Category: Technology

Cue the iCoffin jokes

“Jobs has asked to be buried in a coffin with rounded corners and no visible latches or hinges” — Something I read someplace this morning but can’t find now.

I’ve never had an emotional stake in the whole “Mac vs PC” debate.  The only Apple product I use is an iPhone, and that only because my employer pays for it.  I stick with PCs because I’m paid to program them, because they run the software I want to run, and because I’ve never been willing to pay the premium for the pretty box with a fruit logo stamped on it.  I don’t begrudge Mac fans their choices, though – if that’s the tool that works for you, I’m happy for you.

I do have an issue with Apple as a company: their tendency toward closed, proprietary systems that serve no purpose other than to keep people shelling out money to Apple.  Why does my iPhone need a different USB connector than the standard mini-USB jack that’s used by, oh, everyone else?  Would it really hurt Apple’s bottom line that much to let me plug an SD card into the thing for more storage space?  And I haven’t used iTunes in years – is it still so damned hard to get songs bought there to play somewhere other than iTunes?  Microsoft gets pounded, sometimes deservedly so (but not so much anymore) for bucking standards… often by the same people who sing Apple’s praises while the Fruit Empire’s practices make Bill Gates look like Linus Torvalds in a very, very expensive suit.

What I’m trying somewhat unsuccessfully to get at here is that I’ve been neither a fanboy nor a vocal detractor of Steve Jobs (though, obviously, I disagree with some of his policies).  There are two areas where I can’t help but sing his praises:  he popularized (but did not invent) and steadily added innovations to the graphical user interfaces on which most of our interactive technology today is based; and he was a driving force behind turning the cell phones we’d all started carrying into techno-swiss-army-knife do-anything gadgets that have connected us all in ways that only science fiction had previously imagined.  (Just please don’t use your smartphone to “connect us all” while you’re speeding down the same highway I’m driving on, thankyouverymuch.)

So whatever I may think of some of his actions, the man did change the world, and probably for the better.  Those who would be innovators have an icon to look up to and a big set of shoes (not to mention a closet packed with long-sleeved black turtlenecks) to fill.

(Jobs also earns bonus points with me for living a life that would cause the Westboro Baptist people to protest at his funeral.  If the WBC hates you, you must have done something very, very right.  And if they tweet their hatred via a device you brought to market, you deserve some kind of posthumous award!)

Westboro iPhone

I really want to like Linux, but…

… every time I’ve installed it on a machine, it’s been a let-down.

I have an “old” (4-5 years) laptop (Athlon XP 2500 with 3 gig s of RAM, using the nVidia 440 series display, if that makes any difference) that’s been running its original Windows XP install since I bought it. For the most part it sits next the monitor for my main desktop PC and is used these days to watch DVDs or streaming video from Netflix or Hulu, or for some light web surfing now & then – tasks that it has always been adequate to perform.

So for whatever reason I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to take this perfectly functional machine and wipe it to install Linux. Though my success with various Linux incarnations of this open-source OS in the past has been, shall we say, limited – there always seemed to be some piece of hardware for which I couldn’t find adequate support, or some piece of software I wanted to be able to run, but couldn’t – I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take the plunge, because I could always re-install XP if it didn’t work.

So I grabbed the latest Ubuntu 9.04 release and it installed flawlessly. Installed a utility called Synergy to allow me to share mouse & keyboard across multiple machines, and it worked flawlessly once I set all the machines involved to fixed IP addresses, because the Linux and Windows boxes didn’t seem to want to recognize each others’ presence any other way.

Next I downloaded the Boxee media center, which I remembered reading on LifeHacker had support for streaming Netflix movies… what I didn’t remember, though, was that it only had this support on non-Linux platforms, and in fact there’s currently no way to view netflix streams on Linux at all except possibly through some kind of Windows virtual machine setup – which kind of defeats the purpose. Boxee crashed out to the desktop most of the time anyway.

Next I tried to watch Hulu, and it worked fine, except that with headphones plugged in, sound was coming through both the speakers and the headphones. I had to Google for a solution to this (ticking a checkbox in the sound control panel to enable automatic headphone detection), and this is a minor quibble, but it seems like something that should be set by default.

Sound problem resolved, I clicked “view full screen” on the Hulu page – and bye-bye browser window. So Hulu only works if I keep it running in a small window.

“Surely they’ve gotten DVD playback right,” I thought.

Not quite.

In order to watch pretty much any commercial DVD, I had to track down a quasi-legal driver to decrypt the contents. This is, of course, not at all the fault of the open source community, but rather of the greed of the film industry, but it’s still a stumbling block in the acceptance of an alternative desktop OS.

Decryption installed, I popped in a commercial CD, and was able to watch it right up to the FBI warning – at which point the player locked up. Several other DVDs did better – I didn’t watch them all the way through, but at least I could get into the movie itself and navigate around.

So, as has happened every time I’ve installed Linux, it’s just not up to the task for which I’d hoped to use it. I suppose it would be ideal if I needed an Apache server, but, for the moment, I don’t.

For my next trick, I’m going to grab the Windows 7 RTM through my employer’s MSDN subscription and see how that works on the old laptop. Most likely I’ll end up back on XP.

Living in a Swirly Purple Bubble

It’s a frequent tactic of theists to post video “refutations” of atheism to YouTube but to either turn off comments altogether or so systematically delete any rebuttal that didn’t share their viewpoint.

The video you’re about to watch was one of those, but thanks to a new service called BubblePly, I was able to create a point-by-point “live” reply!

(It’s my first attempt at pop-up video, so forgive me if there are quality/timing issues)

Aaaarr! Avast, ye scurvy e-mailers!

Har! Sit back, me mateys, and let ol’ Round Don Silver spin ye a yarn of an e-mail gone bad; a tale of a sorry scallywag an’ the fools what followed ‘im inta the briny deep!

This mornin’ some scurvy dog sent out a missive ta all the ships at sea (where the sea be defined as most of th’ employees of the largest agencies of a government body) that did use a lot o’ words ta say, “Be happy, Jesus loves you – now send this to all yout friends!”

If tweren’t bad enough that landlubber lootin’ and pillagin’ me tax dollars ta send a chain letter on a government network, out o’ the woodwork came a bunch o’ sailors greener’n a virgin cabin boy who couldn’t tell th’ difference twixt the “Reply” button and the “Reply ta all” button. So there were dozens o’ global replies sayin “thanks”, or “please stop sendin’ this, or it’s the brig for ye!”, or “please take me off this list” – not realizin’ that the only way off th’ all-employees list was ta walk the plank. When one fella Reply-Alled ta say, “Stop replying ta all”, another fella Reply-Alled with “I agree, stop it!”

Ta the brig with all of ’em, says I! Remedial Microsoft Outlook fer ’em until they learn ta tell their aft from a hole in the ground!

Checking In

Over the past month I’ve been dealing with a new job where internet connections are closely monitored (so no blog or forum posting from work), a dead PC whose replacement parts never seem to want to work together, and various other distractions, so there’s been little time and/or inspiration to add any updates here.

I’ve been learning the ins and outs of Microsoft’s .NET 2.0 lately, and tinkering a bit with the ATLAS libraries as well. I’m using both at the office now and am gradually working on moving the family web site over into 2.0 with a few changes along the way to take advantage of new features like master pages and menu controls. Watch for it… oh, I dunno… eventually. In the meantime, take a look at the recently reorganized and expanded Susan’s Art Gallery page.

While I haven’t been blogging, I have been writing. Not a lot, but I’ve made more progress on my work-in-progress in the last three weeks than I did over the preceeding several months. I found a way to make a tedious-but-necessary part of the story much more interesting and fulfilling, and in getting through that I’ve now gotten to a scene I’ve been eager to write – and not just because it involves naked people. With luck, I’ll be able to crank through that over the next couple of days. This book may actually get written if I keep this up!

Wii3

The internet is abuzz this week with news from E3, the annual get-together that is to the electronic gaming industry what the Republican convention is to gun-totin’ fundamentalist “librul”-hatin’ rednecks named Jeb, or the Democratic convention is to, oh, I dunno, maybe people looking for a market where they can sell replacement spinal columns?

Now, for me, the biggest news out of E3 is the announcement that signups for the beta of Lord of the Rings Online have begun. But what the press seems to be focusing on is the rivalry between the Big Three of console gaming. While I’ve owned a few consoles and currently have a Playstation 2, I’ve always preferred PC games for the most part. All the PS2 has been used for in over a year is to entertain children (and occasional adults, myself included) with “Eye Toy” games. So a while back when the trio of next-generation consoles was announced, I was interested from a detached point of view, but shrugged off questions of “which one will you get”; at the time I figured, “probably none of the above.”

I’m beginning to rethink that opinion. Not because of the possible tremendous strides in graphics and processing power (the PC has or will soon pass the consoles by once again), but because of interface innovations on the new machines. The XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 will both have Eye Toy -like peripherals available. I like the PS2 Eye Toy, but it is limited in resolution, is vulnerable to low or changing light levels in the environment, and has a very limited selection of software to support it. Microsoft has already demonstrated a camera type peripheral for the XBox360 that displays in a higher resolution and recognizes such minute movements as hand gestures, and likely Sony’s product will follow suit if they ever get their act together on the PS3 in general. In any case, it remains to be seen what kind of software support these devices will have, and unless someone figures a way to coordinate 2 cameras from different angles to map a player’s movement in 3D space, they’ll always be limited to 2-dimensional gameplay.

Enter the Nintendo Wii. Dumb name, yes, I agree, but it certainly has drawn a lot of attention to the machine. (I dare Nintendo to produce a portable version called the Wee Wii!)

Way back when the machine, then code-named Revolution, was announced, the pictures of the simplistic, rectangular TV-remote-like controller made a lot of folks scratch their heads and wonder aloud, “What were they thinking?” Since then, of course, we’ve learned that this controller can in fact sense its position in space, so it can be swung like a sword, aimed like a gun, etc, and the game environment will react to the player’s movements through three dimensions. I wonder if there is the possibility of using multiple controllers to say, wield two weapons in-game, or to attach similar devices around one’s ankles so the game could track leg movements like kicks?

The Wii does in fact trail the other two new consoles in terms of sheer raw power, but based on the information available now, it’s the one I’d choose. The fact that the 3d-sensing controller comes with the system means that pretty much every Wii game will make use of it, and it will enjoy much more support than the Eye-Toy-alikes ever will.

Price is also a concern, of course. The Wii looks to be a lot less costly than the XBox360… and for the price of a PS3 (if and when it ever gets here), a person could by an XBox and a Wii!