Monkinetic Weblog

At work we're trying to set up a bunch of users on laptops with directory-based authentication and home directories. The trouble we're running into is that these laptops are all wireless, and on OS X, airport doesn't start until a user logs in. Therefore the machine can't see the authentication directory on the network until a local user has logged in and out again.

>"Marketing, shmarketing. I say, bash away on java as much as possible. I dont know exactly what problems people are having pushing openacs to clients, but I have found that getting the initial project spec, taking it home, and coming back with their project 60% completed in two days is a lot stronger marketing tactic than saying 'well yes, it will take 6 months to build you a bulletin board, but your system will have an object-relational persistance layer and full J2EE compliance.'"
-- Rzolf

See, this is what happens when you realize that a good friend has had an RSS feed all along and you finally subscribe.

> "It wasn't just slow, it was Majestic"

I'm finally working on my next SiteLight, an interesting if long-ish interview with Mark VenderWettering of brainwagon.org. I hope you enjoy it, I know I have!

This past weekend and week, |Jodi| and I spent a lot of time working to finally finish LT's room. Following are the results...

Seth has been writing about many aspects of development for the Mozilla browser for a while now, and he's finally gotten published! Seth contributed a number of hacks to the new Firefox Hacks book from O'Reilly.

Seth's been busy - he recently added channels (sort of like customizable &uumlautber-categories in Conversant) for people he blogs about, including one for Steve Ivy - neat! If he's mentioned you and there's a category for your name, you can also subscribe to a vanity feed (linked on the channel page).

Once again, I'm driving Kreg up the wall... oh, and someone remind me to beat him over the head for that horrible pun.

A new implementation of tabs in CSS using standard semantic markup: Tabtastic [via SimpleBits]

To the man who was, for many of us, the original Rocketman... Captain Kirk, now 74. Happy Birthday, Bill!

Best. Strongbad. Email. Ever. Guitar.

The Register: Ctrl-Alt-Del inventor makes final reboot

I've uploaded the lastest PodCastHelper. PodCastHelper is now a Mac OS X AppleScript application, so it should be much more efficient. I've wrapped up some of the external calls so they won't throw a dialog up if they error out. Also, PCH now recognizes timecodes that start with '#', so Christiaan Stoudt's HomeNetworkHelp.info podcasts work "out of the box".

At work, we recently "upgraded" from using CVS for all our source control to using Subversion. Subversion is what all the cool kids are using, but we chose it for several reasons, not the least of which being intelligent tag and branch management. With CVS, managing our release branches was becoming more and more hairy, while creating a new branch with Subversion is almost trivial. Other bennies:

Ok, I gave up on getting Kevin on the line for some audio. Maybe at a later time I can add it back in.

PodCast Helper is a stay-open AppleScript that looks at the current track in iTunes; if the genre is "podcast", it grabs the comment from the track, and parses it for timecodes and notes of the form:

Geek alert: Does anyone know if there's a way to ask iTunes for the elapsed time of the currently playing track? I don't see anything in the AppleScript dictionary, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place...