SC2008 Booth Systems set-up Day One

I think the flickr photo set tells the story. Day one is primarily about the setup of the hardware apparently, I'll get on to software tomorrow. At the end of the day the main kiosk is holding a ton of stuff, cables, VGA splitters, two laptops, a server, Fiber->Copper converter, GigE switch, router, etc. A big mess to get wired up in an organized fashion, but I managed to do it. It's been a long day though, and the laptop is dying, time to sign off. Flickr pictures here
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Thinking like a mac (old post)

Those of you playing WoW since the latest patch have probably noticed a few of your favorite mods going through some growing pains. The most notable of which is probably Omen. Omen is a great tool but they've been having to update nearly every day (sometimes 2-3 times) because of the recent changes. Eventually Nicole and I became frustrated with this and she gave me a 'programming excersie' to write something to handle this.

My first instinct was to write a shell script to handle this, then dump it in a copy of the WoW Launcher app so it could be launched from the Dock as an actual application. This method is pretty hacky and I wanted to hand this out to some friends, and I didn't want it to be a complete hacky pile.

Enter my local Mac fanboy/oracle Dave (http://freeke.org/ffg) with a suggestion to use Mac's Automator app. Here is where my normal habits of writing some shell script on a Unix machine to handle simple tasks get called in to question. Dave's initial suggestion was to just put my shell script in an Automator, but this tool is pretty darn useful on its own. The screen shot below illustrates the simplicity of grabbing our latest mod version, unziping it, and starting wow. Something that a shell script could of course do pretty quickly, but this feels like the Mac way ;)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I'm quite impressed with how dead simple it was to get this working, and being a Automator n00b I'm sure I am going the long way round, it I still find it quite nice. The best part is the Automator workflow can be saved as a proper 'app' which can be launched from the Dock, all this in something like 15 minutes with Automator (which brings my life total Automator usage to 30 min).

The longest part of this whole experiment was putting the icing on this workflow. Figuring out how to effectively edit mac .icns files was an interesting experience in itself. (tip: When in doubt, type 'icon' in spotlight)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

That is the least impressive icon you've probably ever seen, but the goal of this was to have an Icon, not to get an award. Once my app had an icon the next step was packaging. This was pretty easy once I looked over the hdiutil man page and used skitch to make a quick and dirty background.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Overall thinking like a Mac (with a little help of course) has given me a fairly simple way to keep my Omen settings up to date, and hopefully it'll help out some of our Mac WoW guildies. The whole experience was interesting just in learning a bit about the 'icing' bits like custom disk images with views and backgrounds, to editing icons. The funny part is it probably took 3 times as long to get all the 'icing' on the cake than it did to bake the thing.

Maybe someday I'll get off my lazy ass and write something that takes longer to make, than to package.

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copyright

So I had this idea for a facebook application. In fact a bunch of people have had this idea and no one seems to have done it right (and by right I mean something that actually functions). So I figure, I've got background with the flickr API, I can throw something together to display photos on my 'wall', no problem. Well there is technically a problem... Since the app displays photos, and could potentially be used by someone else, who could display photos they don't have rights to, there are copyright issues. I basically would have to go through a bunch of red tape, and mail something off with a check for $80 to the US Copyright Office to make sure everything is on the level.
Yeah screw that... Maybe if there is some app I can write that won't potentially display copyright protected material, I'll look in to it.
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facebook

So I finally caved and joined facebook. It would seem that it has become the preferred method of communication among my friends. I suppose it could be worse.... could have caved while they all used myspace. Overall it seems like it is reasonably well designed, a couple things that drive me nuts. See I think the facebook I wrote is much nicer... take a look over here at my alternative... Oh that's right, I don't have my own facebook product, or millions of dollars, so I'm going to shut up now :)
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the landscaping saga

It has been quite a week dealing with some damage to our home and trying to get reimbursed for it. Not worth going into at this point but it is quite frustrating.
I actually got so frustrated, that I destroyed the lcd on my razr while leaving them yet another voicemail. This, forced me to go out and get a new phone. Its not awful but its no Motorola (bye bye iSync compatability).
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