day 2: also fun :)

Went through a few more chapters today. Learned about the QuickTime Streaming Proxy, and did some other hands-on lab type stuff, coupled with plenty of theory. The curriculum is laid out in a pretty logical fashion, and incorporates quite a few related concepts, such as basic firewall / NAT implementation, ip protocols, quicktime media authoring, and much, much more ;)

I’m getting kinda pissed at bish for being all jacked up concerning airport. Since upgrading to 10.1.4, I’ve had a problem where I can’t switch between airport networks without rebooting (more accurately, I can switch, and even exist on the wireless lan, but nothing works at the network layer until I reboot). It’s a real pain. There’s even a wireless net in the training center, but I can’t join it *at all* with my laptop, even after a reboot… I simply cannot get a dhcp lease. Blah! I guess when I get back to Seattle, I’ll re-install OS X and hope that it goes away… and if not, I’m still under warranty. I get the feeling that there’s possibly a larger problem because I have pretty serious airport signal strength problems at times.

We had a good time lusting over apple’s newly announced rackmount server. It’s pretty much totally badass… but I do have a few lingering questions, such as: can a user install his/her own drives, or is the “Apple Drive Module” something that one has to acquire from apple? In reality, it won’t ever affect me personally since I’m starting to think I might be poor for the rest of my life… my first priority is making it off my old-ass g4 400 and into something a bit more reasonable for desktop use. It’s a bit saddening to see almost everybody else at the apple training with tiBooks, meanwhile I’m klunking along on my slow-ass iBook… It doesn’t look like I’ll be making much more than what I need to survive at my current job; at least not in my current position. I hear that some of the service techs are well paid… maybe I’ll do that. I hate to bitch, but it sucks being a first-rate geek with second-rate hardware. Blah.

On a less self-pitiful note, I think I’ll get a chance to see QuickTime Broadcaster (for os x server!) in action. I learned today that it’s included with the jaguar server installation that was distributed at wwdc (along with the rest of QuickTime 6). One of my classmates (who is staying upstairs, in fact) happens to have the aforementioned jaguar server installed on his tiBook… he also has a firewire cam, a hub, and an extra piece of ethernet cable… So, tonight we should be able to do a live quicktime video / audio stream all the way across the vast, uncharted chasm of his double occupancy room @ the Comfort Inn :) We were joking about just brining the whole rig with us and setting it up tomorrow before class, but our instructor is bound as an apple employee to be very careful about what he says / does with QuickTime 6… besides, the jaguar stuff is under NDA as well. It’s kinda lame that badass broadcasting software for OS X is done and ready to ship, but is being held back by politics. At least us geeks can get at it ;)

Also, to add to the leetness of the entire operation, I found out that we’ll be the first batch of apple certified quicktime streaming server instructors in the world :) woop!

I think I’ll do some fewd shortly, then tinker with qtss upstairs, then review my qtss courseware to prepare for possibly having to present it tomorrow :)