njr 3.0

It’s been much longer than a week since my last post, but I can reveal the good news: I’ve joined a new research group. It’s too early to make any predictions, but I’ve really enjoyed group meetings and collboration so far.

Last semester and this semester I’ve also been working for the University of Illinois College of Medicine, doing various Web, database and desktop software development jobs. Despite having to use Windows for some things, it’s one of the best work environments I’ve ever been in. A supportive environment makes it easy to work hard: you know you’ll be appreciated.

The aforementioned additional work commitments, increased dedication to Kuk Sool, a bit more of a social life and ACM involvement have meant I haven’t had much time for personal projects and blogging. I’m trying to get my schedule sorted out in the next few weeks, so I can at least make the F-Script Anywhere release I planned to make in January.

My schedule did not work out so I can attend PyCon (which looks amazing this year), and I won’t be going to MacHackADHOC this time either. But overall, I’m much happier now than I was this time last year.

On IRC a few minutes ago I spoke with Derk-Jan Hartman, primary Mac VideoLan Client (VLC) maintainer. He’s done some amazing work; VLC 0.7.0 has a usable GUI even for the gigantic mass of preferences. Unfortunately he doesn’t have time to continue, and it’d be a terrible waste if the project bitrotted. If anyone’s got Mac GUI or video knowledge and wants to contribute to a very heavily-used open-source project which already runs beautifully on the Mac, here’s your chance.

1:22 PM | PyCS
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Today was indeed marked by good news; I’m as excited about the future as I’ve been in years, and I just got back from a huge, tasty dinner at Peking Garden. Details next week, if everything goes well.

On the downside, it’s even colder here.

Iain asked what all the little icons were. From left to right:

• WeatherPop
• Timbuktu Pro
• ZÖE
• LaunchBar
• Apple’s Script Menu (use with shell scripts as well as AppleScripts!)
• Classic menu: enable with “Show Classic status in menu bar” in Classic Preferences under Panther
• Displays menu
• Input menu
• Volume menu
• Clock

I have traditionally spent all my March vacation with my parents in New Hampshire, but this year they’re going to the SOT meeting in Baltimore that week. Thanks to a message I received on Orkut I was reminded about PyCon, in Washington DC this year at about the same time. Given my increasing interest in Python in the last year, and that it’s relatively inexpensive, I think I might go.

10:41 PM | PyCS
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It’s cold here.

Good news tomorrow, I hope.

8:12 PM | PyCS
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All day I’ve been looking at dates on my Mac and thinking something is wrong. I guess fifteen years of “this is an invalid date!” has me trained.

Happy new year everyone. I’m up in New Hampshire with my parents, working and relaxing, and will be back in Illinois on Sunday. I’ll hopefully be blogging a bit more soon, though I still have a lot to sort out.

8:13 PM | PyCS
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AOL has finally implemented multiple simultaneous sign-ons to the same AIM screen name. As of today, I have no more use for njriley@mac.com (previously used on my PowerBook) and njrwireless (previously used on my hiptop): I use njriley everywhere. This not only makes it easier for other people to contact me via AIM, it means I’m more likely to get your messages. Half the time my hiptop is sitting somewhere I’m not, or I can’t hear it or feel it vibrate when I’m wearing headphones. Someone IMs me, then gets frustrated that I don’t respond when I appear to be around.

A bonus is that it’s a lot more convenient not using iChat all the time if you want to carry on audio and video chats. I hope to see some type of iChat-on-demand make its way into the third-party AIM clients for the Mac, so it’s possible to start AV chats from a contextual menu or similar mechanism.

I also looked at the popular third-party AIM clients for the Mac. Adium 2 seems wonderful except for its lack of Address Book integration and a few user interface nits; Proteus seems to have fallen behind, as it seems quite flaky, and I can’t get its Address Book integration to do anything. Proteus also maintains its own buddy lists separate from those stored on the service, which I’d have to manually sync between my desktop and laptop Macs, and copy separately to my hiptop…not worth it. Fire I haven’t tried in ages; it used to be very unstable.

So until I can see people’s names instead of their nicknames in other clients with a minimum of setup, I’m sticking with iChat.

12:09 AM | PyCS
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