But, you are not here for brain teasers, are you. So, no fear, as I set out to compile my latest time-killers list of Favorites, to satisfy your fancy (if your taste is anything like mine, that is). Again, available only in USA (most likely). Voila:

• Action: Air Force One – Great suspense, well executed all around
• Drama: Fatal Attraction – Borderline drama, thriller, and will help ensure that you never date again
• Sci-Fi: Virtuality – Something new, made for TV, but heck, why not…
• Science Documentary: Cosmic Voyage – Well spent 36 minutes, if it is that time of day when you brain still works
• Independent: Gamebox 1.0 – I’ll admit it, I haven’t watched the movie, but reviews look promising!
• Kids and Family (free babysitter! ) – Anastasia – Even has a bit of historical authenticity to it

Frankly, the quality of movies is drastically lower than it was a year ago. I think their lack-of-revenue is showing. Of course you can always try crowdsourcing the task of choosing the best movie for you (but see warning from paragraph one above).

Better yet, hit their excellent TV shows selection, which is still very decent. Enjoy!

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Microsoft announced officially last week that they are discontinuing Microsoft Money product. This Really saddened me, frankly. Something in the way they presented it made me especially sad. I was always expecting MS-Money desktop software to die, and to be replaced by cloud based solution (like Quicken.com and MSN Money). But instead of telling us to use Web solution, they just told us to “Go Away”…

Worse yet, I have been buying Home & Business edition for many years, to manage our small business, using their wonderful inventory management tools and invoices, etc. What replaces this? Nothing, really… Only super expensive and complex accounting packages, which I really hate (and don’t need for our tiny business)!!!

Ok, onto next rant… iPhone 3.0 came out, just installed it today. Where is my Video!? I really expected them to provide some video capture support for older handsets. Seriously, I don’t need fancy video editing in-phone, but I should be able to capture low-resolution clips!!! Phones with far lesser CPU were able to do this easily for years – Apple, I didn’t expect this level of incompetence, seriously! I am looking forward to finally be alerted if someone is trying to IM me on Yahoo Messenger or ICQ, etc. I hope it works, as finally latest OS should allow it, but don’t know which Apps implemented this yet… I’ll report on this later.

Final rant of the evening is about email and Twitter. I had a case in the office recently, someone replying to an email with “screenshot” of the issue. All he wrote was “I will check into it”. This resulted in 500KB+ email being blasted to hundreds of people by poor Microsoft Exchange server (and poor people who have to keep cleaning their mailboxes). Ridiculous! We need a better email system, and at least publically Twitter does some of that. Needs more evolution, but exchange Must Die and quick. We must figure out a better way to communicate, both inside the Enterprise and over public Internet. Well, I can blog my ideas on this in the future, if there is interest (hint, post comments!)

There, Rant Done! I’ll try to come back to regular insightful blogging in the near future

Meanwhile, I leave you with MORE RANT! Windows 7 64 Bit Release Candidate STILL doesn’t install on my main PC. No love for me, very sad… Thinking of replacing my Motherboard or something, but it’s annoying to go through all that trouble and expense…

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Back then, in mostly age of DOS, it occurred to me that one can easily create “An Engine” which could easily be reused in many different applications without any coding. The simple idea was to combine files with pre-prepared “screens of text”, and have a master “script” file, which describes the flow between the screens of text and tells the engine what to show, and what to do if a user selects X or clicks on Y. The whole thing took less than a week to write, if I recall correctly.

This wasn’t any major breakthrough, mind you. Even back then, awesome Sierra On-Line figured out that by coding single “Game Engine”, and giving it "Assets” (such as graphics, music and overall “story-line” script), you can create myriad of quality entertainment quickly and with consistently high level of quality. The quality comes in because “Game Engine” itself is small and highly optimized piece of software.

Next we fast forward, through the rise of Macromedia, which essentially conquered game makers market by offering a effective pre-built platform with Engine and “Asset Creator” for graphics and animation. No forgetting the Shockwave player and ultimate unification of Macromedia with Adobe, through brilliant consolidation of companies, giving the world a single preferable standard.

The latest chapter in this saga brings us the Adobe Flex Builder with Adobe AIR platform. Suddenly, creating exciting business applications, with pretty animations and fast response time is as easy as loading up “Assets” along with main “Story script”. Well, in reality, business is never that easy, but this is clearly a Leap Forward. And Yep, your business application is running on the same optimized “Game Engine”, at 30 frames per second!

A Wish Come True for us business developers, who always wanted to Make Games!!!

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My computer suddenly hung, though mouse was still moving, which is highly unusual! After simple troubleshooting failed to recover it, I proceeded to a full power-cycle. World of Warcraft promptly crashed again, much quicker this time, with CRC error. Concerned, I scheduled a full HD check-disk and surface scan, and left it overnight.

In the morning, I found situation to be same or worse. Software was crashing left and right, seemingly randomly. World of Warcraft’s handy Repair utility, told me my installation was “Too Corrupt to Repair”. I tried many different things, at first focusing on Hard-drive integrity, and kept finding pretty much all data written to disk, coming back with CRC errors.

Long story short, I recalled a handy memtest utility right on the boot menu of Ubuntu. I ran it, and voila, my screen quickly filled with Lots of RED errors, thousands, in fact. I proceeded to remove all memory modules (I had four DDR2), and put them one by one to the test, and as Murphy would have it, the last module was the faulty one. All others passed long battery of tests with flying colors. I reinstalled the three good memory modules, and computer is back to normal, as if nothing was wrong!

Moral of the story? I see several here – For example, why didn’t self-respecting Vista OS (ahem, funny!) include some sanity checks, to alert me to memory failures, instead of crashing with blue screens and failing “Host Processes”? (Yea, I know there is ECC memory, but I am not sure it would have helped in this strange scenario).

But even more so, what about Cloud? I had Mesh and Live Sync going! Something may have Synched into the cloud, with corruption on it! Any Cloud Backup, and pretty much everything else, would cause a disaster! Amazon’s entire S3 cluster went down not too long ago, due to corruption in status data being passed around the cloud.

I’ve been long excited about ZFS technology, and while I am sure it would have alerted me to problems sooner, I am not certain it could have prevented real data corruption in this case. With faulty memory module, everything written from memory to disk, will most likely become “corrupt for life”. Even an attempt to rescue such data will likely not end well, unless hard-drive is moved to another computer for rescue.

It seems that as computer scientists we are missing this very fundamental issue. We can’t trust our latest operating system to alert us if our underlying hardware is misbehaving?! And that our files are becoming corrupt every time we touch them?!

Back to the drawing board!

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Mind you, I know exact name of podcast, and even the short version #twist. So I searched on Google – Got Nothing. Next I tried Mahalo, still nothing. Delicious? Nada! And don’t tell me iTunes, that’s not very useful, since I prefer not to overload my iPhone, and still use Zune for all my podcasts.

So, who saves the day? Twitter of course! Sadly, for now only Video subscription is available. I’ll update this post as soon as direct MP3 RSS feed is published.

This Week In Startups!

UPDATE: Direct MP3 RSS Feed posted, as well as others, check the web site!

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And now, the actual point – For a while now, everyone agreed that a lot of our collective progress was often hindered by the infamous “backwards compatibility” syndrome. The base dilemma thus, for engineers not just of operating systems, but of many core technologies, was “Do We Make It Faster and Break old software” or “Do We Keep it slow, but not Break anything”. Traditionally, Microsoft preferred not to simulate old software standards fully, probably because it would end up being too slow to properly run older software.

But now, with faster CPU’s and built-in virtualization on chip level, they can finally move forward and just run that old Windows XP stuff inside “Virtual PC” – a full computer simulator running a “real” copy of Windows XP SP3. This “magic” finally allows the developers to Revolutionize, as we often like to do.

This magic comes to Windows 7 officially now, though I used Virtual PC in Vista as you all know, happily running Windows 98 and some 1995 software in it, without a hitch. Even in Windows 7 it feels like an “add-on” to me, hopefully in Windows 8 and beyond, the engineers will fully realize the potential “simulating” past, and allow themselves to Rethink every layer of the Operating System! What will result is prettier, faster, better technology. But where would we want to take it? Stay tuned, we’ll discuss that in the next parts of the series!

[via Within Windows blog]

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I’ll give you my two sentences summary, or you can read the entire post on his blog. It starts of by complementing Google for their focus on efficiency. Then proceeds to emphasize the importance of the relevant component (hard-drive), and ends with “why not check out this awesome product” pitch. Classic Marketing Formula: Gain Favor via Complement, Gain Trust by presenting logical arguments about importance of “X”, and finally mention a better “X”.

Brilliant or Sleazy? You decide… But sure way to get the message across, which is the hardest part of any marketing effort. I am sure that Google employees monitor the “tubes” for their company name, and certainly one or two (likely more) will forward a link to relevant Senior decision maker, and with enough incoming emails, that decision maker will take notice, enough to probably learn more about this technology. This is 90% of the sale effort, right there! Think about how hard it would normally be to get senior management’s attention to even agree to hear out your Sales pitch?!

Everyone is talking on the web about Social Marketing (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) and other such silly obvious things. For me, as soon as I see someone continuously taunting their own product(s), I un-follow, no matter how fancy the product is.

Maybe I am approaching this completely wrong, and Bob has nothing to gain personally from Google buying all these (apparently yet Non-existent) MFD drives. Either way, this approach is definitely novel, especially the ending, turning the discussion away from product and into personal unjust conflict?

Sensational (pun intended)!!!

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For me, the main focus in this demo is on computing interfaces. Notice how many different ways of interacting with the “computer” are shown. Amazing ones are on little cards/devices, that “sense” the motion of the device and respond by showing you different parts of the content, zooming in, etc. Actually, this is something easy to develop on the smart phone today, though I only know of very few apps that do that.

Interfaces are something I am always excited about discussing and improving. Also, you can’t make this vision a reality without a ubiquitous network availability and backed by some Cloud infrastructure somewhere. And we all know how Hot the Cloud discussion is these days. For more more complete story around this video, check out the blog where I found it.

[via i started something]

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With an upcoming launch (April 5, 2009) of actual Nintendo DSi device, Apple wants to be sure we instead talk a lot about iPhone 3.0 operating system potential features. They are organizing “Preview” event on March 17, but no word yet on when the actual operating system will “hit the streets” as they say (or whether Apple, in a suicidal move, will decide to charge for this upgrade).

There has been a lot of speculation about what the new features should be in 3.0 (and you can try to weigh in). Personally, I hope they will finally address the biggest trouble with the iPhone – The Lack of Communication Features.

There, I said it – for a communications device, it is in BIG trouble with “missing the trend” of how young next generation communicates these days. We all heard enough complaints about MMS, but I really think that is Old-School already. Instead, next-gen use IM these days, and with it, the Video Chat! Seriously, no IM or Voice Chat on iPhone?!

Which brings me to last point of this post – Walled Gardens, again! Knowing Nintendo and Apple, they are likely to opt for “proprietary” software. End result? People on DSi can talk to friends on DSi only, and people on iPhones, with each other, only, etc. This is the ultimate insult, I think, yet one that is very hard to overcome. Not just because of “tradition” at the companies, but also because of the mess with Intellectual Property laws around software.

Maybe Nintendo and Apple can “sign an agreement to open networks”, etc, etc? This is just as bad, as offers no help for Android (G1, and later devices) nor people on Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, etc, etc…

We, The People, want Open Communications Standards! Skype could offer us some hope in the Video/IM arena, but it being owned by eBay and all, makes it unlikely…

Meanwhile, just pick up Xbox Live Vision cam, hook it up to your 360, which is already connected to your Big Screen TV. Now you are ready to experience the future of Video Chat, straight out of Back to the Future 2 movie. Of course walled garden applies, and is escalated by setup complexity (plenty of people with 360 who still can’t connect it to the Internet, even).

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Can we have it all? Must we compromise privacy in order to gain safety? Is the constant flow through giant NSA “filter” makes our personal communications insecure?

I vote for safety over privacy any day. Beyond the sheer benefit of safety, I believe that the “privacy” proponents are comparing Apples to Oranges when raising concerns about the classic “Big Brother” sense of the word. In many countries around the world, if you say “Stupid President”, or “Dump Oppressive Government”, and the government actually hears you - chances are that you are in trouble. But in USA, clearly the freedom of speech rules above censorship and oppression. Thus, as long as strong Freedom Of Speech laws in place, I say we should all be willing to compromise on our privacy a little.

What troubles me, from a professional angle, is the fact that we spend so much time and resources on Information Security. This is a valid and critical issue, with rampant rise of hackers and computer data & credit cards theft. In the process, we develop methods by which anyone can securely communicate, thus also avoiding our Big Brother, who is trying to watch over us. Or, Big Brother is successful in intercepting our “secure” communications, and likely, so are the hackers.

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In my opinion Microsoft really can’t blame the OEM’s this time (like they tried with the Media Player Plays-for-sure fiasco) and “Come Out with their own Phone-Done-Right device”. I think OEM’s tried as hard as they could, over the last few years, to Make Windows Mobile Work. They developed their own additions and enhancements to the Windows Mobile, trying desperately to “prop-up” the ailing platform. But, no luck thus far – Today I can’t recommend any of the Windows Mobile smartphones, after experiencing the iPhone and RIM’s offerings…

I think it is really a combination of issues, from the slow display drivers/response (bad for UI overall, especially video and navigation), to seriously lacking Internet browser (where is their Deepfish?). But the biggest issue of all, ironically, is their openness, allowing problematic plugins (that consume CPU and Memory) to run on the Phone’s front page and allowing the many programs to run in the background, slowing phone down to a crawl. I say Ironically, because this is the biggest thing that iPhone disallows - only single running application and very controlled “3rd party software”. Of course it is also biggest complaint about the iPhone, since we can’t have our “gTalk” running in the background for people to reach us, which seriously cripples the usefulness of the whole “Unlimited Data Plan”.

Meanwhile, Android to the Rescue! Yea, more on that to come, stay tuned!

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Shortly thereafter I installed 32 Bit version, on 2 very different computers. One was old Athlon 64 processor, 1gb ram, barely alive computer that my daughter insists that she still likes. The other was good Quad Core system. The new optimizations really shine, as old Athlon 64 computer felt as snappy as the new shiny quad core system! My daughter loves it now, and discovered several favorite features already, like that rotating desktop wallpaper (kitties galore!) and the sticky notes on the desktop. Most software she tried so far, worked properly and performed very well! We hit few minor bugs, but it’s beta after all, so we promptly reported them.

In light of this positive experience, I finally got the courage to install 64 Bit version of Win 7 on my Primary computer with 4gb of Ram, as dual boot, of course. However, most strange thing happened, sad thing, annoying thing or even Disturbing thing.

DVD with 64 Bit Windows 7 booted fine, though seem to take longer to reach first screen than I remembered on other installations. And from there, it only got worse. Win 7 Setup took 10 or 15 minutes between each “installation” step, and on screens where I had to type something, I would press a button and see it reflected on screen only 20 seconds later.

7 Hours later, it was still on First install step!!! Though, it wasn’t stuck, you could see percentages going up, I think it was as high as 80% by then, so I left it running overnight.

In the morning, the whole computer was completely “Off”, for whatever reason. Trying to boot into Win 7 (which now appeared on dual-boot menu), did nothing, just black screen. Safe startup mode was no help, hanging at some driver that didn’t seem related to my hardware…

I didn’t give up, wiped that partition and tried again… After second time, I gave up.

Strangest thing is that I don’t even know how to report this to MS. They have crashes and Feedback reported from within Windows 7, everywhere. But what if it is a case like mine, where Installer doesn’t even work?! I wonder if there is some log somewhere.

Another strange thing is that Windows Vista and Ubuntu work flawlessly on that same computer. Go figure…

But, it’s beta, so I am not holding it against folks at Redmond. I’ll keep trying to figure out how to submit a Setup log or something like it, in hopes that they will find time to analyze this issue.

Final words on Windows 7 – I think it is critical that in these hard times Microsoft prices Windows 7 properly. It should be cheaper, have LESS “editions” and allow for multi-PC license for home (like Mac does!).

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This weekend I happen to visit the excellent Wikipedia page for this game, and noticed a link to a completely payable Flash Version of this game!! Even has the original Music and Sound Effects, amazing!!!

What is this game, you ask? It’s a board-game style Game of Life simulator. You simply play week by week, figuring out how much of the week’s time to allocate for various activities. Choose between eating (dohh), relaxing at home, working, or learning in Hi-Tech U. Of course you need to manage your budget through all of this and decide when to buy shiny new TV, move to better housing or try to find a better job.

This is just high level, the game has great depth, and definitely teaches you some real skills useful in life out there.

Kids and I already played one big game, late into Friday! Silly computer won, but my youngest came in close second, and me 3rd (What!? I forgot how to play, Okay!). And today, I plan to have a big challenge match, at least one. Kids love it also, starting to realize that it isn’t an easy game to master. Really fun for the whole family! There are enough surprises (winning lottery, getting robbed, getting fired, etc) to keep it interesting from match to match.

Of course, lots of credit goes out to Sierra! I really loved them and their games. So sad that they lost their way and disappeared into corporate jungle of America nowadays. Also, Kevin Boye, whoever you are, Thanks a Ton for porting this to flash!!!

Play it now, right here!

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Actually, on the NYSE web site itself the quote seems correct, but looks like whatever feeding many other systems is messed up! And this is not the only quote, I found many others to be strange and incorrect!!! Some showing down 95% overnight, others up, and so forth, all over the place. Not clear if those prices are something from history of few years back, or just random glitch…

Makes you wonder, how safe is our financial system? Hopefully this is no hacker, but just a small bug, we all know those happen, and fortunately today is not a trading day!

UPDATE: OMG!!! While I was typing, it already got fixed! KUDOS (though we are still worried)! I have Photographic Evidence above! I checked several others that were broken, they appear fine also now… Hmmm…

UPDATE2: For proof that I am not crazy, look closely at Google intra-day chart (comes up by default, or click on 5d). Look at Jan 10, it shows some fluctuations of AMD stock (for example) with stock in $26 range, and moving in price – STRANGE!

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