What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I decided to put together a simple little homepage for mao my Fedora 9 laptop in my office. As of the Big Update, I had gotten rid of my old linux laptop, and it'd been a few weeks before I got this guy rebuilt from an old XP laptop. Now that I had a little time off with the Holidays, I decided that it was a good time to throw together a little homepage for this guy.

It's nothing much. In fact, its the same format that I have for all the machines in my office, but it's nice and functional, and a lot better looking than the default Fedora 9 web page.

This morning I saw that ZeusDraw 1.3.2 is out and it's been a long time since 1.3.1 was released. Sure, it was stable, and the updates to 1.3.2 are minor - a few bug fixes and the visual indication of a grouping in effect, but still... most drawing packages are continually evolving and this one hasn't. Not bad, just a little surprising.

On the upside, I do like it, I have done a lot of fun stuff with it for the past several years, and I'm glad to see that the developers are still working on it - if only to fix the bugs. It's a great MacDraw-like app - not pixel-pushing, but object-based, and very nice.

This morning I took the time to update the web sites on sherman and ghost - my two iMacs in my office at home. Sherman is an Intel iMac, and Ghost is an older G5 iMac that used to be Sherman until it died and I took it to the Apple Store to get it fixed only to find out that the cost of the repair ($900) was almost as much as a new Intel iMac. At the time I needed a machine, and so I got the new one and shelved the old G5.

After about a year, I decided with the office re-make, I needed to fix the G5 for sentimental reasons. This time, the Apple Store fixed it for free! Gotta love that service. I'm sure it had more to do with the fact that I'd dropped several thousand dollars at the Apple Store this year, but hey, free is free!

So I needed to update their web sites with correct pictures, names and details. Not hard, just needed to pay attention to a few details. Got it done and even updated the DNS records at easyDNS for Ghost.

This morning I noticed that MacSpice 2.10.15 is out and the release notes indicate a smattering of bugs fixed.

This is just one of those things that is like a time machine for me - it takes me back to my roots in Electrical Engineering and the hours I'd spend on the design and then verification in SPICE. It's not a tool to help you design something as much as it's there to verify that you've done your job. It's like a compiler - it's a measuring device on the correctness of your work, not an aid to doing it.

Lots of interesting times sitting at the terminals at Purdue getting outputs. It was so very long ago, but at times it seems like yesterday.

This morning I noticed that the Mozilla Group had released two releases: Firefox 3.0.4 and Camino 1.6.6. The Firefox release was about the typical security and stability fixes, and the Camino was the same. However, I have to say that this release of Camino has markedly better button rendering when going to sites that didn't render buttons nicely in the past. For that, I'm grateful.

So, it's update time for browsers. Not bad.

The more I use VoodooPad Pro, the more I like it. Version 4 was a great update - the best part being the singular palette like Acorn (another FLying Meat product), which makes it very easy to manipulate things in the notebook.

With 4.0.3 released today, there are a lot more things to like. Most of these things are bug fixes and a few extensions. Nothing hit me, but it's great to stay up to date.

Probably the nicest graphing package for Mac OS X - DataGraph, was updated to v1.6.2 today. He added a lot of nice features - templates, assistants for the date/time formats, pop-up widgets for the selection of values like line width, etc. It's a nice little update. I still like the fact that if you register for $30 (or something like that) you can incorporate his graphing frameworks into your own apps. My idea was to use this as the basis of a lot of simulation graphing. I haven't gotten around to it yet - as much by the time as for the fact that he still doesn't support the types of graphs I need - 3D mapped to 2D. Contour, heat, those kids of graphs.

Still doesn't make this any less nice of a package. Excellent.

This morning when I'm trying to get things done, Comcast is at it again! They take down the cable model, maybe reconfigure it, and then it's up for a minute, and then down again. In all, I probably had it less than 5% of the time this morning. Annoying, to say the least.

I know that they are supposed to be coming out with a new 50Mbps service this month to much of ChicagoLand, but from reading the press releases, it sounds like it's not going to get to the western suburbs until 2009 - which is fine. I'm not sure it's worth another $70/month for 50 Mbps/10 Mbps - but it's close.

Anyway, I wish they would not do the maintenance at 3:30 - 4:00 am... that's when I need it.

This morning I noticed that Perian 1.1.3 is out and available within Perian for update. With this release they have put in a few more decoders added more sanity checks for some of the streams, and even reduced the memory footprint.

This is just a great way to be able to view a lot more diverse content in QuickTime. GOtta love that.

Last night, I had a mix-up with my daughter's basketball practice schedule - I was sent to the wrong school by my wife. I realized that I needed to put the schedule into iCal, and once there, there should be no reason I couldn't publish it and let her have a look. Even if she didn't, there was value for me in learning how to publish iCal calendars.

I knew the publishing is over WebDAV, and so I started looking for public WebDAV servers that would host this content for me. I have been disappointed that HostMonster doesn't have WebDAV support - but I decided to send them an email this morning just in case they may have recently added it.

[UPDATE: no they do not have any plans to support it.]

I also looked at a site called Box that said it was WebDAV, but I think that's been pulled and it's a less-general web-based file sharing system now. Shucks.

I ended up seeing iCal Exchange a lot, and it turns out that's an incredibly easy way to do it. They have public and private calendars, and it's got adds if you look at the calendars online, but it just works if you don't.

I ended up getting an account, and then publishing the calendar from within iCal to the base URL of: http://icalx.com/public/drbobbeaty/ - this, they tell you right on your account page at iCal Exchange. Very slick.

Once it's published, you can subscribe to the calendars by using the URL: webcal://icalx.com/public/drbobbeaty/nameOfCalendar.ics - it's pretty much idiot-proof. You can even make it a link on a page so that people don't need to know how to type the URL. That's not anything new about URLs, but it's a nice thing about the integration of iCal into Mac OS X.

So I ended up publishing the calendars for our volleyball team, the Rampage and Angelina's basketball team, the Comets. If I update the calendar in my iCal, it pushes these changes to the server, and each subscribed iCal picks it up. Sweet.