Author Archives: Brock Tice

Posting through Bluetooth and My New Treo 650

With three sales tax free days, some free time to get accustomed to a new device, and a dying Treo 600, I finally bit the bullet and just bought the Treo 650. This means that I can now use my phone as a modem over Bluetooth, and I get a connection speed of around 75 kbps according to 2wire. This is phenomenal, as it means that I don’t need to find a WiFi connection for basics like e-mail, blogging, and reading blogs as long as my phone has a connection.

Even though some of that stuff can be done from the phone itself (which is totally sweet, by the way) it’s nice when available to use my PowerBook instead. It has a 1440×900 17″ wide screen and a full-sized keyboard. This is definitely not the case with the Treo.

The camera seems to be much better than on the Treo 600. It works much better in low light situations. The Treo 600 camera was basically useless unless you were outside in broad daylight.

Here’s a picture I snapped of some graffiti in New Orleans:

Someone's tagging with my name!

It seems there’s an thug artist who shares my name in the city.

As you may have inferred from the title, this post and the upload of the photo have been done using my Treo’s connection over Bluetooth. I happen to think that’s pretty cool.

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Katrina/New Orleans Guest Blogger

I was recently approached by someone I know about guest-blogging on VirtuallyShocking.com with posts regarding New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina. His first guest post is here. Please see his disclaimers about whose views belong to whom and so on.

I had meant to post with an intro before he posted anything, but I was driving back to Louisiana from St.Louis yesterday, so it didn’t happen. So now you know — noone hacked my blog. He is a welcome guest.

I’ll have more info and posts later, but I haven’t unpacked any of my stuff yet, so it’ll have to wait till then.

When it’s all said and done…

When it’s all said and done,
It’s real and it’s been fun,
But was it all real fun?

–Greenday

It was fun, for the most part. Most labs spend a lot of time together. Not many of them cohabitate for the better part of a semester. It could have been awful, but it was mostly rockin’. Thanks guys, and so long St.Louis. I finally saw the arch today, from afar.

I should probably write a longer post about this later. Off to bed.

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Adobe Acrobat Stupidity

I’m filling out a fellowship application that requires the use of Adobe Acrobat, and the free reader won’t cut it. I had been using a computer in Dr.Rudy’s lab, running Win XP, that had Adobe Acrobat Pro installed. Unfortunately, I’m not done filling it out yet, and I am leaving for NOLA tomorrow bright and early.

Therefore, I had to go buy Adobe Acrobat for Mac. I opted not to get the professional version. It cost $100 at the educational pricing level. It’s bad enough that I should have to fork out cash for this when a simple web form would have been just fine, but it gets worse.

It wouldn’t run. Nothing. Not run and quit. Double-click-then-nothing. I was pretty sure that I knew what the problem was right away: they assumed that my filesystem wasn’t case sensitive, and were accordingly careless in writing the program. When installing OS X v. 10.4 (Tiger), it’s possible to choose a case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem, rather than the standard non-case-sensitive HFS+. I chose case-sensitive, because I normally work with case-sensitive filesystems in Linux, and there have been times in the past where I had collisions — files that were named the same thing except where case differed, and transferring those files to Mac OS X had been a mess.

Luckily, I was able to figure out what the problem was. I ran the program from the command line, and discovered from the error message that the program was looking for AdobeBIBUtils.framework. The file that existed was AdobeBibUtils.framework. The difference is just the case in IB vs ib. I renamed the directory. The program then launched, but crashed moments later looking for AdobeBibUtils.framework. They had used two differently-cased names in the same program.

I just symlinked one name to the other, and now the program runs without a problem. Adobe has something about this problem on their support site. Their solution? Install it on a non-case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem. For many people this means reformatting their hard drive and reinstalling everything. That’s a great solution to Adobe’s shitty coding. There may be a few more of these spelling land-mines in the software. I guess I’ll have to find and fix them as I go along. How absurd.

Guess what, Adobe? It took 30 seconds to fix the problem. I suggest you take care of it on your end. I can’t believe I paid money for this.

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To Do for Move Back to NOLA

  • Clean Apartment: I’m not the last one out, but I feel like I should do my part and get it as clean as I can before I go.
  • Get Stuff From Work: I packed up a box of my desk stuff yesterday, but didn’t want to haul it home manually. I’ll have to drive over and get it.
  • Purchase Printer Cartridges: Natalia wants me to print something for her and leave it on her desk before I go. I’m out of ink. Stupid half-full demo cartridges that came with the printer ran out quickly.
  • Check Car: Fluid levels, tire pressures, etc. Make sure it’s ready to go for tomorrow.
  • Pack Food: Pack up all of the food that I still have in the kitchen.
  • Pack Kitchen Utensils: Mainly my coveted Calphalon anodized non-stick jumbo fryer, silicone spatula, and a few other odds and ends. (This and food must come after dinner… or maybe lunch. Dinner is some potlach party thing from 18:00-21:00)
  • Pack Up Room Stuff: There’s not much stuff in my room, but it must be packed nonetheless.
  • Pack Clothes: Except what I’m going to wear tonight (pjs) and tomorrow. Again, I just don’t have that much stuff.
  • Bathroom Stuff: Most of this will actually have to be packed after my shower tomorrow morning.
  • Something Something: I’m forgetting something. I have all day to remember, so hopefully it’ll come to me.

It’s going to be a busy day, but obviously I’m not going to get much done in the way of lab work. Our server’s going down tomorrow, so it’s not going to matter much that I’m driving then anyway.

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