Schinckel.net

Meow

via John Scalzy.

Well, I’ve had my last Year 10, 11 and 12 classes. That was a nice thing to have finished.

Even better was the last lot of school reports. Ever.

Now it is time to rant and rave about the reporting process(es) in schools. Or maybe that will be after I’ve finished…

Trying to read an article at school today, I was blocked by the foolish filter:

That’s right. This site is blocked because it is a Personal Page. What sort of shit is that?

With my Mac Mini I also got an Upgrade DVD. Now, I wasn’t too fussed about having Leopard on the Media Centre, but I did want it on my laptop. So, I thought, I’ll just insert it into the MacBook Pro, and install from there.

Of course, that would be good if it worked. Which it didn’t. According to the dialog box, I “Don’t have Mac OS X v.4 Installed”.

Which isn’t the case:

Using Disk Utility was odd - for some reason my internal drive was not being mounted by the system.

I’m now trying the disk on a G5 iMac. I don’t know if this is a deliberate inability to install as it is from a Mac Mini, or if it is just an odd error.

later: And it appears like this DVD will not boot a G5 iMac. Or at least, not this one.

Don’t ever, ever, pop up a dialog box notifying that the update server could not be reached on an automatic update.

Perian decoders, when installed, keep trying every couple of minutes (if the pref is selected) to reach the update server and see if the version that is running is the current one. Now, I am without ‘net at the moment, since I’ve gone over quota at work, and I keep getting dialog boxes saying that the update server cannot be reached.

Now, I wouldn’t mind having automatic updates, but since I am not always connected to the ‘net, I can’t have them on. As the repeated dialog boxes are driving me mental.

I used to be a big fan of “the right protocol for the right job” - meaning that HTTP was just right for Hypertext documents, and FTP is what you need for transferring files. That’s what they are designed for, right.

Well, that was before I was behind a draconian firewall that only allows out HTTP and HTTPS.

So now, I can’t download a driver for a C2100 Fuji Xerox DocuPrint printer, which I need to use for work, because they only offer the file over FTP. And because it is a system-wide block, I can’t even get my local sysadmin to allow the transfer.

Stupid management.

I bought a copy of this fantastic textbook on Friday.

I won’t write a review, suffice to say it is the book to use to learn how to program on the Mac.

It’s an interesting situation, this whole change of career business. I’ve had lots of opportunity to say to myself, or anyone who will listen, “this is the last time I will do this.”

Most recently, this is the last time I will write reports. Something I have always despised, and I won’t miss it one iota.

I’ve also had the last Year Level Meeting, last Student Free Day (those are pretty good, but), and last time I have to submit student work for moderation.

In three days, I’ll have my last teaching lesson. That’s a big one!

And then, at the end of next week, my last day.

Roll on, last day!

I have used a number of Computer Aided Design and CAD packages. Today, I used Google Sketchup for the first time.

It has some differences, and could be an excellent program, but it just does lots of things (IMHO) wrong.

For instance, it allows you to place a dimension on a line, and then change it. But it doesn’t actually change the length of the line. If it did this one thing, giving it parametrically controllable dimensions, then it would do most of what I want. Instead, I need to create a line or box, (change tools to) place a dimension, (change tools again to) resize it until it is close enough to the size I want.

To make it a bit better to use coming from Inventor, I set up ‘D’ as a shortcut key for Dimension, and F5/6 for Previous View/Iso View. Much better for my muscle memory!

It uses a different paradigm than Inventor, rather than using a series of parts, it really is just a sketch. Having said that, here is an accurate representation of my house. Accurate in some ways, not all.

And the best thing over Inventor? It runs native on OS X.

Well, I’ve bit the bullet and bought a Mac Mini Core Duo to use as my media centre. The old Xbox just doesn’t cut it anymore - the two things I need to be able to do are play H.264 movies, and record video from Digital TV, and it can’t do either of these. I’ve had to purchase an eyeTV USB TV Tuner to do the latter (and I’ll be returning my Miglia TVmini2, since it doesn’t do what it is advertised to do - which is play Digital TV properly, or do scheduled recording properly).

The machine was ordered online via the Apple Store. I’ve had issues with NextByte in the past, so I was a bit loathe to purchase through them. I rang them anyway, figuring that if they had one in store, I could order it, and collect it the same day.

They didn’t and said that they had about 6 on order, and there weren’t any in Australia.

Now, I knew that wasn’t the case, as Apple have a 24 hour shipping note on this model. So, it was “no thanks” to their offer to place an order. And I ordered online.

Within about 5 hours, my order had shipped. And, for evidence that it has been shipped, TNT have the following data about my package:

So, I’m all excited. My new machine is supposed to arrive tomorrow…