Well, aside from being away from home from 8am to 10pm yesterday, it was a good day.
Project Done
We got the project I’m working on in Chilliwack up to a point of release, and JimFromWork was in the office until 1am or so finishing up a data import and tweaking things. One down. We still have work to do, but now it’s out in the hands of the people that are going to be using it, so that’s good. Now if they’d only use it…..
Now an iMac Owner!
Last night I also went and met with JohnG, who works at a school that does online learning from the dark depths of Chilliwack and got him set up with some software. Basically they are looking for an online learning option and he needed someone with some experience to install things for him. I got Moodle up and going very easily, but the other one, Jones E-Learning (or something like that) wasn’t so easy. It required Tomcat to run, but it wouldn’t, there were strange “can’t find com.saxon.xml.org” errors, which I eventually got rid of to be replaced by other errors (NullPointerException). sigh There were directories missing as well, apparently you are supposed to go into the webapps/serverlets/META-INF directory and edit a file, but the serverlets directory wasn’t there.
End result is I have a system sitting on my floor I’m going to play with over the next week or so to try to get it up and going, may have better success with a different distro and without the pressure of someone waiting for me to finish.
The good news out of this in exchange for this work I am now the proud owner of a iMac (even the same color as the one in the photo there). A whopping 233 mhz with 128 megs of ram, but still a nice machine. It’s got the latest OS X installed on it and runs it (the OS) just fine (now running lots of apps… we’ll have to see about that). It seems it’ll be perfect for me to be able to play with it enough to see if I like it all enough to maybe spend some $ on a “real” system (a g4-400 tower or even a laptop). We’ll see though. And if I do do that then the iMac may go to my mom! Don’t tell her though. It came in the original box, with software, keyboard, and all that. The best thing is that the mouse isn’t the original puck, but a non-sucky mouse (though still with only one button).
I spent last night messing around with it, and this morning going through the preferences panel and seeing what is available. I’m pretty impressed so far, but I have yet to actually use it for “real” work. Now if only I could use it to do remote display from home to work 🙂 Even if I could I don’t know what password they set up so I can’t log in remotely anyway! I’ll post my impressions of it in a while.
Taxes
In addition to all of that I got all my paperwork for taxes to the accountant, who says she’s not only impressed but also in good shape (can’t wait for a big fat return!). Anyway the paperwork is done and that’s one less thing to worry about.