Ivan in Michael’s textbook

Posted by rae in family, friends, science
at 7:51 pm on Thursday, 16 June 2005

Michael showed me page 451 of his science textbook just now, and I had to scan it and post it here.


Ivan in Michael’s text

Yes, indeed, it appears that our friend, Ivan Semeniuk, is now famous enough to appear in high school textbooks! What’s next? schools named after him? :-)

See the full-sized image on flickr.

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tnir acting up

Posted by rae in Reid, software, web site
at 12:43 am on Tuesday, 14 June 2005

T’nir is being cranky for some reason. Today I rebooted and logged into the console, only to see that the top 10 processes were all spamassassin. Not only that, but spamassassing kepy running out of memory, and the Linux kernel (I think) started killing off httpd processes to free up memory. It was weird, but any command I entered was delayed about 5 minutes before it was executed.

I ran my “playing Quake” script, which kills off the web server and ftp server. Then I sat back and hoped all the backed-up mail would get de-spammed over the afternoon. That seems to have happened, but then I noticed that mail wasn’t getting delivered, so I checked and postfix, one of the main mail programs, wasn’t running correctly (the master wasn’t running).

I restarted postfix and a lot of mail is now flowing. Thing is, I’m not sure what’s going on. It would take time to really dig into it and if I figure it out I will post here. In the meantime, you may notice tnir experiencing hiccups, with the web server not running or something for a little while at a time.

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Rails book

Posted by rae in Reid, development, the Net
at 9:20 pm on Friday, 10 June 2005

Ok, I lied. One more post. I bought the “early beta package” of Agile Web Development with Rails, which gets me the beta PDF of the book and the final PDF later when it’s done, along with a paper version when it ships. I figured it would make for good reading on the plane.

On the way here I found out that even with a full charge, the Powerbook’s battery cannot handle playing AVI’s for more than a couple of hours, and the flight is longer than that. Actually, Thomas (my friend from Alias who was here) told me that there are seats that have plugs in the backs of them. On the way here the seat in front of me had a phone instead. I will have to try to get a different row. I was in row 15. Maybe I’ll try for 16 or 14.

Of course, I can always play solitaire!

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All done

Posted by rae in Reid, friends
at 8:52 pm on Friday, 10 June 2005

Went to the last session for me for WWDC — Cocoa Advanced View Techniques. Andrew was up on stage! Woo! He held the microphone well, although he didn’t actually have to say anything. :-)

So Ted and I are going to go have something good to eat and then maybe watch some TV on the powerbook. (Hey Hon, at least we’re going out to eat!) Well, we might stop off at the Metreon, a giant Sony store across the street from Moscone West.

I’m sorta looking forward to experiencing Toronto’s heat wave when I get back. But I’m sure I’m going to get *too* hot, and turn on the air conditioning! There’s always the pool, too.

This is my last post before I head home, so bye for now!

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End-of-week tired

Posted by rae in Reid, development, family, hardware, software, work
at 1:07 pm on Friday, 10 June 2005

A lot of people have left WWDC by this point. The tablecloths have coffee stains, and everyone is looking a bit bleak and weary. Wired ethernet access in “the nooks” on the 2nd floor are not handing out IP addresses; the DHCP server is down. So we all sit at the same tables and just use AirPort instead.

Last night’s “Apple Beer Bash” was a bit disappointing. Mostly because of the cold weahter I think. It wasn’t as much fun to sit on the grass listening to the Wallflowers live about 20 feet away. It was kinda funny when the Wallflowers’ lead singer asked the audience for tech support to get his Bl;ackberry to talk to his Mac. One guy in front offered to help — I’ll bet it’s one of the guys who worked on Blackebrry code or something. Hah.

The lineups were horrendous. They said at the keynote that there were 3,800 people here and that it was the biggest WWDC in the last 10 years. Maybe they just didn’t plan well enough for that many people. I was lucky enough to miss the lineups for the busses to Apple (Ted and I hitched a ride with Mike, Thomas and Matthew, who had rented a car), but the lineup to get into the store, the even longer one to pay for stuff and get OUT of the store (I skipped that one, not buying anything), and then the huge lineup for food (which people were wangling their way into near the front a lot), all served to put a damper on things.

Today is definitely a “day-after” kind of day. Most of the remaining sessions are feedback sessions. Like I told Luisa, I don’t have much feed to give back. I’m excited about things like Core Image and its Image Units, and yes, I am looking forward to powerful, Intel-based laptops.

Poor Ted has to leave in a taxi tomorrow morning at 5am. Egad. Fortunately for me, my flight isn’t until 3pm. Unfortunately for Luisa, it gets in to Toronto around 11pm! I suspect Michael and Ronnie will stay at home, which will make things easier on Luisa.

I think I’ll head downstairs to check out the gaming area. They’re featuring Doom 3 today. But I think everyone is going to quit and run Star Wars Battlefront instead. :-)

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Chinese food last night

Posted by rae in Reid, development
at 11:38 am on Wednesday, 8 June 2005

Last night a bunch of us went out for dinner after the last WWDC session. It turned out to be fortuitous, because the two evening events — the Apple Design Awards and “Stump the Experts” — were postponed one day to Wednesday night instead. However, on our way out of Moscone West, we saw WWDC employees carrying in literal armfuls of Chinese food. Hah, oh well.

We met up at the Apple store, which is only a couple of blocks away from Moscone West. There were Florian and Stuart from El Gato, Mike and Thomas from Alias, Ted and myself.

The food was good and we recounted some interesting tidbits form WWDC’s past as well as interesting company histories. Ted took some pics which I’ll try to scarf and put up later.

Today’s schedule includes:

After all that it’s off to the Apple campus for the Thursday night beer bash, where we get to see Andrew’s office again (Ooooh, ahhh). It’s pretty much cold and rainy right now (19 C), so if that continues it might put a bit of a damper on things. Hope it clears up and gets warmer. It’s no fair — back in Toronto there’s a heatwave on!

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Tuesday morning

Posted by rae in Reid, development
at 9:16 am on Tuesday, 7 June 2005

Session on “Advanced UI Design” was a wash. I was hoping for more of a hands-on deal, showing how to enabled various drag-and-drop stuff or integrating with the Finder better.

I’m going to check out the “Core Image” session at 10:30. After lunch it’s either “Cocoa Today” or “Utilizing Quartz Composer in Your Application”. There’s nothing in the 3:30 to 5pm slot — maybe I’ll check out “3D Environmental Audio with OpenAL”. From 5 to 6:30 I think it will be “Uniform Type Identifiers and Launch Services”. I am particularly keen on Launch Services as they are replacing a whole swath of Unix technologies which are indeed getting crufty and difficult to manage.

After the session are over (6:30) I’m trying to get people from El Gato and Alias together for dinner, meeting at the Apple Store at 7pm. Probably Chinese food, yum.

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WWDC Keynote

Posted by rae in Reid
at 10:05 am on Monday, 6 June 2005

Steve is on. Over 3800 people here. Everyone is waiting with baited breath to hear the “Intel” word. Saw some people wearing suits and carrying Intel laptops while waiting to come in.. Hmmm…

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A Day Out on the Town

Posted by rae in Reid
at 8:58 pm on Sunday, 5 June 2005

Ted and I spent the day wandering around San Fransisco. After registering for WWDC and downloading the “sample code update”, we discovered there was no internet access from Moscone West (where WWDC is being held). So we headed off to the Apple Store in downtown San Fransisco, since it’s supposed to have wireless internet.

We discovered that the Apple Store wasn’t open until later (since it was Sunday) so we then headed off to check out the trolley car. The trolley took us to the piers, where we walked around and Ted managed to find a place that served clam chowder in a sourdough bread-bowl. Mmm-mmm.

When we got back to the room, we were bushed, so I sucked Ted into watcing 24 with me (season 3). I think he’s completely hooked now. Heh heh. After watching 3 episodes or so in a row, Ted headed off to try the Apple Store’s internet again. I decided to stay in the room and type this up, as I have a bit of a headache. (Thanks for the Advil, Hon!)

Tomorrow is the big day. Steve Jobs is making the keynote, from 9am to 12 noon. Some anticipate he will reveal that Macs are switching to Intel. I’m thinking it will be some Intel chips in a new hardware device. I’m wishing it would be the “PowerPod’. Hey, we have an “i”-book and “power”-book, an “i”-mac and “power”-mac. Why do we only have an “i”-pod and no “power”-pod, hmm?

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At the airport

Posted by rae in Reid
at 7:10 pm on Saturday, 4 June 2005

Sitting here waitying for my baggage to show up at carousel #5. There is a huge white sign telling us where to find oversized baggage and sports equipment. I took a picture for your enjoyment.

I also took quite a few shots on the plane — I was bored, can you tell?

WWDC Plane Trip
The view out the window

WWDC Plane Trip
me on the plane

The food was okay, and I brought some of my own diet coke to drink, which was a good thing.

I see quite a few people speaking German and who I think must be Mac developers. The blue “X” Mac OS X logo on the back of the leather jacket is a dead gieaway.

Oh! There goes my luggage. Time to go!

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