Kevin's Blog

Laptopification of the iPhone

2014-09-01T20:07:00-05:00

For every new release of OS X operating system there is a flurry of analysis about how Apple is turning OS X into iOS. While Apple isn't going to make Macs into touch screen devices any time soon, the two OS's are getting some similar features and functions. They're becoming more related, kissing cousins instead of siblings. However, I do think that the way Apple markets the iPhone models will become similar to how they differentiate the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptop lines.

There is much speculation that Apple's next iPhone will be available in multiple screen sizes, probably 4.7" and 5.5". Some "analysis" (AKA pulled from their butt) seem to think there can be only one flagship model iPhone and that'll be 5.5" inch, priced $100 over the 4.7" model will retain the same price as the current iPhone 5s and be considered an "inferior" model, maybe even replace the current 5c while the 5s will disappear.

In Apple's laptop line models are not broken up by screen size or battery life. Rather it is body type, processor and memory that break up which line a laptop belongs to. Both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines have a 13" model. In the Air line one model (11") has a 9 hour battery while the 13" has a 12 hour battery. The Pro line the 13" has a 9 hour battery while the 15" is at 8 hours.

Instead the Pro line can have more memory (both in drive space and system RAM). Processor speed is faster and the body builds are different. The Pro line is currently the only line with Retina displays, but the iPhones are already all retina so I don't think this matters.

So this year I think the numbers will be dropped from the mid-range (currently the 5c) and flagship lines (currently the 5s). I think the lines will be split into the flagship/mid-range based on processor, memory and body type.

Flagship

New processor A8. The new screens will need a better GPU than the A7 processor is my from the butt guess on what'll be new.
More system RAM. 5s is currently at 1 GB. I suspect it will go to 2 GB.
New body style. I think most of the body has leaked now from parts suppliers, but I don't look at those. Not much you can really do with a phone that is mostly screen and a couple of buttons. Change back material and some edge styling to make it feel better in hand. New colors? (I'm guessing no on colors.)
2 screen sizes: 4.7" and 5.5".
There will be resolution differences between the two but Apple will just call them "retina" and leave the details in the tech specs.
Different battery life between the two. It'll be mentioned but unless there is a significant bump in both models it'll be glossed over.

Mid-range

The mid-range name won't be a number but will still only have one screen size.
The model will be the iPhone 5s but with a plastic body similar to the 5c.
The colors available will be different than the current 5c.
Only available in 4" screen size.

"Low-end" (Free with contract)

The 5c will become the "low-end" (free with contract)
Drop number of colors available? Just black and white?
Drop number of flash sizes available? Current 4s is only available in 8 GB.

What will the names be? I've no idea and don't want to speculate. Apple seems to like "Pro", "Mini", and "Air" currently. But their use is a bit inconsistant. the iPad Air is the larger screen size with top of the line processor, but the MacBook Air has the smaller screens and lower processors.

How likely to I consider all this? I suspect it'll happen either this year or next year with a high bet on this year. Forced to put a number on it I'd go with 75% chance it'll happen this year.

Finally, new, well, everything

2013-12-22T21:40:00-06:00

It has taken waaaay longer than I wanted but the site is finally migrated to a new blogging system. The whole backend has been redone, and most of sites hosted here are now SSL. This post is mostly a test to see if it's all working correctly. If it is it should auto-post to the blog in less than 30 minutes of setting it as publishable.

New blogging software

I liked Darby Lines' description of the Pelican blogging platform so selected this as my blogging platform as well. As Darby did, Dropbox is used to get content to my site where it is then processed by Pelican into this web site.

Most blogging systems store content to be displayed in a database. When somebody opens a page, the content for that page is retrieved from the database and displayed. To use Pelican, on the other hand, the files that make up a site are stored in a content directory. Mostly stored as Markdown or other supported file formats, plus images. Pelican takes these files and processes them into a website of all static HTML content. Creating rss/atom feeds, index pages, archive pages, etc... as required.

There were several reasons for going with a static site. Primarily security but also perfomance. While I've not suffered large loads on the site, database backed dynamic sites can be overwhelmed by a large traffic spike. Web servers perform at their best with static content so this leverages this feature.

A dynamic site typically requires a scripting language such as PHP, Ruby or perl. Plus a database like MySQL, SQLite or, Postgres SQL. Including the web server this means you have to keep all required components patched for security reasons. Each patch update can cause conflicts with other installed components. Reducing a site to just the web server reduces the number of things that can be attacked.

New virtual machine

Instead of using a hosted web service I have a virtual server from Host Virtual. I prefer running a virtual machine, it gives me flexibility to run the services and software I want. I can host multiple domains and sub-domains without paying extra. I get to pick, and maintain the Linux distribution I want (Gentoo) and my choice of web server. Keeping up to date with security patches and new versions is my responsibility, but I prefer it this way and Gentoo's package management makes it pretty easy.

SSL

I used SSL on my old server, mainly with the mail server and a sub-domain site I had setup. I decided to expand my use of SSL because I think there should be more encrypted traffic flowing on the net. The NSA gathers as much as possible, and is especially interested in encrypted traffic. Might as well fill their drives with my pointless blog.

I didn't just throw a self-signed SSL certificate on the server and call it good. I wanted a truly signed SSL certificate, but I'm cheap, so I went with a free certificate from StartSSL. They provide a basic domain signed public key for free. Although they offer to create a private key for you, if you create the key yourself on your own equipment then they never have to see it and you don't need to worry about the security of their service.

Once I had an officially trusted public/private key pair I wanted to make sure SSL was setup correctly. I used SSL Labs SSL site tester to verify I was doing it right. After some experimentation I got all the current best practices working. Forward secrecy is supported so that even if my private key has been compromised the encrypted traffic can't be broken. According SSL Labs Internet Explorer really won't like this site, although the IE 9 I use in the office seems to work OK.

2013 New Year's Resolution

2012-12-31T19:42:00-06:00

I'm pretty happy with the results of my one resolution from last year, to exercise more. I went from being able to barely walk for 20 minutes (a bit under a mile), to being able to walk, with some slow running mixed in, for 4 miles (120 minutes for that). I like having one resolution rather than a whole list, it focuses me more, so I'm going to continue that and just have one new resolution for this year: donate blood 6 times in 2013.

My father has leukemia. Because of this, 2012 was a very roller coaster year emotionally for the family. The absolute bottom was when he was sent home with pneumonia that wasn't responding to drugs on top of leukemia that wasn't responding to drugs. He was given less than a week to live. This was last August and he's still around. The pneumonia is gone, and still working on leukemia. During his treatment, even back to when he had MDS (pre-leukemia), involved frequent blood transfusions. Both red blood cells and platelet transfusions, sometimes both on the same day. He's probably had 20 transfusions over the course of his treatment. So my one goal for 2013 is blood donations.

I know, I can already hear "Kevin you dumb ass, you don't donate now?" Unfortunately no. I've given blood twice in my life. Well, actually once I gave blood, and once I failed at it miserably. I don't know why but I seem to have a psychological problem with donating blood. It's not the pain, i'm not sure why but just the thought of it fills me with dread. That second time I tried to donate blood? I fainted - before I even donated, i'd completely psyched myself out and collapsed as i was getting on the chair to donate. So in firm belief that the best way to overcome fear is to face it and keep going, I plan on donating 6 times in 2013 (you have to wait 8 weeks between donations). It's a mere drop in the bucket for what my dad needs, but it helps, and if overcoming this fear makes me a better person along with it then double-win.

I'll be donating at the Community Blood Center of Greater Kansas City. Medical requirements for donating are here

Steve Jobs, Apple and Me

2011-10-06T14:50:00-05:00

I am a computer person. Computers have not been widely available all my life, but I was exposed at a very early age. Learning BASIC on a mainframe at the National Weather Service. My freshmen year of high school I'd take the bus to my dad's office after school and hang out until he was done for the day and we could go home. It was mainly a way to get me out of my dad's hair.

At high school we had Apple ][+ and Commodore PET computers. I was a die hard Apple user. I didn't like using the PET computers and got away with almost zero usage on them. At home my father bought an Apple //e that pretty much ended up being my computer (in fact, I still have it.) I used the hell out of that thing, playing games, learning Applesoft BASIC and eventually 6502 assembly language.

In these early years I was much more of a Wozniak follower. He was the engineer and the did the real work. Steve Jobs, eh, he was the business guy, whatever (hey I was in high school.) I used an Apple //e through college (getting an electrical engineering degree because, hey, I already knew how to program, screw computer science.) Campus computers were either dumb terminals tied to mainframes (oh god I had to learn FORTRAN) or IBM PC's, and even in those early days frequently virus infected. I'd heard/seen Macs but stuck with my tools (not to mention I couldn't exactly afford anything at that time.)

My first job after college used software that was IBM PC only, so I learned to use those (DOS mainly with a bit of Windows 3.1 thrown in, yuck) eventually support them, and to this day use them. Through Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, on up to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (f'in Microsoft names) today.

But at home, it's always been Apple. I got paid to use/support PC's but I wanted to use Apple. At first I just hung onto that Apple //e. Finally, I broke down and got a Macintosh Performa 400 (with the Apple //e card, natch.) This combined with Adam Engst's Internet Starter Kit and Mosaic got me a color computer and on the Internet (and was the cause of the first all-nighter I'd pulled since graduating college.)

This is when my idea of computers started changing from the Wozniak engineering, to the Steve Jobs design. This is when I started to see that it isn't function over form, or form over function, but that form when properly designed for it's function is beautiful and so much more preferable to use. Not every iteration was perfect, but so many more things from Apple fit this than anyone else.

It was Jobs' insistence not just on simplicity, but justification of every feature. Machines weren't just an assembly of parts with a few drivers thrown in. Features needed stories and poorly written stories weren't included. Now matter how many competitors jumbled the parts into their models seeking to differentiate themselves with checklists of functions.

I use, support and make a living from Windows machines. I use Linux servers at home because they satisfy some engineer's sensibility in me, but I, like millions of other people, ENJOY using my Mac, iPhone and iPad. I don't think Steve could've had a better legacy.

In-App Web Viewers vs. Safari

2011-04-15T21:08:00-05:00

I recently got into a bit of a twitter argument with Dan Frakes of Macworld about apps that have links to web pages and open those pages in their own web viewer within the app, instead of handing the link to mobile Safari (hereafter just called Safari as this is an all iOS discussion) and letting it handle it.

Most apps do this because it became the norm when there was no multitasking on iOS. Switching away from an app meant shutting it down. Reopening it sent you back to the beginning. Apps avoided this 'return to the beginning' by opening web pages in a browser built into the app. It worked around this limitation nicely.

But under iOS 4 when an app supports multitasking it can save its state so when reopened it returns to the same exact state it was left in. This means it can send the user to Safari, and when the user returns they resume right where they left off.

When an app with an internal webview works perfectly the workflow is:

Click link in app
webview opens
read web page
close app's internal web browser
return to what I was doing

When an app sends the link to Safari the workflow is:

Click link in app
Safari opens, read web page
Double-click home button, click app icon
return to what I was doing

That double-click home, then click the app icon is the only complaint about this process I've seen that I think holds any water. More on that later.

So why is opening in links in Safari better than opening web pages in an internal page? Because the internal web browsers randomly break on many web pages, plus many actions I typically do when reading web pages aren't available to me.

The number one broken web site on internal browsers is YouTube. I've yet to see any browser but Safari that can open a YouTube page and have the video actually work. Additionally I've seen many other pages break because the internal web browsers User Agent strings are set to something weird which websites don't identify correctly and then present really broken web pages.

The workflow for working with an app that opens links that won't work with it's internal viewer is:

Click link in app
webview opens
Me: "oh it's a YouTube page" (frequently disguised behind a URL shortner)
Click button to bring up menu of other options
click button to send web page to Safari
watch video
switch back to app
close app's internal web browser
return to what I was doing

For an app that always hands off links to Safari the workflow: Click link in app Safari opens, watch video Double-click home button, click app return to what I was doing

One of Dan's points was that with internal webviews context sensitive options are available. In other words when you click a link in a twitter app you're most likely want to do twitter things with that link in the future. This is true occasionally, but far more often because it's a web page I'll want to do many more web things with it than twitter things.

What if I want to make a bookmark to the website so I can read more goodies in the future without waiting for someone to tweet about it? Can't do that with an internal web view, i have to send the link to Safari then bookmark. What if I want to send the link to some other web service? Apps with browsers are pretty good about supporting Instapaper these days, not so good at supporting Read It Later, and pinboard.in support is very rare. But all these are available in my Safari. Future ones not yet invented won't have to wait to get popular enough to be supported by iOS apps, they just need to support Safari and app support is there.

One final pain is when the link is to a website I frequent and when I'm finished I want to comment on the article. But since this isn't Safari I'm not logged in. Now I have either go fetch my password from 1Password in order to login via the internal web page, or send the page over to Safari where I'm already logged in.

Felix Metzger on twitter mentioned that sending links to Safari has the disadvantage that returning to the original app is 3 taps (2 on the home button, one on the app). He's correct, and you'll have to do this every time. My argument is that this is so LESS annoying than randomly having pages not working and then opening them in Safari anyway (frequently requiring 2 or more clicks), that the 3 click return for every link doesn't bother me at all. I already do it for every broken link, plus I have to then additionally close the internal web viewer in the original app -- adding one or two more clicks that wouldn't have been necessary at all.

Sending links to Safari always works (so long as the website itself is in working order). The workflow is consistent every single time, click link, go to safari, read web page, 3 taps to return. Internal web viewers frequently break, I estimate around 10% of the links I get don't work at all and another 10% end up with me opening in safari anyway so I can bookmark or comment or add to pinboard. That means the workflow is sporadic, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The Mac way has always been to go for the method that "just works". Internal web viewers don't. They should go away.

Apple's Newish In-App Purchase Policy

2011-03-02T03:44:00-06:00

A follow up to my Apple vs. Sony post. Apple has specifically stated that if you link to a website store in your app, anything digital you offer for sale on that website store has to be made available to app users via an in-app purchase. Apple charges developers 30% of the in-app purchase price.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball wrote an article covering these topics as well, I pretty much agree with everything he wrote and reinterate some of his points below.

Again the big question here for consumers is how does this affect Amazon Kindle app. Apple just accepted an update from Amazon last week that still includes a button that has a link to the Kindle Store on each page. So to date Apple appears to be OK with Amazon. They may be waiting for iOS 4.3 to ship before enforcing the policy with Amazon, or they may be in dicscussions with Amazon, or they may just be ignoring Amazon. It's Apple, all three are likely.

Even if Apple rejects the Amazon Kindle app from the store it's doubtful they'll delete the app from everyone's devices. Although they have the capability, Apple has never done this (which puts them ahead of Amazon, who has deleted several books from Kindles.)

A bigger question is why is Apple doing this? And many seem to be saying "Oh my god Apple is so unfair" or "30% is too much money!" I'll take a shot at answering these.

Why is Apple doing this? I see two reasons behind this. One is about books and magazines. Apple doesn't want iBooks to become irrelevent in the ebook market. Currently a book publisher that wants to make ebooks available can go to Amazon and have the book available on way more devices, including Apple's, than if they negotiate with each ebook reader individually. If Apple can reduce the use of the Amazon Kindle app on iOS devices it will force those publishers to either create their own apps and sell the books with in-app purchases, or to make books available via iBooks. Either way the publisher gets 70% of the price, Apple gets 30%, Amazon gets circumvented. Win-win for Apple, and no loss to the publisher (Amazon's cut is 30% or worse on Kindle books, so the publisher doesn't lose money this way.)

The second reason is this: Does Wal-mart allow Costco to setup little stores inside of their stores? Hell no. Apple feels the same way. They went to all the trouble of creating this awesome device, and awesome market, and now they're getting circumvented? That would piss them off a great deal. So they're putting an end to it. By the way, Amazon does allow other companies to sell stuff via Amazon's web site. I'm curious to what cut Amazon takes from those companies. Would be an interesting perspective to the "30% is too much money" argument.

Does it hurt the customer? Not immediately. Customer's probably won't lose access to any current applications. If Amazon's app gets pulled I believe it will be Amazon's decision to pull out, not Apple kicking them out. There is the potential that some developers may decide to opt out of developing for iOS because the costs, but I don't see that happening anytime soon while the iOS has so many more people actually buying apps (with real money) than other platforms.

"Apple is being unfair." Apple is only being unfair to resellers. If you want to setup a web store and cater to iOS users with a custom app, Apple wants a cut. If you're a publisher you're already used to giving a cut to various retail outlets. Apple's deal may actually be better for them. But if you're an aggregator of content and you already negotiated taking a cut from publisher, Apple's 30% is probably coming from your cut. And you may be screwed. Apple doesn't really care, they want to bring publishers direct to the customers, not through multiple layers of middle men.

Is 30% too much money? I honestly don't know. Amazon wanted more, when they were the only game in town, then Apple undercut them and they dropped their own pricing pretty quickly, suggesting 30% cut is more than generous. Press releases announcing price cuts are greeted much more enthusiastically than announcements of price increases. If Apple determines 30% is keeping away too many publishers or developers, they can lower later. As a consumer I don't really care what the deal is between the publisher and Apple. Just as I don't really care what the deal is between Costco and the various manufacturers. I'm looking at my total cost. If Apple reduces the 30% cut will app prices drop? Some may, but I actually think most developers would keep the extra money (and there is nothing wrong with that!)

I think publishers are currently using to paying way more the 30% to get their books on shelves of bookstores. They have to pay the author, editor, the printer, advertising, the middle men, etc... If they negotiate directly with Apple or Amazon or Sony or Barnes & Noble they know they'll get 70% of the price. They'll still need to cover the author, editor, and advertising but other costs are eliminated, Apple is now the middle-man for all the other stuff (bandwidth, storage, store front development costs, etc...) and it comes out of the 30%. Currently publishers are most likely avoiding ebooks because they don't want to risk their paper book sales, which are probably still larger than their ebook sales. So they'll keep the prices artificially high while they transistion. I expect prices of ebooks to start dropping in 4 or 5 years as paper book sales tank.

Apple vs. Sony

2011-02-01T23:19:00-06:00

Full disclosure: I own Apple stock and am a (paying) member of the Apple iOS developers program, although i've no apps in the app store.

Well in typical Apple vague as shit manner they've muddied up the waters of how ebook apps have to work on iOS devices. Apple rejected an app from Sony that, according to Sony was for reading ebooks on iOS devices, specifically books people bought from Sony's ebook store for their Sony ebook readers.

Apple never talks about apps it's rejected, and recommends dev not talk about them either. Probably good advice, it's easy to piss off Apple and hard to un-piss them off after. Sony probably figures they're big enough to get away with it, but Apple really doesn't care how big you are.

Anyway, all we know about the app is what Sony says it submitted, which according to the New York Times story is an app which works just like the Kindle application. The Kindle app has a button labeled "Kindle Store". Pressing that button opens Safari to the Kindle store at Amazon.com. That's it. You can't search for authors or titles in the app, and can't buy anything in the app.

Assuming that's true (and I wouldn't be surprised to find Sony shading the truth somewhat) then it would appear Apple has changed it's policy regarding apps in the app store.

In a clarifying statement (which you just know pissed them off having to issue,) Apple said:

We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines. We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.

First they claim they aren't changing terms or guidlines, but their very next statement is "We are now requiring," (emphasis mine) which implies that they weren't previously requiring this and therefore it's a new requirment. Ugh.

"If an app offers the customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app." It doesn't say if the company offers ability to purchase books outside of the app, it says if the app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app. Sounds like the Kindle button is no longer allowed. But really that's just a web link. If you offer a link in your app to someone else's store, such as a link to Baen's ebook store, which has all DRM free books in many formats, or Fictionwise, which has some DRM free books, is that no longer allowed, even if it isn't your store?

What about Amazon's store app? This is separate from the Kindle app. It allows you to search for MP3 downloads, but you can't buy them, only add them to your wishlist for purchase from your computer later. Is this allowed (Apple's statement only references books, but i imagine it applies to all digital content purchases)? If they duplicated this in the Kindle app for books -- searching and browsing but no puchases just wishlists, is that OK? If I were Apple this would irritate me more than the current link to Safari does.

So as a stock holder, what do I think? Overall I think Apple is starting to get just a bit greedy on wanting a cut of every purchase made with an iOS device (I'm sure they're doing this with the near field networking they're setting up for adding to iphones sometime in the future as well, if you want to use it Apple will need a cut.)

Am I selling my stock? Hell no. They've got a ways to go before i reach that point. Besides, I'm not sure any of the interpertations of this are correct. Two sentances from Apple and a story from Sony (I really am not fond of Sony, they are the original "lock it up" device maker, the reason they've never made it in the digital music player market is their initial insistance on using ATRAC only, no support for MP3 at all.)

When Apple can release an app for the Sony e-reader that lets me buy iBooks I'll be more concerned about Sony's welfare on iOS devices.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2010-12-10T03:33:00-06:00

A few nights ago (but I just watched tonight) Jon Stewart had General Hugh Shelton on for the interview segment. It went long and they put the full interview on the web (and in the iTunes episode, which is how I watch them.)

One of the topics they discussed is Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT). General Shelton was against repeal of DADT right now, saying it needed to be studied a bit more. His reasoning for saying it needed a bit more study was because the Marine Infantry and Army Infrantry, when surveyed, were the most likely to say it would affect unit cohesion. And because the infantry units are the core foundation those arms of the military DADT should not be repealed until further study into unit cohesion in the infrantry is complete.

I think the General is wrong, but we'll get to that in a minute. I just want to say that General Shelton had the best argument for a delay in this whole moronic debate. He had a reason for the delay, he had facts from the study, he presented it well. Meanwhile John McCain is over in the senate acting like he's terrified of the gays and desperatly grasping at straws for reasons to delay (the economy was the last reason. Are you effin serious?)

The reason I think General Shelton is wrong is because he's really arguing against gays being in the military at all. DADT doesn't keep gays out, but it forces those gays that do serve to lie (and lies of omission are still lies), and it creates taboo subjects for military to talk about. When people in military units are keeping secrets, I'm pretty sure that has an affect on unit cohesion, right now. Delaying the repeal just keeps the lies coming.

Other effects of DADT affect the security of the nation, making gay service personal keep secrets just gives more ways to blackmail. Being able to start a witch hunt against anyone by making implications they're gay is another good way to threaten unit cohesion. All around DADT is a bad policy. It was the delay needed to study the affects of gays being in the military, and it's pretty clear that except when they're hounded and hunted down, or can't take lying to their fellow soldiers anymore, it works out pretty well. Take away the lies.

Interview from the Daily Show (DADT part starts at 11:20):

Thoughts on the Original Apple TV

2010-09-28T22:51:00-05:00

I've got an original Apple TV, the one that shipped with a hard drive and component TV outputs. I'll be getting the new Apple TV, supposedly on Thursday, that only streams media — from your own computer or from the internet. I wanted to document my complaints about the existing Apple TV so I can do a comparison of the two systems.

My current Apple TV connects to a 32" HDTV (720p) via HDMI. Sound is via the digital optical cable to my receiver. It's connected to the home network via wire, however my computer is downstairs, and my Apple TV is upstairs. The two locations are joined via a powerline network. I reviewed this setup in TidBITS way back in 2007. TL;DR version is the powerline setup is faster than 802.11g wi-fi and I still don't have 802.11n wireless at home. I'm hoping to connect upstairs and downstairs via an ethernet cable (which would give me a gigabit connection between the two) before the new Apple TV arrives. My internet connection is a 6 Mbps (down) DSL connection from Speakeasy.net (one of the best damn ISPs around, even while being owned by Best Buy).

Back in December I cancelled my cable TV subscription. It cost $60 a month. The digital signals on cable TV were terrible. They had frequent drop-outs where everything would turn completely blocky and the audio would drop out. You can watch a poor analog TV station to a certain degree, espeically if the audio was decent throughout, but on digital even small dropouts are really annoying. This is a huge reason I think downloads are the better solution than streaming, especially over the internet.

Since cancelling my cable the Apple TV has become the dominant way for me to watch and listen to stuff from on my media center. What I previously watched from cable I buy from iTunes. My TiVO records over the air (at better quality than cable provided), but I typically only watch it a few times a week to catch up on shows. I listen to more podcasts than I ever listened to the radio. The Apple TV is on almost all the time that I'm at home.

Despite the continuous use the Apple TV drives me crazy. The interface is poorly thought out (the TiVO interface remains the best media center interface I've used.) Here are the top annoyances I've found with the current Apple TV.

Syncing is flaky

This is a combination of issues with iTunes and the Apple TV. There isn't a way to iniate a sync from the Apple TV side. Just the iTunes side. Even using something like Keyboard Maestro with it's iPhone interface that can be used control iTunes makes it hard to start a sync remotly.

Apple decided to fix this problem by completely doing away with syncing. I'm not convinced this is the answer, but perhaps network streaming from a local machine will be sufficent. I think it might work if the Apple TV can do a wake-on-lan and launch iTunes on the remote computer automatically so it doesn't have to be awake and online all the time.

Slow interface

Navigating menus on the Apple TV can be painful. Reponses to button presses on the remote can take forever to register. With no feedback if a button press was accepted this leads to pushing buttons over and over, and then having them execute all at once.

Opening the My Movies or TV Shows list is slow as it tries to build a screenshot of the first frame of each movie. It doesn't appear to cache any of this data so it's always rebuilding these snapshots. If you add "album art" (the same phrase is used for iTunes music, movies and TV shows) you can stop it from rebuilding these frames all the time.

The single most frustrating behavior to me is when the Apple TV can take 10-30 seconds to resume playback of a long podcast. If I pause playback of a podcast, then press play, the further I am into the podcast the longer the resume takes. Short music tracks don't seem to have this problem, neither do video (video podcasts work fine as well.)

Different remote control behaviors for audio vs. video playback

When playing audio, pressing the forward button once jumps to the next track, pressing it in video playback puts it into fast forward mode. The audio choice makes some sense for music playback, but i'd really prefer the button to do the same thing all the time. And the jump to the next track operation sucks when listening to podcasts and you want ff through a bit of it.

The reverse button changes similarly in video vs. audio playback modes.

Can't rate songs as they play

iTunes has allowed you to rate music with 1-5 stars for many years. You can't rate songs from the Apple TV interface. With the introduction of Ping I'm hoping they allow both star ratings and Ping "likes" from the Apple TV.

The New AppleTV and Ping

2010-09-02T20:19:00-05:00

Apple's iPod event was yesterday. As usual rumors abounded before hand, and failed to come through. The funniest was Apple didn't rename Apple TV to iTV as every-freaking person in the world predicted. Apple TV also didn't become a touch driven interface (touch provided via the Magic Trackpad Apple introduced). This is a good thing, mostly. I don't recall hearing too much that Apple might roll-out a social networking deal (Ping), so I guess most people missed that too.

I'm going to confine my comments to just 2 things: Apple TV and Ping. Most of the rest of the announcements were typical. Shuffle and Nano changes are neat, like most people I think the Nano would be a cool watch, but I hate wearing watches so I can't bring myself to get excited about it.

Ping

I've signed up for an account, played with it for an hour or so, hate it. I'm not a huge social network user. I've got a twitter account for spewing forth my idiotic observations to the void and that is tied to my Facebook account (if the void has to put up with my idiotic observations, so do my family and friends.) My Facebook profile is mostly empty. It's got my name and hometown. My birthday is a lie. My high school and college - not filled in. To find me you have to remember how to spell my name correctly.

I frequently post about music on Twitter, typically when I'm downloading stuff from E-Music or found an album I just can't stop listening to. My tastes are very wide-ranging. Classical, Blues, Rock, Alternative, World music, I've got something from every genre imaginable.

Ping is completely worthless for this type of interaction. The whole purpose of Ping is the iTunes Store. There is no link between your iTunes music library and Ping. The only way to comment on a track you like is to leave a review of that track on the store. The only way to like a song is via the store. In other words, even if you've bought all the albums from your favorite artist via the iTunes store, the only way to tell other people how much you liked them is to jump to the store and click the like button there.

If you're like me (and everyone should be!), you've purchased tons of music from other sources. I've been a member of e-music since the good old days of "download as much as you want for a flat fee". It was awesome. I bloated my music collection by several gigs during those days. To this day I still download 2 or 3 albums a month from e-music. If e-music doesn't have something I want, I'll check iTunes and Amazon MP3 store (before iTunes went DRM free, I'd check Amazon first. Now I check Amazon's $5 album specials and I love their 99 classical tracks for $5 specials.)

If it's an artist that isn't in the iTunes store, then you can't like them in Ping. That's right, nobody on Ping likes the Beatles, those haters.

Next issue is right in the same line. There is no web site for Ping. Not even through Apple's Mobile Me server. Only usable in iTunes. This means I can't use it from work, or even a friends house. Once again, tied to tightly to the iTunes store. Plus this means it's very difficult for me to encourage non-iTunes users to look at my music tastes, and gasp buy some of that music from iTunes -- bringing them into the fold. Short sighted thinking from Apple.

Apple TV

Apple did a better job with the upgrade to the Apple TV. I've got the old Apple TV, and I've already ordered the new one (I'm such a sucker.)

Back in January I killed my cable connection. I use my Tivo HD to record HD over the air signals for the shows available that way. Cable shows I really love I buy subscriptions to via Apple TV. I buy the standard def versions (they fill my wide screen TV but they look like upscaled DVDs rather than even 720p HD) so I pay in the range of $20-$40 for a season of shows (I've only purchased about 7 shows this year so far, so that's a pretty huge savings over the $60 a month I was paying for HD cable.)

Because I killed my cable connection, the Apple TV has become the most used component in my media system. Haven't used my DVD player in years (I rip the DVDs I buy and put them on the Apple TV), Tivo is just recording over the air, haven't fired up the xbox in a few months.

Even though it's the most used component doesn't mean I love it. The thing has problems galore, and is barely usable. I'd probably have switched to a mac mini connection instead but the Apple TV was limping along (and i upgraded the hard drive in it to 320GB, which helps.)

The biggest problem with the Apple TV is how freaking slow the hardware is. It plays H.264 video great, but that's about it. Moving around the menus is horrible. Half the time I switch my system from the Tivo to the Apple TV I have to turn the TV off and back on before the video will show up. Random reboots (very rarely when watching, but frequently if I've left something paused for a long time to switch to watching the Tivo.)

The new Apple TV does away with the old hardware. They've adopted the A4 chip for it's CPU, the same chip that powers the iPhone 4 and new iPod touch. They've eliminated the hard drive, and got rid of the component connections. These changes let it drop the size to a 1/4 of the previous Apple TV size, plus they dropped the price to $99.

Software-wise the interface remains mostly the same (with the elimination of locally stored stuff) adding on Netflix streaming and a system for accessing TV show episodes from your favorite tv shows (this ties into their new, limited to a few networks, $.99 tv show episode rentals).

Dropping the price to $99 is the biggest point in Apple's favor. This makes it much more competitive with the Roku boxes used for Netflix and Amazon streaming. Hopefully the A4 chip fixes some of the speed issues (although not mentioned, it would be nice if they doubled the memory. Current model has 256MB of memory. 512MB would go a long way towards fixing some of the speed issues.

Dropping the component connection is a typical Apple move. They were the first to abandon a whole slew of interfaces (floppy, Apple propritetary keyboard ports, SCSI) for newer USB and Firewire technologies. It's right in line with their dismissal of Flash as "old technology". It pisses people off for awhile, but goes away as everyone else catches up with Apple. Even Flash stories have changed from "Apple will die without Flash support" to "look how crappy Flash is on these other mobile devices." No component connectors saves Apple on space and money at the cost of a few individuals with older TVs.

I have a bigger issue with dropping the hard drive. I actually like syncing to my Apple TV. Currently my media center connection to my main computer is fairly slow connection between floors so when I do stream, especially video, it can occasionally get laggy. rewinding and fastfowarding also get a bit weird on a stream.

The new Apple TV still includes an "Apple use only" USB port, the same as the original Apple TV. This was used to hack the old Apple TV, so hopefully it will be possible to do so on the new one.

The biggest disappointments to most people was that Apple didn't appear to adopt the iOS operating system, and there are no 3rd party apps available.

I'm pretty sure Apple is using iOS, and has been using iOS, on the Apple TV for a long time. iOS and regular Mac OS share a great deal of underpinnings, differing mainly in how apps run (sandboxed in the case of iOS), user permissions (very restricted for iOS) and interface (mutli-touch for iOS).

My guess is that Apple TV uses iOS, with a different interface (in other words, sandboxed apps and restricted user permissions but AppleTV menu system). Touch interfaces will never work on a TV. Touch interfaces are TERRIBLE when what you are trying to touch is not immediately under your finger. Try turning off your iPhone screen and touch where you think an app is. Turn the screen back on and see how close you were. You were probably off a bit. Probably enough to have launched the wrong app. While voice over works wonders for vision impaired, it requires a lot of gliding over the phone to find out what is going on. This will be insufficient for the majority of TV users. I've found even touch sensitive remote controls are terrible unless they are gesture based, rather than target based (use gestures like swipe down to move the cursor down, swipe right to fast-foward, etc...) Most people don't want to look at their remotes to rewind the good scene they just watched.

Apps would be nice. The absence of Pandora on Apple TV was pretty noticible to me. But they would have to be dedicated to the AppleTV, not just allow the existing apps to run. The non-touch interface just wouldn't allow existing apps to translate to the AppleTV. But until this new form factor settles out, and the iPad is further along, I don't see Apple dedicating resources to this until next year. So we might see apps in 2011, but I'd guess 2012 more realistically.

So as far as I see, the Apple TV is still a hobby. A more significant hobby. Hopefully they got the hardware right this time, the price point is pretty darn good, and the software is where they'll focus next.

Hiroshima & Nagasaki - A biased opinion

2010-08-06T15:51:00-05:00

Today is August 6th, 2010. The 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. In 3 days it will be the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. Many claim these bombings should not have taken place, or been done in different locations, specifically that a demonstration on an empty island should have been done first. I disagree, I think that these bombings were necessary both to end the at-the-time current conflict, and to provide a warning to future generations exactly what it was we had developed.

I'm not unbiased in my opinion. My father and his family were held in Japanese concentration camps. My grandfather and many of my older uncles were forced into Japanese slave labor, mainly in mining. My grandfather and several uncles died in the mines. I remain convinced that greatly shortening the war saved several of the lives of other family members.

Did the bombings really shorten the war? I think the evidence is pretty clear on this. The Japanese didn’t give up anything without losing a lot of blood over it. Every island in the island hopping strategy was a fierce battle. I think how much worse the battle in the Pacific was is just coming out now, with HBO’s “The Pacific” being a good example.

Six months of continual fire-bombing of 67 Japanese cities had killed 500,000 people, with little apparent result to the Allies. The atomic bombs killed around 123,000 in the first day and 2x total. How many more months and more hundreds of thousands would’ve been necessary to bring the war to a conclusion? Would an invasion by the allies been required, how many lives would that have cost? Great Britain never surrendered to an aerial bombardment alone, would the Japanese have done so?

Would selecting a different target have had less of an impact? Would a demonstration have proved effective? We can never know for sure, but I think the indicators are pretty good that the emotional impact the bombs produced would’ve been greatly diminished.

Many say that more military targets should’ve been selected. World War I and World War II put an end to a clear delineation between military targets and civilian targets. All major cities were housing to military manufacturing centers, ports and rail hubs are vital to the logistics of war. Major military bases are located near cities. Hiroshima had a number of military bases by it, including the headquarters of the army in charge of the defense of southern Japan. Nagasaki was a major military manufacturing center and seaport. I don’t think locations of significant military importance, but not near a civilian city would have worked; they may not have even existed.

Finally, I think there is another aspect to these bombings that is important to consider – their impact on future generations. Serving as a warning to future generations is never a justification for using wepons of mass destruction. But these bombings brought the very real power of them to the forefront. If they hadn’t been used in WW 2, I’m convinced they would’ve been used in a later war – with far more powerful bombs, and with far less true military significance. Demonstrations just aren’t visceral enough for this. The first hydrogen bomb was detonated at Bikini Atoll. This bomb was orders of magnitude larger than the atomic bombs used on Japan. It pretty much wiped out an entire island and produced radioactive contamination over many more islands. Yet when speaking of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction we point to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima must be honored and remembered. The enormous power and ease of use of our greatest weapons must not be forgotten. But I remain unconvinced there was another or better way of achieving what was needed, as quickly and with a lower cost in lives (on either side).

We haven't learned

2010-07-19T20:00:00-05:00

Argh. I wrote this back in 2006: More Analysis Not More Data

Information gathering is certainly needed, but that isn’t what we’ve been lacking. We’ve been lacking good analysis of the information we do have. Why the administration insists it needs the ability to spy on anyone/anywhere without warrants when they can’t even analyze the current information they have is beyond me.

Now the Washington Post has an in-depth look at this building and building and building of intelligence agencies to suck in more data but not actually analyze it. Complete waste of time that is just waiting to explode into huge scandal of abuse and cover-ups.

Top Secret America

Plantronics 975 bluetooth headset

2010-02-20T22:14:00-06:00

I'm on my 5th bluetooth headset. Two Motorola something or others, an Etymotic etyBLU which I lost, a Jawbone 2, and now a Plantronics 975.

The Motorola headsets were cheap and adequate. Not spectacular looking and the audio wasn't great. I upgraded to the EtyBLU based on reviews that it was supposed to be the best. It's an in the ear canal model. It also has a removable boom mic combined with its noise supression makes it work really well in noisy conditions. The problem I had with it was its bluetooth connection to my Blackberry was terrible. I couldn't get more than 5 feet away from my phone without completely dropping the connection. Even with it right next to the phone it was fairly poor connection. Then I lost it in an airport.

After that I got a Jawbone 2 pretty cheap on Woot. Initial impressions were favorable. It certainly had a solid connection to my phone. But in actual use I wasn't quite as impressed. It has a switch on the phone called a voice activity sensor, it's supposed to help the headset with noise suppression but i don't think it sat on my jaw correctly and actually caused problems. The button for answering calls was very hard to hit as it is hidden under the surface of the headset, but has no tactile feedback for when your finger is over the button.

Both the Jawbone 2 and the EtyBLU have custom USB chargers. I find this annoying when I travel. I'm always forgetting a cable or two, and needing special cables for each device is a pain.

Now comes the Plantronics 975. I really like this headset. Like the EtyBLU it has a boom mic (permanently attached so I'm not worried about losing it) I don't feel like I have to yell to make sure the mic picks up my voice. The answer button is easily found and activated. The bluetooth connection is solid, I can walk across my living room into the kitchen and not lose signal. The recharger is a standard mini-USB connector. This is the same as my Blackberry so one cable can recharge both.

The ear connection is really nice. I thought it was an in the ear canal model, but it actually has an interesting silicon system that hooks inside the ear lobe and the speaker sits outside the ear canal. I really like this, it doesn't block outside noise nearly as much as the in the canal ones do (this may turn out to be a disadvantage in noisy environments, but my calls so far have been great). Also I seem to have a slight reaction to silicon in my ear. After an hour or so it starts to itch (foam ear tips work better for me, which I switched the EtyBLU to, the Jawbone 2 can't be changed.) The Plantronics starts having a reaction too, but it seems to take 3 or 4 hours. Washing the silicon may help with this as well.

One final thing that really put the Plantronics ahead of the other models for me is the case. It comes with a really nice faux leather case. It's like a small solid box. The box really feels like it'll protect the headset during travel. You dock the headset in the case via the mini-USB and you can charge the headset while it's in the case via a mini-USB connector on the outside of the box.

All well and good, but then reading the instructions I found out the case actually contains an additional battery. When fully charged the internal case battery can charge the headset two more times. That's 15 hours of talk time before needing to find an outlet. Perfect for those long travel days with lots of layovers. This design is really great, and makes it well worth the $100 price ($130 list, I bought mine cheaper via Amazon.)

I'll have a better feel for how the headset itself works for me over the next few calls but so far I'm very impressed with this headset.

Tinkerers are smarter than you

2010-01-31T21:57:00-06:00

Lots of words going around about how the iPad is the beginning of the "tinkerers sunset." In other words the apparent locked down nature of the device is going to bring an end to the tinkering people do with thing like their computer.

I call bollox. When I was a kid I began tinkering on one of the most open systems around, the Apple ][+ at high school, then the Apple //e at home. Those systems cost $2000+ dollars. My high school, a private catholic school, had around 7 Apple's, a handful of PET computers, and some weird mainframe in the corner. A handful students were tinkerers and sat around in the computer room over lunch and after school. There were occasional fights over who had a computer because there weren't enough. Whoever didn't get one ended up at a desk either hand marking up code, or reading the fucking manuals.

Now we have a $499 device (equivalent to a $250 device in 1984). I'm sure many schools, especially those expensive private ones, are looking to give one to every single kid. Resource limitation of 7 computers -- gone.

The Apple //e had one language available for free. Applesoft (or BASIC). When I wanted to learn a new language, 6502 assembler, i had to pirate an assembler package I couldn't afford.

Now, FOR FREE, Apple will give you the entire development environment for both the Mac OS X and iPHone OS. This is the same environment Apple themselves use to produce applications for the Mac and the iPhone. So far the current enviornment is WAY better for tinkering than when I was a kid.

Now we get to the part the death of tinkering claimers is bring about the death of tinkering. If you write an iPhone app you can't "officially" load it on your iPhone for free, you can only run it in the simulator. You need to be a paid member of the Apple iPhone Developer Program. Cost is $99 a year ($50 in 1984). Once you're a paid member you can load ANY program you write onto your own device. Apple does not approve apps you are loading on your phone, just the ones you want to make available via the iTunes App Store.

Except, you can jailbreak your iPhone. Jailbreaking means getting rid of the Apple requirement for apps to be signed by Apple to run (it's different from unlocking, unlocking an iPHone means allowing the celluar components to work with other cell providers.)

Just as I was willing to pirate an assembler package to learn a new language, any tinkerer worth their salt is going to know how to jailbreak their phone and skip the whole Apple approval process.

Is jailbreaking legal? Not completely. The DMCA copyright extensions would provide Apple a way of trying to legally shut the practice down. To me it's a lot more ethical than the pirating I did. I personally oppose the DMCA extensions and would love to see them repealed. But at the same time Apple hasn't enforced these provisions. They've not shutdown Cydia the app store for jailbroken apps. They haven't sued a single jailbreaker (more than the RIAA can say.)

Even if Apple starts hammering down on jailbreaking they won't really have any more affect than the anti-pirating measures companys put in place to prevent what I did.

I GUARANTEE you, put an iPad or iPod touch or iPHone in the hands of every teenager at a school and you will have tinkerers. Damn good ones. Ones that will learn to circumvent your locks. Ones that are smarter than you.

The iPad

2010-01-28T19:58:00-06:00

I do like the iPad. I think its a new category of device. Fat iPod is a visual description but I think it does the device a disservice. I can't count the number of times I've talked to people that have gone to a dual monitor on their computer. It changes their workflow, they feel more productive, etc.... Technically that's just a fatter computer but it's made them use it in a different way.

I have the same feeling about the iPad. It's a dual screen iPhone and it's going to trigger different uses and workflows. Things you don't even think of until you have it in hand.

Most specifically what the iPad ISN'T is it isn't designed to replace any device you have now. It's not an iPhone replacement (or even an iPod Touch replacement). It's not a laptop replacement. I've even seen it said that it'll fail because it doesn't replace an XBox. Well duh it's not an XBox. Neither is a netbook, neither is a laptop, neither is a Mac Pro.

I think everything left out that people complain about was left out on purpose because it actually made the product worse. Given that the original iPhone was called the Safari Pad it's obvious Apple has been working on this for a long time. My guess is they made lots and lots of prototypes and tried them extensively and if it was awkward or not working, out it went.

The use case I see for this is when you are sitting down. Recliner, couch, airplane seat, less so an office chair (unless next to the monitor of your "real" computer). iPad will spend most of it's time in your hands. Next most common will be propped up (probably by the case), the dock less than that (I'm sure there are people that will dock it with the keyboard and leave it that 24/7 but I think this will be rare outside the blogging/writer adopters.)

I also think this device will be left at home far more than smaller devices. I'll leave it on the arm of the couch when I go to work. Unless it works alot better for taking notes from the virtual keyboard then I'm picturing, I don't think i'll take to meetings with me (I do take notes on my iPod Touch). When I travel I definitely take it. For business travel I'll take it WITH my work laptop, not instead of. For personal travel I think it will be sufficient on it's own. At the bar, restaurant, ~~bathroom~~ I still use my iPod Touch.

Most common complaints I see are:

No phone - duh, it's a 10" device. You don't want to put this up to your face (by the way, I believe VOIP will work on the device.)
No back facing camera for taking pictures. Really? You want to pull out a 10" device to take pictures. Give me a break. Your phone is faster and more portable.
No foward facing camera. I thought about this one for awhile. On the surface it makes sense for things like iChat and Skype, but think about my use cases. If the most common use case is sitting down with the iPad in your hand, it's going to be in your lap. A camera would be angled straight up your nose. Even if you're tilting your head down the angle makes your head look huge. Next use case is propped up on a table. In landscape mode the camera would point at your chest (unless you angle it back more, then you're back to up the nose.) Portrait mode, on a dock might work, but unless you're very short I think this camera would shoot. your chin. To me a video chat works best with the camera at eye level. Which is a rare position for the iPad.
USB/firewire/HDMI - I don't want cables dangling all around me on the couch. The camera connection adds a USB to connect a camera will be curious to see how useful this is.
No 1080p - duh, the device is 10". 1080p at 10" is stupid waste of disk space, and you're already limited to at most 64 GB on
Only up to 64GB memory - it's thin and cheapish device. More memory is expensive, and the device has to be thicker, and heavier. This one will change over time. I'll never argue against more space (my iTunes library is over 500 GB, so the more I can put on a portable the happier I am).
No tethering from iPad to iPhone - this would be nice to avoid another data charge. I'm hoping for a wifi tethering mode in a future iPhone OS (similar to mifi functionality.) I'm guessing this was more a carrier decision than an Apple decision. I'd also like to tether to the iPad if it has 3G.

So what I see is Apple has come up with a nice device that supplements your other devices. It isn't designed to replace any of them, especially not combinations of them. Apple wants to sell lots of devices so their design is specifically set to be an additional device, not a replacement for existing ones. I can clearly see a use for Computer, iPhone/iPod Touch, and an iPad as a group of devices. Those whining it isn't awesome because it doesn't let them dump their existing devices don't know what they're talking about.

Global Warming — asking the wrong questions

2009-12-15T10:53:00-06:00

NPR ran a story on the Copenhagen meeting on climate change this morning and talked to Bjørn Lomborg. Lomborg is not a climate denier (those that refuse to believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes warming and that if it does the human contribution doesn't matter.)

Lomborg's stance is that climate change is a minor issue compared to disease and poverty in the world, and that money spent on trying to curb CO2 emissions is better spent on disease and poverty. I don't agree with this, but do agree that this should be looked at -- risk/benefit analysis should always be done on problems and potential solutions.

The problem I have is that the NPR reporter's question to Lomborg's economic view of the problem was "what is the economic value of the last polar bear?"

This is idiotic. Humans are selfish. Sure we care about polar bears, but ask most people what the economic value of the last polar bear is and you'll probably get an answer of "0". Same as the value of the last Dodo and the last Passenger Pigeon. If you want humans to care about saving polar bears, or taking action on climate change, you have to relate why it's important to them. Polar bears being cute, or it sad to watch them swim for miles to search for food is good for many people, but not enough people to really make an effort.

The real question for Lomberg is -- "what is the economic cost of expanding malaria carrying mosquitos by 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%?" or "what is the economic cost of increasing the number of droughts in the US by x%" or so on. These are questions with real meaning to humans.

These of course might be offset by "Increased CO2 increases plant growth, what is the economic benefit of this?" (this isn't necessarily a benefit though, the increased CO2 benefits weeds as well, does this mean we have to spend more on weed killers?)

Until reports on climate change start showing the actual costs to humanity we're never going to get past this low support for climate issues.

Mac Pro vs. iMac

2009-11-24T23:08:00-06:00

Got into a debate about the future of the Mac Pro on twitter. I believe this all started from an article Ted Landau wrote for Mac Observer

I haven't read the whole thing but that hasn't stopped me before. Here's what I think it would take for the iMac to be able to replace the Mac Pro. Do I think this is likely? Not really, I do think it's got an outside possibility of occuring. I'd give it about 30% chance of happening in 5 years. Also note that I do assume both lines will continue to be updated.

So, the Mac Pro has several advantages over the iMac. Most of them would have to be overcome for the iMac line to bypass the Mac Pro.

Multiple cores

Currently the Mac Pro maxes out at 4 core Xeon (the Xeon means it's capable of hyper threading where each core can act as 2 cores, effectively making the current Mac Pro an 8 core system). The next update will probably double this.

iMac matches the current Mac Pro. Top end iMac is a 4-core i7 which has hyper threading. Will the next iMac update be able to match the Mac Pro's next update again? My guess is yes, in a year. but the real question is: does continually throwing cores at your software scale linearly or is there a point where no additional processors will improve your speed. My guess is there is a maximum but it's probably more limited by drive speed than anything else. 128 core processes seeking to store their work on the same drives simultaneously will probably choke waiting for drives, while 2 64 core processor machines (with separate drive systems) complete the same task faster.

This is going to come down to the nature of the work. Fortunately for the Mac Pro, it's primary use in video and science research are easily parallelized on to multiple processors. It may be a lot of iterations of processor upgrades before the a peak is hit on these systems.
Maximum RAM

In 2006 the differential between max memory in the iMac line and the Mac Pro line was 16x (iMac - 2GB, Mac Pro - 32 GB). Today it stands at 2x, and after the next Mac Pro update will probably be 4x. It appears the iMac is closing in on the Mac Pro. If the next update jumps to a 128GB max instead of 64GB, then it may be able to keep it's advantage a lot longer.
Maximum video displays

iMac is at 2, Mac Pro is at 8. Will future upgrades add more to the iMac, will users demand more than 8 on a single computer? This is will be doable in the near future and mostly comes down to: Apple will do it if they really want to replace the Mac Pro line with an iMac Pro line instead (and if Apple wants to do this is completely up to Apple, who hasn't asked me.)
Maximum drive space

The only way the iMac can compete here is if there is some new external bus speed, faster than eSATA and Firewire 800, that enable the iMac to access an expansion system faster than an internal system. Rumors abound Apple will be going to the Light Peak interface, replacing all Firewire and USB connections, but Apple rumors gather like flies and are about as reliable. I think a new external bus sufficient to overcome current internal drive speeds is likely, but 1 year, 2 years, 10 years?

Also this assumes there won't be some new internal bus system that is far superior than the internal. I actually think this will be true. SATA/eSATA point to systems going to the same bus technology internal/external and I think that will continue.
Specialty expansion cards

Want fiber channel cards or speciality rendering cards? Mac Pro is your only hope. Only 2 ways an iMac could over come this: some brand new, super fast, not even rumored, external card system comes along (express card is insufficient), or the iMac gains so many processors that dedicating them to some of these speciality tasks is a no brainer.

We'll probably see some advances to express card, but not enough to overcome internal slot advances. Only hope here is for the the need of speciality cards to be reduced via additional processors, more memory and
Heat dissipation

When you have a big open volume of space and lots of fans you can run things hotter. Which means they can either run faster or you can run more of them. Rejiggering the case a bit to make it bigger (something Apple hates doing, they much prefer going smaller) might help. That might lead to a product line like the laptops, where MacBooks are the small ones and MacBook Pro are the big. iMac and iMac Pro, with the iMac Pro form factor being slightly larger.

Better power dissipation and higher efficiencies help as well, but that just lets you pack more in the larger case too. Moving to an internal SSD hard drive,with the large capacity drives being stored external would be a benefit. Assuming the SSD drive capacities expand as expected (pretty likely.)

So after all this, the summary -- the only real hope for the iMac to overcome the Mac Pro is if there is a point where the hardware is so ahead of the software that throwing more cores at it won't help, and new technologies come out that the advantage of external vs. internal is significantly reduced.

Likely? As I said, not really. Possible? Yeah, a faint possibility.

Copyrighting Stupidity

2008-03-23T06:43:00-05:00

The level of stupidity on the internet knows no bounds, but occasionally there are individuals that descend below even the typical train wreck mentality of the average internet user. And they usually start a blog.

Eventually the worst of the stupidity will get called out, usually by holding it up to the light, pointing and laughing in derision. And in typical fashion the derided will shake their little fists and stamp their little feet in anger and claim copyright violation.

Case in point. Global Geek News, a lie in every word as the site has nothing global in scope, the writer is obviously not a geek, and there is no news on it, decides it’s time to dictate Twitter policy. A person following 44 people with 57 followers decides to dictate Twitter policy. His post:
http://globalgeeknews.com/blog/?p=18

The derision:
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/03/on_twitter_ettiquette.html You’ll note the comment from the writer of Global Geek News (pcnerd37) claiming “you basically steal nearly every word from my posts.” Followed by posting PCNerd37’s Legal Whining which states:

bq.Any unauthorized reproduction of the contents of any post on the Global Geek News blog is strictly prohibited without consent from Global Geek News owner Jeremy Bray.

But no matter how much you whine, Fair Use still applies and fair use allows copying parts of a work for comment or CRITICISM, wihtout permission. Now fair use allows for copying pars of a work. And that is what the Bynkii post does, copys 2 posts from a blog and then criticizes them point by point. Each quote is accompanied by criticism.

Anyway, I’ve quoted is Legal page verbatim. He can claim copyright infringement if he wants, but he’ll lose.

oh and a tip, if you don’t want other blog posters commenting on your blog posts (which pretty much requires quoting) you should probably stop providing Trackback URLs.

Apple vs. Think Secret

2007-12-26T21:19:00-06:00

Mac rumor site Think Secret recently shutdown as part of an agreement with Apple. Apple sued Think Secret on January 5, 2005 after they published rumors about Apple’s plans to announce the iPod mini at the 2005 Macworld. Think Secret wasn’t the only rumor site at the time publishing rumors about Apple’s announcements, but Apple sued them to get the names of those that had leaked the information, and no one else, before actually making their announcments. This of course immediately lent credence to all of Think Secret’s claims, including claims that were wrong (such as price).

Many people have ventured opinions on the news, some claiming victory for Apple, some claiming Apple is a bully, others expressing disappointment in Nick Ciarelli (Think Secret’s publisher) for seemingly caving in to Apple and “damaging” the First Amendment.

I think both opinions are wrong. First, we don’t know the full extent of the agreement. All we know is Think Secret is shut down and Apple failed to get the names of those that disclosed information to Ciarelli. No information on if Ciarelli is prevented from stating another site, or working for another site. No information on if Apple paid Ciarelli any money.

I don’t think any damage was done to the First Amendment. This never went to court and no precendence setting decisions were rendered. You can’t cite agreements of this sort in a legal brief. So the First Amendment is where it was before the case began. The only precendence that might be claimed is that after 3 years a college student might get sick of a court case getting in the way of his studies.

Apple didn’t set any new claims for what is a trade secret. I’m not sure the information Ciarelli published could be considered a trade secret. The report simply stated: “Reliable sources inside and outside of Apple have confirmed Apple will announce the new pocket-size iPods in a number of capacities and in various colors, including stripes. Capacities will be 2 and 4GB — meaning users could store some 400 and 800 songs, respectively. Prices will start at around $100US”

David Zeiler at the Baltimore Sun believes Think Secret violated trade secret law because Ciarelli received information (citing the trade secret law) “knowing the same to have been stolen or appropriated, obtained, or converted without authorization”. The problem is that Zeiler doesn’t examine what a trade secret is. The law defines a trade secret as:

(3) the term "trade secret" means all forms and types of financial,business, scientific,
technical, economic, or engineering information,including patterns, plans, compilations,
program devices, formulas,designs, prototypes, methods, techniques, processes, procedures,
programs, or codes, whether tangible or intangible, and whether or howstored, compiled, or
memorialized physically, electronically,graphically, photographically, or in writing if?
    (A) the owner thereof has taken reasonable measures to keep suchinformation secret; and
    (B) the information derives independent economic value, actual orpotential, from not
        being generally known to, and not being readilyascertainable through proper means by,
        the public;

So is what Think Secret published a trade secret? I don’t think so. Part of it was finanical information, but that information was WRONG? So is wrong information a trade secret? I don’t think so, it might be harmful to Apple, but not a trade secret.

Part of it could be considered technical information, it mentions 2GB and 4GB sizes, but does this information “derive independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to…the public”?

Adam Engst contends that rumor information can be harmful to Apple by causing Apple customers to delay purchasing items. The problem is that close followers of Apple already KNOW Apple announces new products at Macworld and are waiting for that anyway. Personally I doubt those that aren’t close followers of Apple would be following Apple rumor sites, so I don’t see how they would even know to delay their purchase. At least not until Apple sued a rumor site and brought it to national attention.

Basically in the end I don’t think Apple or Ciarelli think they had an open and shut case and that is why they compromised. There are probably tangential reasons for the decisions on both sides for deciding to settle. I don’t see the First Amendment as being harmed in any way, it certainly has slowed down the flow of Apple rumors. Apple does come out looking like a bit of a bully, but it would’ve been even worse if they’d continued the law suit. I actually think Apple did the most harm to itself by filing the lawsuit to begin with, and then even worse by filing before Macworld commenced making everyone believe all the rumors Think Secret posted, including the wrong $100 price point.

Harry Potter and the World Wars

2007-07-16T19:50:00-05:00

Somebody will write a thesis about this someday I’m sure, but it struck me the other day that there were some weird similarities between early 20th century history, and the Harry Potter storyline. I frequently hear these kind of suppositions made about books like the Lord of the Rings, but generally you can make draw similarities between any story with an over-arching evil person and Hitler. The Harry Potter storyline struck me more in it similarities with the history of both world wars, rather than just World War II.

World War I was a long drawn out war of attrition. Waging back and forth over the same land. Several passages in the Harry Potter books indicate that the first rising of Voldemort was also a long drawn out war of attrition with Voldemort knocking of members of the original Order of the Phoenix one by one.

World War I ended with the arrival of the US troops reinforcing the Allied forces. This marked the US’s entry into the world as a Great Power. Voldemort’s first rise to power was ended when he attempted to kill Harry Potter, newly born to the world, and after Voldemort’s defeat considered a great power in the world of magic.

World War II began with the world refusing to acknowledge the second rise of Germany’s power. Winston Churchill stood out as a lone voice arguing for Britain to strengthen its defenses against Hitler. Not until the invasion of Poland did the world acknowledge the danger and openly declare war on Germany. In the Harry Potter novels, Dumbledore stands out as the lone voice arguing that Voldemort has returned to power, and it isn’t until the Ministry of Magic is invaded that the world acknowledges Voldemort’s return.

I guess I’ll have to wait until this weekend for the last Potter book to come out to see if I spot any other parallels between the world wars.

More updating

2006-11-25T06:34:00-06:00

More updating of the site. I’m still goofing around with the RSS Feeds section. There were some things I didn’t like about the old one. I like the new one a bit better, but I think I need to tweak it a bit more.

I’ve also setup a gallery for photos I’ve taken. Currently I’ve got some images from my trip to New Orleans and pictures of my cats. Thrilling stuff.

Kevin’s Photos

New site look

2006-06-09T02:34:00-05:00

welcome to the new site look. I’m pretty happy with it overall. Only downside is those collapasable sections of web links don’t work in IE 6. Of course. I don’t use IE 6 much so I’m debating if i’ll bother to fix it. Probably. I also want the arrows to point to the right when collapse, and point down when opened. Shouldn’t be too hard to do, I learned some neat tricks with CSS and raster images that emulate old sprite behavior in 2D games.

This is pretty much a straight port of the mollio free templates to the open source xoops CMS. It took a bit of hacking to get it done but it works pretty smoothly.

More analysis not more data

2006-03-22T19:58:00-06:00

Read stories about what we knew about the 9/11 hijackers before 9/11 and most of them read like this:

Moussaoui Trial

Over and over again it is shown that red flags were thrown up about people taking airline training, interested in flying but not take-offs/landings, etc….

Pretty clear that we had the information in front of us that something was going on but that we failed to connect the dots and see what was being planned.

Unfortunately since 9/11 all the administration wants to do is gather more dots, not actually spend time putting the dots together. More dots actually clouds the pictures, especially when most of the dots gathered aren’t relevant to the picture.

Information gathering is certainly needed, but that isn’t what we’ve been lacking. We’ve been lacking good analysis of the information we do have. Why the administration insists it needs the ability to spy on anyone/anywhere without warrants when they can’t even analyze the current information they have is beyond me. Add in the bogus information gathered from library records and internet search data and e-mail sniffing and the system is going to bog down in unuseful data and miss the next plans again!

This month in music

2005-10-19T16:33:00-05:00

I subscribe to emusic.com at their top level, which I means I get 90 tracks at month for $20 (or about 22 cents a track, take that iTunes). Plus the music is in pure MP3, no DRM, no limitiations on what device I can use, no limits on burning to CD. All around a good deal.

EMusic has a feature called Save for Later. Basically I browse and search for tracks during the month and add them to my Save for Later list. Frequently I don’t remember why I added them, that’s why some of my descriptions might be slightly vague.

Here’s what I picked up this month:

Hard-Headed Woman: A Celebration of Wanda Jackson – I love rockabilly and I love Wanda Jackson’s stuff. Plus they have one of my favorite Wanda Jackson songs, Fujiama Mama, by one of my favorite bands, Trailer Bride.

Dark Snack – speaking of Trailer Bride, this is the lead singers new band.

Whip It On – I think I heard this band on Sonic Spectrum on KCUR here in KC. Best damn radio show ever.

Memory-Minus I think I picked this up because of an EMusic review.

The Donnas Turn 21 I saw The Donnas on Adam Corolla’s Too Late show. They were hot. (Yes I’m a guy that will pick up a cd if i think the artists are hot. I’m just like every other guy in the world)

Hope is a Thing with Feathers more Trailer Bride.

Absenter b/w Chinese Fork Tie My brother got me a Jawbox album many years ago which I enjoy very much. This is an EP of theirs.

This has leaves me with 2 tracks left, which don’t roll over so I pick some random tracks from my save for later list. Fortunately EMusic keeps track of whay you’ve purchased and if you redownload something it doesn’t count against your downloads for the month.

And now a miracle occurs

2005-09-10T15:18:00-05:00

There is an episode of South Park where the Underpants Gnomes explain business to the boys. The Gnomes have a business plan that consists of 3 steps:

Step 1 – Collect Underpants
Step 2 – ???
Step 3 – PROFIT!

Unfortunately nobody knows exactly what step 2 is, only that it leads to profit, and that it will occur.

Underpants Gnomes

Equally unfortunately the more I observe the operation of the Bush administration the more I think their planning is equally inept. Their planning for Iraq seemed to be:

Defeat Army!
???
Democracy!

When they got to step 2 they just kind of assumed we’d be the heroes and liberators of the populance and ignored any non neo-conservative planning that had been done, and the neo-conservatives had done none of their own planning other than protecting the oil ministry. So while the military stood around with its thumb up its butt (not the military’s fault, they aren’t supposed to do anything without orders) the looters take over and all the good will and momentum we had build up faded away.

The plan for disaster recovery seems to be:
1. Catastrophe!
2. ???
3. Medals for everyone!

Again, no real plan after the very first initial stages. Mostly just standing around waiting.

I’m not sure why they are so bad at this. Sometimes I think they’ve watched too many after school specials where, at the last minute, something miraculous occurs and everything turns out ok in an hour.

Other times I think they’ve got too much religion. A little praryer and everything will turn out ok. I guess they’ve forgotten that “God helps those that help themselves.” We’ve got to exert some effort, it’s not like prayer takes anything away from physical exertions.

Then I get totally cynical. FEMA seems to be doing a pretty good job elsewhere, New Orleans is a democratic strong hold in Louisana, all of Bush’s appointments are based on political favors, not ability, maybe this is how politicalized disaster recovery works — your “friends” get help, your “enemies” don’t. I don’t really belive this, but to be honest nothing freaking surprises me about the Bush administration anymore.

The Daily Show

2005-07-27T16:40:00-05:00

I’ve been saying it for years, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is the best political commentary show around.

Last year he went on a rampage on Crossfire and CSPAN berating them for their style of inviting people at the show and then yelling over them and basically pummeling them. Stewart was totally on target. Those shows suck. They have since they were invented, I want to hear positions stated, attacked and defended — not who can yell the loudest or be the biggest ass.

Jon Stewart vs. Crossfire

One fair criticism that Crossfire had was that The Daily Show didn’t seem to do any better. Jon’s comeback that it isn’t Comedy Central’s job to show news channels how to do their jobs is very valid — but since the news shows seem incapable of doing it right, then somebody should.

It seems to me these last few weeks that Stewart has really stepped up to the plate and been showing up the news channels. He had guests that he disagrees with — Senator Rick Santorum and Bernard Goldberg in particular stick out, but was able to have a real DISCUSSION with them, let them state their points of view and get his across in a civilized manner.

It’s a shame that CNN, Fox and MSNBC need to learn from a comedy channel how they should be doing their jobs.

My Music Library

2005-07-10T23:29:00-05:00

I found a neat program tonight. It dumps an iTunes Library to a lovely HTML formatted series of pages.

iTunes Publisher

So of course I dumped out my listing of 13,352 songs. Peruse the list at your leisure.

My Music Library

and no, you can’t download the MP3s. And my collection is legally obtained. Either ripped from my own CD’s or from emusic.com.

emusic.com

Beers I've Drunk (3)

2005-06-06T16:45:00-05:00

Hmmm, this latest round of topics is making me out to be a drunk. Guess I better come up with some new topics.

In the meantime, my latest beer is from the Point Brewery. I must say I’ve been wanting to try Point beer for years. It’s the only beer I’ve had that came high recommended by a comic book. Mike Baron’s character the Badger frequently drank Point beer, which until recently seems to have been available just in Wisconsin.

When I saw bottles of Point available in the local HyVee (which has a good selection of beers for a grocery chain) I immediately picked a six pack up. I’m on my 3rd six pack (over a couple of months, not all tonight) now. Currently drinking the Special, but I think I like the Amber better. The special is just a bit too light in the flavor, even for me.

I really would like to try their white biere, Belgian white beers are among my favorite beers (Blue Moon is excellent, but that is for another post). And their Root Beer. I’ve been on a Root Beer kick to go along with my recent experiments in beer drinking.

Beers I've Drunk (2)

2005-06-02T12:38:00-05:00

Widmer Hefeweizen

Excellent beer. Had this in Seattle with a very pleasant crab fettucini. If I hadn’t been so tired I would’ve enjoyed more than the two I had. Next time I’m in Portland Oregon I’ll need to do the tour of the place.

Beers I've Drunk (1)

2005-05-08T15:37:00-05:00

I’m in Baltimore. Had a lovely beer, with an unpronounceable name, that I’ve enjoyed before.

Yuengling Beer

I believe I had the “Premium Beer”. Yuengling (I think pronounced Ying-ling,) is out of Pennsylvania and seems to mainly be served mainly in the Northeast. The first time I had it was 2 years ago, also when I was in Baltimore. Then again a few months ago in Pennsylvania.

Oh, I don’t bother trying to descibe beer tastes as I’m terrible at that kind of thing. Just know my tastes run to “sweeter” or lighter beers. I don’t like the bitter tastes so I tend to avoid dark beers that others swear by. I’m not a huge fan of Guinness beer but then I pretty much hate Bud Light, I only drink that when I’m too lazy to think of something else to order or it’s the only thing around.

What I did on New Year's Vacation

2005-01-03T16:36:00-06:00

Computerwise I had a busy weekend.

First, it’s the turn of the year so I changed out a bunch of my passwords. Even my pgp and ssh private key passphrases changed. Actually took me a while to go to the most common web pages i use and change my passwords. Not to mention all my root and user passwords on my linux boxen.

Then I learned how to setup an Apache DAV server (no not on this server, so don’t bother trying.)

Then I figured out how to setup a wiki server, these are pretty damn cool. I replaced the articles section of this site with a wiki on my SSL pages (not sure why I put it under a secure page.) I used MediaWiki, the same software the Wikipedia uses.

My Wiki feel free to edit anything over there.

The World's Only Tape Eating Cat?

2004-12-24T17:05:00-06:00

One of my 2 cats is the sweetest most well-behaved kitty you’d ever meet (the other, on the other hand, is a little ruffian.) However she has the weirdest habit I’ve ever seen — she loves adhesive, specifically tape and labels. I pick up the lint roller (don’t act all surprised, I have and use a lint roller, but only since I got the cats) and she is all around me wanting to eat the sticky sheets. Peel a price tag off, same deal. I have to actually put away my scotch tape rolls so she won’t shred them and eat the plastic tape.

Going to the fount of all knowledge, Google, I search for tape eating cats and only turn up the tip that puttin double-stick tape on a plant will keep them from being eaten by cats. They forget to mention if your cat likes tape it isn’t much of a deterrent.

Welcome to SuperFantasmoWorld!

2004-11-13T18:46:00-06:00

Yeah, I changed the domain name. Something I do on occasion. The old URLs still work, but hey it was time for a new name.

I’ll probably redo the logo and the colors shortly too.

Why I'm not voting for George W. Bush

2004-10-31T21:48:00-06:00

you probably assume from the domain name for this web site that i’m some sort leftist liberal that would never vote republican, but the truth is the domain name is more of a joke, and I have voted republican in the past.

I voted George H. W. Bush and on other occassions in lower races. I’m a big believer in split government, the more congress, the president and the judiciary argue the less gets done and the less governement that gest done the better off we all are.

Of course, from the statement that I believe in less government one would assume I would vote straight rebublican, after all they claim to be for a smaller government. Unfortunately I’ve found this claim by the republicans to be bogus. The republicans aren’t for smaller governement, neither are the democrats, republicians are just for increasing the size of different areas of government than the democrats are (quick name a republican president that actually reduced the total number of government employees or spent less money at the end of their presidence than at the beginning.) So where the democrats might decrease the size of military and increase the size of social services departments, the republicans are for the opposite, decrease the size of social services and increase the size of the military. Unless of course you’re GW Bush, in which case you pass everything that’s presented to you (by a republican congress no less) AND ask for more and more money, AND cut taxes. All of which adds up to a fiscal irresponsibility that makes the typical American’s credit card addiction seem minor. Perhaps the President should enroll in a Consumer Credit Counseling service.

My next complaint with Republicans in general is their claim that they fight for the freedoms of American’s. Frequently they point to the “political correctness” crap of some left wing people, especially on college campuses. The republicans are raising an old issue from the 90’s that rarely occurs any more. Additionaly they seem to miss the fact that the supposedly leftist organization the ACLU fought these issues (the ACLU’s 1994 article on campus regulations about hate speech: http://www.aclu.org/StudentsRights/StudentsRights.cfm?ID=9004&c=159). Finally in a completely hypocritical turn about school students today are frequently being expelled or punished for wearing anti-republican clothing: http://www.aclu.org/LesbianGayRights/LesbianGayRights.cfm?ID=15675&c=106, http://www.aclu.org/FreeSpeech/FreeSpeech.cfm?ID=13913&c=87. And yet at the same time this leftist organization continues to fight for pro-republican issues too: http://www.aclu.org/StudentsRights/StudentsRights.cfm?ID=15680&c=159. Not to mention all the anti-free speech proposals/amendments the right likes to offer around campaign times such as outlawing flag burning.

And again the president has managed to take a typical hypocritical republican stance that the left is anti-free speech and taken it to the extreme. Expressing any opinion against the president brands you, at worst a terrorist, at best anti-american. Simply to attend a campaign rally requires signing a loyalty oath and wearing a Kerry/Edwards shirt will get you kicked out. So much for free speech.

Yet the anti-free speech stance of the Bush administration is nothing compared to the load of crap the Patriot Act put on the American citizens. The 9/11 commission has shown that the failure of the intelligence community in picking up on the plan to hijack planes and run them into the world trade centers was not in the low end finding out significant information, it was in properly analyzing and disseminating that information. So of course the response of the administration was to pass the Patriot Act which simply focused on making easier to spy and gather information about Americans, while at the same time removing checks and balances to ensure these expanded powers are used properly. Simply take a look at one of the first uses of the powers — Tom Delay asking the FAA to hunt down a plane of democratic Texas state senators that had fled the state to prevent a quorum being reached on the Texas redistricting plan (which was then thrown out by the courts anyway….) Oh heck no, wasting Homeland Security personnel on a personal political mission when they should be working on terrorist issues is not an abuse of power.

Additionally I think the Patriot Act will actually reduce the effectiveness in finding the next terrorist plot. In radio systems there is a term called the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), the signal is the part you want to receive, the noise is the unwanted static you want to get rid of. The more signal the better the reception and the easier it is to understand the signal. The Patriot Act will increase the amount of total documents to be analyzed, but assuming the amount of terrorist activity remains the same (an unlikely proposition at the current time in the US as I imagine most terrorists still in the country are currently trying to disappear until some of the heat blows over) then all the Patriot Act has done is increase the amount of noise (or non-terrorist documents) that have to be analyzed.

Additionally neither the Patriot Act, nor the president, has done little to increase the number of analysts, or provide methods for improving analysis (i.e. bringing on additional translators). All this adds up to is a set of laws more likely to be abused for personal gain while making actual findings of terrorists less likely. Yes, the democrats did vote for the Patriot Act, but it is the Republicans that are currently offering extensions to the Patriot Act that extend it’s problems not solve them.

Next up on my list of issues with GW Bush is his appointments. He appointed John Ashcroft as Attorney General. This is they guy who’s department has written such upholding of the American way memos as how torturing prisoners is OK. As passé as the comparison is, this guy is a closet fascist. As a resident of Missouri I’m one of the people that voted for the dead Mel Carnahan over Ashcroft. Only to have the guy appointed Attorney General.

Then there is Dick Cheney, who’s campaign methodology is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt and scare you into voting for him. I’m not going to cower because he wants to tell scary bedtime stories.

Donald Rumsfeld who apparently thinks winning a war ends when the other side surrenders and then magically the defeated country will turn into a right-wing democracy over night. Way to go.

Thomas Ridge, Homeland Security. I’ve no real problems with Ridge, other than he seems to raise the terror alert level everytime there is bad news for the President. I don’t know if he’s trying to pull attention away from the bad news, or like Cheney just enjoys sowing the seed of FUD.

I think my primary problem with George W. Bush is his whole attitude towards the presidency. Actually I think it’s his whole attitude towards leadership. I think Bush wants to be in charge of things, but he doesn’t actually want to do the actual work involved in being in charge. Look at all the businesses he was invovled in, all failed, needing to be bailed out by daddies rich friends, except one. The one was when he was in charge of the Texas Ranger’s baseball team. And that job just inolved him being the front man, the glad hander. He wasn’t making real day-to-day business decisions.

This is the same way he does the presidency. Before 9/11 he spent over 40% of his time on vacation. All reports of his mangement style seem to indicate he surrounds himself with yes men and doesn’t want to hear any negative news. He refuses to read newspapers, claiming they’re “filters”. That leaves him with his news coming from the biggest filter of all — the government bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are great at passing good news up the line while covering up bad news. This means the President hears only good news from underlings, while bad news is covered up until it explodes. The end result is an uninformed President that can’t troubleshoot problems, only react to bad news that comes out at just the wrong times.

In 2000 Bush ran on a policy of not being a nation builder. I guess that’s one promise he kept — since 9/11 he’s invaded 2 countries but failed to build anything successful in either. Afghanistan is back in control of the warlords that ran the place into the ground (making way for the Taliban to take over) after the Russians were driven out. Afghanistan is back to providing a majority of the opium for the United States. Iraq is even worse off. Way to go Mr. President.

No more coffee

2004-09-28T01:09:00-05:00

So it’s been a little over a week since my last cup of coffee. When I got the root canal I figured I’d be on so much pain medication it would prevent the withdrawal hangovers. Plus I’d already cut back to a single small (small to me) cup a day anyway.

Today is the first real day I went coffeeless and pain medicationless (well until I got a headache in the afternoon). Not too bad, although I do think the headache this afternoon was caused by caffeine withdrawal.

I haven’t given up caffeine totally, still drinking coke and tea, but today was about the most of cut out, just some ice tea and a coke for lunch, but I am working on cutting that down some (especially the coke.) At the moment I’m drinking a lovely orange spice chai.

Oh, and I know dark gray text on an orange background is hard to read. I’m working on fixing it (and a bunch of other things too.)

What a crappy week/month

2004-09-19T13:25:00-05:00

woosh, what a crappy month. My internal mail server crashed about a month ago (yes I have 2 mail servers). The internal one actually holds all my mail (about 8 years worth of mail). The cyrus database pointing to all the mailboxes went corrupt.

I decided it went corrupt because I was running Gentoo’s unstable installation (also known as ~x86) and compiling installing too many experimental kernels (the mm-sources). So first I rebuilt the entire OS using the gentoo-dev-sources (I still wanted a 2.6 kernel for firewire & XFS support) and the stable (x86) packages. That was last weekend. I spend about 10 hours on that.

Then yesterday I spent another 10 hours bring mail back online and getting my mailboxes back. Fortunately the actuall mailboxes were still OK, just the mailboxes.db file had become corrupt. Cyrus’ reconstruct option wasn’t working. So I created a new one by creating a new mailbox with the same name.

Once I had done this I ran the reconstruct command to recover the mailbox — budda-bang, almost all my mail was back. Only one folder and it’s sub-folders was missing.

So I went into my mail program, created a folder with the exact same name, flipped back to the server and ran reconstruct again. That did it, now I had all my mail back.

A quick re-implementation of fetchmail and a restoration of my sieve rules and I’m back in action on the e-mail front.

Of course that is all fairly minor, but during all this I also had a root canal (which still freaking hurts and drained my bank account until my insurance reimbursement kicks in) and my car’s check engine light came on (because i ran it out of gas — not immediately fatal in a hybrid car but not exactly a good idea either) and it needs to be serviced for a whole day on a recall notice. And my tooth still needs a crown.

But then on the plus side, I don’t live in Florida or Alabama so I haven’t lost my house to a hurricane and the dentist gave me lots of pain killers for the tooth.

New Site Theme

2004-09-05T23:42:00-05:00

Welcome to the new site theme. I grabbed it from 7dana.com. I’m not totally happy with it yet, but I’ll tweak some things as I get time.

I think first I’ll try and get into a 2 column mode.

I do like my new logo though. I probably need to use some of the colors from the logo in the theme design.

The Weather Service needs a better sense of humor

2004-08-13T14:40:00-05:00

I don’t know who was behind the recent hurricane naming but Tropical Storm Bonnie and Tropical Storm Charlie are bearing down on Florida, how they missed the obvious naming of Bonnie and Clyde I’ll never know. Somebody was asleep at the stick.

Latest map of Bonnie and Charlie

The Subservient President

2004-08-04T16:01:00-05:00

Yeah, yeah, the subservient chicken was all the rage and now the subservient president is the cute site of the day. but for some reason i find it amazingly entertaining.

Click for the subservient president

Things I’ve found he’ll respond to:

count to ten
give the bird
dance for me
tell me a secret
pray
kill reagan (actually i think anything with reagan in it does this)
vote kerry
get osama
do a magic trick (same as get osama)
how can i win the war on terror (same as osama)
find wmd
give speech
raise money
laura
drink
what should I do to the prisoner

How to be Creative

2004-08-02T15:33:00-05:00

The Gaping Void is a neat web site. Hugh Macleod, among other things, does art on the back of business cards.

However he’s done a bit on how to be creative that is totally brilliant. A must read.

How to be creative

Be sure to click the More links under some of the points that have further thoughts.

Reagan (now with 100% correct spelling)

2004-06-06T15:52:00-05:00

Ronald Reagan was the first president I paid attention too. I wasn’t old enough to vote for him, but I was old enough to begin paying attention to politics. The fact that I rode with my father to a bus stop in downtown kc to catch a city bus to go to high school, and that my father listened to NPR’s Morning Edition the whole way probably had a lot to do with this (why I turned out more to the left than my right-wing father is unknown.)

I never liked Reagan. Listening to him, I always thought I was being sold a bill of goods. This was even further cemented during the Iran-Contra trials where I thought everybody was pretty much lying to cover Reagan’s involvement. Or at best if everything was true, then Reagan wasn’t in control of his government, and couldn’t remember anything.

Listening to all the retrospectives playing his famous speeches, he was indeed a good speaker and his voice was much stronger than I remember from the end of his presidency.

I think about the only thing he did right was to recognize that the time was right to apply the final push to the Soviet Union. To claim he brought down the Soviet Union on his own is a big mistake, a concept I think the current Administration believes and has led to a extremely bad foreign policy. Reagan’s policy worked because of the years of containment policies of past administrations. Reagan applied a well placed, well timed final blow — but it wouldn’t have worked without the hundreds of blows (economic or otherwise) in the past that had weakened the Soviets.

[updated – nothing says “I’m an idiot” more than misspelling a president’s name. Except maybe when it’s your father that points it out.]

Drinking

2004-04-26T01:37:00-05:00

There’s nothing like drinking for 21 hours of 48 hour period to really clear the sinuses right out. I am truly surprised I wasn’t hung over (or even more surprised that i’m not still hungover…) Not bad for an old dude. A list of alcohol types consumed, just the types, no quantities:

wine (3 or 4 different vineyards, at least 4 types in one vineyard)
beer (uh, probably around 10 different brands, including Stag)
rum
vodka
tequila

My First Web Page

2004-03-28T20:04:00-06:00

Way back when the internet was still pretty young (1997) I did my first commerical web page for the wife of a co-worker. I recently found my notes from the project and thought I would look up to see if the pages and the company were still around.

The company is Indigo Wild, yes they still exist, although i’m not sure it’s still owned by the same person. They make natural soaps and such. Click the link above to see their current web site. The one I did for them is available via the wayback machine.

On the whole I think the pages hold up pretty darn well. One of the primary considerations of the day was that they load fast, accomplished by keeping the amount of text high and the graphics sizes small.

Couple of things I’d wished I’d done is put navigation links at the top and bottom of the page instead of just the bottom. And made the logo at the top of each page link back to the home page (I’m not sure that was a standard back then like it is now.)

And as with most of my pages, it was hand-coded. Probably in BBEdit under Mac OS 8 (I still use BBEdit for my pages, but under Mac OS X now).

Under no circumstances blame me for the How to Order or the Contacting Indigo Wild pages. Somebody else modified those, probably when the business change from home based. Hopefully Emily didn’t do those pages (or ever reads this page) because I think they are terrible.

Online Music

2004-03-28T17:35:00-06:00

Slashdot reports that buymusic.com is being merged with the parent site buy.com.

I’m assuming this indicates the failure of BuyMusic.com, and good riddence I say. I looked over the site when it first fired up but never bought a song from them.

IMO, the main reasons for the failures:

Horribly variant restrictions – I guess buymusic.com decided their customer was the record labels, not the people giving them money. As such they allowed each label to set it’s own restrictions per album. Look at The Who’s Then & Now album. On BuyMusic you can only play it on one computer. It does allow unlimited transfers (transfers are to portable players) and unlimited cd burning — always features on iTunes.

Flip over to Norah Jones and the restrictions are 1 computer can play, only 5 cd burns, unlimited transfers.

Check out Cypress Hill and they do let you play it on 3 computers, but you can only put it on your player 5 times.

Cypress Hill (or their label) is freaking insane if they think I’ll ever buy something I can only put on my iPod 5 times. My iPod is my primary mode of listening to music. Any music that limits the number of times I can put it on there won’t get bought — period, you’re telling me you only want me to listen to your songs 5 times, well screw you too I won’t listen at all.

Although I don’t like DRM on my music, iTunes is minimally acceptable – 3 computers at a time can be authorized to listen to music, unlimited transfers and unlimited burns. But most imporatantly it’s freaking consistant across all the music.
browser bias – only supports windows with IE 5.0 or later. Hey I’m typing this on my Windows XP box, but I prefer the FireFox browser. Not helpful to tell potential customers you don’t like their shoes so they can’t come in the store. iTunes has a browser bias too — only the iTunes application can access the store. At least that supports Mac’s (hopefully Linux at some point too….)
Format bias – WMA’s don’t work on my iPod (yet). I’ve a personal bias against Microsoft document formats so this may not have been a big issue — but it is a strike against you to not support the #1 selling portable player on the market. Of course iTunes also has a format bias and if Apple doesn’t open up the the authorization scheme to non-Apple players I’m guessing they may get accused of anti-trust activities in the online music biz.

Overall iTunes is a better store, but the my favorite way of getting music, especially new and odd stuff is from emusic.com. The downloads are unrestricted MP3’s. It’s a subscription service so it’s much easier to download music you’ve not heard of. You are limited on how much you can download (40 songs per month for $10 a month), but that is somewhat acceptable limitation (I was a memeber when downloading was unlimited and it totally rocked.) emusic does not have the big name labels like iTunes and BuyMusic, but those services aren’t too different from commerical radio anyway.

I’m debating rejoining emusic and the primary strike against it is that they don’t have a yearly plan. I’d rather pay $120 right now for 40 songs/month than be dinked $10 each month on my credit card. A discount for a full year would be nice too 8-)

On the plus side emusic is like that little college radio station you find that just plays whatever music they feel like it. Always something interesting around the corner. Combined with the forums and the charts and user lists and it’s actually pretty easy to find some good music. Gah, I guess I’m talking myself into signing back up.

Electronic Voting

2004-03-13T18:20:00-06:00

As big a tech geek as I am, I’ve always distrusted electronic voting systems. Especially the current ones being sold. And internet voting is right out.

Voting has some particular requirements. Voting requires both authentication and anonymity. Authentication because you don’t want people voting that aren’t supposed to. Anonymity because you don’t want to be able to track a vote back to the person that cast it.

Openness of the process is another requirement. Voters should feel that the process of voting, moving votes to the counting location, and counting votes is reliable and trustworthy. In any well designed system (computer or not) the weakest link is almost always the people involved. So the system should have checks in place to help keep the people involved honest.

Accuracy, of course, is a huge requirment.

Speed would be nice, but isn’t a huge necessity.

The problems with current e-voting systems are not limited to just having devices that don’t print out a physical record of the vote, although that is a key factor in the process i’m about to describe.

So here’s how I think e-voting should work:

authentication must be kept seperate from the voting booths and the voting system. The current system (in Missouri, at least) is a table you identify yourself at and are issued a ballot that you then go to the voting machine with to cast your vote. This seperation should be maintained in any new system. You should NOT authenticate yourself to the voting machine, authentication MUST be seperate from the vote itself.
the electronic voting machine itself can be of several varieties, touch screen probably being the most flexible. The device MUST include a device for issuing a human-readable paper ballot. However, I do think multiple methods of encoding the paper ballot should be used. For example, in addition to the human readable ballot a 2d barcode can be printed at the bottom for a machine countable ballot. So I think recounts would be handled in the following order:
1. Initally transmitted count - Machine count of bar code on printed ballots
2. Count by people of human readable porton of printed ballots
printed paper ballots are collected in locked voting boxes, as the system is done now for regular ballots.
voting machines can transmit data back to the central location, but it must not do this over the internet (so the phone system would most likely be used.) In addition a method of preventing bogus machines from reporting data must be instituted (one way that comes to mind is issueing each machine a key that encrypts and authenticates the data in transmission. The keys would be changed for each vote.)
the central location would have methods in place of protecting the count on the collection system. Some simple steps include — no connection of the system to the internet, or even any system of remote control (so support would always have to be on-site). Don’t keep data in databases that can be manipulated right on the box. Robust unalterable logging (i.e. to a printer and/or write-only cd-rom)

One thing I didn’t mention was the software used in the machine. How do we know we can trust that? Although I prefer the software be open source (preferrably GPL), I don’t think it has to be required. What does have to be required is the source code MUST be available for review by any that request it. It can still be proprietary and protected by copyrights, but most be reviewable by any that wish to.

Memories of Childhood

2004-03-08T17:08:00-06:00

I used to have what I though were dreams about being this giant kid rampaging through a tiny town. Kind of like one of Calvin’s imaginary rampages through the Calvin & Hobbes strips.

As kids my father always shot slide film instead of print film in his camera. This is a good thing as it’s very difficult to whip out the old slide projector and a screen to show any friends/dates/random relatives any of the embarrassing pictures of his kids.

So one day, we were having a slide show and dad was running through all the slides he had from the trip we took to the Netherlands when I was a wee little kid. A trip I was sure I had only one memory of (my only memory of my paternal grandmother, she was lying in a hammock (she was sick) but my memory is all shadow, I can’t remember her face at all).

All of sudden these slides show up of me rampaging through a tiny town. I was flabbergasted! What was this? I thought for all these years these were just dreams I’d been having (world domination for Kevin!). Turns out that when were in the Netherlands we had visited a place called Madurodam, which is a 1:25 scale model of various places in the Netherlands.

I’ve not been back yet, but if a place can make such a memory it must rock! The place still exists, here’s a link to the place: Madurodam

I’ll try and get some of the scans of the slides my dad has made and post them in the gallery.

Stupid Cat

2004-02-29T16:31:00-06:00

just spent an hour searching for my damn cat. apparently he jumped off the deck i let them run around on (a second story deck with no direct path to the ground.) turns out he was huddled under the deck of my neighbor. he let me pull him out and carry him home. He didn’t freak out and start biting me and clawing big holes in my shirt ‘til we got outside the door.

oh well, it’s better exercise than searching for the damn tivo remote.

Words of Wisdom

2004-02-13T16:22:00-06:00

Write this on your hand or something ‘cause it’s important. Use a sharpie so it doesn’t fade.

If you’re going to get really hammered in a bar make sure:
1. you only lick things you’re pretty sure you know where they’ve been
2. you lick them before others

Woohoo! Free Wireless

2004-02-11T16:54:00-06:00

As you can tell from my domain name I consider myself to be somewhat of what Eric Cartman refers to as a “god damn hippie” (without the long hair or new age bullcrap). Part of this means sharing. So I’ve finally opened my wireless connection to anybody who wants to use it, for free.

The main reason I haven’t done this in the past is I like sharing things, but I’m not so insane as I don’t have stuff I want to keep private. So until I could develop a way to connect to my other computers in a secure fashion I didn’t want to open my wireless up.

Enter IPSec. Mac OS X added support for IPSec to my G4 PowerBook laptop, and VPN router endpoints have gotten cheaper. So now to connect to my privater computers I build an IPSec tunnel from my laptop to my router and connect to my computers through that.

Using a VPN is far more secure (at least with at least 3DES encryption) than the security protocols WEP or even WPA that wireless networks use. Note that traffic across the internet is not secured by any encryption and anybody in the neighborhood can sniff your traffic to see what you’re doing. But this isn’t really different from the internet in general. A couple of simple hacks on a cable modem and people can sniff all the traffic in their neighborhood. The important stuff goes through SSL anyway.

It’s a true geek that sets up a VPN in their own house. Not sure if that is just totally cool, or just really sad.

A Special Message Just for Tim

2004-02-03T15:22:00-06:00

we interrupt this non-regularly scheduled weblog to bring a special message just for Tim.

Thanks for the spelling correction guy!

Woohoo!

2004-01-21T16:25:00-06:00

I just bought Harry Nilsson’s album The Point from the iTunes Music Store. I grew up listening to this album (and if my brothers or sister read this – yes I’ve the album! Ha! Ha!) and it kicks butt.

Oh and even though I’ve got the vinyl album, I no longer have a turntable to play it on, hence the iTunes purchase (and now I can put it on my iPod).

Link to album (I think that requires iTunes for it to work.)

Found on my desk

2004-01-19T15:34:00-06:00

I should probably start a new category “Weird things I’ve found on my desk”. Cleaning off my desk at work (for the new year!) I found a half-used Far Side desk calendar.

No big deal, except it’s from 2002. Apparently it hasn’t been seen since August 15th 2002.

My first applescript studio app

2004-01-16T15:37:00-06:00

I wrote my first Applescript Studio. It’s a simple password generator but I think it’s pretty cool. If you have Mac OS X 10.2 or greater you can click here to download. I wrote with Apple’s XCode so the source may only be viewable on 10.3.

Applescript stuido is pretty neat. An admirable competitor to Visual Basic, with the huge benefit of being free (as in beer). The language scans funny if you’ve written in other languages, but it reads pretty well as english.

Here’s the core routine that generates a password. PassLen is the length of the password to create, ValidChars is a list of characters that can be use, MaxRepeats is the maximum times one character can appear in a password.

on GenPassword(PassLen, ValidChars, MaxRepeats)
    set Passwd to ""
    repeat PassLen times
        set PassChar to some item of ValidChars as string
        repeat while CountChar(PassChar, Passwd) ≥ MaxRepeats
            set PassChar to some item of ValidChars as string
        end repeat
        set Passwd to Passwd & PassChar
    end repeat
    return Passwd
end GenPassword

Stupid Music for Commercials

2004-01-05T16:08:00-06:00

I just saw the HP digital camera where they use The Cure’s Pictures of You as the music. This has got to be one of the more retarded choices of background music I’ve heard.

This song is about someone who’s love has left them forever and all they are left with are the pictures.

I guess HP’s message is “buy our camera and your loved ones will leave you.”

Damn good song though!

Pictures of You Lyrics

The Lord of the Rings

2004-01-03T18:07:00-06:00

I saw the Return of the King a few weeks ago (a couple of days after it opened.) There are probably some spoilers below so if you don’t want to read them, stop reading now and go see the damn thing already!

As a whole, the movies are excellent. Pretty well acted, well directed, beautiful landscapes, and great use of special effects.

The Lord of the Rings makes the best use of really great special effects. I don’t know why, but many people seem to think that a great movie that had special effects was great because of it. Wrong!

The first Matrix was a good movie and had great special effects. The next two, had good special effects (mostly, some of the fight scenes seemed to have the quality of a video game to me) but the story wasn’t there. Having great special effects doesn’t make a movie, integrating those effects into a movie to help bring it alive is the right way.

Andy Serkis, the actor that played Gollum, could probably do a one man show on a stage, with no make-up and no effects and still convince you that you were seeing Gollum. The effects help, but it’s the actor, director and scripting that fill-out and make it real.

But I digress, The Lord of the Rings movies are good but the books are better. Peter Jackson obviously had to cut and replace certain scenes. He maintained quite a bit of the first two books, cutting the Tom Bombadil section from the first book (as every adapation does), but the third was too much to handle, even in three and half hours.

It’s interesting that he cut all the stuff about the return of the hobbits to the Shire. In the books, Saraumon and Wyrmtongue escape the Ents and take over the Shire. The returning Hobbits lead a rebellion against Saraumon, throwing him out. Wyrmtongue kills Saraumon and the people of the Shire kill Wyrmtongue — finishing off all the bad guys.

In the movie Saraumon and Wyrmtongue are left alive, that’s kind of a weird loose thread. I don’t think Peter Jackson had time to cover everything that happened in the Shire, but he probably should’ve offed them somehow.

Another change that I find interesting is the reduction of Aragorn’s kingliness and the increase of Gandalf’s abilities. In the books Aragorn starts out as a capable ranger and guide, progresses to a follower of Gandalf, then to a leader of the fellowship (which distengrates around him) but still following Gandalf’s orders, to finally making his own decisions about saving the world.

In the books this last part comes when he uses Sauramon’s Palantir to wrestle with Sauron himself, wrenching control of the orb back for himself, and then using it to see that he needs to take the Paths of the Dead, rally the ghosts of the oathbreakers and wipe out the Corsairs approaching Gondor (in the books the ghosts don’t wipe out the entire army attacking Gondor as in the movies, their oath is held fulfilled when they wipe out the Corsairs).

At this point in the books Aragorn pretty much starts making his own decisions and acting (in my opinion) more kingly. In the movie, he’s following Elrond’s orders to go down the Paths of the Dead and still isn’t really making his own decisions or offering advice. In the movie, it isn’t until he suggests they attack Mordor to draw the attention of the eye that he offers any real significant advice or makes a decision.

None of these points are bad, just different. I prefer the way the books handle them, but they weren’t limited by time as Peter Jackson was.

There was one addition made in the movies that was totally hideous. When Gollum divides the Hobbits by making it look like Sam had eaten the food. This ploy was total crap, ripped from the worst sit-com episodes ever. In the books, Sam and Frodo get split in the caves while being chased by the spider — simple, believable (assuming giant spiders are believable.) This whole “poison the relationship” crap was just stupid and a waste of time. Those minutes would’ve been better spent showing Aragorn wrestling with Sauron to gain control of the Palantir.

So on the whole, the movies are a good interpertation. The BBC radio version is still better (holding more to the story line) and the books, of course, are the best.

One of my favorite days

2003-12-21T14:32:00-06:00

December 21st, the winter solstice, is one of my favorite days. I’m not overly fond of winter so it might seem odd that I like the shortest day of the year. But to me it’s the turning point, we now begin our journey toward spring. Today will be a short day, but tommorrow will be longer and the day after that even longer. Sweet.

New domain name

2003-12-16T23:59:00-06:00

Well I got a new domain name, a whole bunch of them actually, but this is my new favorite for the time being.

Werid Things I've Seen (3)

2003-12-09T16:28:00-06:00

Just remembered this from my trip to Mississippi a few weeks ago (must’ve blacked it out of memory).

When I travel I end up spending lots of time in hotel rooms, and if said hotel room is sans fast internet connection the concept of hooking up the ‘ole laptop ~~to search for pr0n~~ to read the news is just a bit too much to bear. So I read. A lot.

In Mississippi I was bored out of my mind at nights so I read 3 or 4 books that week. I usually only bring a few with me, so I wandered into a bookstore to replenish the supply. Nice bookstore, lots of books, actually had seperate fantasy and science fiction section (usually they are just lumped into one big geek section, not too distant from the computer books). But the books were organized in seemingly random order.

Not by alphabetical by author, although many books by the same author were frequently grouped together. Not by title — not even close. They obviously didn’t know what they had on hand, I found 3 different printings of some books — in different parts of the store.

Near as I can figure they used one of two systems it’s either:
1. when new stuff comes in, push everything to the right and shove it in. 2. when new stuff comes in, shove it in an open space.

I’m leaning towards 2, but I did find some fairly old printings of books in the lower left corner of the shelving.

I know what hell will be like

2003-12-05T14:44:00-06:00

I’ve found out what hell will be like. In hell you will have a Tivo with the best setup imaginable — plasma screen tv, surround sound system, digital cable AND satellite tv — but no remote control.

This isn’t “too lazy to get up and hit the button” issue, the Tivo has no front controls! Did you hear that? THE TIVO HAS NO FRONT CONTROLS!

Worst 2 hours of my life looking for that damn remote. I’m just glad my mind isn’t so far gone (yet) that I can proudly say it was NOT in the refrigerator.

Thanksgiving

2003-11-29T16:51:00-06:00

Thanksgiving is my favority holiday. Christmas is my least favorite. Thanksgiving is so much more low key. Not all the stress of presents and all that. Just a good time for families to get together for a big ‘ol honking meal.

Of course with the good must come the bad. I refuse to buy a single thing the day after thanksgiving. People are freaking insane on the friday after. I didn’t even buy gas or go to the grocery store today, it’s my way of resisting the peer pressure.

Weird Things I've Seen (2)

2003-11-20T06:50:00-06:00

So I was in Mississippi for a weeking fixing things. While there I was driving behind a Ford Explorer, you know an SUV thingies supposedly designed for off-road driving. The lady driving was dodging all the pot holes. What the heck is the point of owning an SUV if you’re scared to drive through a few pot holes?

October Sucks

2003-10-13T04:04:00-05:00

October officially sucks. Of the 4 accidents I’ve been in since getting out of college 3 have been in October. 3 accidents in 3 years was bad (2 of those in October, 1 in August) but this month officially takes the cake.

Here it is not even halfway through the month and I had 3 cavities drilled and filled. A week of intense tooth pain after that, go back to dentist and get a root canal.

Now to top things off, I was driving down the road and some moron decides to make a right turn from the center lane. Starts the turn and hesitates. I started braking but at the hesitation I figure they’re going to wait for me to pass. Nope, as soon i come up a little behind the truck they start the turn. Gah, I dodge right into the intersecting street, start to come back to the main street and tag the curb with my right front tire. Car immediately starts wobbling. So I pull over, while the moron that pulled this stunt takes off down the street.

Wonderful, just wonderful.

Finally, secure e-mail connections

2003-10-09T04:59:00-05:00

Took me a few days to figure out what I was doing but I’ve now got my external server offering pop3 and smtp over ssl connections. Since I don’t use FTP (hmmm, need to look into SFTP next) I’ve eliminated all cleartext password passing from my server (well, except for the password for this web site. Guess I’ll work on that in a couple of months)

My smtp server has always used CRAM-MD5 authentication so that password was never cleartext, but my pop server has been.

An added advantage of moving to SSL connections is that the data is encrypted too. So when I travel I can download my e-mail via wireless or unprotected net connections and not have to worry about others reading my mail.

Of course when I send mail the connection is only encrypted from my computer to my smtp server, it’ll be cleartext after than, but it definitely is safer than before.

I’m working on documentation on how I set this up next.

Weird Things I've Seen (1)

2003-08-31T14:46:00-05:00

55-65 year old lady, all gray hair, in front of me at the grocery store buying 6-24oz cans of Icehouse beer. Guess the tall boys need fewer trips to the 'frig.

GPS Rocks

2003-08-24T02:07:00-05:00

I’m in Dallas having all kinds of fun. Driving in Dallas is very (very) frustrating if you’ve never been here before. So when I picked up my rental car and they gave me an option of upgrading to a slightly bigger car with free GPS I did it.

This kicks. You pick your destination, usually by address or intersection. They have other options such as a Yellow Pages lookup but that sucks (we had get a replacement part from a computer store. We looked up CompUSA in the yellow pages and the closest it found was in Louisiana.)

Once it has the destination you are prompted which way to turn, when to enter a highway, or get off the highway. Turn warnings are timely enough to give you time to actually look for the turn (on a highway changes are announced starting at 2 miles out, and repeated occasionally after that)

Accuracy isn’t enough for it to really tell if you’re on a highway or on the access road next to it (I didn’t want to pay the tolls many times so I’d drive the access road the whole way, I kept getting warnings to exit the toll road)

It saves previous destinations so if you’re frequently driving to the same locations it’s easy to enter that point (Hertz doesn’t wipe the previous location entries between renters, so you can see the previous destinations of other renters. I’m going to try and wipe my car before I turn it back in.)

I do like getting lost and driving around randomly (ask for directions? HA! I spit on your directions.) But in a city like Dallas (and when you’re supposed to be working) this isn’t such a hot idea. GPS works great for this.

Well let's give this a try

2003-08-20T18:32:00-05:00

My hard drive started having intermittent problems. I couldn’t get it to be stable long enough to recover everything, although I can seem to recover individual files.

I decided to rebuild everything from scratch. In rebuilding Xoops I decided to use this weblog module instead of the old News module I was using. Not sure I’ll be able to recover my old entries or not. I’ll try for that later.