There are a ton of articles about this being posted on the web today, but many of them have errors in them (even the Space.com article, which I'm not going to link to, contains an about the timeline of the discovery and analysis). Anyway, the two best articles I've seen so far are on Time and Ars Technica:

http://time.com/24894/gravity-waves-expanding-universe/

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/big-rumors-circulating-about-detection-of-primordial-gravity-waves/

Whenever one of these restarts is required, the shutdown menu shows an option to "Update and Restart". Sometimes, it also shows an option to "Update and shutdown". However, the "Update and shutdown" command is not always available, and the rules for when it is available are not clear.

There are Registry and Group Policy updates available that allow you to modify this behavior in Windows 7 and 8, however, these updates still don't always make the "Update and shutdown" command available.

This is, at least from someone that doesn't know the underlying rules, irritating, and seemingly arbitrary. More annoying than it might seem. What makes this more irritating is that I would expect the "Update and shutdown" command to be available whenever there are updates to install, and not just updates that require a restart. And yet, it is available even less often than the "Update and restart" command.

This would be a small change that Microsoft could do to make updates easier, and make it more likely that they are applied as soon as they are available.

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

...

Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country.

...

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day.

Now, to be clear, I would be surprised if Putin wrote this entire article himself. There should also be no doubt that there are Russian nationalistic motivations underlying these statements. At the same time, there's something very interesting about a foreign leader trying to speak directly to the American people.

So great.

In addition to the mouse and the accompanying chord keyboard, Doug invented computer time sharing, network computing, graphical computing, the graphical user interface and (with apologies to Ted Nelson) hypertext links.

...

Doug had a vision of modern computing back in the day when many computers were still mechanical and user interfaces did not even exist. He saw in a flash not only the way we do things today but also the long list of tasks that had to be completed to get from there to here. Now that’s vision.

Doug recognized immediately that to even describe his vision to computer scientists of the time would be to invite ridicule. He laid it all out for a colleague once and was advised to keep the whole idea under his hat, it was so crazy.

Cringley has some fantastic points in his article, which is absolutely worth reading in full. I really like what he has to say about genius versus vision.

Geniuses can be found on every street corner in Silicon Valley, but visionaries are much less common. Geniuses are good at completing tasks while visionaries are the first to recognize tasks that need completion.

Read the full areticle at cringely.com.

Google Nose BETA

:p

For posterity.

Time to start looking for alternatives.

Lifehacker has a list of alternatives

C|Net also has a list of alternatives

The average CEO makes in one hour what it takes the average employee one month to earn. The top 1% of the wealthy own 40% of the wealth in America, and 50% of all stocks and investments.

Absolutely nailed it. Maybe a bit more pain than joy sometimes :)

From PHD Comics on 2013/02/22

So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?

To be blunt, those are some strong statements, and, if I was an American, I would find this very upsetting.

Childless people usually have a list a mile long of things they would do better than most parents if they were parents. I was like that. I was going to read bedtime stories every single night, never raise my voice, go on walks after dinner, teach them perfect manners, always put them first, make them listen to classical music, and basically have perfect kids.

Then reality sets in and it's amazing how many of those things you will be willing to compromise on over a little fatigue. Then you add work stress and when you get home you just want to relax. You start to rationalize bit by bit.

Then they start school, and it's amazing how quickly you let yourself believe that school is a break from the kids and thats where they learn, and there is no need to waste more time on learning at home. That's my time, after all.

Thankfully, though, I think most parents realize this happens and they struggle to fight those urges. But it is indeed a struggle, every single day. When I look back at what kind of parent I wanted to be vs. the parent I actually am, it saddens me but motivates me to try harder. But it's also made me realize that parenting is far more challenging and gruelling than I ever gave parents credit for. So I try not to judge other parents when they make mistakes or lose their way mentally and emotionally. We're all a lot closer to being that scumbag parent than we think.

Everyone should watch this.

http://elections.msnbc.msn.com/ns/politics/2012/all/president/

The breakdown of votes by income brackets is certainly insteresting. Overall, it seems fairly clear that most U.S. citizens are in favour of tax, economic, and health care change.

The conventional wisdom is that, typically, presidents have more freedom in their second term, since they're not thinking entirely in terms of re-election. So, it should be an interesting four years.

Walt Disney, please adopt this ASAP. Thanks.

Well, now that's interesting.

Ask Patents is a new Stack Exchange site launching today that allows anyone to participate in the patent examination process. It’s a collaborative effort, supported by Stack Exchange, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the Google Patent Search team. It’s very exciting, because it is opening up a process that has been conducted behind closed doors for over 200 years.

This sounds really promising.

More data is required to validate all of the predicted behaviours (such as decay rate) but these are significant results, with a high level (99.99994%) of confidence.

On a related note, I like what I'm seeing with Microsoft Surface. It's interesting, and I really do hope it succeeds. Competition is a good thing.

To review, there is a 90 percent chance of a large earthquake in the minimum three years required to remove just the most unstable part of the fuel load at Fukushima Daiichi. The probability of a large earthquake in the 10+ years required to completely defuel the plant is virtually 100 percent. If a big earthquake happens before that fuel is gone there will be global environmental catastrophe with many deaths.

I have no idea how accurate the data that Cringely quotes is, but if he's right, a bad situation could become much worse.

Google is creating a better web that's better for the environment. We’re greening our company by using resources efficiently and supporting renewable power. That means when you use Google products, you’re being better to the environment.

It's hard to say how Google compares to other companies in the same space, because most companies are not being as open about these issues.

On a side note, the story of send is a very interesting look at what exactly happens when you send an email from Gmail, and how Google is trying to minimize environment impacts along the way. Of course, I wonder what the enivornment impact is of everyone accessing the Google Green website ;-)

Saved for posterity.

I refuse to give in to a cynical view of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto; that ethos was very real, a sincere and important guiding principle... But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.

Via John Gruber at Daring Fireball.

Think about how much of your daily life revolves around Google services. Just remember that you are the product that Google is selling.

From: Ray
To: All
Subject: in late tomorrow

All, 

10 GOTO Subject
20 PRINT "I am going to be " + Subject
30 END 

Thanks,

Ray

==================================================================================

From: John

Line 20- is never reached, optimized out.
 
Perhaps you mean gosub?

==================================================================================

From: Eric

I detect an infinite loop:

- read the subject
- read "All,"
- read line 10
- goto the subject
- read the subject
- ...

and as we all know: recursion is preferable to side-effect based looping.

(def read-email [email]
  (read-subject email)
  (read-email email))

==================================================================================

From: Ray

Re-factored with apologies: 

10 Subject == getConfig(Email[Subject])
20 PRINT "I am going to be " + Subject
30 IF getConfig(Email[TO]).RespondedToThisEmail
40     PRINT "You took this way too seriously - now the email will never end"
50     GOTO 40
60 ENDIF
70 END

Thanks,

Ray 

==================================================================================

From: Dave

Did this message go through an E & A?

==================================================================================

From: Eric

Why are we writing code without tests?

==================================================================================

From: John

At least it’s going through PQA.

==================================================================================

From: John

But will it have two ship its before tomorrow?

==================================================================================

From: Ray

I am so glad that you all are so interested in my project!  In order to move
forward more efficiently, I have created a wiki page to continue to track the
progress: 

http://devwiki.../Basic_In_Late_Email

Please feel free to add yourself and comments to the page going forward.


Thanks,

Ray 

==================================================================================

From: Dave

It's kind of scary how far outside the process this project has gotten in such a
short time. We really need to reign this in.

For example, I'm assigned to setting up an E & A, and I can't help but notice we
have no story cards for this project. We really need to get those cards written
(let's think in MMF's here, gang).

Oh, and Jackie, we'll need to get a Kanban board set up ASAP.

I think we're all agreed that we'll do a review of what Ray has already done
followed by a retro on Friday.

==================================================================================

From: Eric

Is this part of an Impact Area? Should we even be doing this without executive
oversight?

==================================================================================

From: Davin

Good point Eric.

This project is of core importance to this company, and we should give weighty
consideration to forming 2 oversight committees and a special impact area for
this. I'm also wondering if we can earmark any of this for an innovation grant
to help offset the cost to us. Marketing needs to weigh in...

That's really quite funny.

Via Marco Arment.

Thanksgiving is a one of our better ideas. We, theoretically, reflect on how fortunate we are to have what we have. The day after Thanksgiving would be a great day to start thinking how we might start addressing wrongs perpetuated on anybody trampled in the process of putting together the comfort and security we are so thankful for. Instead, we’ve turned it into a symbolic date for acquiring shinier objects in anticipation of how we can best miss the point of our next major holiday. Perhaps worse, it infects Thanksgiving itself, turning the holiday into, effectively, a paean to culinary gluttony in preparation for commercial gluttony.

Sad, but true.

Via Marco Arment.

Well, almost everything... As seems typical for John Siracusa (see his epic 8000+ word reviews of Mac OS X for example), he has a lot to say, and this podcast is only part 1 of 2, with part 2 coming out sometime this week.

Here are some of my comments on Steve Jobs and the biography.

So here goes.

Having finished the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, it seems to me that the underlying theme revolves around how incredibly talented a designer, visionary, and thinker Steve Jobs was. However, at the same time, it also seems to me that Steve Jobs wasn't a very nice person. Perhaps one might go so far as to say that it seems he wasn't a very good, well, human. He seemed very emotional, but often only when he felt things were not going his way. However, at the same time, it seems to me that he was was completely lacking all traces of empathy.

His family and friends might disagree, but the biography contains a number of stories that portray Steve Jobs as lacking empathy, being self-centered, and just not caring about the effect his actions had on those around him, including his family and close friends. Sometimes he seemed to actively find ways to hurt people.

Was it for a "greater good"? Maybe. It seems Steve Jobs often felt that it was.

As to whether or not his passing will lead to Apple slowly fading out, well, only time will tell. In the meantime, they seem to be in good hands, with great business and design leadership.

Now, with respect to the biography itself, it was disappointing. It felt rushed, and there were numerous technical errors within the book. In addition, some parts of the book appear to be simple summaries of earlier books on Apple and Steve Jobs, such as Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer, Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, and stories from Folklore.org.

All recent Mac computers have been moving towards incorporating Thunderbolt connectivity, both for peripherals (of which there are currently only a few) and external monitors. It would be easy to assume that the next Mac Pro would also include Thunderbolt connectivity.

However, stop and think about this for a minute. How exactly would this work? The Mac Pro computers are unique to the Mac line-up in that they allow for discrete video cards. If the Mac Pro is to offer Thunderbolt connectivity, how would the Thunderbolt port interact with the discrete video card, and where would the Thunderbolt port physically be located? Would the port be on the video card?

Placing the Thunderbolt port on the video card might be the simplest solution, but then it would mean that all Thunderbolt data is being routed through the video card. I am by no means an expert on hardware, but I suspect that this would be somewhat problematic. At the very least it would mean that Apple would be depending on third party hardware for their Thunderbolt connectivity, and I don't think Apple in general likes to rely on third parties for anything. On the technical side of things, it would mean additional bandwidth and load on what is already a hard working, hot running part inside your computer. In fact, video cards are usually the loudest part as well because of the fans required to cool them.

OK, so maybe the Thunderbolt port will be on the Mac Pro chassis itself. This would also seem to pose a problem for the discrete video cards, as they normally (based on my limited understanding of hardware) route their video signals out through the ports on the video card itself (i.e. some combination of DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, or VGA ports on the back of the video card). Having the Video Card route the video signal back to the Mac Pro motherboard and then out through the Thunderbolt port would strike me as being problematic. Once again, based on my very limited knowledge of hardware, it would seem like this would be problematic. First, it would be limited by the bus bandwidth, and second, it would require a custom video card, as this is not something that normal video cards do.

So where does this leave us? Perhaps the Mac Pro will not have a Thunderbolt port. I doubt that. Thunderbolt is perfect for external storage, and the typical use case of Mac Pros is for sound and video editing, where users needs tons of storage. Mac Pro users probably want Thunderbolt more than most typical users, who might not ever add external storage.

So that leaves Apple with either adding the Thunderbolt port to the video cards, or adding the Thunderbolt port to the chassis and running video signals back from the video card to the motherboard and out through the Thunderbolt port.

Or does it?

Perhaps there is some third option. What if the next Mac Pro chassis is radically different. What if it doesn't have an internal video card at all. What if instead of an internal video card, the motherboard has Thunderbolt ports that allow for external video cards. This wouldn't be unheard of. In fact there has already been a somewhat limited demo of this. Or, as Robert X. Cringely suggests, perhaps the video card will be in the monitor.

Interesting times ahead for sure.

1. End all software patents. Don’t make them shorter, eliminate them.
2. End all process patents. They serve absolutely no purpose. None.

Obviously he elaborates some more on this, but really, it's this simple. Software patents do not make sense.

About that name

These headphones are named terribly. The name is so bad that it's actually difficult to find them for sale online or at retail, as there are several other Sennheiser models with similar names (Sennheiser HD 25, Sennheiser HD 25-SP, Sennheiser HD 25-SP ii, and Sennheiser HD 25-1 ii Originals headphones). In fact, you might notice that I am using the lower-case "ii" instead of the "II", as that actually made them easier to find online.

Sound

There's not much to sound other than the sound is simply fantastic. But don't take my word for it, go do a quick search and check out some of the very detailed, comprehensive reviews out there.

Build Quality

The first impression you receive when seeing or holding these headphones is that they look fragile. In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth. I've been carting these to and from work on the bus for over a year and they are just as solid as the first day I owned them.

Comfort

While some of the reviews do say that these headphones are not comfortable for extended use, I have to disagree. Although this is always going to be subjective, these are the most comfortable on-ear headphones that I've ever tried. I find most on-ear headphones irritate me or are downright painful after less than a few minutes of use, but I've used these headphones for entire days at work without any discomfort.

Conclusion

I really like these headphones. They are the best sounding and most comfortable on-ear headphones I've ever used, and based on my experiences thus far, they're going to last me for years to come.

There are several things that are strange about this email message.

• It only appears in the iPhone's unified inbox. It does not appear in the inbox of any of my email accounts.
• It cannot be opened.
• It has no subject or sender.
• It has a received date which makes no sense, although it is probably a default value or the minimum possible value for dates.
• Finally, it cannot be deleted.
• Powering off and on the phone does nothing.

Very strange indeed.

In the report, Tokyo Electric says the containment vessel of reactor No. 1 may have developed a hole as big as 3 centimeters in diameter 18 hours after the quake.

Fifty hours after the quake, the hole may have widened to 7 centimeters, the report said.

In reactor No. 2, the containment vessel may have developed a hole as wide as 10 centimeters 21 hours after the quake.

Bad news in a bad situation.

What I wonder though, is what these charts would look like if Google was included. As best as I can tell, Google makes about $1 billion in mobile search and ad revenue each year. Although Horace Dediu doesn't provide numbers for all of his charts, I would estimate that Google is starting to approach the same level of profit as some of the handset manufacturers (note that I'm talking about profit and not profitability). That might not sound impressive, but when you consider that this is just from mobile services and ad revenue, I think that Google is in a strong position.

However, when you consider the Google Android platform, I think Google is in an even stronger position (with respect to mobile revenues), as it gives them access to user data, and control over which services end users have access to. The Android platform is doing really well in terms of adoption, and, for better or worse, it seems to have become the Windows of the mobile platform.

Whatever you say about Apple, Google, and other players in this market, mobile computing is the future, and I think we're getting closer to a time when mobile computing will overtake desktop computing.

I could be wrong, but I think that what he's suggesting is a situation in which you could only install software on your Mac via the Mac App Store.

It's an interesting situation. It could potentially help eliminate the issue of malware and trojan horses. However, what about users that want to install software that isn't available in the Mac App Store, or, as in the case of some open source software, can't even be made available in the Mac App Store? I just don't see how that part of the equation would work. I could still see Apple pushing for this though, as, generally speaking, they case about the user experience over all else.

There's more in Boardments Etsy Shop.

I used an IKEA VIKA AMON table that I already owned, and switched out the (non-adjustable) legs that I had for adjustable VIKA BYSKE legs. I'm not too fond of the chrome look, but these were the only adjustable legs I could find that went high enough for me (43"). The legs were kind of expensive at $16 each, but at a total cost of just over $100 for the whole desk I can't complain. One note if you do decide to set this up yourself; the adjustable legs are slightly unstable when they are fully extended, and I would recommend using the included brackets to attach the desk to the wall. I haven't yet done this myself as I might still move the desk, and the stability is fine, but I do plan on using the brackets once I know for sure that I want to keep the desk where it is.

So far after about a day of using it I like it. My feet are sore but I'm sure they'll adjust after a few days. Standing is definitely making me more active at my desk, and I think I am focusing more than normal, although that might just be because it's a new experience and I'm paying more attention.

I'm going to give it a try for another week or so before I move my speakers, USB hub, and second monitor over. For now they're on my regular desk. In the meantime the rest of my office is a complete and utter disaster, with cables, books, and other stuff all over the place. I'm not even going to take a picture let alone post one, it's that bad.

Interesting story for sure. I suppose this is a type of modern-day corporate espionage; rather than stealing information, ideas, or technology, Facebook is trying to reduce Google's market value.

At the same time, you have to think that one of the potential outcomes of any kind of privacy related PR is that the public is going to be more aware of privacy issues in general. This could really backfire on Facebook, as they already have someone of a tarnished history with respect to privacy (anyone remember Beacon?).

However, in the process of looking at Git, I discovered that Google Code hosting now supports Mercurial! In fact, their Mercurial support seems to be even better than BitBucket, which I was using previously for my Mercurial hosting. In particular, I had some issues with using BitBucket behind a firewall on a Virtual Machine that doesn't seem to be a problem with Google Code.

So anyway, I have now moved the MouseMover project to Google Code.

Update 2011/05/10 08:22 AM: Looks like it's official, with Microsoft to purchase Skype for $8.5 billion! That's quite a lot more than the $2.6 billion that eBay purchased Skype for.

All I can say is that Microsoft better not rename Skype "Microsoft Windows Office Live Skype Communicator Professional Edition 2011" or some such thing. Seriously. They would do that.

This whole situation kind of reminds me of The Right to Read article by Richard Stallman. If you haven't read this article you should go do so now. In fact, it should be required reading for all Computer Science students.

That said, I worry that Stephen Harper is doing this because it is most beneficial to his own political party. I certainly hope that this is not the case.

“We don’t monetize the thing we create,” Andy Rubin says. “We monetize the people that use it." (Levy, Steven (2011). In The Plex (p. 229). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition).

Of course, this isn't just limited to Google. Any time you are using a product and not paying for it, you aren't the customer, you are the product. This is one reason that, in many ways, I prefer paid web services over free ones.

Last Pass provides a great service, so much so that I pay for a subscription, even though I only really need the functionality that the free account provides. I want the service to succeed, to get better, and to stick around forever, so paying for a subscription account is, to me, a good value.

(Click for a larger version)

Well, as of two weeks ago, I finished coding the index page generation, and the system now entirely generates static pages. I did some internal testing to try and weed out bugs, and, not finding any, I deployed the code to my live site, and hit the "Generate Content" button. Since then I've been watching the logs carefully. Everything seems to be working great, and I couldn't be happier.

The resulting system is quite simple. I have a set of admin pages that use JavaScript and Web Services to save a series of text based documents. When a new article is written, an existing article is edited, or a category is updates, the system automatically generates the article page, the index pages, and the associated category index pages. For example, publishing this article will cause the following pages to be generated:

• /index.html
• /page/1/index.html
• /page/2/index.html
• /page/.../index.html
• /articles/index.html
• /articles/page/1/index.html
• /articles/page/2/index.html
• /articles/page/.../index.html
• /articles/baking-static-websites-2/index.html

I also added the ability to generate pages without categories. So, for example, the "About" page is simply a standard article with no category, which causes the page to be published to /about/index.html and prevents the article from being included on the main index page.

There's still a lot of cleanup work to be done. Some of the code is really messy and there are a few things that are hard-coded that I want to fix. Overall though I'm very happy with what I have here. I ran some basic performance and load tests and was not able to bring the site down; I hit the network bandwidth saturation point far before the server was under any significant load.

I'm thinking that when I get some time I'm going to work on getting the source up to GitHub. Although I've never used Git before, it seems similar to Mercurial (which I have used and like a lot) so it shouldn't be too hard, and it would be a good learning experience.

Download

"My criteria for considering an app for this list is that it either requires Android 3.0 or have its user interface be specifically designed for a tablet experience. I didn’t count games or existing Android apps that are just upconverted to take advantage of the existing screen real estate. While it is a marginally better experience than trying to run an iPhone app on an iPad, I’m not counting it given that Apple doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands of iPhone exclusive apps in its 65,000 iPad app count."

This seems like a fallacy. Just because something is true on one platform doesn't automatically make it true on another platform.

Now, I'm not saying he's wrong, he very well could be right that the experience of running an Android phone app on an Android tablet is only "a marginally better experience than trying to run an iPhone app on an iPad". However, from what I understand, Android apps are written to scale on nearly any screen size. Just from reading through the API documentation, it seems to me that the experience should be better compared to an iPad running an iPhone app, which just scales everything up to be 4x the size.

Now, to be fair, I say all of this without actually owning an Android Tablet, so again, what Justin Williams is saying here could very well be correct.

This isn't a new concept of course. As Brent Simmons notes, Aaron Swartz talked about this in 2002. And, let's not forget John Gruber's Daring Fireball site, or Joel Spolsky's CityDesk web publishing software, which was the first product released by Fog Creek Software back in 2001.

When I set out to write the software for this website several months ago, one of my goals was to produce mostly static output. This site does not use a database; the web-based site administration functionality outputs files as simple static HTML files using the Markdown text-to-html system.

So far I'm very satisfied with what I've done for my own site. Of course, there's always room for improvement.

The iPhone does have "over the air" syncing for Podcasts and new music that you purchase, but it doesn't work very well. For example, when you "get new podcasts" you end up with two entries for the same podcast; one with the existing podcasts you've already downloaded and synced, and one for the new podcasts that you downloaded over the air. I've also found that the over the air downloading will sometimes download recent podcasts that are no longer on my iPhone because I've already listened to them and the iTunes sync has removed them.

Why doesn't Apple make this easier? You already have to sign into iTunes with your iTunes ID, so why don't they provide a means to sync based on your account?

If Apple can't figure out how to get the wireless syncing to work, the next best solution that I can see is that iTunes would sync your Podcasts, purchased content, and playlists up to the iTunes servers. This would enable you to sync from any computer, provided you login with your iTunes account first. You wouldn't be able to sync or download non-purchased content (such as content you rip from your CDs) but using this new syncing system, iTunes would simply no longer prompt to "replace your existing content" when syncing on another computer.

Obviously, this is a massive oversimplification of how it would work, and there are likely DRM or other copyright issues, but I wonder how many other people find themselves in a similar situation.

Since I don't currently have an Android, Blackberry, or other non-iPhone mobile device to test with, I'd love to hear what's broken or not working. Things are still a little broken on the iPhone, but it's getting there.

No problem, just add a reference path to the top of your file. For example, if you want IntelliSense for jQuery 1.4 (yes, I'm not using 1.5 yet), just add the following to the top of your JavaScript file:

/// <reference path="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.min.js" />

A complete list of CDNs can be found on the jQuery site. I typically use the Google one, but I choose to use the jQuery one above as it is more compact.

Interestingly, Xcode 4 is now available from the Mac App Store for $4.99, although it's still free if you download it from the Apple Developer site. I suspect the only reason it's not free is to prevent a slew of people who shouldn't be downloading it from doing so and costing Apple a huge chunk of bandwidth. Fair enough I guess.

I really wish Microsoft would release the full version of their developer tools for free. Their "Express" versions are decent, but they are missing enough key features that it just doesn't work for me.

http://codebetter.com/iancooper/2011/03/08/tddbdd-and-the-lean-startup/

An abomination!

Ha, well at any rate, lately I've found myself using my Mac less and less. The work I've been doing for my master's degree has been mostly on Windows (the numerical analysis package I've been using is Windows-only), this website was written using Microsoft ASP.NET, and my job involves software design and development also using the Microsoft .NET platform. So while I still very much enjoy working on the Mac, and I'm excited for many of the new features coming in Mac OS X Lion, I just don't use it very much.

Hardware

My current Windows PC is a six year old ThinkPad. While it runs Windows 7 quite well (I've upgraded to 4GB of RAM and an Intel 120GB SSD) I'm really pushing it to it's limits. Meanwhile, I have a nearly unused but quite powerful Intel Xeon powered Mac Pro sitting under my desk. Sounds like the recipe for a project...

The Plan

However, rather than using Apple's Bootcamp software I decided I wanted to try and completely remove Mac OS and replace it with Windows. The main reason for doing this was to use the SSD in the Mac Pro as the Windows boot drive rather than as the Mac OS boot drive. To keep my Mac OS X installation around, I simply cloned the SSD in the Mac Pro to a regular SATA drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.

The lesson here being that once you go SSD, it's hard to go back. Really hard.

After doing some basic searching around the internet I found several promising guides, including this one.

The Results

It worked nearly perfectly. The only issue I had was that when I had to put the Mac OS X Snow Leopard disc in during the Windows installation process, there wasn't a way to eject the DVD drive, as the Mac Pro has a "hidden" disc drive. I ended up having to poke around inside the drive door with a pen until I found the button.

Anyway, it should start showing up soon.

Is this really true, or is this some artificial limit that Apple imposes on third party apps? According the Apple, the iBooks app has "over 150,000 books". I haven't browsed enough through the iBooks app to confirm whether or not all 150,000+ of these books are available for purchase through the iBooks app, but I also don't see a way to purchase books outside of the app itself, so I assume they must all be available through the app.

If this is the case, then clearly there is a way to get around the 3,500 limit for in-app purchases.

I will be importing old content as I have time. You can also find some of it on the archive pages.

Hilarious, and true!

An amazing app for iPhone that translates signs and pictures in real-time using the camera.

It looks kind of like RPM for .NET development. Looks interesting.

1. Signup for MMS Personal Pay (check the HP intranet)
2. Get your manager to approve.
3. Purchase or borrow a Windows Mobile phone (no, really, you need to do this, I’m not joking).
4. If you’re borrowing a phone, you will need to do a factory reset (no, really, and good luck convincing the owner of the phone, I got really lucky with this).
5. Put your iPhone SIM card in the Windows Mobile phone.
6. Open the web browser on the Windows Mobile phone.
7. Navigate to http://remoteaccess.hp.com/ on the Windows Mobile phone.
8. Accept the SSL Certificate twice.
9. Login using your HP credentials.
10. At this point you should be redirected to the "MMS Installation" page.
11. Click "STEP 1 -- Install Root Cert"
12. Check the "Open file after download" checkbox.
13. Click "Yes"
14. You should see "Installing VSRoot.cab" and then "VSRoot.cab was successfully installed on your device".
15. Click "OK" in the top right of the screen.
16. You should be back in Internet Explorer now.
17. Click "STEP 2 -- Install ActiveSync Configuration file"
18. Check the "Open file after download" checkbox.
19. Click "Yes".
20. You should see "Installing Activesync######.cab"
21. When prompted, click "Yes".
22. You should see Activesync######.cab was successfully installed on your device".
23. You should then be prompted to login using your HP domain credentials.
24. Click "Finish" in Internet Explorer.
25. Launch ActiveSync (it might already be launched) and follow the prompts to enter your information.
26. Once this is complete, click "Sync". If all goes well, the Windows Mobile phone should now be working.
27. You should now get a confirmation email from Exchange indicating that the MMS service is configured for your email account.
28. If you've managed to get the Windows Mobile phone working with your account, you can now move your SIM card back to the iPhone, and setup your HP account on the iPhone.

Note that if you run into any security or permissions errors (as I did), you will need to contact the HP IT support help desk, send them your MMS account confirmation email, and then complete a manual setup process.

Reposted from the archive.

What makes this a desirable device for me is both the ubiquity and convenience it offers. Being able to take all of my documents, pictures, videos, and other parts of my digital life with me everywhere I go would be very convenient. Even more convenient would be the ability to connect to and utilize other hardware, such as keyboards, mice, larger displays, and so forth. Although we are nearly there today, the user experience just isn't quite there yet, and I find that their are still too many small inconveniences.

Although I think the device that I am describing is still a few years off, I suspect that I am not alone in this vision, and that it might actually be closer than I think.

Reposted from the archive.

UPDATE: Sorry, the images above are dithered pretty badly. Should have used JPEGs

http://pong.flash-gear.com/

I've seen other versions of these games before (a drawing one, and a pacman-type one), and they're really interesting to watch. There's always a group of players trying to win, and a group of players trying to lose, perhaps with the intent of "destroying" the gaming experience for the rest of the players.

It's fun to play and to watch. Of course, if you just watch, you run the risk of falling into the group of players (inadvertantly) trying to lose :-)

Episode 2 - Calamity Jen

Episode 3 - 50/50

Episode 4 - The Red Door

Episode 5 - The Haunting Of Bill Crouse

Wow. That's some pretty incredible tech going on. According to Scoble's post, there are some 10 million images for San Francisco - what a dababase indeed! I can't even imagine how long it must have taken them to assemble all of the images.

"10/000/1000" Ethernet (from http://www.apple.com/macmini/)

UPDATE: Looks like they fixed it (http://www.apple.com/macmini/)

Licensing Costs

Microsoft currently offers a licensing program for "startup" businesses. Essentially, you are given a very cheap set of Microsoft licenses (I think it cost around $600 CDN) that covers MSDN, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition. The license covers 3 years of development and production use, which should be more than sufficient for us to build up enough revenue to migrate to full Microsoft licenses.

Open vs. Closed

Up to now, our entire business has been strongly reliant on and associated with open source software. We've relied on various Linux distributions, Apache as a web service, the PHP language and tools as our development framework, and MySQL as our database management system.

In some ways, switching to the Microsoft technology stack represents a significant change for us. At the same time, our thinking has always been that we should use the best tool for the job. In our current situation, it's looking more and more like Microsoft .NET is the way to go.

Risk

Obviously there is some risk in this. Rather than focusing on new features and functionality, switching from PHP to ASP.NET will require a significant investment of time on our part. However, after significant deliberation, at this point we feel the level of risk justifies the potential rewards.

Impressions

The biggest challenge for us thus far has been acclimating to the ASP.NET style of development. Everything in .NET is event-driven, and the entire platform is very state-heavy. We're not yet sure what the pros and cons of this are, but it certainly requires changing how we do things.

In terms of issues, the only thing we're seeing so far is that there is a proliferation of frameworks, addons, and tools for the Microsoft .NET platform. This isn't really an issue in and of itself, but it does make it hard to determine what works, what doesn't, and where do you even start.

The presentation focused on "aspects of software liability related to the software design process". I thought the lecture went well, and there were a lot of great questions.