I got myself down to SOMA to go to a justin.tv tech-talk. Sure, they were talking about OAuth (which is pretty much a nice standard for authenticating to share data on the web) but of much more interest was who “they” are. But let’s back up.

The point of my going down there was to answer the question Dad asked me at Thanksgiving:

“Where do you want to work?”

I hadn’t really thought about it in the sense outside of “depends on who wants me”. It started to grow on me, and when I heard about this talk through Karen through Facebook, I found an outlet. Over time, it’s gotten in my head that, (a) there are a lot of tech startups in the City, (b) they do either cool or lame things, or some of each (depending on the startup) and (c) the lifestyle is vaguely like being a pirate: you have a small crew of dedicated folks; much riskier life, but also more rewarding in other ways.

So I figured I’d test the waters.

I found myself chatting after the talk with some of the people I’ve read about in tech blogs and whatnot; people who do crazy and interesting things. I rode back on the BART with a similar sort of buzzing feeling as when I first visited Berkeley as an eighth-grader, and it lasted all afternoon. I may not know exactly with who yet, but I think I’m starting to figure that I’m understanding where I want to work. Or at least how it should feel.

On the other side of the coin, I’m flying up to Seattle in a few days to be shown around Amazon. Amazon strikes me positively in other ways — the benefits of a bigger, more established place. My take on their “corporate culture” as I can see it from here is that it’s roughly a looser, friendlier Microsoft; though part of the goal of going up there is getting a very solid read on it, and what exactly they’d want me to do. They may really surprise me, and I may come back really jazzed.

But now they’ve definitely got that buzzing feeling I got from the cool kids* in the City to compete with. Which is good for all parties involved; if I really want to work at Amazon, I’ll know.

The rest of Thursday was cool in that I helped a friend-of-a-dancing-friend with his computer troubles for an hour or so; and for my time, he helped me brush up my piano skills and showed me how to improv some blues — cause this is what he does for a living. I’ve yet to record myself, but it sounds pretty good when I plunk on my keyboard here.

And then I went to 920, as always. All in one day!

*I say “kids” — I was probably the youngest one there, but the vast majority were 20-something, so I didn’t feel out of place at all.

That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

• New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one.
• You can almost feel the underlying API changes (I recompiled MacVim from SVN because of this)
• It’s a little more shiny. Stupid blue folders are gone, though I’m not a huge fan of the Tango-esque ones.
• Stacks are genuinely useful.
• They got Spaces wrong. I mean, this one should have been hard to mess up, given the precedent, but they did. It’s a fine virtual desktop manager (a feature in the X11 world for AGES) but it could use a few more keybindings — it’s great that I can switch desktops logically, but why must I use the mouse to move applications around? (Needs a Move-Current-App-in-Direction key combo)
• Also, closing a program will switch Spaces on you. This is wrong. It should work it’s way down the apps in the current Space, not bounce all over based on last-usage. arg.
• Time Machine is about as useful as Dashboard — which is to say, oh, it’s cute, but it’s disabled and apt to stay that way.

So you may wonder “What’s the point?” if I just kinda shot down the big features.

It’s for developers.

They’ve added official Ruby/Cocoa bindings. Python TK apps no longer require X11 (as I found out from running Pacman). Both of these are at the current version and include many nifty non-default libraries (Rails, Twisted, NumPy, etc, etc…). Not to mention all the optional dev tools (I recompiled the latest MacVim, as stated earlier. This is UNIX thinking). I’m thinking that interpreted-languages-as-second-class-GUI-programs is coming to an end. Ruby is the new Java. Make the devs happy, and they will develop for your platform.

MS is doing it too. Visual Studio Express was no accident. And today I hear about F# — which is essentially Microsoft OCaml (as C# is Microsoft Java)

The real power of Leopard — as with the real power of Vista — is yet to be seen. It comes down the line, about a year and a half from now, when the freelance dev masses come along. Vista arguably added a number of genuinely useful API stuff — the .NET 3.0 backings come as an obvious example. Microsoft, logically, is backing it’s own horse. Apple knows the flaws of writing in straight Objective-C and so opens up to more casual devs and UNIX devs by backing open, interpreted languages.

In fact, I bet they added PyObjC by default, instead of giving a user guide to it…

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import objc
>>>

Oh look….

So I got Leopard today, and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to upgrade my system.

bzzt Wrong! I am hosed!

So I’m lifting my userdata out onto my iPod — praise be unto the gods of the command line — and am going to do a fresh install.

I guess it all works out; but I would be lying if I weren’t disappointed (so far)

However, playing with the display computers at TSW I discovered that python is ver. 2.5 and has Twisted and NumPy by default. Which is awesome.

So much I could write about. I could expound on any of the following topics:

• Kurobox rebuild
• HDHomeRun
• vimperator
• Lindy at Night/Big Swing
• Pictures
• Summer plans!
• SPIHT project
• Seattle post-mortem

But the only reason I’m posting right now?

Lotsa new pictures are up on Flickr!

And I’m listening to copious amounts of The Rolling Stones. For some reason they capture my mood of late.

Lindy on Sproul is still lots of fun. I have ~ 2.5 gigs of swing music now, which is quite awesome. Note that this is only ~ 500 songs because I’m a nut for quality where I can get it (192+) — I’ve even gone so far as to get FLAC albums in some cases

It’s been almost overwhelmingly WARM in Berkeley — my handy internet thermometer suggests that it was 77 degrees earlier — and with a higher humidity than I get up in GV. Blah. At least b33r tastes even better now.

And apparently a troupe of LoS people are out to find a swimming hole after dancing tomorrow, which I am so in the mood for.

Running a LoS movie night (courtesy of the CSUA) in 306 Soda on Monday…. yay Swing Kids.

UU stuff on Monday too.

And I can write a simple lexer in 38 lines of Python, including comments and whitespace? Who’s the man?

And then darch and I want to write what seems to be a gstreamer-based mpd/mserv replacement in Python — which is totally doable and would be bunches of fun — mainly because it scratches a mutual itch in terms of music serving.

Looking for work, as always — considering Google SoC and research and whatnot.

Next minor project is to finally SVN my interesting homedir stuff (the theory being I can sit down at a fresh machine and go “svn co Homedirstuff” and have my shell work as it should) and possibly reinstall/fully-move-into a copy of Feisty Fawn, which I dunno why I haven’t et myself do — for some reason, my brain calls it temporary when I want it to be more permanent. Likewise, it’d be very nice to put FF extensions and configs into SVN for total cross-platform ‘lovin.

That and update my blogroll to also include blogs of people who a) are not Karen and b) are not on LJ. LJ is for legacy connections — and besides, that’s what my friendslist is for.

In short, what AREN’T I doing these days?