Driss-A-Blog

The syslog session was interesting, but it seemed that most people were there to find out how they were going to fill a full hour with syslog stuff. They didn't; syslog was over in 15 minutes. They filled the rest of the time explaining to people that they really do listen to complaints of users about things like package management.

Next up was Understanding Document Binding. No one has a clue about how that works, so it was pretty full. Last year for Panther a type system called Uniform Type Identifiers was introduced. Now, they're finally bringing it to handle file associations.

After lunch, I visited the battery charging station. The guy still didn't have a charger for the 17" PowerBook's battery, but he took some charging interfaces and screwed them to a block of wood. So I dropped off a battery for recharging.

Then came Maximizing JVM Performance. They talked about some new Java stuff and some new tools.

Next was PDFKit. Even though Core Foundation has classes that parse PDF files, they're a bit clumsy to use. Enter PDFKit, a set of Cocoa classes that combine parsing the files with displaying them and interacting with the user. No Carbonheads need apply.

Finally was CoreImage. That's a new toolkit that lets apps do lots of image manipulation and drop the processing onto the GPU. It's amazingly cool. Half the talk I understood-- the part about how to call it from an app. The part about writing a shader program was beyond me.

Matt and I dropped by the JBoss cocktail reception. It was on the 39th floor of the Marriott, and the view was gorgeous. Matt munched on some food and had his Guiness; I had a ginger ale. We talked with the guy who wrote JBoss's distributed transaction tree cache. It's cool stuff, which I wish I could use.

Finally was Stump the Experts. I dropped off all the MacHack swag at the prize table, and put my question in. It was picked.

On a stock install of Panther, I have a credit. Who put it in there?

That was not well phrased. I should have asked "How did it get there." They pondered for about 15 minutes, but couldn't even find my name in the files. (It's in /etc/services if you care.) They gave up, but were not amused when I couldn't answer my question better than "the guy who synced you up with FreeBSD for Panther". I still got the hat, but got a cheese award for a cheesy answer.

Prize? Etymotics ER-6 earphones. Cool.