Mac OS X Advanced System Administration v10.5 (Apple Training)

Edward Marczak, the editor of MacTech magazine, is the author of the book Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Advanced System Administration v10.5 (Apple Training).

My new MacBook Pro

After 3+ years with my PowerMac G5 DP @ 2GHz, I now have a 15'' MacBook Pro 2.4GHz!

My reliable and trusty PowerMac G5 DP is in the hands of another Mac user as I could not afford to have two machines.

My new machine is quieter and more powerful so I should not complain. I only hope that it will be as reliable as my PowerMac G5!

iMac advertisement (from Macworld magazine)

Creating a Dashboard Widget that uses a Plugin

The "Creating A Dashboard Widget that uses a Plugin" article that I wrote for MacTech is online.

Did you find the above information helpful? You will find a lot more information in my eBook "Programming Dashboard Widgets". The eBook describes how you can create Apple Dashboard Widgets using many programming languages including JavaScript, Perl, Objective-C, and PHP. You can buy it here.

Things I learnt during, and about, my PhD

A small part of the post (From Jamie's Weblog):

Supervisors: a curious species,

rarely sighted in their expected habitat

"Supervisors are strange creatures. Some are like ghosts, appearing occasionally for a fleeting moment, and you’re more likely to meet them at a conference than at the University. Others are always around but they’re too busy running around like demented hamsters on a wheel – all motion and no progress. They’re disorganised. All of them will, at some point, forget what your project is about – and some will even forget who you are.

I made an interesting discovery half way through my PhD: the number of good/useful/interesting/brilliant things that your supervisor will say to you isnot proportional to the amount of contact you have with them – it’s constant. Yep, that right. You can have weekly meetings with your supervisor but you’ll only get three good suggestions a year out of them. Oh, and on the subject of meetings, there are only about five types of meeting that you’ll ever have during your PhD: The Big Picture, The Progress Update, The Paper Writing Enslaving (a.k.a. My Research Review Is Approaching So I Need To Get You To Write Something), The Thesis Word Count and The Pub (usually accompanied by beer). Do not make the mistake of going into a meeting and expecting it to be any different to last week’s. And try not to get them confused: even if you supervisor is plying you with beer, watch out for the sudden switch to Paper Writing Enslaving.

Supervisors also participate in a little-known game which can catch out the naïve student: Hunt the Supervisor. This involves the PhD student attempting to locate their supervisor during the agreed meeting slot. And, no, they are definitely not going to be in their office. You’ll be lucky if they’re in the right country."

You can find the original post here. From Jamie's Weblog.

Stephen Kochan and Apple Discussions

Today, I saw that Stephen Kochan, the author of "Programming in Objective-C" (which will have a 2nd edition soon) can also be found at Apple Discussions site.

You can find his first post here.

You can also find useful things about the 1st edition of his book here.

Thinking Like a Cocoa Programmer

There is a great article at The CocoaHeads web site called "Thinking Like a Cocoa Programmer".

Highly recommended!