Bobbis.net

So, now that I'm getting back into things, I figure I should finish writing about my week in San Francisco.

Wednesday night I met with Ted from the ISU stat department and Rod form AIT at the conference. We went down the road to a mexican restaurant and discussed bits about Tiger in the ISU environment. We exchanged ideas about directory services and what not, and my meal was on Ted (Thanks!). Later that night I found that Colin's universal binary of ATX works well on the Intel machines.

Thursday morning I hit up the integrating OS X in a heterogeneous environment. After lunch I hit up the advanced dashboard widgets section and the end of the session for AppleScript (I must remember to download the session slides for AppleScript, the session was taught in a way that makes sense for C, or C++ type programmers). Immediately after the session I got in line for the busses to Apple campus. I ended up setting next to an Apple employee form Sacramento who works on the Power School application for K-12 education. We talked about data validation, databases, and web servers. Very cool.

At the bash, I ended up loosing the Apple employee I sat with (he might have been able to get me in to see the rest of campus ;)). Campus was a bit smaller than I thought it would be, but still pretty cool. To add one more reason why I need to work for Apple, there is an Outback Steak House right across the street. They didn't let us inside the place very much, just the main lobby and a couple conference rooms for the PlugFest. The food was mediocre, but they had good beer, though not enough of it. By the time I got to the beer tent they were already out of one variety of beer, and I had one of the last glasses of a second variety.

After hanging out in the courtyard for a while, I stood in line for at least 90 minutes to get into the Apple Company Store. By the time I got inside I only had 15 minutes to wait in line until the busses would leave for San Francisco. I only had time to pick up a shirt that says "I've been to the source" and a nice Apple coffee mug.

On the bus ride back and sat next to a person who is working on a really interesting application that utilizes CoreImage and CoreData to be a photo editing application similar to Photoshop, except for the consumer and easier to use, called Lets Grin!. Sounds like an interesting concept, but they had a nice marketing goof when they were planning to promote it at WWDC and have a demo available for download.

Friday was the trip back to Ames. I didn't mention this before, but on our way in at the San Francisco airport the air tram was broken. The air tram takes people from the terminal to the parking and car rental places about a mile or two away from the terminal. We had to take a shuttle bus from the terminal to the rental counter, and once we got our vehicle, the tram started working again. As you can imagine, as soon as we get in and drop off the car, an announcement comes on saying that the air tram was out of service and to take the shuttle busses again. Then, once we were on the plane taking off, we see that the air tram was working again! Arg!. Anyway, Gaila was at the airport to pick us up in Des Moines and we went for Outback steak and I slept in 'til 4pm Saturday.

Now, things are getting back to normal.

Also, if you have been keen the past day or so, I have posted pictures from San Francisco.

Well, Tuesday became a lot less stressful. A lot of people have left and the Internet at the center has become a bit more usable. I am enjoying all the free food. I spent most of the day with Enterprise IT stuff. I attended sessions on OS X Server, Enterprise Lab, and Active Directory Integration. I ate lunch with a couple people who do consulting work form Canada, then saw a presentation by Tim O'Reilly, CEO O'Reilly books. After the conference, dad came by to pick me up to do a little bit of sight seeing and take me to dinner. I ended up drinking a $8 glass of wine at a fancy place in Sausalito overlooking the bay. I will have some pictures eventually when I have time to download them. I may even stitch together some panoramic pictures. I have to say, the bay and the bridge is a lot bigger than I was expecting from the pictures I have seen.

Today I spent the morning learning about dash board widgets. Hearing some comments people had about them and what not. People have some very interesting ideas about where they would like to see dashboard go, and the dashboard team seems to be very open to suggestion. One thing that has been a recurring theme here is that the developers are always looking for feedback. If there is something you would like to see or perhaps you encounter a small bug, please don't hesitate to submit a but at bugreport.apple.com (ADC Membership required).

Over the lunch hour I hung out with a few people from Xerox talking about how cool their new phaser printers are and they asked me how we use their printers and our general feeling about their products. Pretty cool people. The lunch session I attended was about PHP given by the creator of PHP Rasmus Lerdorf. Mostly a forum about the past and future of PHP, nothing really technical.

This afternoon I'm looking forward to the session about setting up a subversion server and how to use it, and then a session on upgrading to OS X Server 10.4 Tiger. I also found out someone from ISU is here (non student) so, I will be meeting him around 6:30.

Laters.

Ok, so if you were really keen, you may have noticed my last post was done after the keynote and I didn't get time to go back and edit a bunch of stuff, so you saw stuff like BLAH and <jp site here> or what not. I actually don't have very good access to the Internet here. Access at the hotel is only in the lobby (I'm on the 5th floor) and their AP does not give any IP addresses. At the Moscone center the wireless network is very unreliable. So, the only time I really have to post or to look stuff up online is when I'm plugged into an ethernet cord So, this explains why I haven't been online much and haven't written in my blog, even-though there has been so much going on. I'm typing this right now in TextEdit since I can't even get to my own web site at the moment. I will end up copying and pasting this into my post next time I have net access. I also have a few other things queued up for INternet, such as bug reports and email.

So, my thoughts about the Keynote:

Overall, it was short. Just about an hour I believe was the length. It started just like any other keynote. iPods, retail, and then the slide that said "Transitions". This slide made most of the room snicker, and me commenting "I don't like where this is going.". Sure enough Steve talks about the transition from OS 9 to OS X, then 68k to PPC, and now the future with PPC to x86. Though what really surprises me is how easy they are making the transition for developers, or, I should say, how easy they say(<- keyword) it will be. Steve really put his reality distortion field to the test today with the announcement. xCode 2.1 was announced (I don't know if that's available yet on ADC or not, I have my copy from after the Keynote), which introduces a nice feature that makes a check box for compiling your app for Intel, PPC, or both. The demos say that just checking the boxes is all you need for most Cocoa apps, otherwise there will have to be just a little bit of tweaking. Carbon apps will require a little bit more tweaking.

By the way, Colin, please stop taring your source. Trying to play around with ATX I found that the untaring process (either in terminal or the GUI app) causes some of your files to get messed up and thus not work with xCode. Please upload it in a .dmg so that I can play with it.

After talking about the transition, Steve brought the guy from Mathmatica on stage to tell everyone how easy it was to port Mathmatica to the Intel OS X. They say 2 hours. Though, for a program like that, I am still skeptical. I don't recall them mentioning how many Apple Engineers Steve sicked on that project last weekend.

After the Mathmatica demo, Steve paraded Adobe and Microsoft so they can say that this is a good move and they will be supporting it (IMHO what else are they going to do?).

The CEO of Intel came up to give a few words as well. He gave a little history of Apple and Intel. He even included the Disco Inferno commercial that Apple did back in 1996 bashing the Intel chip.

The rest of the day is under non-disclosure, some cool stuff in the Enterprise IT State of the Union and the evening reception. Though, I guess I can say that I was able to play with one of the Intel test boxes and ended up BSing with a bunch of other geeks about how Apple will keep OS X from getting installed on a generic other brand PC, how Windows may run and some more technical details of what the final product will be. Though all this BSing is all speculation, even a lot of the Apple people don't know exactly what is going to happen, what parts of these test boxes will stay, what will be replaced, etc. I kind of feel like this is going to be a moment that I tell my grandkids that "I was there when Apple decided to switch from the PPC to x86." While in the halls and BSsing around I saw Phil Shiller (I got a nod out of him, an Apple executive acknowledged my existence lol), and was in a geek discussion about the new platform with an Apple 64bit technologies guy and (I believe was) Mr. Captain Crunch.

Some thoughts about the transition:

Apple is doing really well right now. They have a rather large cash reserve. People think that Apple is going to destroy themselves again by doing this. Because of this official announcement that in about a year, the current processor is going to be obsolete, nobody will be making Mac purchases unless it is completely necessary. Mac sales are going to plummet. Though, this is the time to make such a move if such a move is necessary. If it is required that Apple switch to a different architecture, doing so while Apple is doing really well and has lots of cash on hand makes this endeavor a lot less risky. Apple (or any company) can not be on an ever rising success. Instead of waiting for the roller-coaster to start going down, Apple is taking advantage of its position.

Some good things about the switch is that it will most likely be easier to run Windows apps on OS X via VirtualPC running as a VM and perhaps evern DarWINE which will now not have to worry about emulating the x86. I have no clue how they will be preventing Windows from being installed and how they will keep people from installing OS X on the bargain box.

So, thats about it for for Monday. At this point of the entry, the wireless network is actually working at Moscone and I'm in a session.

Laters.

So, currently I'm waiting in line to go to the Keynote address at the Moscone center. The line streatches around an entire level. The rumors about Intel and Apple are thick around here, but I can't believe there are people who haven't heard the news yet. Sometimes, I doubt the devotion these Apple geeks have for Apple.

So, Saturday we drive down the the Airport with Gaila so we don't do the long term parking. All the flights were on time and ok. Because of mom, we were able to get an electric cart to go through the entire terminal in MSP. We arrived at gat B23 and left gate F5 for those who know the MSP airport. The trip was pretty uneventful, with exception of annoying parents. Checked in, ate dinner, went to bed.

Last night was really interesting. Sunday was the student sessions at the Argent Hotel near the Moscone center. They served us breakfast at 8:00 and we had speakers through the day. I was in a session of about 250 people listening the James Duncan Davidson, Author of the O'rieley book Learning Cocoa with Objective C. I also saw Aaron Hillegass, another author of a good selling Cocoa book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. Lunch was a nice buffet with Chicken Parmesean. All this is FREE :). After lunch was the coding session, but instead of codeing James decided to show us cool stuff with Core Data with one of the Core data engeneers. THen we spent a bunch of time with the Quartz Composer, got some cool screen savers at Futurismo Zugakousaku . During this time I recorded 98 people on my Bonjour list. When I signed on, my Growl notification ended up going off the screen. After the fun stuff with Quartz Composer and Core Data, we had a nice presentation about finding jobs or starting your own software company done by the founder of the Omni Group and creator of Delicious Library Wil Shipley(?). After the events Peter (a friend I met from Glasgow, Scotland) and I went shopping around for a PSP for Peter because they are not out yet in his country.

Anyway, the line moves. Perhaps I will have updates later.

PS: some editing needs to be done later.

EDIT: Edited for completeness

Well folks, it's Friday already. Next week I will be in San Francisco with my parents. Though since they are paying I guess I can't really complain too much.

Here is my itinerary:

Saturday 6/4/05
Leave DSM NWA 3173 @ 12:35 PM to MSP
arrive MSP @ 1:53 PM

Leave MSP NWA 369 @ 2:37 PM to SFO
arrive SFO @ 4:32 PM PST


Friday 6/11/05
Leave SFO NWA 360 @ 12:25 PM PST to MSP
arrive MSP @ 6:02 PM CST

Leave MSP NWA 3674 @ 7:27 PM to DSM
arrive DSM @ 8:52 PM

I have conference every day, even Sunday the 5th. My cell phone will work (but I may be busy), and I will probably be around Internet a bit, but not on AIM. If anything interesting happens I'll try to post it here. I guess, that is all for now. Wish me luck at WWDC.

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/. I found some nice cheat sheets for MySQL, PHP, CSS, and Apache there as well as a few tutorials and articles about these technologies that can be very helpful.

In the spirit of Memorial Day, bring your own meat on Sunday and we shall grill before going to Episode III. If anyone wants to bring extra food like desert or something, that would be fine too. Adrienne has volunteered a salad.

Ok, so I've decided about what to do about this StarWars marathon. Since this is a nice holiday weekend I have decided to split it up into two days. Here is the schedule I see for happening this weekend.

Sunday:

Noon: Meet at my house (don't know where it is, contact me) for Episode I and II
5:00: Dinner of sorts after movies are over.
6:30: Episode III at Movies 12

Monday:

2:00 PM: Meet at my house for Episode IV, V, and VI. Order pizza or something for dinner.

If you wish to participate please post a comment here. You don't have to be around for everything, come and go as you please. It also might be a good idea to purchase the tickets in advance. I figure this can be done Sunday morning. I suppose I can just let people purchase their own tickets on their way in to my place since it's kind of on the way.

Well, Colin and I are closing in on an apartment starting this fall. We are putting down the deposit this afternoon and will be moving around Aug 1. We went through J & L Sorenson Enterprises who seem to be a good couple of people. Small and devoted. Plus, I got a good recommendation of them from my co-worker. Rent is 595 / mo and includes water, expanded basic cable, wireless internet, and 940 Sq Ft. They are even willing to install new flooring, ceiling fans and microwave at no charge.

Anybody know much about Resonant Networks for wireless? I'll probably end up calling them to see if I can get a static, external IP. If someone has experience with them, please let me know.

So, the topic comes up again. Apple May Use Intel Chips. Anytime this comes up that Apple is talking with Intel or AMD people get all excited that Apple will be porting to x86 and Mac OS X will be available on the same hardware Windows is. People think Apple will be abandoning the PPC plaform for their systems. This happens every year or so. Examples: 9/2002, 3/2003, and I'm pretty sure there was one in 2004, and now the current Reuters report.

There can be several reasons Apple would be talking to x86 manufacturers other than looking to move the Mac or port OS X. These are for devices or just to get a better deal from their current vendors.

If Apple looks interested in using Intel chips for the Macintosh, that may give IBM and Motorola an incentive to lower the price on the PowerPC chips, even though Apple really didn't have an interest in going with Intel anyway. Though, I really doubt this is the case. This is a pretty shady tactic and I assume it is not something that would be smart to do with a vendor who is a close part of the design and manufacturing process, especially given to somewhat long relationship Apple and IBM have.

The other reason Apple could be looking into Intel chips is for a different device. Some (perhaps all?) AirPort branded base stations use AMD processors. Perhaps Apple is thinking about switching these to Intel chips, or perhaps Apple is planning on releasing another product that uses Intel chips, but we don't know what that product is yet. Intel also makes a lot of controller chips for things like PCI E and the xServe RAID.

Now that I have gone over why Apple would be working with Intel, how about all that discussion of Apple porting OS X to x86? This is something that would almost never happen. Here's why.

The really big reason Apple won't do this, is because Apple is in the business of selling computers not software. Apple's bread and butter are in the profit margins they make selling the machines, not from the software development. Granted, Apple does make some kick-ass software like Final Cut Pro, Logic, and the iLife suite, not to mention iTunes and the iTunes music store.

Back in the early to mid nineties (when Steve Jobs wasn't around) Apple decided they would be able to license the Mac OS to other hardware developers like UMAX. Because of this, Apple lost a lot of computer revenue which almost killed them. This was an experiment that went really bad, and something I don't think anyone would like to try again, especially in a market dominated by Microsoft.

Some have speculated that Apple would switch processors and still closely control the hardware, so that there really isn't much difference between what we have now with PPC and just replace the processor. They say this is possible because OS X can be very portable. They already have the Darwin core of OS X available for the x86. The problem with this is that it would require another transition for developers to deal with. It was hard enough to do the transition between Mac OS 9 and X. It was even harder doing the 68k to PPC jump.

Even though Apple has successfully done a processor change with 68k to PPC, changing from PPC to x86 would be even worse. Emulation for legacy apps will be terrible (as seen by Cherry OS or PearPC), plus the developers would be upset having to do another transition. Right now Apple can't afford to piss off developers. It is never a good idea to piss off developers.

I hope that this explains a little bit why I don't think Apple will be switching to x86 based Macs. Now, when there is another rumor Apple is doing this. I have my arguments laid out here, and I may modify them a little be to update them.