Rick Swift & Apple & Embedded I make things. Sometimes, I’ll talk about it here.

My Gorram Frakking Blog

Boo. SpaceX Scrubbed for the Day

As of 1712, they are beginning scrub procedures. This means they will not launch today, and it sounds like they may not launch for 24-48 hours. They will begin de-tanking (removing fuel) shortly. Sigh.

Damn. SpaceX Abort

Demo Flight 2 has been aborted with less than 3 minutes to go. The rocket was secured (a pretty exciting process to watch and listen to), and the countdown stopped at T -00:01:02. I'm still waiting to see what the outcome is.
They're just now saying they're going to spend the next 10 minutes to assess why they aborted.

SpaceX Launch in 5 Minutes

This is very exciting. I'm watching the webcast right now. I hope it goes well...

New AirPort Extreme base station

Well, I just finished installing my new AirPort Extreme base station. This is the one shaped like a Mac mini. The new software is very nice. They added the client signal strength graph feature, something that used to be there, then wasn't, and is now back again. They've also added link status lights to the ports on the back (although no indication of connection speed).

There were a couple of things that caused a fair amount of difficulty. One was that the new admin software has been renamed. The old one was called "AirPort Admin Utility." Thew new one is "AirPort Utility." I kept trying to upgrade my software before I realized the difference. When I was on the phone with Apple tech support, the agent told me this was a frequent source of confusion.

The other problem I had was that Comcast's cable modem seems to not assign a DHCP address to a new MAC address without being rebooted (this is what initiated the aforementioned support call). The AEBS behaves as if it can't get a DHCP address from Comcast, which is exactly what's wrong. The fix (in my case) is to unplug the cable modem for 30 seconds or so, and plug it back in. (Note: the Apple support agent wanted me to unplug it for 5 minutes, but I told him I'd try 30 seconds first—it worked).

I have yet to hook up a drive, the whole reason for getting it in the first place. I want to find out if they've improved AFP enough to where applications like SuperDuper! can back up over the network without needing to create a disk image first.

Now, to get an MBP with 802.11n networking in it...

Carbon Application Development in D

D is a very nice programming language by Walter Bright. Carbon is a very nice API for developing Mac OS X applications. I wanted to develop Carbon applications in D, so I created an open source project to let others do the same. Please check out Darbon, and let me know what you think!