Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

Frozen in our memories

Frozen in our memories

Victoria is my home, but Edmonton will always be my home town... and why not? It's a special place, populated by extra-special people who never give up, always think big, and love their city more than others can comprehend. I would have loved to have been a part of it, to share in the positive vibes and communal pride of pulling it off yet again, but I thoroughly enjoyed it sitting at home in Victoria.

Thank you Edmonton, for standing by your team, for doing what you do, no matter what.

November 22, 2003. A beautiful day.

It was better than life

CP: Fans at outdoor game happy despite cold

Lots of sentiment that matches my own. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the games today, and it was clear that the people in attendance did too. What's done is done, I'm very happy I got to see it at all. Maybe Gretzky and friends will come back next year anyway... if that happens I will pull out all the stops to attend.

The Oilers won the game that really mattered last night... the alumni game. Fuhr and Ranford (Oilers goalies) were sickeningly good, Ranford made at least half a dozen saves he shouldn't have given his time away from the game.

Montreal played well in the "real" game. I don't think Edmonton adapted to the outdoor ice very well. It was pretty clear that the Edmonton/Alberta-based players on the Oilers had a little something extra.

It would have been nice to have seen the game in HDTV (it was CBC's first HD broadcast) but an HD satellite receiver would have been around $800. For that price I might as well have gone to Edmonton and tried scalping a ticket!

Back from COMDEX

Sorry I didn't mention it here, but I was at COMDEX in Las Vegas this week, showing off Plone.

Plone came in 1st place in a O'Reilly vote for open-source projects. The top six projects got pedestals at the show: Plone, KDE, OpenOffice, Zope, GIMP and GNOME. GNOME didn't accept the invite so Eclipse, the 7th place project, went in their place. I was shocked that Eclipse came in 7th instead of... well, 1st, but apparently they didn't know about the vote so they didn't make their community aware of it.

The Plone booth was staffed by Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi (Plone co-founders), Scott Paley of Abstract Edge, and myself. A good time was had by all! Standing for 4 days was tiring, but it worth it.

Las Vegas is a great place to visit. Lots of fun things to do, and lots of good food to eat. On Tuesday evening, Alan, Alex and I had dinner with half a dozen attendees of ApacheCon, including Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Joe Gregorio and Michael Bernstein. Mark included a picture of Alan, Alex and I in his ApacheCon photo album.

On Wednesday night representatives from the six projects enjoyed a fine dinner with four representatives from O'Reilly, including Mark Stone, Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly himself! (Sorry, I don't remember who the other person was, I don't think he introduced himself to me)

I also had the honour of demoing Plone 2 to Tim O'Reilly at our booth while everyone else was out having lunch.

Another thing I'll never forget was the guy who lost about $100K in 10 minutes playing Blackjack ($1000 minimum bet table) at the Bellagio. There was a big crowd around the table he and his sexy companion were sitting at. He had a big bag of money sitting on the chair text to him... I lost count of the number of bundles of $100 bills he pulled out of it.

Oh, and then there was the guy who turned $50 into $5000 in around the same amount of time playing craps.

One chance to be a kid again

If you've been reading my weblog this year you know I HAD TO GO TO THIS GAME. I said it over and over again. And over and over. And about 5000 times more offline. I've talked people's ears off about it.

Well, it's the morning of, and I'm at home in Victoria. I couldn't get a ticket, and I couldn't afford the scalper's prices on eBay. Well, I could have, in the "I had enough credit to do it" sense, but then there's no presents under the Christmas tree, no going out for dinner for our impending anniversary, no responsibility. I wanted to do it with just about every fiber of my being. To hell with maturity, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

I had one chance to see Halley's Comet, and my parents wouldn't let me stay up late and go outside to see it. (Hopefully I'll live to be about 87 to see it the next time around)

I was the parent saying no this time... to myself.

I had one chance to see my childhood (and current) idols play together again in Oilers silks, and I couldn't afford to. I don't think this is something that's going to happen again. Not with these players, anyway.

Excuse me while I go feel sorry for myself.

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Update: It only took nine minutes after posting this for Dad to call to ask me about the Halley's Comet situation mentioned above. They don't remember not letting me go out to see it.... I do!

Rhapsody to OS X in 2 years

I was just thinking back to when Mac OS X Server 1.0 came out... the one based on Rhapsody, with the YellowBox and BlueBox and OpenStep-like Workspace Manager (Finder) etc.

I was at the Apple campus the day it came out doing WebObjects training. To think that 2 years +/- a few days later, Mac OS X 10.0 came out is just astounding. The two are completely different beasts. And now we're a little over 2.5 years later and we've had 3 major OS revisions.

Very impressive. Kudos!

RIP Internet-Enabled Disk Images

I just downloaded the new version of SubEthaEdit.

Before I installed it I Rendezvous'd the file over to my other Mac (which is still running Jaguar).

On the Jaguar machine, the contents of the disk image were copied to the desktop, and the image was unmounted automatically. On Panther, the disk image was mounted but nothing else happened... so it looks like Internet-Enabled Disk Images have finally bit the dust. I'm glad that disk image handling is consistent again.

Michael Tsai noticed this too. Good.

CNET vs Apple

I wonder if this explains why CNET has been so critical of Apple lately...

Not that Apple doesn't deserve criticism, of course. Interesting "coincidence".

JavaScript Event Sheets, and sorttable

Simon Willison's Weblog: Javascript Mojo

From the sounds of it, two very interesting projects and concepts for you web UI folk to consider. I don't have time right now to personally look into it deeper, unfortunately.

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I suppose I should have known this... Andy McKay just informed me that this is a standard feature of table listings in Plone, even in Plone 1. I tried it and it didn't work in Safari, but it did work in Mozilla. Very cool. I wish it worked in Safari, though.

Thanks for the info Andy!

Serious Jaguar/Panther interop problem

I just ran into a really distressing problem with Mac OS X. I mounted my Panther-PowerBook's boot drive on my Jaguar-PowerMac, so that I could copy the PowerBook's copy of SubEthaEdit from its Applications folder into my PowerMac's Applications folder.

SubEthaEdit wouldn't run on Jaguar. Okay, maybe it was built against the newer SDK, so it won't run. Same thing happened when I tried SubEthaEdit 1.1.4 from the disk image on Jaguar.

A little later, I accidentally launched iTunes. It presented me with its license agreement and setup windows! Weird, I thought, I guess my iTunes setup was wrecked somehow.

Then a few minutes ago I tried double-clicking on a PDF (I'm still using the Jaguar-PowerMac at this point) that's in my ~/Documents folder. A window appears saying it can't run the application because it's not compatible with the system!

I right-click the PDF, choose Open With, and there's two Preview entries listed. 2.0.1, and 2.1 (default). 2.1 is the version on Panther!

So, because I had my Panther machine mounted, it was loading THOSE applications, because their version numbers were higher!

That's BAD.

Canada’s government is turning its back on its people

Ottawa Citizen: Now, let me tell you who I am: Arar's statement -- read this.

Ottawa Citizen: 'My life and my career have been destroyed'

Citizen Special: 375 days of uncertainty and torture 2002

Ottawa Citizen: Second Canadian held in Syria 'We didn't know whether he was dead or alive'

Ottawa Citizen: PM rules out public inquiry

Ottawa Citizen: Arar may never find the answers he's looking for, Graham admits

canada.com: Contact the government

If this is how our government supports its people, then it is not a government worth our support, our pride. It is shameful and pitiful to be led by these spineless cowards. I still believe Canadians are a strong, proud people. If this doesn't get us riled up, nothing will, and then we're all spineless.

If our government won't step up to protect Maher Arar, what do you think your chances are if some foreign government decides to deport you to a dangerous place? Not too good.

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Seth Dillingham has picked up this story on his weblog. Thank you Seth!

I don't have Trackback or referrer-tracking on my site, so I don't know if others have linked to this. If you have linked to this story on your site, or read about it on another weblog, please let me know. Thanks!