01.03.05

The Tech World Is On Fast Forward

Posted in General at 8 am

Man, things are really moving fast in my little corner of the tech world. In the last 24 hours I’ve seen the following:

1) My 12-year-old niece has become comfortable with FTP in a 10 minute session, as she starts building her own web site from scratch. She picked up how to do external style sheets from a bit of sample code along with font and background colors, plus how to access images that are in a subdirectory.

2) My 10-year-old nephew compiled his first Java program. From a command line. A basic “Hello World” type thing, but it’s the kind of thing that is where you start and no doubt he’ll be able to follow along in his intro to Java book.

3) Paul Guyot, Newton programmer extraordinaire, has released an early alpha of a Newton Hardware emulator that runs the Newton ROMS in an X11 environment. No kidding. This is incredible. This pushes his work 10 times further than any other emulator project that has ever seen the light of day in the past 8 years.

01.01.05

Airport Express setup notes

Posted in General at 12 pm

Although some people have had problems setting up their Airport, I had no problem at all. I plugged the white semiregular polyhedron with curvilinearly-truncated edges into a spare plug on a power strip, opened up my Airport Setup Assistant (which had been updated recently when I took my iBook from 10.3.5 to 10.3.7) and it found the defaultly named airport Express without a problem.

No cross-over cable or router wiring needed. The only machine of consequence that can’t send music to the AX is my Blue&White G3. I need to either A) run an ethernet cable from one end of the apartment to the other to hook the AX into the wired network, or B) find a /cheap/ WiFi PCI card that will work in the G3.

One is ugly and cheap the other is elegant and more expensive. Isn’t that how it always is?

Added a couple hours later:

I finally figured out *exactly* what’s missing: an iTrip that connects via AirTunes. Com’on Griffin, you can do it! (Belkin, I’m still not speaking to you after that whole pop-up ad packets debacle.)

Christmas Vacation

Posted in General at 2 am

What did you do on your Christmas Vacation?

I migrated 2 web sites to a new host and set up and configured a reseller’s account and set up 2 web hosting accounts for loved ones.

I turned our robotic cat box into a remote control robotic cat box.

I got an AirPort Express that I’m using to stream music to our stereo.

I figured out that our stereo is pretty crappy and should be replaced with a 2nd hand Sony receiver from Stuff for $89. Soon.