• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Next Tuesday Santa finally comes for the Mac faithful when Steve Jobs takes the stage for his Mac World 2008 keynote. Each year I like to make an idiot of myself by trying to predict what santa Steve will deliver for us, so, here I go again! I’m gonna start by putting my neck on the line straight away. I think the focus for this keynote will be home entertainment. I think the reports about video rentals will turn out to be correct and I think there’ll be more to it than what has been reported this week. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Apple TV got a make-over and a new lease of life. Some are even predicting that Apple will sell TVs with Apple TV built in. I’m not convinced, but it’s possible I guess.

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Tagged with: Apple • media event

Something I’ve spent quote a bit of time thinking about during my years as a student, then lab assistant (AKA demonstrator), and finally occasional lecturer with the computer science department in NUI Maynooth, is how students should be introduced to computer science and programming. I’ve seen all sorts of tactics tried over the past 14 years. The absolute worst tactic I’ve seen is the abandonment programming from first year computer science program altogether. Another disaster in my opinion was the introduction objects before the introduction of basic constructs like conditional statements and loops, the confusion that cased was monumental. I have been involved with final year undergraduate projects for much of my time with the department and have seen first-hand the effects of some of the different approaches. No one seems to be able to agree on how best to start computer science students programming, but something no one can argue with is that any system that results in final year honours students being unable to program is fundamentally flawed.

[tags]computer programming, education[/tags]

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I just spent the last 10 minutes picking someone’s used chewing gum out of the power connector on my MBP with a small key. I can only imagine it picked up its sticky and rather unpleasant cargo when I slid it into the seat pocket on the plane for landing. There really are some very disgusting and inconsiderate prats on this planet.

In general the move to Leopard has been very smooth for me but there was one notable exception, getting a working PostgreSQL 8 sever up and running on my MacBookPro. A few weeks ago I’d expended a lot of time and effort on this and gotten nowhere so at that stage I’d decided to work around the problem by using a remote PostgreSQL server rather than running one locally. This works fine as long as you have broadband internet access. However, I’m off to Belgium for a week on Saturday where I’ll have no broadband but where I will need to get some development work done that requires access to a PostgerSQL server.

With the end of the week getting closer I had another go at getting PosgreSQL to behave on OS X and I did eventually succeed. I got 90% of the way there by following these instructions but then I ran into a few strange problem that took a little more time and effort to work around. However, the good news is that I got it all figured out in the end!

[tags]PostgreSQL, OS X, OS X 10.5 Leopard[/tags]

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Tagged with: OS X • databases • PostgreSQL

Thanks to this nice wordpress plugin/theme from the guys at content robot this blog now displays even better on an iPhone or iPod Touch. It works by first providing a theme that is optimised for use on Mobile Safari and then adding a plugin that uses that theme automatically for just Mobile Safari. It’s a nice idea well implemented. (Thanks to Alison for the tip)

Tagged with: web site • site news • Wordpress

In one of my early Leopard posts I was happy to report that my Epson scanner was working perfectly. However, yesterday when I went to scan it wouldn’t work. It kept telling me there was an error communicating with the scanner. I checked the connections and all seemed normal. The only real change there has been on the system since the last time the scanner was used was the update to 10.5.1. I can only conclude that that’s what broke it.

Regardless of who is to blame I did eventually find a solution. First, go to the Epson site and download and install the latest drivers for your scanner, the description should explicitly say that it supports Leopard. Then reboot. It doesn’t tell you to but I couldn’t get the scanner back into life without a reboot. At this stage I found that the Epson Scan utility wouldn’t even launch. However, the TWAIN drivers themselves do work so you can scan using Preview.app. I’d never used Preview to scan before and I have to say I’m impressed with the interface. You can scan from within Preview by going to File -> Import Image ....

I have to say I’m a little disappointed with Apple over this, 10.5.1 was supposed to fix things, not break them!

[tags]Hardware, Scanner, Apple, OS X, Leopard, Epson[/tags]

Tagged with: hardware • operating system • OS X

It’s not uncommon that as part of a complex transaction you need to insert a row into a table with an auto-incrementing primary key and then use the key from the row you just generated as a foreign key in another insert within the same transaction. Java provides a mechanism to return the auto-generated keys from an insert query without the need to execute a second query by means of the function java.sql.Statement.getGeneratedKeys(). Unfortunately the PostgreSQL JDBC connector does not appear to support this feature (at least the version I am using does not). Given the fact that we do not have this functionality available to us when using a PostgreSQL database we need to use a separate query to retreive the value of the key we just generated. It goes without saying that we need to do this two-step process as part of a transaction but it may not go without saying that the correct way to extract the value for the key is by querying the sequence that the key is being generated from and not by querying the table directly. It is true that most of the time the highest value of the incrementing variable will be the value just inserted but that is not a guarantee.

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Tagged with: Java • databases • PostgreSQL

It’s been a while since that last time I got some new hardware, I think my iPod Touch was the last bit of new tech I’d gotten before this week. So, this week I made up for lost time and got myself new network printer and a new USB headset. I have to say I’m very happy with both, they just worked, no drivers, no messing. Actual, genuine, plug and play. Oh, and I was testing these on Leopard.

[tags]Apple, OS X, HP, Logitech[/tags]

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Tagged with: review • hardware

Note: This articles was written for, and first published in, the NUI Maynooth student news paper The Maynooth Advocate.

With the recent Eircom controversy the security of our home networks has at last come to the attention of the press. That attention has focused mainly on one particular flaw in Eircom wireless routers but all broadband users could do with giving their broadband connection a quick security once-over.

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I’ve already posted about two third party QuikLook generators (QLEnscript & Folder QuickLook Plugin) that I’ve come across and like. Today I have another one to add to that list, BetterZipQL. As its name suggests this generator is released by the people behind BetterZip. It’s completely free and doesn’t require BetterZip to be installed to work. The download and buy buttons on the top right of that page are NOT for the QuikLook generator but for the actual BetterZip program. The link to download it is in the text of the article just be low the screen shot. As you’ve probably guessed this generator allows you to see the contents of a wide variety of archive file formats using QuickLook.

On a related note, there is now a 1.0 version of QLEnscript available.

[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, QuickLook[/tags]

Tagged with: QuickLook • OS X • review • software • plugin

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