Like some folks out there who had to work during the day I was following the Apple Keynote via blog updates (Thanks Engadget! The biggest news of course was the iPhone. I expected an iPhone announcement of some sort but I didn’t quite expect what I saw and I didn’t expect that this would be the end all of the keynote. I was expecting a few more announcements like when Leopard would ship, perhaps updated Macs and all that but Steve kept making references to what’s coming in the next couple of months. I guess another keynote of some sort is in order say about February or March maybe. I think the iPhone is cool and my colleage and I were drooling and all that. I decided to make a little contrib to the community at large while we wait for June.

Slainte

I was all excited at the prospect of unleashing Windows Vista on my machine. The IT folks installed it on one test machine and I took a quick look at it. It seemed a whole lot more useful than WinXP to me already. I was honestly a bit excited despite the fact that I was thinking OS X rip off the whole time but I was glad to see the OS modernized since I’m forced to use it at work. Then I got the call… Sorry we can’t deploy Windows on any of the machines coz there is no Netware client for it yet. The IT person found this out after trying to register Vista and it would not pass through our proxy. Apparently, Novell has yet to release a Vista compatible client. I looked at Novell’s site and they are listed as a Microsoft business partner. I’m thinking why would a Microsoft business partner not have a client that many businesses rely on ready when the Business version of the partner’s OS is ready? This is so crappy. If one of the Apple business partners pulled this type of mess there would be some serious flaming going on all over the place. Anyway, I find the whole thing annoying but I guess I just have to sit back and wait until Novell get the client out.

Last week flew like the wind and I find myself working on a website re-design that I change my mind about which direction I want to go in every other day. I know that I should buckle down and just do something but quite frankly I’m in need of a real holiday and is a bit stressed out so my mind wanders off and I change direction alot. I should work on a holiday really soon coz I’ve been going like the energizer bunny since June. I am looking forward to a few things this coming week. First off a project that I’ve been working on for some time via a consultant will be implemented this week. Can’t wait to see the result and learn first hand about managing geodatabases in ArcSDE. I have to say I’m genuinely excited albeit tired. I’m also looking forward to Vista Business being installed on my machine at work. I volunteered to be one of the first recipients of the MS prized concoction. I’m mainly interested in testing how ArcGIS will perform on it. Having just reformatted my HD I figured why not. Besides I’m bored with the WinXP look and feel. Lastly, I’m looking forward to MWSF 2007. Not hoping to hang on all of Unkie Steve’s words or anything but I have my bingo card ready for later. As it turns out, its the same day as the aforementioned project implementation so I can’t follow the blogs during the event and BTW I’m at work so can’t stream the video either (major poo poo for streaming non work related videos as it should be after all this is work). Anyway, I’m still sore from putting a desk together yesterday so I have to go find some tiger balm and get off this thing. BTW found a new piece of software couple days ago called xPad. Its really nice and I wish they had a Windows version. Its free if you own a Mac go grab a copy.

Happy New Year Everybody… My new year started out with a strange occurrence. I was on my way home with a friend after seeing a movie (Night at the museum) when two deers pulled in front of us. It was very odd coz we were both sitting there laughing about the movie and when we saw the two deers it was like a bad dream. Anyway, as it turns out the car went in between them and the Momma deer made a nice little dent on the right side of the car. Other than that we were fine and I think the deers were OK . My friend who was driving was a bit shaken up mainly b/c it was a Momma and baby deer and this was her first time hitting one. I was just thankful that the situation to our person and the car wasn’t worse. I count ourselves blessed b/c this was going downhill on a major highway. I guess you can say my new year started off with a bang. Can’t wait to see what happens the rest of the year… Hopefully good things.

As 2006 is coming to an end one of the things I’ve been doing is cleaning up my hard drive. I have to admit that I have way too many apps on my computer… but the cleaning job forced me to think about the list of apps that I found indispensable in 2006. Below is my list and BTW they are not in any particular order.

• Shapeshifter- If you don’t like the look of Mac OX and would like to change it slightly or totally then this is the app for you. It reminds me of Windows Blinds or Style XP for Windows… Except this doesn’t seem to bog down your OS at all. I’m currently using a theme which looks like iTunes 7 called 7 which you can get at Interfacelift.

• Journler- If you need to keep a digital diary of sorts that includes, URLs, images, and such this is a good program. You can even blog with it. Its essentially free although if you can afford it you should donate.

• Omni DiskSweeper- I recently was at a lost for why I had 10 less GB of hard drive space than when I first turn on my computer since I was cleaning up that day and did not remember adding anymore video files… I searched Mac support and someone mentioned that I probably have something in my tmp folder that was causing a problem. I was wondering where this folder was since I couldn’t exactly get to it. They suggested downloading Omni Group’s DiskSweeper and I did and ran it and it tells you which apps/ folders are eating up lots of space on your HD. I knew that my iTunes folder and Apps folder would be large but then I noticed a folder that was way too large about 10 GB larger than it should have been. Yeah the tmp folder had some large 10GB temporary installation file sitting in it. Disksweeper allowed me to find, delete the file and reclaim my 10GB.

• Imagewell- when it comes to resizing images for the web etal. there is no other tool for me. Its fast and does not reduce the quality of your images like some other programs out there. I use this a lot. Best of all its free!

• Ecto- This is my blogging tool of choice. It supports all the major blogging API like Blogger, WordPress and Movable type. It is availabe for Windows as well as Mac OS X.

• Curio- Blogged about this one before- its basically a project management software that lets you organize all sort of useful stuff like you would a notebook. I’ve already used it to organize my thoughts for 2 grants (which we successfully received) as well as a few web projects.

• Dreamweaver – not particularly just a Mac OS X app perse but this is an old favorite and I have to add it in since I used it so much. I’ve been using Dreamweaver since version 4. I know there are a few other web design tools the likes of iWeb, RapidWeaver, and Sandvox but Dreamweaver gives me ultimate flexibility to design from scratch in design view and switch to code view when I want plus the CSS editing functionality is very straightforward. Its a workflow thing with me and Dreamweaver fits my workflow the best. RapidWeaver with the blocks plug-in is a good second.

• Jet Photo Studio- A FREE piece of software that lets you store, organize, edit, print, and share digital photos. My favorite feature is that it allows you to generate flash based slideshows for the web. It is also available on the Mac and windows platform.

I’ve been checking the ESRI page everyday since I first heard that ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 2 was to be released on December 18th. Alas! It was delayed until after Christmas… Earlier today I went to check and there they were. I downloaded the first of the three because that’s all I had time for today and applied the patch to 2 machines so far. All seems to be working well. I’m wondering if its safe to install IE 7 now (seems to work fine on my Boss’s machine. I’ll have to download the ArcSDE & ArcIMS patch later the ArcGIS Desktop patch was 44 MB. Quite a bit to push over our network. Here are the links to the patch. Go get em! ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 SP 1, ArcSDE 9.2 SP 1, ArcIMS 9.2 SP1

Merry Christmas Everybody! Not much going on today just relaxing, stuffing my face, gabbing on the phone and of course spending some time on the computer. I’m stuck in Upstate, NY again for another Christmas except this time there is no snow. Wish I was in Florida eating my mother’s cooking. Guess I should count my blessings… at least I’m not stuck in other places because of cancelled flights. I still wish my Mom would send me a care packet of curried goat, rice and peas, black cake, and sorrel. Yummmmm… I haven’t had curried goat and sorrel since I was in Jamaica back in spring. Not cool I was almost able to get some goat so I could cook my own but it didn’t work out. Perhaps someone will have mercy on me and send/ bring me some. Who knows. Well, hope ya’ll had a great Christmas and Happy holidays to the folks out there who don’t celebrate Christmas
Nollaig Chridheil,
Catt