Solipsism Gradient

Full day today: Tian’an-men Square, the Imperial Palace, lunch with a “traditional Chinese family”, a trishaw tour through the old (and quite poor) Hutong quarter, the Lama (Tibetan Buddhist) Temple, then dinner at the Beijing Qianmen Jianguo Hotel, imediately followed by the Chinese Opera at their Liyuan Theater. Whew.

Tomorrow, to the Great Wall.

We’ve just arrived at Wangfujing Grand Hotel in Beijing, China. Tired but all went very well; we’re off to get some tourism done, more later.

Update: the CocoaHeads Beijing talk went quite well.

Now at my cousin’s house near Frankfurt (Germany). All’s well and we’ll leave for Beijing the day after tomorrow. Today we visited Aschaffenburg, mainly the Pompejanum and the museum in the old castle.

So, I’m typing this from the VIP lounge at the GRU (Guarulhos/São Paulo) airport. In a few hours we’ll fly to Frankfurt over Paris, and a few days later, Beijing.

Must get busy preparing my talk for Cocoaheads Beijing, was too busy to do anything before our departure. More as it happens!

Non-development developments, that is.

We’ve been busy packing for our upcoming trip to China and other Asian countries. Also, moving from our current apartment to a new one – more packing! I also just sold my desktop iMac (more packing, erh, backing-up); by the time we get back in mid-November there should be a new generation of iMacs out. Meanwhile, essentials are being copied to my MacBook Air, and I’ll work based from that for the next two months.

You can tell that I decided to schedule all traumatic experiences at once! Better to get them done and over with…

Anyway, we go off the coming weekend. On the way to Beijing there’ll be a stopover of a few days in Frankfurt, Germany; enough to de-lag a little, and visit with family.

If all goes well, we’ll arrive in Beijing in the early afternoon of Sept. 25, and in the evening I’ll do a small presentation for the local CocoaHeads chapter. (At this time, that page shows Sept. 26 but we’re trying to move it to the 25th.) I gather that all members are rather young, and will be amazed at someone over 40 writing software!

At any rate, I plan to talk a little about my professional experience, then move to the main topic – tentatively named “Protect Your Application Against Evil Hackers (or, at least, against the lazy ones)” – and finally showing some pictures from exotic places like Brazil and California. If it comes off well, I’ll post the slides somewhere here for downloading.

After a little more than two weeks in China we’ll depart from Shanghai for a 4-week cruise, going to Japan, Hongkong, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Vietnam. On the way back to Brazil there’ll be another few days of stopover in Paris.

Posting updates here from China may not be easy, but I’ll try.

I just pushed out a new build of Quay: version 1.1.2 (297). All users should update.

This fixes the bug where it stopped responding after a certain combination of clicks on the Dock. I’m still puzzled why the event tap timeout responsible for that began happening on Snow Leopard, though; it never did on 10.5 to my knowledge.

Quay 1.1.2 (293) is out, and supports 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Progress report on Quay 1.1.2.

I’ve got it mostly running on Snow Leopard now. There are at least two small things that aren’t working yet though, and I want to implement a couple of feature requests that should be fast and easy. All in all, it shouldn’t take more than one more day, or two.