 dishes off the net for this week. Now all I have to do is make a shopping list, and hot the grocery store. OH MY GOD! I think the idea will die right there. I never go to the store.

Maybe I’ll post an ad on Craig’s List or something.