Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

Mac Event at Computer History Museum

I'm going to this event at the Computer History Museum tonight. Look me up if you're there. I'll be the bald Mac nerd. Oh, wait...

Mac OS X 10.3 features

Apple's marketing materials for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther claimed 150 new features, but there was no list of those features on the product box or anywhere else I could find. There is one now.

Tsuris in Brooklyn

New York City's Department of Transportation will not post a sign reading "Leaving Brooklyn: Oy Vey!" on the Williamsburg Bridge. What a shonda!

P.S. For the goyim as well as the lansmen: a great Yiddish site.

Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!

Yesterday my son Jess showed me a curious Rice Krispies commercial. The high-energy animated ad features a close up of Snap, Crackle, and Pop each doing a single hard "CRUNCH" of cereal. Then, they pound spoons into bowls, splashing milk in the air. They use the spoons to beat on colored tubes, making drumlike sounds. All this happens while catchy, upbeat rock music plays in the background. Yes, Rice Krispies is riffing on Blue Man Group! There is absolutely no doubt that that's what's going on here. Any real journalists out there want to look into this a little more?

From the Kellogg's site:

In Sweden, they say “Piff! Paff! Puff!, in Germany, “Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!”, in Mexico “Pim! Pum! Pam!”

ASCII movie from A Long Time Ago

Go to a command line and type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl for some good old-fashioned geeky fun. Thanks to Dave Mark for this one.

Home again

The Big Nerd Ranch experience is over, and it's back to my real life. I had a great time monastically focusing on Cocoa programming for five days (there wasn't much else to do in the Georgia backwoods) and hanging out with a great bunch of guys in the class. Now my challenge is to mess around with what I learned a little bit each day so that I don't lose the knowledge.

As long as it's all about me, here's a full personal update:

• I'm spending most of my days working on a new book, Hacking iPod and iTunes, to be published this summer by Wiley. Got any wacky fun iPod/iTunes tips? Send 'em along!
  
• Some of you will note that it's about time for the annual appearance of the Knaster Knews, the first holiday letter of every year. We're working on it. Possibly there will be Internet distribution this year.
  
• I'm doing the liquid diet for awhile to get to my goal weight.
  
• I got a new phone, a Sony Ericcson T616. It has Bluetooth, whee! I plan to join the iSync generation any day now.
  
• I'm reading and enjoying The Silmarillion. Yes, it's different from Lord of the Rings: more biblical, more begat-y, no nice friendly Hobbit point of view. But the rich story is there, and it definitely feels like the same world as LOTR.
  
• Barbara is seeing a whole new gang (=2) of doctors this week in an effort to figure out why she feels crummy, has leg spasms, etc. I hope it goes well.
  

One more OS X installation

A couple of weeks ago Barbara upgraded to OS X. She was fed up with too many crashes, and was having particular problems in IE, so she decided to take the plunge. She likes OS X fine, and there are few crashes, of course. The irony is that she has stopped using Safari because it wasn't working with one of her financial sites, she didn't like that it staggered part of new windows off the right side of the screen, and it keeps forgetting her home page setting across reboots.

Being a Big Nerd

Day 2 of Cocoa Programming class at Big Nerd Ranch. There's a lot of stuff to learn in there! It's too much to grok at the lightspeed pace of the course, so I'm sort of letting it wash over me and picking up as much as I can. My head is buzzing with ideas for writing and programming projects.

The alarm clock in my room here at the Ranch is too obnoxious to be allowed to live. So being a Big Nerd this week, I decided to solve the problem with technological overkill. My first idea was to write a Cocoa program that included a movie controller to play an MP3, but I soon moved on to the idea of an AppleScript. With the help of fellow nerd student Dave Mark, I wrote a little script to check the time, then play a song at the appointed hour:

set alarmTime to "01/14/04 7:30 AM" set theResult to display dialog "What time?" default answer alarmTime set alarmTime to text returned of theResult

repeat until the (current date) > date alarmTime
end repeat

tell application "iTunes"
play track "Amsterdam" of playlist "Library"
end tell

Then I realized I had left the power adaptor in the classroom, and my battery would not last all night. So I changed course a little. I used the Energy Saver preference panel to set the Mac to start up at 7:30 AM. Then I modified the script to simply play the tune and saved the script as an application. I created a new user, Wakey Wakey, set the Mac to login to this user automatically at startup, with the script as its only startup item. I shut down the PowerBook. At 7:30 this morning, it turned itself on, started up into Wakey Wakey, ran the script, and played the song.

Of course, I woke up all by myself about 10 minutes before the alarm fired. But I still had to sit around and wait for it all to happen.

Big Nerd Ranch

I'm at the Big Nerd Ranch outside Atlanta this week, taking the Cocoa Programming class. I'm having a blast so far, getting to spend a whole week learning something I've been wanting to mess with for, oh, about 15 years now (counting NeXTSTEP). Various little threads of my past are coming together, such as General Magic's ObjectMaker and MacApp.

Secrets of the Amazon

You probably shop at Amazon.com, but I bet there's more going on there than you realized. Did you know that Amazon has tons of free product manuals, and when you buy a book, you sometimes get access to a PDF of the book, too? They have restaurant menus? And best of all, did you realize that Amazon has tons of free music you can download? Neat.