Live from BEA World

September 18th, 2006

Well, actually, no not quite live. As it turns out the wireless access is extremely flaky in our little corner of the Moscone Center. BEA does in fact have sponsored access, but it isn’t what I would call usable.

As such, any posts today are batched up and posted at the end of the day. We’ll see if there is any better luck tomorrow. In general the conference center feels huge compared to the number of attendees, but it was really on a “pre-conference” set of user group meetings for AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) and AquaLogic Business Process Management (ALBPM) customers. These products were formerly known as Plumtree and Fuego, but apparently the marketing folks at BEA felt those names were entirely too pronounceable. Maybe it’s just an homage to the guys that came up with Intercal (aka “Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym).

In any case, I expect things to get a bit bigger tomorrow, and hopefully more people complaining about network performance will spur some improvement.

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What a surprise, the Mac “just works”

September 18th, 2006

So, after a blessedly quick and uneventful drive up to San Francisco (the Prius nav system makes driving around here much more bearable), I wind up with two computers I wish to connect to the ‘net from the hotel room.  Surprisingly, I am unable to find an open hotspot to, um, borrow some access from, since SF is alleged to be so free-Wifi dense.

This means resorting to the ever popular 12.95/day wired connection in the hotel room.  OK, I figure, we’ll just wire in the work laptop and then share the connection via a wireless card (yeah it’s an old laptop) to the MacBook Pro.  The wired connection works great, and is surprisingly snappy.  The bad news is after a cumulative hour or so of fiddling with various ICS settings, no dice.  It seems the wireless card is not happy to just make it’s on little ad-hoc network (or simulate an AP) and start serving up DHCP address.  It’s not just one card mind you, I actually carry around 3 different ones with me for, um, historical reasons I will not go into.

So hmm, let’s see if this can work the other way around, even though wiring the Mac to the desk makes it so much more impractical to play WoW from the bed while watching Sportscenter.  So I plug it in, tell the hotel service, that “Yes, I did already sign up for this, didn’t you notice it’s coming from the same port you already know about”, and go into “Sharing” in System Prefs.  Aside from a bit of weirdness in the UI (I had to select the wired port in the share from list before Airport showed up in the share to list), a few clicks later it’s happily serving up IP addresses, and my work laptop grabs one.  Yay, chalk another one up for MacOS.

PS OK, well apparently the MBP is having a hard time NATing the VPN connection to work, so maybe we’ll just chalk half of one up for it.

PPS Yes, it’s a bit unfair to compare a 3 year old laptop running a 6 year old OS to a practically brand new one, but since when is life fair

PPPS Finally got things to work using the Windows laptop as the “router”, but it involves having to turn off BlackICE (duh), which I’m not too comfortable doing.

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Off to BEA World

September 15th, 2006

Well, assuming the BEA doesn’t cheap out anymore than they already have on this conference and they spring for sponsored wi-fi at the Moscone Center next week, I’ll be trying my hand at live-blogging some sessions from BEA World.

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Amgen shifts some operations

June 24th, 2006

Well, I think the move rumors at work that most people wanted to ignore or didn’t know what to make of got a little more real this week when we finally announced a bit more publicly that we’re going to be expanding in Longmont, CO. There’s an article in the local paper this morning about it.

Some of us have sort of been anticipating this, and Christy and I actually took a trip out there recently. It’s actually really nice, although obviously it gets quite a bit colder during the winter there than it does in Southern California. Housing is cheaper, and there is the attractive possibility of living very close to work. There is also the side benefit of being in the “right” color of these maps for a change.

In any case, it seems better to me to be proactive and move “early” rather than waiting for someone else to force your hand if possible. Obviously it’s a pretty tough call for a couple of SoCal natives though.

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Redefining the Trinity?

June 22nd, 2006

There is some pretty funny commentary by Tom McMahon on what is a pretty ridiculous topic the Presbyterian Church is apparently considering in The Trinity, Updated.

I would appear that they have more than their share of issues at the moment. On a more serious note, read some of Mark Roberts’ commentary about another really poor decision recently. I can’t claim to have ever been a member of a Presbyterian church, but the way things look now it seems like they are looking to join the Episcopalians if detaching themselves complete from mainstream evangelicals.

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Well it’s *a* reason

June 17th, 2006

As a relatively new participant in the whole Father’s Day thing (see the BabyYates blog for more on this), I find some of the rationale behind the day of honoring fatherhood interesting. Melinda at the STR blog (and an article quoted there) had an unique take on a (IMHO) more important idea of
Husband’s Day.

The whole emphasis on loyalty seems like it’s getting at something pretty fundamental to making marriages actually last past the “twitterpated” stage. I thought the movie Jerry Maguire provided a good commentary about Hollywood’s misunderstanding of the marriage relationship when it had Rod Tidwell (he of the “Show me the money” raison d’etre) practically scoff at Jerry for replying simply “loyalty” when asked why he would to marry Dorothy (the Rene Zellweger character). The idea that someone would be motivated to marriage by something other than the ever-popular “follow your heart” methodology apparently is inconceivable to many folks. Personally I actually kind of liked him for that response, although you may not want to take a lot of serious marital direction from that movie in general.

Don’t get me wrong, being head-over-heels in love with someone is one of the best things I’ve ever experienced, but it should in no way be a pre-requisite for being engaged and responsible as a husband and a father. You’d certainly be hard-pressed to find biblical support for that idea, and I think it would be difficult to make a very persuasive extra-biblical moral argument for it as well.

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Weekend Project – Book Archive

June 17th, 2006

As grown-up items around the Gatekeeper HQ retreat in favor of plastic toddler and baby playthings, we are looking for ways to optimize some of our use of space. One obvious target is the preponderance of bookcases containing classic, frequently-accessed works such as: Statistical Methods in Medical Research and Introduction to Compiler Construction. Many of these are textbooks from graduate school, or even undergrad classes, and let’s face it, I haven’t cracked open Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle too often since the early 90’s. Actually, if my grade from that Humanities Tutorial class is any indication, I didn’t crack it open often enough then.

Anyway…. My point was that a method to clear out some of the clutter without having to part with some items that might be useful someday, we needed a good way to put these things a little more “away” while still being able to retrieve them on demand. Enter Delicious Library. This oh-so-slick little app let’s us take advantage of the built-in camera on the new MacBook Pro to barcode scan and catalog all these old books. It uses Amazon’s web services for actually looking up a barcode or ISBN number to retrieve all the appropriate data. We simply need to tag the entry with a box number, and start filling up file storage boxes with books.

Overall the program has performed quite admirably, although you’ll definitely have more luck getting good information on newer books. This is probably more an reflection on the contents of Amazon’s catalog than on the behavior of the app itself. If you have a Mac with a built-in camera and any substantial number of books, CDs, movies, or video games you would like to track, I highly recommend checking this thing out. The free trial will give you a pretty good idea of what the experience will be like, and the full version will set you back only $40.

PS If you noticed a referral entry on the Amazon links above, it’s from Delicious Library, not from me. I’m not trying to make any money from the 2 other people who ever look at this site, trust me.

Posted in Family, Geek, Mac | No Comments »

Back in Bla-errr-Mac

June 17th, 2006

Well, after not doing much with this blog for a couple of months, I finally have enough new geek toys to keep me busy and interested in posting stuff. First and foremost would be my hot (no, really) new MacBook Pro. Aside from the fact that it will scald me if I actually try to use it as a laptop and the fact that that screen can’t close flush with the rest of the unit, it’s a pretty slick little machine.

I’ve promised myself I’m going to do some development with it. So far I’ve had a hard time getting my head wrapped around Objective C, but at least Eclipse works pretty well.

In the meantime, I’m really enjoying NetNewsWire, and I’m trying out MarsEdit to see if it’s worth paying money to make blog posting a slightly more enjoyable experience. I’m also half tempted to convert the BabyYates blog over to an iWeb site, but I really don’t want to be locked into editing it from a specific computer or using .Mac for easy publishing. Their templates do look nice though, and of course the media/photo album stuff is as slick as you would expect from Apple.

Posted in Blogging, Geek, Mac | No Comments »

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