The part 1 of the post is here --- continuing ---
So back again - different coffee shop (Starbucks at Carling), freshly charged battery, Grande Latte and no internet connection (which means no distractions from emails and the Web) - here we go again, part 2.
If I should single out one or two technologies that I think I have neglected and should have paid much more attention to it would be the Web trio of HTML/JavaScript/CSS as one and the SQL as second.
We are recently interviewing quite a lot in anticipation of the great things coming. It is sort of similar task as we did year and something ago, but I enjoy this round much better. This time, rather than "we have to assemble the project team ASAP", we have the luxury of longer term view and focus more on hiring the people that will be great match to the company culture, will be with us for longer period and will grow with the company.
If the world of physical objects would governed with the same rules as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does impose on all things digital, scissors would be illegal and you could end up in jail for manufacturing, and maybe even owning or using them. Crazy ? Well, see this presentation and judge for yourself.
This "law" is currently impacting our friends south of the border only, but it is very real that it will soon become a law in Canada as well.
The CHM files (Microsoft compiled HTML help files) are often used for eBooks. They are readable on OS-X using excellent open source CHMOX application. If you want to get more useful preview in OuickView than the not very helpfull static icon, get this plugin.
Download here
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...group_id=211847
How to install it: Unzip it, take the proper package for your system (the ZIP file contains several architectures, on modern Intel-based Mac's you want to use x64), put it inside
One of the languages that I managed to completely ignore for almost 20 years was Objective-C. I always saw it as less developed, dead-end version of C++ that has little perspective - despite that GCC supported it since early days. I guess I was wrong on two of three counts - that of little perspective still holds as long as you want to stay outside of OS-X platform.
One of the issues I had was strange syntax and that from not too many books on subject, they were
I was trying to set up an Oracle appliance - install the Oracle Express XE into a virtual machine. What (in my mind) should be smooth and straightforward process was something very different. I should have been forewarned warned after seeing the discussion ... To make long story short, the installer failed on three different Linux VM's I had available - because of unavailable dependencies, too small swap space etc, etc.
As long as you are using OS-X, this is something worthy looking at: the MuPromo is running the annual bundle offer with (currently) 8 applications, worth $534 for the mentioned $49.99. The sale is on for 4 more days. The way how it works is that at certain marks, additional applications will be added to the bundle (for the same price) and will be made available to everybody who purchased the bundle. Including me :-). Currently, the sales are at > 1600, the next app will be added at 2400 (pretty sure it will happen) and the last one at 5000 (fairly likely).
Did you know that for the price of two movie tickets you can spend the full month watching interesting stuff that matters ? This is true, as long as
a) your definition of of "interesting stuff that matters" is a bit on the nerd site of a spectrum
b) you do not get full package with your movie ticket - I mean popcorn + soda - just the ticket.
If you do go for popcorn, we should say "for the price of 1.2 movie ticket", because the amount we talk here about is $25 USD, which still is almost the same amount in loonies. As for the case a), do you find that an example of interesting stuff that matters is video tutorials about development in Ruby on Rails (22 hours), advanced techniques in Photoshop or even Silverlight essentials ? If yes, look at the Lynda movie library. It is subscription based service that offers over 2'000 tutorials on wide variety of all things digital, covering both deeper, developer level areas as well as more general user topics.
Today I got to trying out the major feature of Leopard: the Time Machine. I was postponing it because I did not have proper external storage. Although I do have several USB disks sized from 100 to 260 GB, they are not empty and to clean them would take too much time that I currently do not have. Backing up on network drive would be technically possible - with some tweaking - but copying over network is always slower than USB2 or FireWire. Besides, the drives are so cheap nowadays: I have picked the 500 GB "The Book", Western Digital in Costco (Kanata) for $149. You have to agree that one cannot resist this price and product with this name (I have a weak spot for anything Book ;-))
Why did I arrive to this conclusion so sudden ? After all, I have the iPod for over a month and half now and never really used it for anything beyond podcasts/music/videocasts.
The answer is simple: 1.1.2. The Firmware update that appeared during last sync upgraded the iPod to latest version which (in addition to obligatory bug fixes) brought the long needed possibility of adding an event or modifying an event in calendar or adding/modifying an address card.