At previous Apple WWDC conferences Apple bused the attendees out to the Cupertino campus on Thursday night for food, beer and music. The so called campus bash. I’m glad I went last year because the bash this year will be held in San Francisco. Probably be in the big ground floor hall of Moscone West. Should still be fun but going to the Apple campus was part of WWDC the long time attendees tell me. Still, I can say I was at the last one 🙂
Tag Archives | Computing
Items related to IT and computing in general
WWDC schedule
Not long to go until Apple WWDC 2007. Just done my preliminary schedule based on the published session info so far. See the picture below. Will probably change a bit as there are some slots in the published schedules on the WWDC site that are listed as TBA. These are likely placeholders for new stuff in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard or iPhone. The picture also doesn’t show any of the evening activities such as the Apple Design Awards, The Scientific Poster Session, The Apple Campus Bash and others. There is also a session entitled Mac OS X Scientific Computing State of the Union that is in the full listings but not on the calendar view. It’ll maybe a lunchtime session. I want to go to that. Many of the sessions I’m going to are IT technology related rather than developer related. This reflects that WWDC is taking on a more technical conference feel rather than a pure developer conference. The IT related sessions are of interest for the education technology job I’m doing at present.
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Flight to San Francisco on 9th June. 6 weeks to go. Can’t wait 🙂
Toys for the boys
Finally stepped into the High Definition television age. I got a Sony Bravia KDL-40W2000 LCD television and a Sony Playstation 3. The TV has a 1080p HD display and the PS3 has a Blu-Ray HD drive in it. As a bonus I get a games console in the Blu-Ray player for free 🙂 Here is a picture of the beasts in situ. The image on the screen is from a Mac mini that I use as my music centre with iTunes.
The quality of Blu-Ray movies via the PS3 and the TV is stunning. Very, very happy. I had to take the first PS3 back as the fans would come on and once they got to a high speed, whilst playing a game for example, they would stay at the high speed until the unit was switched off. This was irrespective of what the PS3 was doing after the fans speeded up. So if I left it idling the fans would never slow down again. This was annoying when using it to watch movies when in a quiet part of a film. You could hear the fans over the film sound. The replacement PS3 seems to be quieter but I’ve still to test it fully.
The game MotorStorm is stunning on the PS3. Really, really good fun as well. It outputs at 720p resolution and looks excellent on the Bravia. Here is a picture of a bike from the game. It has a bit of motion blur.
So I’ve cast my die into the Blu-Ray camp in the great HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray face off. Hopefully Apple will go down the Blu-Ray route with their HD optical drives in Macintosh machines. A Mac mini with a Blu-Ray drive and a version of DVD Player that allowed playback of Blu-Ray movie discs would make a very nice media hub indeed. It’d need to output 1080p via HDMI cable though.
‘Twas the night before Macworld…
. . .when all through the house not a creature was stirring!
I’m really looking forward to the new toys and software that will be released over the next few days. I hope there is a iPod phone. I hope it works with the Nike+ shoe thingy. I really hope said iPod phone isn’t a lemon!
The ModBook should be interesting. If it can do screen rotation and doesn’t add too much to the price of a basic MacBook it might be a runner for me. The battery will need to be readily accessible to allow an easy sleep->battery change->wake from hibernation cycle.
Just a pity we’re not all in SF to see the stuff in the flesh. Still WWDC to come later in the year. Hopefully earlier this year than last. Anyone else planning to go? I’m making it my summer holiday like a sad git!
Fancy a Zune rather than an iPod?
I suggest you read this. Do yourself a favour and look at the alternatives to Zune first if you don’t want an iPod. Then do yourself a big favour and buy an iPod anyway.
New Job!!
I’m moving to a new job!! If you look at the side bar it says that I’m employed as an IT Consultant by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, and work mainly in Northern Ireland. Well that’ll soon have to change to something like I’m employed as a Senior Solutions Architect by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, am based there but my work is focused on the education sector in England.
I’m moving sideways in the company I work for into the Managed Services Education section that delivers solutions for the Building Schools for the Future project. The new job will be helping to deliver environments and solutions to the education sector. It involves using technologies to create flexible learning environments, both physical and virtual, so that students can learn at their own pace, access lesson materials when not able to attend lessons (for whatever reason), adopt new technology to enhance learning (podcasts, digital media etc.).
I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll involve finding out how people learn. How the environment they are learning in influences this. How technology can help keep students interested and make them want to learn. Obviously the job will involve more than that, but I’ll learn that as I go along. I’ll transfer to the new role in January. Can’t wait.
MBA Technology Management
I’ve signed up for a first course in a series that are required for an Open University MBA (Technology Management). Given that I’ve got about another 20+ years to work in the IT infrastructure sector I think this’ll help me add more value for the clients and companies i work for in the future. I’m starting with the course Technology management: An Integrative Approach as this is relevant to the work I do at present. I’ll do the pure management Stage 1 course after the technical stuff I think.
Moscone West ready for WWDC 06
The Moscone West Conference Centre is ready for Apple’s WWDC 2006. Registration opens on Sunday and the event starts on Monday. This is my first WWDC. Can’t wait 🙂
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New build of YAPT
There is a new build of the Cocoa version of YAPT available. It now uses Objective-C rather than AppleScript internally (actually I’m still setting First Responder via AppleScript on application launch). See the YAPT page for more info and download. Here is a screen shot of the latest build with some data for Francium displayed.
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YAPT sub-page
I’ve created a sub-page of the soapbox for YAPT. There will always be a link to this sub-page in the side bar on the right. This sub page will have a link to the latest version of YAPT. It will say when the latest build was posted and the archive will contain the latest post date as well.