So, the tech today figured it out. One of my sticks of RAM was bad, and it was screwing things up. Pulled it out and everything seems to be back to normal. Bastards at MacMall, after shipping the computer all over hell and back (3 wrong addresses), were kind enough to throw bad ram in there. Gotta love that.
Monthly Archive for February, 2004
After leaving my PowerBook at the Apple store in Portland all day, it's still hosed. They can't figure out what the heck is wrong with it. It's now gone through 6 separate installs of OS X from a formatted disk since Friday, and it's still dead. Hopefully the saga will play itself out today so I can return to Bellingham with a working computer, but we'll see.
After installing the Safari 1.2 update a couple days ago, my PowerBook has been doing nothing but bad things. 1 in 4 or so web pages cause Safari to crash (including Apple's web site), drag and drop causes Finder to crash, and checking email causes Mail to crash.
So I reformatted and reinstalled the entire OS today. It booted fine, so I started applying the various updates. Installed everything just fine, but then froze up when it was "Optimizing my HD". Just sat there for an hour at 30%. So I force quit Software Update, rebooted, and now the machine won't load. It gets to the grey screen, and then pops a very pretty message that say "You need to reboot," as if I didn't just do that.
Looks like we'll try reinstalling again.
I thought I'd throw a link up here to SETI@Home, which I've been participating in for quite a while now. The project is a distributed system to analyze the data collected by the Arecibo radio telescope down in Puerto Rico (I believe). You sign up, download a client and when your computer isn't being actively used, it will crunch the data, looking for anomolies in the signal that could indicate a non-random response from somewhere out in space. You can check out my personal stats, if you want, or click the link above to check out the project as a whole.
I was playing around with Flash MX '04 Pro, particularly the WebServiceConnector to set up a little browser for PIER. Pretty slick, all in all, especially the stock GUI components that Macromedia provides. However, there didn't seem to be a way to bind a BomboBox directly to a DataSet, unless you happened to have the good fortune of having the appropriate columns named 'data' and 'label', which never happens. Only way to do it that I could find was to expicitly loop over the contents of the DataSet (or the raw result from the WebServiceConnector) and populate the ComboBox manually. What a pain in the ass!
If anyone from MM happens to read this, please fix that. It worked just fine in Flash MX, no reason to have made it impossible in '04. Data binding is supposed to make your life easier, not complicate stuff so you spend a couple hours trying to figure it out, and then have to do it the bad old way anyway.
As the initial hubub died down regarding Lindsay, I realized that there is probably going to be a lot of stuff I want to post that will not be of any interest to most people. I decided, therefore, to split the blog in two. The Boisvert Life will continue to be fo a personal-interest nature, while BarneyBlog will take over for all the technical stuff that will be interesting to a different audience.
The galleries remain on The Boisvert Life, while the software section has moved over here, for obvious reasons. Hopefully this will keep things a little more organized, and not burden anyone with stuff they don't want to read about.
