Last weekend, I got an iSight. I didn’t actually need one for anything, but I was curious and I had a little spot bonus money to burn. So, while I have yet to use it for its main purpose, video chatting, I have tried it for a different purpose: Delicious Library. This app has a neat trick of turning your iSight (or other webcam, really) into a barcode reader. This was so fascinating to me, that I bought Delicious Library just to play with this feature.

The only game that my father plays on his Mac is freecell. He plays the version available in Rick Holzgrafe’s Solitaire Till Dawn X. This is a pretty nice version of the game (although it lacks game numbers and the ability to automate supermoves), and my father occasionally saves deals that stump him. Well, yesterday I tried one of them, and after a while, in frustration, decided to see if it was solvable by running it through the automated freecell solver.

I’ve been programming in Java since sometime in 1997, and in all this time I have never embraced certain, now ubiquitous seeming, Java technologies. Mainly I’m thinking about the whole J2EE thing. Partly this is because I haven’t paid much attention to this (huge) development in Java. Partly this is because in 1998 or ‘99 I remember reacting very strongly to an attempt to convert my employer’s entire back office to J2EE.

We’ve been running on jabberd2 on the new server for almost a week now. So far, so good. Folks are enjoying TLS support. Well, at least I haven’t gotten any complaints. Some of us are excited about the new conference server (mu-conference 0.6.0), since it actually allows you to configure it, assuming that you have a client that exposes this functionality. The two that I’ve used are gajim (a python/pyGTK client) and, surprisingly, gaim.

On Monday, we finally completed the final piece of server migration, migrating our Jabber service. This was our hardest task of the actual migration, in my opinion. It had the most users, and we, for whatever reason, couldn’t just use the same software we had been using. On our old machine, we had been running jabberd 1.4.3, with a conference component as well as several bridges to other IM systems (AIM and ICQ, if I recall).

About 3 or 4 years ago, I bought my mother a scanner for her iMac (G3). Now, my mother isn’t a photographer or particularly interested in scanning pictures or old photos. What she uses a scanner for is OCR. At the time, she was assembling a report for her church, and folks frequently gave her hard copies of things rather than emailing her the documents. This wasn’t the absolute best solution, since the OCR software frequently introduced a fair number of errors, but it beat typing everything in.