ApacheCon US

So there has finally been some movement on the ApacheCon US site.  The big news, at least for me is that we have Cory Doctorow keynoting.  And oh yeah, if you are going to be in the San Diego area the 10 - 14th of December and would like to get a cup o' joe let me know.  I am going to be speaking again, this time on XSLT.

New category: Guilty Pleasures

Yes I know we all have these, and for the most part we don't talk about them.  But there is something illuminating, even endearing about knowing how silly people are sometimes.

So with that introduction, here is my Guilty Pleasures Confessional for this month: I am now a huge Natasha Bedingfield fan... huge I tell you.

I am not sure how anyone who loves music could not be a huge fan of this brit, she can sing, my gawd can she sing, and her writing while not inspired is interesting and approaching clever.

Here are just a few of the lyrics from her single 'These Words' which is getting pretty massive radio play right now:

Read some Byron, Shelly and Keats
Recited it over a Hip-Hop beat

I'm having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and drum machines

I know I had some studio time booked
But I couldn't find a killer hook

Now you've gone & raised the bar right up
Nothing I write is ever good enough

Not to mention the music is hot.  Add this all together and you get a really fun album. Well worth your money.

I am not a big fan of memes, but I think that it would be interesting to see what each of us would consider a 'Guilty Pleasure' since to me it might not be, and so on.  If you decide to reveal your own GP, please let me know through a comment here, or a track/pingback.

Avast and stuff

Well as many of you know today is Talk Like A Pirate Day.  In honor of this most auspicious day, I present to you the 'Avast, ye.' desktop:

I will be back later to talk about K2, Believe, Shuttle and anything else that catches my fancy, but for now get to practicing your pirate-ese people!

FF7 Advent Children

Well I am back from my retreat; it was an experience to say the least.  But as fun as that was it isn't what I want to talk about right now.

So yeah, as the post name implies I just finished watching the Japanese release of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children and all I have to say is wow.

I feel robbed, robbed that I wasn't able to watch this on the big screen.  I won't say it was everything I had hoped a FF7 movie would be, but it was close people, very close.

The story was very well written, in terms of being true to the characters we all know and love from the game, and the animation was wonderful, especially the fight scenes.  The director didn't shy away from very hectic action, which allowed for some very impressive sequences.

All in all, a must see for any FF7 fan, or for any fan of animation.

Out of touch

I will be out of touch from now until Friday evening as I will be on a Staff Retreat.  Every year the PR office takes a few days in retreat at a wilderness center near the college.

It is traditionally a time for reflection on the year so far and a time to look ahead to what the future might hold for us.  This will be my first outing with the office, and it will be bittersweet as I will be leaving my very pregnant wife to go.  Thankfully her parents will be arriving this evening to stay with her, so things should be fine.

If you email me or leave a comment here during this time, I will not be able to respond or approve as the case may be, until Late Friday evening.

See you on the other side.

Sillyness back in action

Well as you can see things are back to 'normal' now. I still haven't received any communication from Dreamhost, which makes me more than a little angry.  Maybe it is time to start looking into Textdrive and Media Temple.

It seems that my host Dreamhost has decided to take a nap.  Most of the sites I host there, as well as the sites of some of my peers (Stan, Khaled and Clint) are now back online and functioning, but the one site that I need to work is still out of commision.

Navigating hidden folders via the Finder

For some people this will be a no-brainer, but for the new mac user, or non-power user this tip will be a life saver.

Have you ever needed to navigate to a hidden folder via the Finder, or worse yet from somewhere like System Preferences?  Lets say you are following along with my SVN tutorial, and you have gotten as far as to install SVN and scplugin, and now you are on the scplugin System Preference pane and need to 'open' your svn executable.

The only problem of course is that SVN was installed to /usr/local/bin/ and that is not accessible via the Finder.  What is a mac faithful to do?  The answer is surprisingly simple, in fact I can outline it in 3 easy steps:

1. Click 'open' on the scplugin Preference pane
2. When the Finder dialog opens perform a shift-command(apple)-g to bring up the Go To Folder... dialog.
3. Type in /usr/local/bin into this dialog and press return.

And thats it, the open dialog should have moved to /usr/local/bin/ and you will be able to select the SVN executable.

Still sound confusing?  I recorded a little video of the whole process for you to watch, and you can find it here.

Finder

Videos

Publishing