posting from the leather chair in Pete's apartment in Brooklyn. 3am and all is peaceful and quiet. i am very comfortable.

the Lovemakers are playing in San Francisco this Friday night (July 1st) at Mighty. dunno what time. if you can't make that, perhaps you can catch them one of the subsequent Fridays in July during their residency at Cafe Du Nord. i'll be at every one of those shows. they are also playing a charity event at the Playboy Mansion on July 23. tickets only $550. shit, if i lived in LA i'd be there - only time i'd ever be allowed to set foot on those grounds, i'm sure. i'm looking at you, Mark.

let me just say that i am extremely fucking frustrated with .Mac. since i upgraded my PowerBook and two G5s to Tiger, .Mac calendar sync has not worked. changes to one iCal instance are not reflected in the others after sync. in a fit of rage i deleted all of the calendars in the PowerBook's iCal. now no matter what i do i cannot get any of the calendars that were supposedly synced to .Mac by my home G5 to show up on the PowerBook.

i guess this is just an ass backwards additional bit of motivation for me to get Cosmo's CalDAV support working ASAP, so that Apple will begin to have a reason to add CalDAV to iCal. imagine if we had to sync email between computers rather than using IMAP (and POP before it). the current state of affairs is just ridiculous.

speaking of sync - my Treo 650 showed up in the mail last week. once i was all moved into the new apartment i chucked the old 600 with the dying screen, set up Bluetooth on the 650, and used Missing Sync's iSync conduit to copy the iCal and AddressBook data from my home G5 to the phone. now that is what sync is for - when you have a device that spends most of its life offline and/or has a generally slow and flaky internet connection. luckily with the impressive Missing Sync tool, everything JFW'd and i have all my contacts, events and tasks on my phone.

i also set up VersaMail (which now does IMAP and supports SSL for both IMAP and SMTP - yay!) and VeriChat, which continues to be both simple and extremely cool. it's the one Palm app that seems to be able to stay running even when you switch to other apps. too bad the fucking scrollbars don't seem to work on the 650, and i have to tap any icon 2 or 3 times before there's a response. also there seems to be a problem with pssh on the 650 so that you can't import SSH keys. i really hate typing my passwords on the Treo keyboard. finger cramps!

i'm flying to Brooklyn this afternoon for a short visit, returning to SF on Sunday night. NY pals, call or email. Great Lakes Wed night!

for several weeks i've had a problem playing AACs from my G5 to the Squeezebox2 devices attached to various stereos around the house. after just a few seconds of playing any particular track, the buffer would empty and the song would start skipping unlistenably.

i finally got around to emailing Slim Devices' technical support staff. the solution turned out to be installing LAME for iTunes, which the Slim Server is able to use to convert AAC on the fly to 320kbps MP3. for whatever reason this makes everything JFW. and hell, i can't hear the difference anyway. well, yeah i can, i guess - i can actually listen to the damn music now :)

After four years out of the geek con circuit, I am heading up to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland from Aug 1-5.

I sat down and worked out my schedule today; it's listed below. It turned out to be pretty heavily PHP biased, which seems weird given what I do at my day job until you recall that I have a medium sized public web service built in PHP 4. (It's gotten bloated and has always been much too slow, and something needs to be done, but for those same reasons I'm scared to make large scale changes. I hope some of these presentations will give me ideas for small steps to take toward better performance. If i had a do-over, I'd use PHP 5, Propel or the PDO that's being talked about in one of these sessions, and memcached.)

I'm most looking forward to the "It's Time to Share: Calendar Data Interchange" session. I wonder if there will be any surprises. The session seems to be focused on calendar clients, but hopefully some of the other server developers will be there too. Having missed the CalConnect interoperability event the last go-around, I haven't met any of those folks yet. I will be on Mitch Kapor's CalDAV panel though, and probably some of them will be there.

In any event, it will be strange to be jumping into the deep end of the geek pool again after all this time. I hope folks I know will be there so we can drink heavily and oversleep the morning sessions just like the old days.

Monday
8.30 am: Introduction to Ruby (tutorial)
1.30 pm: Scalable Internet Architectures (tutorial)

Tuesday
8.30 am: Learning Ajax (tutorial)
1.30 pm: Creating Passionate Users (tutorial)

Wednesday
8.45 am: Trends in the Open Source Marketplace (keynote)
10.45 am: Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5
11.35 am: Accelerating PHP Applications
1.45 pm: The Evolution of Web Application Architectures
2.35 pm: How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl
4.30 pm: State of PHP
5.20 pm: Implementing CalDAV, a New Standard for Sharing Calendar Information Over the Internet

Thursday
8.45 am: TCP/IP and Shipping Containers (keynote)
9.30 am: Computational Origami: From Flapping Birds to Space Telescopes (keynote)
10.45 am: PDO: PHP Data Objects
11.35 am: Getting Up to Speed with Apache Geronimo
1.45 pm: It's Time to Share: Calendar Data Interchange
2.35 pm: PHP Is Ready for Big Business
4.30 pm: Flagship Features in MySQL 5.0
5.20 pm: XMPP in Java

Friday
10.45 am: Extracting Rails from Basecamp
11.35 am: Building Responsive Web UIs with DHTML
12.45 am: Closing Session (keynote)

I'm posting this entry with ecto, a fancy desktop blogging client. not sure if i really need the overhead, but i like being able to edit all of my blogs (i have four) in one place. thanks once again to Ted for turning me on to another handy tool.

i'm listening to the new Pharaoh Overlord album, and i keep hearing things reminiscent of World of Warcraft sound effects. like the whistle you hear when your hunter summons his pet, or the undescribable noise of jumping off the gryphon/wyvern/bat after you just flew from one zone to another. i'm not sure what to think about that.

heh, Wil Wheaton is editing the SG tech news section. strange how the various bits of the Internet are bound to collide if you wait long enough.