Time to kill

Just got a copy of OSX 10.3 in the mail today. I’ve spent the last three hours trying to get it installed, with some success. Initially I was hoping for the smooth upgrade, but when that continued to bomb over and over again I gave up.

Now I’m typing on it – Panther is definitely a step up from 10.2. However there is a significant downside to having performed the upgrade. I no longer have access to the music I purchased through the iTunes store. Totally forgot about it when I decided to whack my partitions. It’s still on my iPod, but I don’t think there’s an “official” way to get it off of the iPod and back on the iBook. I bought the damn music (and had a good 50 or so of my cd’s ripped that are gone now to), so I’m quite willing to stoop to less legitimate means to get my precious music back. Most of my favorite stuff was on the iPod already, so it’s just a matter of keeping those two kids separate until if figure out how to hack the thing.

In other news, I have some new software arriving at a website near you. This time it’s some java code that provides two useful things. First is the ability to parse HL7 structures efficiently. Second is the set of applications I’m writing to go with that. So far an HL7 “snip” utility is almost done. It allows reports to be made from fields within a set of HL7 records. Also a rewrite of my famous (ha!) HL7_Browser. This time it will include a built in network engine, so there’s no need to jump back and forth between the browser and the PI Engine to do things. In fact, I’d say that the entire PI Engine’s days are numbered. Java’s come a long way in two years.