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Leopard is cool, I get it

I’ve had a few folks ask about Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Have I seen it first hand? No. Have I upgraded to it? No. Do I want to? Yes.

I’ve been reading a lot about it[arstechnica], and it seems like something I could really use, like, and get used to. There are so many features that I would love to get my hands on, and there are some pretty neat podcasting tools that have peaked my attention.

Still, I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet. In due time, it’ll come. Rebecca’s MacBook can handle it, and the iMac will cruise right along with it. However, I’m thinking that my 17-inch Powerbook G4[wiki], this being my major hesitation before leaping into Leopard, might not like or be able to fully handle the new OS.

Right now, I’m running 1GB of RAM on my Powerbook, and the maximum I can put into it is 2GB. There lies the dilemma. Do you make the upgrades or do you consider an overall upgrade, getting a flavor of MacBook with a faster processor?

It’s a no-brainer as to what you should do, but the reality of what you, and the bank account, can do is another.

I’m incredibly jealous of the track pad on Rebecca’s laptop and the ability to use it to scroll. I swear that ups the ability to do things faster, and it might be time for me to downgrade to a smaller laptop for the sake of portability.

That brings me back to Leopard. The Spaces feature means that you don’t need a huge screen real estate, the reason I got this first generation 17-inch, to be efficient. I think I could be happy with a 13-inch screen, and the ability to have Firewire 800 is a consideration that I could live without, but prefer. Still, with the iMac at home, I can survive on Firewire 400 when being portable with my external hard drive, but even that lives at home most of the time.

After that, I have a little issue with being on the bleeding edge. I’ll let those brave souls out there be the first to be first. If there are any issues, let them figure that out and have the fixes come down as a result. I haven’t heard of anything huge yet, but never say never.

Until then, I’ll keep contemplating upgrades for my Powerbook and looking for cheap RAM for a laptop that was discontinued about as soon as it was released.

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Vancouver Facebook Garage thoughts and follow up

Before I talk about the event I attended tonight, let me just start out with the fact that Facebook has probably changed my, and our, lives. I’ve long lived by the principle that social networking sites are not that affective when it forces us to sit behind terminals and not interact, calling each other friends when we’ve never even met in the really real world. Doesn’t sound very social, does it?

Facebook, on the other hand, falls outside of that premise. Granted that in the days that Friendster actually held ground, I was stuck in the Midwest of the U.S. where you tend to think of meeting other users to be utterly geeky, if not insanely dangerous or bizarre. In Vancouver, on the other hand, it’s made our lives incredibly busy, and that falls outside of things you do with your friends. And those are friends that I’ve actually made contact with in some way, most likely face to face.

In a way, that kinda brings us to the Vancouver Facebook Garage that occurred last night. Rebecca was sponsored to do the live blog for the event, and I should add that she rocked it. So much so that I’m not going to do much to recap it because all the details you need to know are there.

Facebook Developer Garage
Photo credit: kk on Flickr

I will say that my major contribution to the night was bringing along my tripod for Roland to use for the live video stream of the entire event, but all of the presentations were of unique interest.

They all had something that you could take away from them if you looked at the overall, big picture of how a Facebook application could imply a concept to a different or new idea. I know that I took a lot of ideas away from the night for potential projects in the future, but those will remain to be seen. Plus, I wouldn’t have a clue as to where to start to make my own Facebook application.

Not to rip into the event, but there were some certain aspects of the evening I would have reconsidered if I had planned it. Perhaps I should have payed more attention to the Facebook event, but I didn’t know that the evening was scheduled from 5:30PM to 8:30PM. By the time the evening was over, there wasn’t much time within the eight minute break to find some food to put into my very empty stomach, not to mention any ideas as to where I could get water or find the washroom. Being the maiden event in Vancouver, I’m sure things will adjust for the next one.

Also, Kris Krug took some amazing photos during the evening, so you can check his flickr out for more shots from the event.

I’m not sure what or how I can take away some of the things that were presented last night, but there are a number of concepts that I can think of as to what I would add to Facebook in terms of an application. I’m just a little fuzzy as to how I’d do it, yet alone where to start. Maybe I’ll learn that in the next session where someone can point me to how a newbie can make a Facebook application.

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The Crazy Canucks #49 – It’s still early in the season

Recorded last Thursday and posted on Friday. Get your Crazy Canucks while it’s still the latest episode… because we’ll probably record a new one this week yet.

We were without Alanah for this episode, and John was under the weather during the recording. Rebecca was in the driver’s seat and held down the podcast with JJ and Dave to discuss the season thus far. It’s still early, but every game gives us a feel for the team.

Record as of this episode: 3-3-0

There is still plenty to talk about, including the fallout from the Kesler/Boulerice hit, trade murmurs, and a variety of other topics that the crew finds interesting.

31:33 minutes
The Crazy Canucks

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Ben Folds – landed

Every so often, I head down the YouTube maze of fun and discover things that I never knew existed. This is actually one of two videos for this same song. The other one is cool, but I like this version better.

I’ve been a Ben Folds fan for a long time. The first album from Ben Folds Five is still around in my rotation, but all of them are good in their own right, at least to me. Ben Folds solo stuff is just as good, but I do miss the days of Robert Sledge[wiki] and the fuzz bass. Oh how I love me some fuzz bass.

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Giving a presentation at the Vancouver Drupal Meetup

IMG_3792.JPG
Photo credit: uncleweed on Flickr

Last night, I was invited to the monthly Drupal Meetup for October in Gastown. Boris and I have had numerous conversations about various projects that I’ve been working on, and the one that stuck out to him was the site I generated for knox-church.org. I wrote about this project some time ago, and you can read that post here.

The point of having me talk about the site was to talk about the development process of how the site was originally created in WordPress and then ported over into Drupal. As Boris was saying in the meetup, it’s not often that you hear of a site having this done because using Drupal was seen to be easier than WordPress.

Allow me to explain that a little better because WordPress is something I am familiar with and use it for this blog on a regular basis. I’d even say that I love WP. I’ve built five sites using WordPress, so it is a CMS that I am comfortable with. It was that reason that, and this would make it six WP sites that I’ve built, I originally chose to have knox-church.org based in WordPress. On top of that, the plan was to build something that would enable church members the ability to interact with the site, adding and removing content as needed.

The site was based primarily on categories and a few, key plugins. The categories made particular posts appear in certain locations in the site, and not choosing these correctly would cause the post to not show up when and where it was intended. The plugins were subtle manipulations of posts, listing certain posts in an event list as well as an automatic deletion plugin to remove the posts once they expired. Both are very cool tools, but those are two extra fields in the post editor that the submitter had to parse through.

Vancouver League of Drupalers October 2007 -Image1010
Photo credit: roland on Flickr

Being contacted about the site after a time of decreased to little activity by church members, they wanted to be retrained on how to add posts to the site. Over time, they forgot the process and were confused by the site after logging into it after an extended period of time away from interacting with it.

It was at this point that I decided, based on things I knew about Drupal, to port the site into the new CMS. There wasn’t a lot of content to contend with, so manual transfer was the path I took. However, I knew that the CCK and Views modules could solve the multi-step process that came from WordPress and, in turn, having to teach that process to users with novice to intermediate understanding of how to interact with a web based CMS.

With the revamped look to the site in Drupal, the Calendar module brought a new level of listing events to the site that wasn’t there previously, but requested. When a user logs into the site now, they are directed to the area of choosing which type of content they wish to create(using the Login Destination module). The only fields they have to worry about are the ones they are presented with, making it a streamlined, simplified process of making sure everything they need is there before they hit the submit button.

Vancouver Drupal Meetup - October 2007 Additionally, step-by-step instructions are at the top of the page to guide them through the process, something much more difficult to do inside of WordPress, and these can be adjusted as need be to better reflect the needs of the users over time. This helps when someone goes for extended periods of time between logging into the site, forgetting how to interact with the editor that is presented in WordPress versus the custom page they are presented with in Drupal. Listing events on the front page, displaying news items, and listing sermons are all things that are coordinated on the back end through the Views module.

When it comes down to it, Drupal was a better route to go for what the church wants and needs. They want to be able to interact with the site and need to have something that can work for them without being overly difficult to use when it comes to their level of understanding. It’s also not as much as the ability for a church to have a website for its current members as it is to have a way of expanding their community and allowing others to find the site to get information about becoming apart of their organization.

I had a lot of fun speaking to everyone about the project and did my best to answer their questions. Not being the Drupal ninja compared to some other folks I know out there, I never felt out of place, and that is a very welcomed feeling. However, I did spike a massive fever when I got home and am still recovering from it today, so let’s hope that isn’t Drupal related.

If you would like to find out more about Drupal user related events going on in Vancouver, check out their page at groups.drupal.org/vancouver or visit groups.drupal.org to find a Drupal community near you.

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Inside The CBC tours the plans for Vancouver renovations

Just because I find these things so freaking interesting, I wanted to post this video. I’ve toured the studios in the CBC once with Tod Maffin, and he writes for Inside The CBC. Actually, Tod is basically the new media guru and ambassador for the CBC, at least here in Vancouver. I love that he uses the medium to share information about the substantial renovation that is occurring at their downtown location, and this video really helps to understand what’s going on and how it’s going to look when it’s all done.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

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Battery heated hockey skates being tested for the NHL

Take one hockey skate and stick a battery in it to heat the blade, and this is what you get.

A Canadian-made heated skate blade touted as a means of boosting velocity was approved Tuesday for testing in the National Hockey League.

The Therma Blade will be used by as many as 10 NHL players in games and practices, said the blade’s inventor, Tory Weber of Calgary. The NHL will use this testing phase to examine possible safety issues and the blades’ effect on the ice to determine whether they should be used more widely within the league.

A battery in the back of the skate blade heats up to 5C, helping to reduce friction and push the wearer forward with less work, Weber said.

“It’s very simple technology. A warm blade basically creates a thin film of water and melts the ice,” Weber said. Skaters that use the heated blades, which will retail for about $399, find it’s much like skating on ice that has been freshly groomed by a Zamboni, he added. [cbc]

I have two reactions to this. One is that this is an incredibly neat way of using technology in such a simple way. It makes sense, and the science of it ridiculously smart. My other reaction is one of simply asking, buh?

You can call it complaining and sounding like an old timer, but we’ve come a long way since wooden sticks, skates, and sweaters. Composite sticks, synthetic jerseys, tougher padding made with less material, etc., but this kinda blows my mind.

Not only will you have to suit up, strap on your pads, tape up your shins, and lace everything up, but now you’ll have to make sure you check your batteries. Granted that it’s the equipment manager’s job to make sure that you stuff gets taken care of, but what happens if you start having a bad night on the ice because there is no juice left in your skates?

Imagine the post-game interview in the locker room and the player saying, “I was giving it my all, 110%, but apparently my skates were only at 30% charge capacity. They must have died half way through the third period. Everyone was really giving it their all, but… I’ll just have to get the circuitry in my skates checked out before the next game.”

That being said, I like the concept and am curious to see how it all plays out. Gretzky has given his seal of approval, but I’d really like to hear if this makes that much of a difference. On top of that, does making the blade even hotter allow for better performance? If that were the case and it became an unfair advantage, then that might mean league rules and temperature tests before every game, would it not?

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Star power to raise awareness of Angelman Syndrome

I have a nephew by the name of Zach that I probably don’t mention enough. He is almost ten years old and has a condition known as Angelman Syndrome[wiki]. It’s a rare form of a mental handicap that slows the nervous system from developing at an average to normal rate.

Angelman Syndrome (AS) is a rare neuro-genetic disorder named after a British pediatrician, Dr. Harry Angelman, who first described the syndrome in 1965.[1] AS is characterised by intellectual and developmental delay, speech impediment, sleep disturbance, unstable jerky gait, seizures, hand flapping movements, frequent laughter/smiling and usually a happy demeanour. [wikipedia]

Even more rare to the point is that Zach also has a form of albinism. The chance of a person being born with both of these conditions is less than 1%. Our family goes to great lengths to make sure that we keep a hat on his head when outside, but he has grown pretty accustomed, if not quite hip, to keeping the sunglasses on his face.

Caring for a child with AS can be tough, and my brother’s family have done a lot to consistently adjust to Zach’s needs. This is outside of the need of special beds, wheelchairs, car accommodations, or simple daily assistance. Even though his development is slower than the average child, turning corners can be quick. You have to be on your feet and be prepared for anything, and the kid can surprise you with the way he interacts or problem solves something unexpectedly. Speech and walking is still something to be worked on, but he has developed his own form of communication over time. It would almost seem that his older brother, Ben, is the expert interpreter.

The other day, my brother emailed me with a news story that actor Colin Farrell[imdb] has recently announced that his son also has AS.

Hollywood superstar Colin Farrell yesterday opened his heart and revealed that his four-year-old son James is a special-needs child.

The renowned Irish actor revealed that his treasured son was born with a rare form of cerebral palsy called Angelman Syndrome. […]

And he said that he is dedicated to helping his son reach his own “individual potential” and to be “as happy as he can be.”

”With my son the only time I’m reminded that there is something different about him – that he has some deviation of what is perceived to be normal – is when I see him with other four-year-olds.

“Then I go “oh yeah” and it comes back to me. But from day one I felt that he’s the way he’s meant to be.” [independent.ie]

Now it can be said that Farrell has had his share of not so good exposure in the Hollywood limelight, but for those who seek to raise awareness of AS, the actor is doing some good for the cause. His support to the Special Olympics is giving me extra consideration to the fact of the 2010 Paralympic Games coming to Vancouver. They are different events in their own right, but I still hope that I can lend my efforts to help support the cause in Zach’s honor as well.

Zach and I talking on iChat Zach is a strong, little boy right now, and everyday presents new developments. I don’t get to see him as much as I used to, but we say hello to each other on iChat every so often. Even there I can tell that his cognitive functions have changed. And when I say that he’s strong, that can be an understatement. You never know if he could end up being in the Special Olympics himself, doing some greco-roman wrestling perhaps, and you can ask his older brother about that.

To find out more about Angelman Syndrome, visit angelman.org. Their mission “is to advance the awareness and treatment of Angelman Syndrome through education and information, research, and support for individuals with Angelman Syndrome, their families and other concerned parties.”

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Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining

Rainy morning on Georgia St.

Welcome to fall time in Vancouver once again.

Wet leaves everywhere

As I look out the window right now, the rain drops are the size of marbles. A few minutes ago, they were falling at a left angle. Now they’re falling at a right angle.

Leaves clog the drain

My feet are damp from walking to and from breakfast this morning with Rebecca, and the first storm of the season is ramping up to hit the lower mainland today. More trees to fall? Less water to drink?

Cold, wet, and rainy means fall time

This is what living in Vancouver means, and I’m okay with that.

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Pilot To Gunner – barrio superstarrio

Pilot To Gunner[myspace] has been on the scene since 1998, but they don’t have the numbers in terms of releases to really make that believable. Doesn’t make me like them any less. This is a really good track to run to. They make their way into my running mixes here and there.