– Woke up at 6:39am. Far too late. Meant to get up at 6am. The hotel’s alarm clock didn’t go off, but my Blackberry did. Saved by the BB once again.
– Got ready and headed down two blocks to Starbuck’s while listening to a work telecon. It sure sucks to be on morning telecons at 7am. I feel for the west coast folks (Ames, JPL, etc.)
– Sitting in Starbuck’s with a grande sugar-free vanilla latte and a sausage, egg and cheese english muffin with my coworker writing this to you. Next up, we head down two or three more blocks to Moscone West to register. My coworker thought this thing was at Moscone Recreation Center. Hit Google Maps for where he thought we were going. That’s a hell of a walk (and uphill, too!)
– Got through registration cattle call. Total time to process badge: 45 minutes or so. Pictures of the line posted below.
– Made it to our conference for the day: Beyond the Box: Advanced OS X Server. Got on the net with cell card because it appears they have locked down the network inside the conference.
Pictures of morning line:
– Just a note: the speaker at the conference I am attending indicated that binding to Active Directory is broken in 10.5 and 10.5.1. He hinted that there was a fix coming in 10.5.2, but wasn’t allowed to elaborate.
– 10:13am PDT: We’re in a break at the power tools conference 1. We just received a presentation on how to have three live copies of server and OS X running for quick recovery in the event of a failure. Interesting stuff, but a little beyond me at the moment. I will have to check into it further.
– I forgot to mention that I left my power adapter at home (I knew I forgot to blog SOMETHING). Wife is having to overnight the adapter to me so I don’t have to go to the Apple store and plunk down $75 on another adapter. Isn’t she sweet? Therefore, I’m trying to conserve juice… hence my popping up and down on the net.
– 10:34am PDT: Our presenter pointed out a funny in Apple’s man pages for route. Go to a terminal and type “man route”. The first paragraph states:
Route is a utility used to manually manipulate the network routing tables. It normally is not needed, as a system routing table management daemon such as routed(8), should tend to this task.
Further down the manpage, under BUGS, it says:
BUGS: The first paragraph may have slightly exaggerated routed(8)’s abilities.
FYI, the Google employee Nigel is the one that pointed this out. The presenters, btw, are Sean and Nigel from <afp548.com>
– 10:58am PDT: Right now, learning lots about dscl for manipulating diretory objects in either LDAP directories or local directories (mainly for user manipulation). These guys from AFP548.com really, really know their stuff. dscl allows you to read/write to the local or remote directories for users and user attributes for password resets or whatnot. Nice stuff. Leopard is cool.
– 11:02am PDT: Finally had to borrow my coworker’s laptop juice. Laptop is mad at me. It’s hungry.
– 11:18am PDT: Just thought to state for a minute. I do have a “Super Pass” to Macworld, so I have a seat for sure at the Keynote tomorrow morning. However, security is usually pretty tight around that thing so I will probably leave the liveblogging up to other press folks and then comment afterwards. Plenty of people will be liveblogging it or Twittering it or Jaiku’ing it – I can’t imagine you think of me as a source of live news for something like that 😉 But I will post photos and/or videos of products I see on the floor later… and thoughts about them, because I am that opinionated.
– 11:27am PDT: A tip from the guys presenting. Copy all of the NetInfo binaries from 10.4 over to 10.5 and they work just fine (even though Apple removed NetInfo from Leopard).
…Lunch in 30 minutes… back in about two hours!
– 1:02PM PDT: Lunch is over… chicken stir-fry. It was just okie. What was more fun was sitting around birds of a feather talking shop. Lots of people from the advertising business here (shocker!)
– 3:06pm PDT: So far, I believe to have spotted celebrities: Sal Saghoin (sp?), the coder of Automator and Applescript, Merlin Mann (Macbreak, 43folders) and John Foster from TWiM.
– 4:31pm PDT: A boxed copy of Office 2008 Expression Media Edition just fell in my lap. Nice lookin’ box.
– 4:50pm PDT: Power tools session closing. Next mission: find out where the damn keynote is, because nothing online tells you!
– 9:06pm PDT: Hooked up with another NASA worker from GRC for dinner. Then we headed out. As of now, just returned from a long walk from the hotel to Rubicon, a wonderful fine dining restaurant on Sacramento St. I can say for sure that I highly recommend this place for good eats. Not cheap though. I had a mild reaction to something I ate – can’t really decide what it was.
We made plans to meet up for the keynote at Moscone West by 6am. Even though we’re super pass holders and have guaranteed seats, we still want good guaranteed seats. Rumors around the show indicate some folks intent to start waiting at 4am. Sick.
That’s all for today… tomorrow’s the REALLY big day! Hope I can get some sleep.