A while after I last reported about the battery problems I was having, I took the battery to NextByte in the city and shipped the battery off to the service centre. 3 days later, it was back in my hands and I'm happy to say it now works perfectly! No sudden discharges and the computer sleeps properly when there's no power left.
Monthly Archive for June, 2006
Sony BMG (hissssssss) has put up a bunch of Ben Folds [Five] videos online. Woo! (Pity about the crummy flash movie player, though.)
I saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight as part of the Sydney Film Festival. Al Gore provides some hard facts on global warming and the effect OUR activities have had on the planet over the past few decades.
This is one of those films that ALL people should see, no matter which country they're from.
There aren't any more SFF sessions, and it's apparently not coming to Australia until September… which means you might need to obtain it from more dubious source. Although I doubt the movie distributors are listening, BitTorrent would be the perfect medium to get the "message" out there.
(As a side note, I've moved across to one of EnergyAustralia's renewable energy plans, to contribute some small part to this. It's as easy as filling out an online form.)
Atlassian had its 3rd FedEx Day today, so Jens and I tried to tackle CONF-1837 and implement an offline client for Confluence. I've been meaning to try out Core Data for a long time, so this was a perfect opportunity (cross-platform issues aside).
I have to say that Core Data is just amazing! We were able to recreate all of the objects required to store Confluence Spaces and Pages using Xcode's data modelling functionality (including referential integrity - weeeee!). What blew me away was that we did not have to write any model, controller or view code to get the interface working:
The only code written for the entire app (please ignore its temporary ugliness) was to retrieve the Spaces and Pages via XML-RPC and pass them onto Core Data. Yep - that entire interface was displayed without writing any code! It's one thing to see it in a tutorial, but a totally different experience to make a 'useful' app.
and now… for the bad part. Jens and I spent half of the day futzing with Apple's WebServices framework to get Page retrieval working. The WebServices framework appears to be a black hole in Apple's Documentation. There's little information on the methods for making SOAP/XML-RPC calls in a Cocoa application, let alone code examples of how to do it!
I ordered an extra 1GB of RAM for my MacBook Pro at 1:45AM this morning, and had it delivered at 4:15PM this afternoon, making the time from order to delivery 14 1/2 hours.
Woah.
So thankyou to the kind people at AusPCMarket for shipping it out so quickly! 
(For anyone who's interested, bumping the RAM up to 2GB has made my stuttering little MacBook Pro teh snappy. I highly suggest maxing out the RAM.)
