After much procrastination on my part, I completed my degree requirements. I already have diploma in hand, but commencement is Thursday the 18th.

Woo hoo! Summa cum laude!

In the fall, I start planning for the next degree :)

I'm not leaving this blog, but I'm moving my non-Cincom and non-Smalltalk related tech posts over to Computerworld. My blog there is As A Programmer (RSS feed).

Feel free to come over and smack me around in comments :)

Technorati Tags: blogging, computerworld

I know of companies that have 50-100 million per year in revenue and are considered to be quite successful. Revenue is one measure, and profitability is another. Many years ago in the software business I remember one person pushing the revenue per employee ratio as a good metric.

9to5Mac reported this week that Apple's three NYC strores are pulling in 10% of all global store sales:

If the NYPost's numbers are correct, Apple's 5th Avenue store is pulling in more than its fair share of revenue. The store, which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days/year pulls in $440 million in revenue per year or a staggering $1.2million a day, including weekends and holidays.

Wow. Just wow. If Apple has 1,000 employees there, that's 440,000 USD per employee.

Did I say "wow"? I think that's an understatement. The early perception of the Apple Stores was that they were loss leaders. Let's see, if 10% = 440 million, then 10% is 4.44 billion. That is not a loss leader.

When we were on our honeymood in NYC last November, I made the pilgrimage to the 5th Avenue store. I used to think the Cincinnati Apple Store was busy, it's certainly busy compared to other stores in the mall. Indeed, the Sony store looks like a ghost town in the same mall. But I was not ready for the throngs of people in this store.

As an aside, I now have a better idea of the meaning of "throng".

In spite of the throngs, Apple store employees were calm, cool, and available. I was approached within a couple of minutes once I settled down in front of some drawing pads.

Seeing this, I'm more convinced that MIcrosoft should exit the Zune business and concentrate on Office, .NET, and their Internet push. Steve Jobs and Apple won this one. There's a time to just walk away, and Ballmer should do so.

Technorati Tags: apple, apple store, nyc, revenue per employee

On the Mac, Safari does not provide a way to change the search engine. I'm surprised the European anti-trust types haven't made Apple open this up. They do offer more options in the Windows version of Safari.

I have been aware of the "patch the code" approach for a while, but that only lets you change the default. It does not provide a dropdown selection of search engines.

I checked the Safari plist and plugins but found nothing. I then looked inside the Safari application bundle, and decided if the setting was in there I would search (with Google) to see if anyone had found a better solution.

As it happens, since I last looked into changing the Safari default search engine, several Safari tweak/customization applications have appeard. The first two I saw were Inquisitor 2 and Glims. I arbitrarily picked Glims, installed it, and hey presto I have search engine selection and many other features to explore. It provides many functions that I've seen in Firefox addins.

Glim adds a new tab to Safari preferences. There are plenty of options to explore. You can also create search links for any site, so if there's a forum you search often you can add it to the available search providers. You can also create hot key combinations to select search providers if you don't want to use your mouse.

I had some confusion when it looked as if the close tab button had disappeared, but it's merely obscured by the favicon for the site. If you don't like that you can turn it off, but I think it speeds up finding which tab you want to move to.

Thanks to Francois Schietttecatte for the pointers.

Technorati Tags: safari, hacks, tweaks, search

At the risk of jinxing myself ... I would frequently get BSODs when restarting Windows XP on VMWare Fusion. I checked the various forums, nothing seemed to fit what was going on, and a restart always cleared up the problem. I switched to suspending my XP VM and restarting infrequently, but that never seemed to make a difference. Every third restart or so, BSOD.

Enter the 10.5.7 upgrade. I've been doing shutdowns and restarts of XP frequently--a few times a day--and so far no BSOD.

I was then left with one last mystery: system restore points were created in XP for "Printer Driver TP PS Driver longHexNumberHere Installed." I found a solution to this on the web: too many restore points in XP professional. It turns out that I had left printer sharing available. Every time I restarted, and maybe woke the VM from a suspended state, a printer driver would be updated. There are two restore points per restart/awaken, about 1 minute apart. There is no "printer creep", so there's only one device when I check printers. My only problem with this whole process is the churning of system restore points. It could cause me to lose a meaningful restore point.< /p>

Printer sharing is disabled, I almost never need to print from my VM.

Technorati Tags: vmware, fusion, bsod, 10.5.7, system restore, xp

This spring I can see continued success with one endeavor and the completion of another:

• I just had my four year followup for my gastric-bypass. I'm still down over 100 pounds and still getting better and stronger every day.
• I finished my last required class for my current degree program at Cincinnati State. I have my diploma already: suma cum laude! how cool is that? I know a few people from my distant past who would be shocked. Silly people, I wasn't slow or stupid, I was just bored.

Those are the second and third best things I have ever done for myself. The first was meeting Jackie and starting a life together.

It's never too late to do good things for yourself and those around you.

Technorati Tags: weight loss surgery, gastric bypass, bariatric, education, school, personal achievement

I couldn't get to sleep tonight so I've been up fiddling with various things on my Mac. I've wanted to checkout WordPress and it's supposed to take about 5 minutes to install.

Of course, it wasn't that quick.

I already had MySQL and PHP running, so this should have been dead easy. After some confusion about where to drop the WordPress files (~/Sites instead of /Library/WebServer/Documents) I ran into what appears to be a common problem. The install kept giving me an "Error establishing a database connection" message.

I dutifully checked user, password, and privileges and everything looked fine. Searching the WordPress doc and forums didn't turn up any help. This is one of those issues that usually don't seem to get solved on forums, or people who do solve it rarely followup on their questions.

Google eventually yielded a rather odd solution, but it worked. It seems that on the Mac (and only on the Mac) setting DB_HOST to the default 'localhost' doesn't work. For some unknown reason you have to capitalize the host name, so use 'Localhost'.

Weird, but it's working now.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, install, mac, database, bug

A Youtube video about enginners with cats included a kung fu duel with calculators.. Yes, I know, we geeks and nerds are pathetic.

That video and a comment from my cousin Matt put me in a retrospective mood. I fired up Google and found a picture and description of the TI SR-51A. I was given one of these as a Christmas gift my junior year in high school and it rocked! I had been using a 10" Pickette slide rule (picture). I'm pretty sure it was the N1010-ES. I inherited my dad's and acquired another one sometime in my 20's. I would have to do some unpacking to find them and confirm the model number. I also inherited my dad's circular slide rule. It was the 4.75" model pictured in the link.

I never mastered the circular slide rule, and I'm not sure what happened to it. I learned to use the slide rule with the help of Isaac Asimo's An Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule.

I also still have my dad's mid-60s edition of the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae.

So what use is all this? Not much anymore, but there used to be a picture of me in the Xavier University computer lab playing Star Trek (character mode) on a RSTS/E system/ADDS terminal using my Pickett to calculate photon torpedo trajectories :)

Since I use my Mac as a production machine, I postponed the 10.5.7 update to give bug reports a chance to filter out. I checked with some people last night and they reported zero problems. A bit of google research showed one problem with VMWare Fusion and ATI cards, but the MacBook Pro uses NVIDIA graphics cards.

The update took less than 15 minutes, and as is typical with an Apple update it ran without a hitch and without any need for me to babysit it as it ran.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, os x, 10.5.7, software update

I received a "reset Twitter password" email that appears to be legit. Two odd things, it was sent at 4:40AM, and I was asleep, and I had not requested a password reminder/reset.

So who is trying to break into my Twitter account, and why? I see no bogus updates. What's up? Anyone else getting these?

Technorati Tags: twitter, security, hacking

With all the noise about RIA, enterprise development, dynamic languages, etc., I was fascinated--OK, pleased--to see that REALbasic was the top choice by CodeProject members in the programming languages category in the CodeProject First Annual Members Choice competition. Here's a link to the press release from REAL Software

I'm a licensed REALbasic user on my Mac, and it's an interesting spin on BASIC. I actually prefer the navigation in the IIDE to that of Visual Studio. It isn't as good as a Smalltalk browser, but it provides cleaner navigation. View is by method, so you don't get the either the temptation or the opportunity to page through a whole source file.

I noticed that Apress won the books category.

BASIC seems alive and well. I'm not really surprised, it's a versatile and productive language.

Technorati Tags: programming, software, realbasic, basic, apress, books

Our IT department has Skype access blocked on our Intranet. The only reason I was ever given was "it looks like a virus while it's running." I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but I lived with it.

I've started using Skype at home and am pleased with it, but I begin to understand what IT was getting at. I'm running Little Snitch on my Mac just to see what's up with network access, and I stopped trying to count the UDP connections all over the world (literally, all over the world) that Skype makes.

It's a pain to deal with all the popups. I'm back release on Little Snitch, 1.2.4, and probably should upgrade if I decide to continue using it. This came in a MacUpdate bundle some time ago and I'm just now trying it out.

Update: OK, the guys at MacUpdate and Objective Development rock. The license key that came with the MacUpdate bundle included free upgrade privileges. And, the rules are easier to manage in version 2 of Little Snitch. Much more useful and tolerable. If you want to control outbound traffic from your Mac, I think it's worth a look. They have a 30 day demo available.

Technorati Tags: skype, security, udp, network traffic, little snitch