As some of you know, I worked for Be briefly, so I feel some ownership in this even though the BeBoxen were a thing of the past when I was there.

Here’s the story.

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“Expect an order confirmation from the seller within zero to five days.”

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I was a big sluggish out of the gate this week. Eight days ago, I bought a new Powerbook. I used mostly Apple’s migration to get everything to my new computer.

However, there were a fair number of migration issues, mostly permissions-related. For example, it didn’t copy any of my stuff in /usr/local (but why would it expect anything there for the average Mac user?). I found that it copied my postgres user (because of how I created it), but not mysql.

Fortunately, I’d rsynced everything to another hard drive. Unfortunately, rysnc -aEv has some issues, including some rather nasty crashes.

I think I’m now done. Everything works, except for one app which mysteriously won’t create new documents (but has no issue editing existing ones). Weird.

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So said Mal in the movie of the evening, Serenity. I’m not going to spoiler it except to say it was great fun, 24 episodes too short and, as the guy in the row behind me said, “The best movie I’ve seen with a space ship in it. Ever.”

We went to the Metreon showing, which was only half-organized — and what organization there was came from the Browncoats. Rick showed off his amazing park-fu by getting a parking space on the street only a few cars from the corner of the Metreon — and this was after literally getting a parking space in front of the restaurant we went to in the outer Mission (which was very good). Carnitas and Jarritos, mmmm.

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Well, I’d been using OmniGraffle Pro (3.x) to look at relationships within an EOModeler file. Having a larger project, I decided to look at the 4.0 to see what it did. On a small sample, it imported Just Fine, including all attributes.

However, when I was trying to import a larger EOModel, OG claimed that the file was read-only, meaning that I couldn’t rearrange the elements.

Later, I realized it was my own fault: I hadn’t entered the license for OG4 Pro and was working on a demo version. I didn’t get any error messages, though, so I wasted time on the issue. Ugh.

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I notice that several people have been looking at my page from the Conjecture.org page of speakers for the upcoming convention, even after I have told the programming committee that I could not attend. While I had originally planned to go down for Conjecture and then come back after RubyConf, it’s just not going to happen. I will still be at RubyConf, though not as a speaker.

Therefore, if you’re looking for me to be at Conjecture, alas, work commitments prevent me from attending.

Sorry.

I really did love Conjecture the first two years and hope to be back next year.

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If you want to see an ugly UI experience on Tiger (yes, the latest version), put your dock on the left and turn magnification and hiding on. Scroll through your list and see what happens to the arrows.

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Support your local medical examiner — die strangely.

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Over the weekend, I attended the WOW design conference. My head is still threatening to explode from being overpacked with information.

When I signed up for the conference, I recognized the names, but (being somewhat bad with names) didn’t realize how cool the instructors would really be. I haven’t even begun to finish transcribing all my notes.

One thing I realized, I’d fallen back into a bad habit of using occasional presentational css class names. I won’t do that again. Really.

I’d also had a site that vexed me, but, with a deadline, I used a single table to work around a browser rendering issue. Or, better description, what seemed at the time to be a browser rendering issue.

When I heard Andy Clarke talk about floats, I realized what I’d probably done wrong. I opened up my project, edited two files, and voila, the entire site was fixed in all the browsers I had on that machine, including the quirky old IE 5.2.3 Mac.

I’m working on some other tests before uploading the changed site, but that was a huge success.

I don’t want to leave Molly or Aaron out, I’m just quite literally inarticulate right now. When I find the brain unpacking device, I’ll post more. I hope.

::stumbles about::

It’s around here somewhere, isn’t it?

In the meantime, Craig Cook has posted a more complete review.

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As a fan of the show Lost, I’m glad it won an Emmy for best drama.

Alas, it’s up against Veronica Mars, also a household favorite, starting this next week. 🙁

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Now that Jake , Mad Robby, and Atmos have talked about it, I suppose I can mention part of what I’ve been working on for the last few days.

I’ve learned a lot. Specifically:

1. Mac users can do pair programming remotely with SubEthaEdit. Very, very cool, even if another developer did ask me to unhighlight some text because I’d turned his entire window “Hello Kitty pink.” Each coder, and there can be more than two, has their own color. I just went with the default, which happened to be pink. So, selecting all the text shows up to all other users, and brighter than any changes you’ve made.
2. Subversion is even cooler than I thought.
3. ‘rake migrate’ is your friend, even during development. Later, you can get the stable version of the db, remove the migrations-specific table, and remove all the migrations. Until then, it’s really spiff to be able to have an entire team add and drop columns and tables in the comfort of their development environment.
4. Test-Driven development is great stuff, but one should ensure that tests run before typing ‘svn commit.’ Really. Rails has a fine framework for unit and functional testing. While I’d understood the unit testing, this project gave me some better insight into writing functional tests.
5. BaseCamp (initially, we used Backpack) is great for managing what still needs to be done on a project.

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If you find CSI or CSI:NY too icky, please skip this post. Really. If you’re eating, please close the window and come back later.

Tonight, I read a very disturbing report (not for the squeamish) from one of the people I met at BarCamp. In this case, the analogy to conditions in Iraq wasn’t pulled out of thin air — he’d been there for some time quite recently.

There’s several things that concern me about this. While I can certainly understand, from a pragmatic perspective, putting emphasis on getting bodies out of water (as they’d continue to pollute the water supply), it is just unconscionable to leave the dead this long.

On a cheerier note, there have also been reports of the Red Cross and FEMA seizing medical equipment brought in by volunteers — equipment and supplies actually being transported FOR the Red Cross.

If that doesn’t indicate absolute zero coordination or communication, I’m not sure what does.

So much for trying to help, huh?

In an attempt to make up for some of the harsh subjects in this post, I bring you a non-icky set of photos: Jacob’s photos of the people in the Astrodome. There’s some great photos in there, but I think this is my favorite.

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This is the best I’ve read about the Katrina aftermath (though admittedly I’ve been quite busy this week and have only had a couple of minutes for reading anything), especially when you consider it’s coming from someone who happened to be in New Orleans to attend a paramedic convention. Teresa Nielsen Hayden adds some brilliant annotations and corroborations.

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For those people who could have evacuated but chose not to, I found something very illuminating today: evacuees were forced to either choose not to be evacuated, or to leave their animals behind to starve to death.

Personally, I want to live in a world where the people who are evacuated are the people who would not choose to leave an animal behind.

Scruffy is my only living link to my late husband; I simply cannot imagine ever leaving the little guy behind, nor can I imagine euthanizing him because it was more convenient for some bureaucrat.

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After a truly awful week last week, it seems that there are some rays of hope. First of all, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is finally starting to be addressed.

Second, it looks as though there may be some chances to Save Kepler’s. After filing for Chapter 7, it looks as though there may be some other possible investors.

I truly hope that there is some way out of this.

I emailed Clark Kepler after the store closed and received a reply the following day, thanking me for my kind words.

I hope I can soon buy more books there.

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