Meez Roomz and Games are now up and running on Facebook. You can create a Meez avatar, create a room, invite friends to chat in the room and even watch videos (YouTube, etc.) together in the room. I’m currently involved with Meez, so I know how much cool technology has gone into this.
Meez Roomz and Games on Facebook
Me, in my Meez Room on Facebook:
It’s 2008!
For the last day of 2007 I went to work, met up with a lunch group, came home, did laundry, called someone and made a date, took a nap and then took the bus to the Castro area to attend two New Year’s Eve parties. I met some fun new folks and marked the new year with close friends and an intimate late night. Then I walked home, enjoying the exercise, the cool breeze and the city lights. The Transamerica building is blinking its regular red light; the multicolored holiday light has been retired until next year. The holidays are over (except for having today, New Year’s Day, off, I suppose) and it’s time to dive back in to the regular day to day.
2007 was a big year for me; I have a lot of optimism about 2008. Out with the old, in with the new, positive choices, making progress.
On another note, my Mac is at the Apple Store getting a new hard drive, under warranty. I hope it’s back soon!
Plus some New Year’s resolutions…
Technology
When I bought my primary Mac a while back, I decided that I was going to treat it as a sort of “home production server,” meaning I wouldn’t use it to try beta software, I wouldn’t repartition the disk, I wouldn’t do things to mess it up and, thus, I wouldn’t need to reinstall the OS after some unnecessary technological debacle (I have other computers that I use for testing, experimenting and messing things up). But over time this computer started to degrade as some applications came and went and various parts saw incremental upgrades, and one not-so-incremental upgrade; for the sake of convenience I did an in-place upgrade to 10.5 instead of doing a clean install. Sure, all my stuff was intact, but performance and overall reliability went down, of course.
Last night I decided to bite the bullet and do a clean install. I run backups every night, so I made sure the backup data was valid, then started formatting. Everything went great and the machine was running perfectly after installing the OS and various universal binaries of the applications I use. Then I realized that I didn’t have any of the iLife apps that came preinstalled originally (iPhoto being the only one that is particularly important to me). I did some searching around and found that I could install the older iLife apps from the OS disc that originally came with the machine. I fired up that installation and everything was fine until it crashed unexpectedly. And brought the whole system down with it. The internal hard drive was totally corrupted! I booted from the CD and ran Disk Utility. It took three tries and then it claimed the massive amounts of corruption had been fixed. I went to start up the machine and, well, it’s not coming up at all. Here we go again.
The positive things: my backups are solid (as expected, using a shell script created before Time Machine was an option), it was pretty painless to import my database backups back into MySQL and it was a snap to configure apache2 for the webapps I use locally. I get to run through this whole routine again, which is good practice. And once I get this rig done up again, I expect performance and reliability to be back on track.
Update: I did another full rebuild, reinstalled all my apps and copied all of my data back, only to have the machine freeze up and refuse to boot again. Time to try TechTool and then go to a diagnostics appointment; the machine is still under AppleCare.
On another note, my boss bought me one of the new thin aluminum Apple Keyboards to use at work (I thought he was just being nice; turns out I was typing really loud on the old clackety keyboard); I liked it so much I bought one for myself to use at home. Excellent keyboard.
Travel
I did a small amount of travel over the holidays, both by train and by plane. I like train trips since I don’t have to deal with the airport, I can move around freely while en route and, most importantly, I can bring a laptop and write. Life has been so busy lately that having a day riding the rails meant I had a day to write and reflect. I wrote over 5,000 words on the train, examining my year and my accomplishments, looking at patterns I have been repeating and working out the things I’d like to keep doing and the things I need to change or stop doing. There are some hard decisions there, but that’s what taking an objective look at myself is all about. I was also able to see some amazing scenery and see how the train winds its way down a particularly tall mountain pass.
The plane ride was pleasant; I chatted the entire time with an interesting couple sitting next to me. We had a remarkably broad conversation for three people who had just met.
The silly moment was before the flight, at the security check, when they pulled my bags for a secondary search. I hadn’t even thought that my tube of toothpaste would be a problem, but it was more than the three ounce limit. I think that limit is ridiculous (as is removing our shoes), but I also know that it’s just not worth arguing about. I just quietly said, “okay, you can keep the toothpaste.” The security woman looked at me with compassion and asked if I’d like her to squeeze some of the toothpaste into a plastic ziplock bag so I could have a little with me to brush my teeth later. I thought that was nice of her, though it occurred to me later that since she believed it was actually toothpaste, and was willing to give some back, then why not let me keep all of it? I figure we were both doing our parts to act sane, within the confines of the insanity imposed around us.
Transit
I got a chance last week to ride the double decker bus that Muni is testing out. It’s nice and clean, and the view from upstairs is interesting. The ceiling on the top level is pretty low, so heads will be bumped. The bus itself felt responsive and didn’t seem to strain under the load. I did notice that it has double axles at the back; I’m assuming that is to carry what must be much more weight than a regular bus carries. I’m curious how these buses compare, weight-wise and fuel efficiency-wise, to the long articulated buses that are used on many of the routes.
I think that an electric trolley-bus version of the double decker would be needed here in SF; we should be lessening the amount of diesel burned here, not increasing it.
Weather
Someone recently said, snarkily, that I “just write about the weather” here. I disagree. The weather is a handy way to mark changes, and the changes in the weather often remind me of the passage of time and prompt me to write a little something here. But the weather is in the background, helping me set a tone for the limited writing I do in this space. I’d like to think that someone who thinks I just write about the weather is someone who is not really paying much attention to what I’m saying. That being said, it’s 45 degrees Fahrenheit right now. To me that is really cold! I am so grateful for the double-paned windows, the radiator and the new boiler down in the basement, firing with half the gas consumption of the old one.
Work
I have some interesting projects underway at work. The big ongoing project has been rebuilding the core network, moving everything to new equipment, renumbering the network with new subnets and moving machines around. All without the folks using those systems noticing. It’s sort of like the way Caltrans is rebuilding the bay bridge and approaches; they build around the old and then move the traffic back and forth, all without shutting down the roads. Caltrans has closed the bridge a couple times, but I’ve avoided any prolonged outages. We’ve migrated from one firewall to another and moved the core switching to a new “layer 3 switch” (layer 3 switching is still so cool). There was about 30 seconds of downtime when we switched traffic over to the new firewall. I’ve been joking that we scheduled it for when the CEO was in his car for the ten-minute drive between the office and his house. It did take some time to migrate some IPSec tunnels to the new firewall, but those tunnels are for specific traffic, not general access.
Design
I’m rooting through my list of art and design projects, looking to pick out a couple small projects I can fit in here and there, scoping some medium projects to make them more manageable and doing some preliminary planning for a larger remodel-type project that may get underway later in the year.
Social
I already have plans into the first couple weeks of the new year. Community, seeing friends, helping folks when I can, enjoying people and being enjoyed; that’s what it’s all about.
I’ve been posting short status updates fairly regularly on Facebook; if you know me in person, please add me to your friends list there.
I’ll be attending the usual events and look forward to seeing folks and catching up.
New Year’s resolutions
I actually have New Year’s resolutions to exercise more, eat more vegetables, lower my fat intake, rest more and pay more attention to healthy choices, physically and emotionally. Delightfully outrageous, indeed.
So here I am, once again writing about Apple. I’ll keep this quick. Tomorrow Apple is holding an event at Moscone Center, where they are expected to announce the latest generation of the iPod product line.
What I would like to see: an iPod which is basically an iPhone without the phone. Give us a large screen, touch controls, wi-fi, web browsing, contact management, calendaring and all of the usual music and video features, running a version of OS X.
Update, September 5th: The iPod touch is more or less what I had hoped for. Saving my pennies…
Update, September 11th: Apparently Apple is crippling the Calendar on the iPod touch, so entries can’t be added and synced back from the device. That is super lame. No longer saving my pennies, at least until the damn thing is out and its capabilities are fully known.
Come on Apple!
Work has been rather enjoyable as of late. I’ve been making good progress on projects and generally cleaning up and planning expansion of the environment for which I am responsible. I’ve been reminded lately, too, that I am much happier working in creative environments than in stodgy places. I find that companies with creative products tend to be companies with creative people, and those are the folks who are enjoyable to work with. It’s certainly nice to enjoy work, since it’s a cornerstone of daily life for me and, I believe, most of us.
I asked a friend how he was doing the other day and he replied, “you know, another shitty day in paradise.” I don’t think things are shitty; I go back and forth between enjoying the stability of a predictable life and looking for new and interesting things to do. In the past this would have involved some “troublemaking” or goofing off, but today it’s more about finding positive experiences to pursue. I get frustrated by some of the general annoyances that are part of my existence, but try to keep an eye on the bigger picture and find gratitude for the very great life that I have. I guess it’s all about balance, which I am good at in a lot of areas and still working on in others.
On the geek front, I am using a MacBook at work and have rigged it up to triple boot Mac OS X, Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. It works using a combination of rEFIt, a Mac boot loader, and GRUB, the Linux boot loader installed by Ubuntu (and most every Linux distribution these days). rEFIt comes up first and will reliably boot OS X every time. If Vista or Ubuntu is selected, GRUB is used, but there’s a hitch. About 80 percent of the time the keyboard is frozen at the GRUB menu, which will boot the selected OS but will not allow selecting something else. To do so, the system needs to be restarted until the keyboard becomes active again at the GRUB menu. Even if the keyboard is frozen at GRUB, it becomes active once an OS is booted. It’s weird glitch that seems to be a bug with the MacBook firmware. I increased GRUB’s timeout and set it to boot the last OS selected, which reduces the number of restarts if I’m just going back to the last OS used.
Triple booting Mac OS X, Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux works without any glitches, all directly from rEFIt.
All of the operating systems work well on this MacBook, though I had to use ndiswrapper with a Windows driver to enable wireless in Ubuntu, and it’s not as reliable as the native wireless drivers used in OS X or Windows. Vista’s graphics performance is quite good on this machine and all of the hardware works great with the drivers provided by Apple’s Boot Camp.
Still no iPhone for me; boo on Apple for forcing AT&T on people and not letting the iPhone become usable until the A&T activation has occurred (there is an activation hack: search for a guy named “DVD Jon” to find it).
Finally, I went on a reading marathon over the past few weeks, re-reading all six of the Harry Potter books before I bought a copy of the seventh and last book, Deathly Hallows (from a local bookstore, of course). It was awesome. I’ve lost sleep staying up reading, reading, reading. I managed to avoid any serious spoilers before I read Hallows and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Now I find myself strangely bereft of the series, wishing I had more and wondering what to do now that it’s all over. I guess I’ll have to dive into something new.
And so it goes…
I’m always working to keep myself up on various platforms and technologies. I’ve been running Vista on a laptop for awhile (Technet is a great investment when working with Microsoft technologies) and my “mini datacenter” at home includes an OS X machine, a Linux server and a Windows Server 2003 system (AD infrastructure and Exchange).
I decided to rebuild this Thinkpad laptop to dual boot Vista and Linux. The process seemed straightforward: install Vista first on one disk partition, then install Linux using the remaining disk space, finally modify the GRUB bootloader configuration to be able to choose which OS to start.
I’ve used various flavors of Linux over the years, including quite a few RedHat and Fedora variants. This time I decided to install Ubuntu desktop edition 4.07. My decision was influenced by, of all things, Dell deciding to sell laptops and desktops with Ubuntu preinstalled. I’ve been hearing great things about Ubuntu anyway, and I was just intrigued that this platform is being sold to regular folks by mainstream ol’ Dell. Linux for the masses?
The Vista install went smoothly, as expected, as did the Ubuntu install. After Ubuntu was installed I rebooted and found it had already detected the Windows partition and added it to the boot menu. Wow, I thought, the Ubuntu folks are making this really easy.
Ubuntu came up and it was ready to go out of the box. I mean, really ready to go out of the box. Sound was already running properly, video was all set. And I was able to connect to my wireless network by just selecting it. Granted, I haven’t been a daily desktop Linux user for awhile, but I was surprised that Ubuntu had detected all of the hardware and setup the appropriate drivers without any fuss.
The only glitch I’ve noticed so far was the “Network” tool under the “Administration” menu didn’t know how to connect to WPA-protected networks. But a different network configurator in the menu bar did and that got me online with a few clicks.
I was pleased that I could mount my Windows NTFS partition and access those files. And the preinstalled OpenOffice is pretty snappy. No problems connecting to my Mac shares or Windows shares via SMB/CIFS. I’ve been able to sit down and do some actual work already.
Of course I’ve been monkeying around in the shell, but for general computing on this box I really don’t have to. I think my Grandma would be able to surf the ‘net easily on this system. Linux for the masses indeed.
Now that I’m back in a Linux frame of mind, I’m tempted to dig up another box to install FC7 and see how it feels compared to FC6.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately. I’ve never been one of those people that sits around with a group of people talking incessantly about bands and songs; music has always been more personal to me. I don’t get any pleasure from analyzing songs with people, I much prefer to say, “hey listen to this new song/band I found; I think it’s neat” (yes, I actually say the word “neat” because, well, I like it). Since I got rid of the TV I’ve been buying more music than I used to over a given period of time.
I was looking at this stack of blank CDs on my desk at work today and thinking about the name, “compact disc.” Such amazing technology in the early 80’s. I only owned a few actual records that I inherited from God-knows-where; once I was old enough (teenager) to scrape together some funds I started buying CDs. I had a couple of those big binder things stuffed full of them. One was “high school music” and the other was, for lack of a better term, “my twenties music.” I still have one of them. The other, as far as I can tell, didn’t make it out of the apartment of an ex and I never tried to ask for it back; I suspect they got thrown out. That makes me sad, but life goes on. I’ve learned that holding on to things is never as rewarding as just remembering they were there. Plus, I can’t remember the last time I actually listened to an old CD anyway. I’ve been an iPod user for awhile now; the music is purchased with mouse clicks and gets backed up to a second hard drive. I guess I’m keeping up with technology pretty well; I text people from my [cute] cell phone, after all.
I was reading the blog of an old friend from high school. Actually I guess I could say the blog of two old friends from high school. The two of them met when we were freshmen or sophomores and have been together ever since. They have a baby now and, despite my lack of child-rearing interest, I find it cute and moving to see how their family is doing.
Thinking of them made me think of Tommy, another high school friend. He was killed early in Bush’s war; the guy never saw his thirties. I went back for his funeral and our high school named their stadium for him. Just a tragic situation. He and I used to sit around for hours and hours listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a CD that I asked for, and was actually given to me by my rather progressive grandmother.
We’d listen to that album all the way through and talk about how the way it felt must have been like getting stoned, which neither of us had [yet] tried. I’d go with friends to see Floyd laser shows. I would listen to Dark Side of the Moon alone in my room. If I heard one of those songs on the radio in the car I would turn it way up. It was just so visceral at a time when I didn’t yet have many life experiences of my own. I even tried listening to it while watching The Wizard of Oz though I didn’t find it all that impressive.
I have no idea where my copy of that CD is today. It may be in the missing binder, it may be in the back of a binder that I still have, out of order, lost, quiet. I could just go on to iTunes and buy the album again, but for some reason I haven’t. I will, sure. Eventually.
Those old records had art on their covers, of course. CDs had art on their covers too. The downloaded songs include digital versions that pop up on the screen while the music is playing. There’s a certain continuity there which I like. It’s not about the packaging, it’s about the sight, the sound and the feel, as it always has been. For me it’s about memories, of building soundtracks into periods of my life and then coming back later to hear those memories anew.
Some bands I’m into right now: Tosca, Mindtrap, Cantoma.
That’s all for now.
Microsoft has released PowerShell for Vista (32-bit and 64-bit versions):
I’ve been running Vista for awhile now, first the beta, now the release version of “Ultimate,” on a laptop that I use quite a bit. It’s fine, though it does use more resources than XP. Mainly, I just want to be up to speed with it before it starts showing up on new machines to be deployed to employees at work. I don’t see any pressing reason to upgrade existing XP machines right now in an office environment, but Vista will be arriving on the new machines sometime soon.
I’m pleased to be able to get back into PowerShell on my Vista machine.
Now if Microsoft would just release a version of the Group Policy MC that runs on 64-bit machines, that would be really helpful…
Macword is going on now and Steve Jobs is in the middle of his keynote.
Apple’s iPhone looks really cool. I’ve been wondering how they were going to fit all the disparate features of a “mobile communicator” — phone, iPod, a camera — into an “Apple looking” package. The iPhone looks sort of like a full-sized iPod, except nearly the entire front of the unit is a touch screen and all functions are accessed from it. So it’s smooth and doesn’t have clunky sliding or flip components. It has senors so it can tell which way you’re holding it and whether you have it up to your ear. And it runs some permutation of OS X. Very cool.
Now what I’m not interested in is a two year contract with Cingular/AT&T. I’m appalled that Apple appears to be forcing folks to lock into one company that requires a long contract. As for the wireless providers, it’s time for the industry to embrace flat-rate plans with unlimited minutes and data services.
Back to Apple. The Apple TV product also looks good, though the prototype had been demonstrated previously, so it wasn’t a big surprise.
I’ve been learning Microsoft’s new PowerShell. I have to admit, I am really impressed. They’re finally putting an emphasis on the command line, and giving us some powerful tools to manipulate Windows systems programatically.
I’ve never been much of a developer, but I’ve certainly hacked together some scripts over the years. That’s included batch files and a bit of VBScript on the Windows side, and some shell scripting on the UNIX side. I’ve put together a little bash script that runs via cron to backup my main workstation, for example.
PowerShell essentially gives Windows the power of a UNIX shell, with some new advantages. The two most exciting ones:
PowerShell pipes from one cmdlet to the next via the familiar “|” character, system processes can be started and killed, text output can be imported from and exported to CSV, HTML and XML. Various “provider” services give access to other parts of the system. For example, a registry provider allows access into the registry at the command line and a WMI provider allows access to the Windows Management Instrumentation.
I’m looking forward to automating more tasks and getting more skilled at this new and nifty (yes, I said, “nifty”) shell.
I am writing this on a computer running Windows Vista RC1. This release is much better than the last Vista beta that I installed. Everything seems to be working and operating smoothly out of the box. I think the interface may be more cohesive as well, though I need to use it a lot more to get a better feel for that.
I actually like how things look and work so far. It’s interesting to me how they keep “dumbing it down” while making the overall look and feel seem more sophisticated. Taking a cue from Apple, obviously. I did switch my Control Panel to Classic View with List details, so at least I can have something the way I’ve always liked it.
I’m not gaga about Vista, but it’s nice enough and experience has shown that it’s always handy to have a head start on new Microsoft products. After all, every new Windows release becomes the desktop standard in short order.
The other Microsoft product I’ve started using recently is Internet Explorer 7. In addition to the copy installed with Vista, I’ve installed the release version of IE 7 on several Windows XP machines. The interface is fine (but what’s up with turning off the menu bars by default in IE 7 and Vista?) and the way tabbed browsing is implemented is intuitive. I haven’t seen any glaring reliability or compatibility problems. I’ll still use Firefox or Camino as my main browser, but it’s nice to have a more useful IE available when necessary.
I was happy to hear the release version of Parallels Desktop for Mac is now available. I, apparently like lots of folks with Intel-based Macs, have been curious about running non-Mac operating systems on the Apple machines. I thought about trying Boot Camp, but I really didn’t want to dedicate a partition on the main hard drive, nor did I really want to turn a Mac into just another “boring” Windows PC. So Parallels was an obvious choice. I’m not comparing Parallels to Boot Camp, obviously, since I’ve only tried one of them.
A quick disclaimer: I consider myself to be platform agnostic, or perhaps more accurately, enthusiastic about many computing platforms. I think Mac OS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and other operating systems each have strength and weaknesses, and I enjoy using all of them. That ideal is really the driving force behind using Parallels in the first place.
This is just an initial run-through. I have not delved very deeply into the technical details of this product.
Installation
I downloaded Parallels and obtained a trial key. It installed easily on the Mac and I began building some virtual machines (VMs). I thought I’d save some space on my primary hard drive by building the VMs on an external USB drive. I also was curious if using an external drive would even work. The initial Windows XP VM went fine. I was in the process of installing SP2 when the VM just up and died. After that I couldn’t get it to run at all; it would start to boot and then just quit with no warning.
I had been impressed enough with Parallels before my VMs started crashing that I had already purchased a full license key and had activated it. For a few moments I wondered if that had been a good idea.
I decided to try building another VM running a different OS, still on the external drive. I got to the second CD of my Fedora Core 5 install when it up and died. Now I had two VMs that wouldn’t run.
I rebooted the Mac (I know, I know…) just to see if that would make any difference. When the OS came up my USB drive didn’t mount. Disk Utility showed errors. I opted to “fix” the USB drive and it found two problem files which were truncated to zero bytes. They were my two VMs, of course.
So I went back and started building a Fedora Core 5 VM on the main hard drive. It installed fine and ran well. Emboldened, I built a new Windows XP VM (on the main hard drive too, obviously) and it ran well also. I installed SP2 manually and then ran Windows Update and installed all the patches and fixes.
At this point I burned copies of both of these new VMs to DVD so I could just go back to those “base” installs if I messed anything up. Then I started adding applications and customizing as if they were actual computers I would use day to day.
Impressions
Parallels Desktop for Mac worked quite well. The XP VM was pretty snappy, especially after installing the Parallels tools, which made the mouse cursor seamless with the Mac desktop. Performance was very good; the XP VM ran comparable to a regular mid-range PC. Occasionally the overall system would slow down for a few moments, or the beach ball would appear. Since I had iTunes and Firefox running on the host OS, and had burned some discs at the same time, it felt like acceptable occasional lag given what else I had the machine doing.
The machine I was running Parallels on was a Core Duo 1.6 GHz with 1GB RAM. Parallels can utilize Intel’s VT-x technology to enhance virtual machine performance. Sometimes I received an alert from Parallels that VT-x was supported but not used, sometimes I didn’t. There are several threads on the Parallels support forums and on the Apple support forums about which Intel Macs can use VT-x and which can’t. I did not look in to this very deeply. From what I read it seems to be a firmware glitch that causes problems on some machines. But that was really just my speculation from reading what others were saying about it. Since my VM performance was acceptable, I was not too worried about it, though I do plan to keep an eye out for future information and resolution.
Concerns
It would be nice to run VMs on the external USB drive. USB support in the VMs seemed lacking. I couldn’t connect my VMs to USB devices attached to the host Mac, such as printers. The Parallels user guide didn’t mention printing at all, which seemed strange to me. I ended up connecting to a network printer from the XP VM; the network printer was actually on the host Mac. That worked, though network printing to the local host machine either feels awkward to me or very sensible to me, I’m not quite sure which.
Overall opinion
I mentioned that I was impressed enough to purchase the license while still in my initial stages of testing. I think that turned out to be the correct decision. I think Parallels is a must-have for tech savvy folks who want to run other operating systems on their Intel Macs. It supports pretty much all of the operating systems for the x386 architecture, so this is a sweet tool for building virtual labs or just trying out new OS versions without dedicating a whole computer. There are so many possibilities for geeks.
I think Parallels is a pretty compelling option for “regular” folks that, for example, use –or would like to use – a Mac at home but need to use Windows for work. Building a VM is time consuming, though, and may stretch the skills of some folks, so that should be accounted for.
As for Parallels, the company, I hope they will provide significant updates to registered users without making them pay constantly. While this release feels fairly solid, I suspect there are plenty of bugs to fix and features to enhance. Quite a few of the features that they say on their web site are “within scope of future development” would add a lot to the product. I hope they get some of those finished and out to the users in a timely manner.
I have read some rumors about Apple buying Parallels and incorporating it in to the next OS X release, Leopard (when are they going to stop using the stupid cat names?). I have no idea how reasonable that may be, but having VM capability in the base Mac OS would be a fantastic addition. Apple does mention Parallels on their web site and, indirectly I believe, via their TV ads that tout running Windows on the Mac as a legitimate selling point.
And as for me, I’m planning to try running Windows Vista under Parallels once my beta DVD arrives or my download completes (whichever happens first!). I’d like to see what the latest version of FreeBSD is like nowadays, since it’s been awhile since I’ve had it running. I may install Windows 3.1 just for old time’s sake, if I can get a boot disk image to access my old 3.1 CD. I may even try installing OS/2 Warp if I still have those old CDs somewhere. Fun!
Parallels Desktop for Mac. $49.99. Parallels, Inc. http://www.parallels.com/
June 19th update: Okay, I can’t run a Vista VM since Parallels doesn’t support ACPI yet. Their web site says it will be supported in the next release.
I’ve been trying to update all of the applications on the Intel-based Mac to Universal Binaries. I haven’t looked through them for awhile; today I started checking up and found stable/release Universal Binaries for a few things that I have:
The Universal Binary version of Firefox is very fast. Since the PPC version felt sluggish, I had been using Camino and occasionally Safari as well, both of which are also super fast.
I was also happily surprised to find HP has produced Universal Binary apps/drivers for a cheap HP all-in-one printer that I use.
I am very curious when Adobe is going to release Universal Binary versions of things like Photoshop and all of the Macromedia applications they now own.
I happened to be clicking around Wikipedia today and something led me to the “Aldus Pagemaker” entry. I learned to use PageMaker way back when, using the 16-bit Windows version. I was pretty good at it, too! I haven’t used it for many years, so I didn’t realize Adobe (they aquired Aldus) had ceased development. That kind of makes me sad. It also makes me sad that the alternatives these days are fairly expensive, at least for folks who just want to dabble with such things.
So software, like everything else, has a limited lifespan; some applications are evolving, some have died.
Now where are my old OS/2 CDs?
One of my favorite unique music sources is SomaFM (somafm.org), which describes itself as, “Listener-supported, commercial-free, underground/alternative radio broadcasting from San Francisco.” It’s run by Rusty, a guy I worked with back in the “tech TV” days; they play about ten streaming electronic music stations, including three new offerings. I’m sure my attempts at description won’t do it justice, especially since I’m not really dialed in to all the different electronic music genres. I just know that I like more ambient, reflective, dark, middle-of-the-night-when-the-city-is-quiet types of selections. Whatever that means.
I’m currently listening to one of the new streams, called “Space Station Soma.”
My friend Ryan runs a show at 9pm on Monday nights via 90hz.org. 90hz is not on the air full time like SOMAFM; they offer scheduled programming run by, as far as I can tell, a volunteer crew.
Life has been really busy lately in very good ways. I’m not going to detail all of the specifics here, but I have been doing a lot within the social groups that I hang out with, I’m taking a short-term class every other weekend, and I am getting a lot done at work, including finishing off a large project and getting ready to travel to Minneapolis on business. I always think “on business” sounds kind of silly, but it gets the point across. I have not been to Minneapolis before, so I am looking forward to seeing a new town, at the very least. Perhaps I can find some cool things to do in the evenings? You betchya?
I like to say that San Francisco only has two seasons, winter and summer. Winter descends sometime around November when the skies suddenly get gray with a little cold and a decent amount of rain for about half a year. Then around now, start of May, it lifts away and becomes sunny and windy and warmer for the other half of the year. I think it has something to do with the Pacific High shielding the area from storms part of the time. Well, “summer” seems to be here at last; the time has changed to daylight savings, the sky is light past 8pm and the sailing should be starting up aggresively pretty soon. Needless to say, of the two seasons here, summer is what I prefer.
I recently read Dry by Augusten Burroughs. I couldn’t help comparing it to A Million Little Pieces. I feel like kind of dick by saying this, given all the mainstream press it received a couple months back, but I read Pieces before it was discredited, and when I did it seemed defensive and disengenous and a little “off” to me. Really, it did, I am not jumping on the “hindsight bandwagon” here! Ask my friend Loretta. Anyway, Dry is cool because it is very close to the same story but I think it’s a more genuine portrayal of the struggle to break through addiction and how hard that can be. The precursor to that story, Running with Scissors is also a good read.
It’s raining. Again. Earlier it was just overcast. The waters of the bay looked kind of grayish beige, reflecting the skies above. Now I can’t really see the water. It just kind of merges in to the sky; there’s a ship anchored in the harbor that is just on the cusp of disappearing in to the mist. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen some really heavy fog or heard the foghorns, but surely they must be blowing out by the Gate.
I keep thinking that spring is going to appear any minute now. The weather will start to get clear, then the rain returns and lasts for days. I miss the sun and those nice days of sailing. Any minute now.
I am taking the day to stay inside my cozy place, reading (a cheesy treasure-hunter type novel at the moment, Wikipedia likely at some point), snacking, listening to music and puttering around my apartment with the heat on and the string of little lights glowing softly. I’m listening to the radio which is unsual. I, like so many others, listen to music on my computer and portable music player — I don’t even own a regular stereo receiver anymore. But that can feel so isolated. Sometimes I think I have no idea what is going on, musically, out in the world. Then I remember I can listen to a radio station via its Internet stream. Oh yeah.
It really is a different world than it was even ten years ago.
The great thing about listening to a local station on a rainy day is the DJs, looking out their windows at the same misty world that I am looking at, play rainy day music. Or maybe I just think that’s the case.
So I spent a good portion of this evening on MySpace. I added a few of my friends, and then kept looking around and found a bunch of other people that I know, and friends of friends, and old friends and people from other times and places in my life.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet, but I noticed that KQED did an hour about MySpace on March 3rd.
Update: The Forum segment was focused on how kids use MySpace and what parents need to know about it. Not my area of interest, but it was a good discussion that hit on some important topics.
Apple has released the new Intel-based Mac mini. There are two models, one with an Intel Core Solo processor and one with an Intel Core Duo. Both models include Front Row, a remote control, wifi and bluetooth, gigabit ethernet and more USB ports than the previous PowerPC-based incarnation. Both start with 512MB RAM instead of 256MB and have combination optical/analog audio output and input.
It’s pretty much exactly what I had hoped the next version of the Mac mini would be (well, I guess I still wish it had surround sound output, or is that part of the optical output?). Unfortunately my current computer is still quite serviceable, so I am having a hard time really justifying the purchase of a new one.
Then again, I’d be able to use the remote to control my music from across the room instead of connecting with VNC from another laptop!
Image: Apple, Inc.
Someone I know created a “syndication feed” to my blog (this site) on LiveJournal. If you add the user “jrandallfeed” [Update: it’s now called “jrandallblog” — see below for details] to your LiveJournal friends list, you’ll see snippets from this site’s posts show up as you read your LiveJournal friends list. I think that is kind of cool for LiveJournal users who want to keep up with people who are blogging outside of that community.
I’m not particularly excited about the name “jrandallfeed” so I emailed LiveJournal and asked then to change it to “jrandallblog” since that is a bit more in line with how I have organized my site (I actually created a feed to my sailing blog called “jrandallsailing” along the same lines). They wrote back and said “no” with a link to their FAQ explaining that once a feed is created nobody owns it and they won’t delete it or modify it.
That got me thinking about how copyright issues apply to RSS feeds. Obviously, content I create belongs to me. But by providing an RSS feed of my content it is extremely easy for anyone to take it and manipulate it. A “default” RSS feed has no security policies or access restriction, so once content is made available there is nothing, at least in a technical sense, to stop it from being used in any way.
So how is copyright actually applied in the give and take realm of RSS feeds?
When listening to copyrighted music on the web or reading a copyrighted static web page for that matter, I don’t assume I can take the content and incorporate it in to my own work just because it was accessible. Is it assumed that content obtained via RSS can be used or presented in any way, with no guidelines from the owner of that content? What are the legal implications?
I took a peek at my XML to see if I am providing a copyright tag in the feed, and I am not. It looks like I can add a plugin to WordPress that will add some copyright verbage to the posts.
As for LiveJournal, perhaps they should provide some level of control to content owners when their feeds are aggregated through LiveJournal syndication? Or, again, is it just assumed that providing content via RSS removes the owner’s right to control any aspect of its distribution?
Update: The LiveJournal folks manually broke “jrandallfeed” in order to let me create a new syndication link called “jrandallblog” — I appreciate that. It’s a messy solution, but I suspect they’ll clean such things up over time as they refine how they handle their syndication system.
I'm a technology worker and city dweller sharing a few of my thoughts in a personal blog project. More...
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