I just officially got word that I’m going to WWDC 2005. This is going to be an amazing conference. I’ve been to two WWDCs before (2002, 2003), and each time it was like a weeklong firehose-drinking geekfest. There is SO much stuff going on, and the caliber of the presentations (and non-presentation gatherings) are much higher than any other conference I’ve experienced.
King and Josh will be going, too, so there will be a strong NMC/Pachyderm contingent. I wonder if we should score some of the traditional elephant stickers for our conference badges?
Anyway, if you’re going to WWDC, and are curious about Pachyderm, just look for the overweight slightly balding man with facial hair, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Wait. It’s a geek conference… I need to be more specific…
I used Priceline to let William Fucking Shatner score me cheap hotel rooms. I don’t think we’re supposed to say how much we get the rooms for, but it’s less than half the book value, at the hotel less than a block from the conference.
It’s going to be a hectic June for me. WWDC is the week before the NMC Summer Conference, where I’ll be dragging the family for an extended visit to Honolulu, so that means I’m going to be out of the office for 3 weeks straight. And both WWDC and NMC are going to be extremely busy conferences for me. I get to mostly lurk at WWDC, but that’s still pretty busy. I get to present a couple of sessions at NMC2005, and there will likely be a lot of Pachyderm-related gatherings as well. That last week on the beach will sure come in handy…
Update: Added small screengrabs of the segment.
This morning, I got my copy of the Technical Knockout episode starring yours truly. I was braced for an embarrassing 2 minute segment, but was pleasantly surprised – it was actually pretty good! And I didn’t feel too self-conscious seeing myself on the little screen.
It should be airing in a couple of weeks, and I’m not allowed to “rebroadcast” the tape (Big Scary Letter™ included with the tape, and a Big Scary Warning™ burned into the first 5 minutes of tape). Keep your eye on the GlobalTV listings, for Technical Knockout (TKO) episode “Satellite Stalkers”
I’ll try to grab the segment (or at the least a few framegrabs) to share with the rest of the class…
I’ve tried playing around with the Folksonomise your files with Automator tip from MacDevCenter.com – I really like the idea of it.
If you follow the tip, you get a handy item in the Finder’s contextual menu that lets you bring up a text field to enter tags for the file. Like you do with del.icio.us, or Flickr, or iPhoto. Then, Spotlight lets you find them easily. Or, you can create Smart Folders in the Finder for tags, and have these files be found (even if the tag isn’t contained within the content of the file – a case that would normally make Spotlight overlook it).
It’s close, but not perfect. Ideally, I’d need a key combo so I could just select a file, hit, say F5 or something, and enter the tags. Having to right-click the file breaks the flow, and isn’t that much simpler than just calling Get Info, and toggling the “Spotlight Comments” text field to enter stuff (which is essentially what is being quasi-automated here).
Some pretty interesting potential – a folksonomy-native filesystem on your desktop. Rock on.
I’ve been asked to participate in a new effort by Apple, called the “Apple Digital Campus Exchange” – it’s basically a community of folks much smarter and more interesting than myself (ranging from Cole Camplese to Alan Levine to Larry Johnson to Carl Berger) who just get to talk about stuff like The Future, iPods in the classroom, etc…
I thought this was going public next week, but I see it was actually scheduled for launch on May 12. Since it is now somewhat after May 12, I think I’m safe linking to it…
I’m a contributing blogger on the Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning in a Digital World weblog. It needs a longer title, or at least an acronym.
I am pretty darned excited by this ADCE effort – it could be a chance to get the stuff we’ve all been dabbling with over the last little while finally pushed out to the Rest of the Class™ (because the folks that still haven’t heard of or use blogs etc… just might sit up and pay attention when the Big Glowing Apple Icon starts talking about it. All we really need is for it to me shown in a Stevenote…)
I took the opportunity to write my First Post to the Tools blog, where I babble for a bit about the internet not being read-only, yadda yadda…
On the technology side, they’re basically mixing existing tools, including Wordpress and vBulletin (and some others, I’m sure) to provide a pretty compelling software suite for managing the community. (the admin side is secured behind an Apple Connect login, or I’d share the URL to that – it’s pretty cool, though…)
Oh, and someone in Apple Corporate decided that we all needed bios on the website. I absolutely hate writing a bio. Booooring. So I decided instead to have fun with mine. They want a bio? I’ll give ‘em a bio! 
Update: The Campus Exchange community site is now live, with registration open to anyone. Come play!
For the Mavericks project, I get to transcode 9 DVD-ROMs worth of high resolution TIFF images into JPEG images for use during authoring by Pachyderm (I could use the TIFFs directly, but that would tax the system more than I’d like to during beta testing).
At first, I was wondering what to do about this. Back in the day, I’d use Debabelizer Pro, or a Photoshop action or something.
But, I just fired up Automator.app, and in less than 60 seconds had whipped up a Workflow that finds all TIFF images buried within a selected folder (or volume), copies them to a designated folder on my hard drive, then transcodes them to .jpg files. Exactly what I needed. In under a minute. It’s going to take a while to run (copying and transcoding roughly 40GB of images may take some time), but the process is now almost completely Automated. I couldn’t find the Finder action for automatically swapping DVDs unattended, or I’d just let this sucker run unattended all weekend…
In my books, this one task just paid for my Tiger upgrade.
Update: After it’s done processing the first DVD, I’ll see if I can tweak the Workflow to display status information. Right now, it’s slowly copying files from the DVD, and there’s no direct way to see how much is left to go (I can go into Terminal and ls -1 | wc -l to see how many files are in the target directory, and hit Activity Monitor’s “Disk Activity” tab, but a nice shiny thermometer progress bar would be nice…
I just updated to Wordpress 1.5.1 (changelog) – a trivial update (just copy over the new files, being careful not to nuke config stuff or wp-content directory).
I had one minor issue after the update – the RSS feed wasn’t displaying. A quick check of the Wordpress support forum showed that I’m not alone, and that the fix is trivial.
Update: A more permanent/proper fix is available here.
On the way into the office this morning, I listened to a very interesting podcast produced by Matt Pasiewicz and released on the EDUCAUSE blog/podcasting network. The podcast was a recording of a presentation by Lisa Kosanovich from BYU, titled “Project Governance: Avoiding Administrivia” – I listened because I feel like I’m drowning in administrivia lately, and was pleasantly surprised by the presentation. She refers to several detailed slides in a powerpoint file, which is available on the resources page for the presentation.
It turns into an excellent overview of functional project management, and how to avoid the easy traps that pull projects into dysfunctional ordeals. She gets a bit off track when using the Air Traffic Control system on September 11, 2001 as a sample project, but the rest of the session is really good.
If you’re working on a project, please listen to the podcast. You don’t have to agree with everything in it, but it is certainly a good starting point.
