Weaver’s Loom

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been playing with the beta of Live Mesh from Microsoft for some time now, and find it a very useful technology. So far the only problem I’ve run into has been some bug that was introduced when I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

For some reason, after restarting or hibernating my machine, Live Mesh gets left in an odd state that leaves it unable to connect to the mesh, leaving it in a weird state where the login action is greyed out:

(more…)

I love Google Voice. It’s an inspired system that gives me a permanent number that I use as the way to get in touch with me.

It lets me have calls ring at multiple numbers, deal with voice mail as part of my normal email, and gives me some nice attempt at transcription that is sometimes useful.

Usually I can figure out what the caller was saying from the weird transcription note that I get, but occasionally I get one like today’s gem. The caller said “Call me back and I’ll fill you in”, and Google Voice gave me: “15 minutes and I’ll kill you” ….

Of course both of those would get me to call back, but I think they need a little more work to get this right.

Today I spent an hour or so trying to clean up some iPhone code that I’ve been working on for Carticipate. I found that I was having trouble with the build that I checked out from our Subversion repository for a bunch of different reasons.

The very first one was that the code was built on an older version of Xcode, as well as an older version of the iPhone SDK, and on top of that the build machine was running Leopard (10.5) while I’ve been running Snow Leopard (10.6) almost since the day it was released.

I tend to try and stay as up to date with software as I can, and most of the time it serves me well. In this case, I ran into several very interesting issues. First thing I did was to check out the code using the command line tools for Subversion. After a few false starts, I got the full directory from the server downloaded to my Projects folder.

(more…)

Today I received a box containing the replacement PC for my wife. I got a really great deal on a refurbished HP Desktop with a quad core AMD processor, 8Gb of memory and a 750Gb drive from TigerDirect.comI’d been waiting about a week for it to get here, and my poor wife has been limping along on my slowly dying laptop in the meantime. I suspect that it’s about to die, as it has become painful just to start up a browser or read email.

(more…)

There’s a saying I’ve heard in self-help and twelve step programs that basically means you will learn more about yourself if you continue to do the work: “More shall be revealed …”

I’ve always been a very confident person when it comes to my ability to adapt to work, and always felt that as long as there were challenging problems to solve, I’d have no problem finding work. And while I am highly skilled, I have come to believe that I have been very lucky, and I may have therefore been a bit arrogant about my abilities. (more…)