Well folks, i got back from the San Fran trip, and since then have been flat out with projects so havnt really had a chance to say hi.
So here goes, just a quick note to say that im back and that i am alive, which is a good sign.
-Rich
WWDC 2007 has been a smash hit with more sessions that i can poke a stick at loads of food and sugar-juice to keep every mind working at 110% and a totally crazy number of developers both from Apple and 3rd party dev shops. (eg Omni , Delicious, MBU, Panic.)
Tonight we had the Annual Bash, which saw Yerba Buena Gardens transformed into one massive party venue with stage, booze, food and people as far as the eye could see. This year Ozomatli took center stage to perform the night away and did a fairly good job of keeping the crowd going till the end of their set. Now i cant say that i had heard of these guys before tonight, and cant really say i like their style of music, but someone apparently does as they are on iTunes (Surprise, Surprise) and have won a Grammy.
All in all, its been a great week so far and hopefully tomorrow will also be a good day seeing in the end of WWDC for 2007. Ill be back dont you worry guys :)
I have put up some photo’s for anyone that is interested.
-Rich
My Air NZ Flight to San Francisco, has by now taken off and im winging my way to NZ and then on from there to the USA.
I am looking foreword to WWDC 2007, and hopefully i can take heaps of information away with me at the conclusion of the trip. I have a few days either side of the week long conference to look around San-Fran a bit, and might even venture up to the Apple Campus, so checkout the mother-ship as its known.
Im travelling with a guy that i met up in Sydney at another Apple event (Abdulla), which is kinda cool as it means that we have been able to share accommodation and it makes organising stuff just that little bit easier where there are 2 people both actively try to find a good deal or solution.
Ill be sure to keep touching base throughout the week so this wont be my last post i promise!
-Rich
This article takes a look at what i have been working on recently, integrating OSX clients and OSX server into an existing eDirectory network system.
Our main goals were as follows:
Read on for more details.
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I love exams, they are the best way to show just how much material you are able to remember, learned by rote and only needed for the shortest amount of time.
You see it all the time, most often right before exams where those students are huddled around lecture notes, cramming in as much of the content as they can before walking into the exam room, to recite it onto the paper. Most of it to be forgotten as soon as they leave that room 2 or 3 hours later.
I have come to find that this information is generally stuff that while important in terms of a specific field or situation, one does not need to carry with them for extended periods of time. eg Inserting and deleting nodes in linear and exponential hash tables or B+Trees.
Case in point, if i’m writing that new funky back-end storage structure for my latest coolMcCoolCool app, im likely to refer to a nice big fat reference book in-order to implement the data structure (one of my favourites atm is Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick ) or the internet in general as it also contains a whole wealth of info on great structures. What i try to do as a general rule of thumb, is to not assume that something that i learned in a uni subject is slightly relevant.
This has come about mainly because I’m fairly sure that anything that we learnt in a uni class, while fundamentally correct has been been simplified to such a level that it is in no way an optimal solution. Implementing it would be sure to highlight these limitations in quick step. Instead I’ll refer to the books and hopefully find something that will work well for the given situation and has an execution curve that is less than exponential as the number of objects indexed increases.
I guess i am just really going on about nothing, as exams have been around for atleast 100 or so years. Yet i have to ask myself. Do exams really work for modern subjects, in a world where information is readily available if you just know where to look?
Surely it would make more sense for the majority of a given subjects assessment to be done in terms of using research materials available to ones-self in-order to find solutions to problems independently. rather than sitting exams where we are expected to recite material learned in lectures.
What does having 60% or more of a subjects end score based on a single 2 or 3 hour exam paper have to do with anything other than making it easier for the subject organisers to assess the students enrolled in the subject. Any results given are based not on ones ability to find solutions to problems, but on their ability to remember some semi-relevent fact or method learned by rote that was mentioned in passing 10 weeks ago, in a single 2 hour lecture.
This is the sort of thing that I am finding all to often at the University level. Surely what one should take away from a 3 or 4 year degree, especially in rapidly changing areas such as Computer Science is more than the material taught in the subjects that make up the degree. It really should be about knowing how to find information for an unknown problem 5 years down the track, and the ability to apply ones-self to learn ways of solving problems that didn’t existed back when the degree was being undertaken.
Just a few thoughts that hopefully have an effect on someone in the near to long-term future.
-Rich
Well it looks like my widgets have found there way into an june 2007 apc article, which is rather funky. You can check out the article with also mentions other great aussie widgets over at the apc website.
In other news there are some cool things on the widget front, coming to you soon!.
-Rich
Relevant section from the article follows after the break.
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