OSCON 2006 - Morning of Day 1

I was just greeted with the morning site of Mt. Hood from my hotel window in Portland, Oregon this morning. I'm looking forward to the week of the conference here. Day 1, I'm signed up for JavaScript Boot Camp and The Rails Guidebook. It should be fun.

Maybe I'll venture out on the MAX later this evening and pretend like I know how to get around in a big city. Austin is slated to add light rail to the options of transportation around 2008, so it will be interesting to see how it works here.

In the meantime, I need to find a MiniUSB to USB adapter so I can upload pictures from my camera...

Metaprogramming

I went to an interesting talk last night by Dave Thomas, sponsored by Austin on Rails. Dave is the author of several interesting Ruby and Rails books. Cool stuff. I am just getting into Rails, and this talk covered some of the interesting features of Ruby that make all that magic work. I'm still learning Ruby, so I don't quite feel qualified in calling myself a Ruby Programmer yet, but maybe someday...

At the giveaway, my name was pulled and I got a free copy of Bruce Tate's From Java to Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know. Cool beans.

Shuffle Recovers from 'Lights of Death'

Those of you that know me, know that I've been limping along iPod-less for a little over three weeks now. My 512MB iPod Shuffle had been experiencing the green-orange Lights of Death.

It would not play, and no computer I had access to would recognize it either as an iPod or a thumb-drive. I had even taken it to the local Apple store for a Genius to look at, and had no luck there.

The troubling thing to me was the method of failure... it seemed more like a firmware issue, and not a component failure. I'm not so sure now. The day it died I had hooked it up to my work computer's docking station for an emergency charge. It worked fine after that, on the car ride home. Then, when I went to plug it into my Mac, it wouldn't show up. Is there some kind of weird overcharging issue?

My plan was to let the battery drain, and see if I could trigger some other kind of reset. Wishful thinking, since flash memory doesn't erase that way.

Over the long weekend, I noticed that a new iTunes came out, and a new iPod Updater. I had tried the previous iPod Updater, but since I couldn't get the iPod to show up in the Mac, it couldn't update it. I downloaded this new updater, and iTunes. I fiddled with my Shuffle a bit, and it still had the Lights of Death... so I wasn't very hopeful when I plugged it in. I was surprised when iTunes gave me the message, "There is new firmware for your iPod, would you like to update now?" Heck, yeah!

So, I just finished a bike ride with my resurrected Shuffle, and things are much better.

Update: Apple releases utility to reset the 1G iPod Shuffle. See: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodshuffleresetutility10formac.html.