PaulStamatiou.com

Turning 23

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:00:53 +0000

Not much to say today other than I’m now 23 years of age! Posting around here has been a little slow and will continue to be for a while. I caught some virus and have had fever for the last week and according to the ER doctor at the hospital, it’ll be ~~another week or two~~ 4-6 weeks before I get my energy back. In the meantime, I’ll be playing Flight Control in bed with my shiny new iPhone 3GS.

I’ve got a lot of good post ideas in the pipeline, including a simple HDR photo how to. As always, you can suggest things for me to blog about on my Skribit profile. We just rolled out some big Skribit updates last week with more on the way. I also recently created a frequently updated Stuff I Use page to keep track of applications, services and hardware I regularly use. TextExpander and Fever were the most recent additions (both recommended). Any other apps or services I should check out?

As always, thanks for reading and subscribing to PSTAM this year!

Related: Turning 20, 21, 22

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WordPress How To: Change Your Blog’s Permalinks

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:16:41 +0000

I recently did the unthinkable. I changed the URL structure of my blog’s URLs. Long considered a scary territory, along with moving domains, due to the SEO implications and potential for losing traffic, I was convinced by Bruce Keener to give it a shot. Ever since my blog launched I have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name URL structure. I thought it was quite handy to know when the post was written before even loading it, but I ended up dealing with very long URLs that got quite annoying. In addition, it is known that if a random visitor from a search engine knows that the post they are loading is old, they are more likely to close the page quickly (to the point that some webmasters remove the date from posts entirely, or move them to the end of the post). Add to that how Google’s own SEO expert Matt Cutts recently switched to the Thesis theme (which I’m using as well) and his permalinks do not include dates either.

The icing on the cake was Bruce Keener’s comprehensive Case Study In Changing URL Structure where he stated that after the switch he did not notice any drop in his traffic, a result of Google PageRank immediately following the 301 redirects.

I had no loss of search traffic and loss of position in the SERPs for any of the URLs that I monitored during this time.

Going Dateless

That was enough for me to give it a whirl. I switched my URL structure to simply paulstamatiou.com/post-name structure as of last week.

Here are the quick steps that did it for me:

1) While this doesn’t have to be the first step, it’s important to clear your cache so changes are immediate once you do them and you don’t have links using the old structure lying around. I disabled WP Super Cache while I was working, and then cleared the entire cache.

WP Super Cache plugin – disable cache, empty cache.

2) Change WordPress permalink settings. Select Custom Structure and type in /%postname%. It’s up to you if you want a trailing slash. Click Save Changes. Your .htaccess might not not automatically update, but that’s fine, we have to add some stuff to the .htaccess anyway.

3) Open up your FTP program of choice or fire up an SSH session. Navigate to the .htaccess file at the root of your blog’s directory and add in the following line

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://paulstamatiou.com/$1

after the RewriteEngine On line. Replace my domain with yours. Below you’ll see what your completed root .htaccess file might look like (for simplicity I took out my other .htaccess and WP Super Cache lines):


Options +MultiViews
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://paulstamatiou.com/$1

RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

NOTE: This RedirectMatch line assumes you have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name structure. If you have been using some other form, it will need to be tweaked accordingly.

4) Save the .htaccess file and re-enable your cache.
5) If you’re not already using the Google XML Sitemaps Generator WordPress plugin, now is a great time to start. Have it generate a new sitemap for your blog.

6) Add your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure that the sitemap was accepted and keep an eye on crawl errors periodically.

That’s it! Two weeks later my web traffic hasn’t changed negatively and I’ll wait a bit longer and report back about how everything works out in the long-run. Overall, the latest versions of WordPress (well it goes back to version 2.3 I believe) are pretty robust when it comes to their built-in redirection engine that can redirect all non-canonical URLs to the single canonical URL for the site. Combine this with a tried and true, SEO-tweaked theme like Thesis and your blog should be good to go.

What URL/permalink structure are you using? Have you been a Google Webmaster Tools user for a while?

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CLEAR Launches 4G WiMAX in Atlanta

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:22:06 +0000

If you live in Atlanta, you’ll be happy to hear that there’s a new ISP in town. And I’m not talking about just any type of Internet connection. I’m talking about WiMAX (read my Thoughts on WiMAX post). It’s called CLEAR by Clearwire and its launch makes Atlanta the “Fastest Unwired City in the South”. That’s a pretty hefty claim that I’ll have to put to the test later. CLEAR isn’t the first WiMAX provider in the United States – Sprint launched WiMAX under their XOHM brand name in Baltimore last October, and other providers have been helping businesses with WiMAX coverage in major cities as well. But for Atlantans, CLEAR is the currently the only consumer choice when it comes to WiMAX, and considering that providers like Verizon have much slower 3G data plans with 5GB monthly download caps that cost about the same, CLEAR is starting to look pretty good.

Clearwire’s new CLEAR logo

Yesterday’s launch event was far from a little booth at the mall. They pulled out all the stops and took over the Atlantic Station shopping center in midtown Atlanta. There were lots of CLEAR demos being given as well as promotional information for visitors to take home.

Atlantic Station CLEAR Launch Event

The Product

Unlike many of its competitors, CLEAR claims to be different, forgoing lengthy and expensive service contracts for mobile and residential plans that can be purchased by the month or by the day (a day pass will run you $10, provided you already have the hardware). However, despite that fluff if you signup for a two-year service agreement you get “additional savings”, as well as if you get both a mobile and residential plan.

Most people will opt for the $50/month unlimited mobile Internet plan, which incurs a $35 activation fee for those not wishing to get roped into a two-year agreement (I’m looking at you AT&T, no way I’m paying $599 for an iPhone 3GS). I don’t think it would be wise to get CLEAR’s residential WiMAX for your home at this time (only 6 Mbps down), when other non-wireless providers can provide much, much faster connections for the same price.

USB Motorola WiMAX modem dongle

So what’s the difference between mobile and residential plans? For one, there’s different hardware and different performance. When you’re on the go, you only have two options – the hideous USB dongle (I would have preferred some smaller ExpressCard solutions), or using a new laptop with an Intel embedded WiMAX chipset. CLEAR’s USB Motorola WiMAX modem costs $59 and they claim a typical download throughput of 4 Mbps (and 0.5 Mbps up) with that. Residential customers can opt for a book-sized WiMAX modem for $79 that is capable of a typical download throughput of 6 Mbps.

If anything, I’d be most interested in their Verizon MiFi competitor — the CLEAR Spot ($139). Hook it up to the USB dongle and you’ve got an instant mobile Wi-Fi network for your laptop and 7 other Wi-Fi enabled devices (all sharing the 4 Mbps connection).

The Performance

For example, some of today’s 3G wireless networks typically deliver download speeds of between 1.0 and 1.7 Mbps. CLEAR customers, however, can expect to see download speeds of 4 to 6 Mbps with bursts exceeding 15 Mbps, far surpassing even the peak theoretical speeds of 7.2 Mbps in upcoming 3G upgrades. In Atlanta, the CLEAR network utilizes an area-wide WiMAX radio system from Motorola.

- Clearwire

The first thing I did on their demo computers was get out of their kiosk mode Opera browser so I could run a bandwidth test. I navigated to speedtest.net, my go-to site when it comes to carrying out reliable bandwidth tests. It was on this site that I discovered something a bit odd, the CLEAR WiMAX connection was originating somewhere in Seattle. To clarify, it seems like all data for CLEAR users must hop along all the way from Seattle before coming to Atlanta. Can you say latency? (Disclosure: These were all just observations noted in a brief 2 minute test, YMMV. I didn’t get to run any tracerts, et cetera.)

CLEAR 4G WiMAX Speedtests – Mobile modem (left) and Home modem (right)

Interestingly enough, Seattle is where Sprint has their XOHM WiMAX network. Sprint Nextel and Clearwire are in cahoots and working together on this whole WiMAX thing. So if you see a Sprint WiMAX offering in Atlanta later on, the service might not be so different than CLEAR’s.

That being said, I decided to simulate the speeds one could expect interacting with locally-hosted sites/services and performed several speed tests with speedtest.net’s Atlanta-based test server, the same server that my home Internet connection can access just fine. For a laptop equipped with the mobile CLEAR service, I received 1.01 Mbps down and 410 Kbps up, compared to the 2.68 Mbps down and 900 Kbps up bandwidth for the residential CLEAR modem equipped laptop. Long story short, I can’t definitively say anything about CLEAR’s WiMAX service without a more thorough review, as their could be various lurking variables with the test setup I had at my disposal. I was expecting better service though.

I’ve been trying to get my hands on CLEAR hardware and service for a review for weeks now, but they are only testing it for PC users. Oh did I mention that their software for the mobile USB WiMAX dongle is only supported by Windows at the moment? I told their representatives that I could make it work (be it via the CLEAR Spot Wi-Fi access point, or playing around with VMware on my Mac), but they insisted that I “won’t experience the true speed of WiMAX” through Wi-Fi. Last I checked a 4 Mbps connection can’t even max out 802.11b, let alone 802.11g. That’s a task for a fiber Internet connection.

For those needing a WiMAX refresher

Clearwire plans to expand its 4G network across other major metropolitan areas throughout the United States, with Baltimore and Portland already sporting CLEAR service. Las Vegas, Chicago, Charlotte, Dallas, Honolulu, Philadelphia and Seattle will get CLEAR later in 2009 while New York, Houston, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C. residents will have to wait until 2010.

CLEAR WiMAX. cool buzzword? Yes. Neat logo? Check. Great for the perpetually-on-the-move coffee shop co-working types? Yup. Anything else? Pending further review. In other news, I dislike reviewing services whose names are in all caps; it feels like I’m just yelling each time I mention the company.

Does your city have a WiMAX service provider yet? What do you think about CLEAR? Are you currently a user of any for-your-laptop 3G/4G data services?

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Review: Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal Cell Signal Booster

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:15:13 +0000

Not too long ago I mentioned how I moved to a new apartment but was very disappointed to learn that I now live in an AT&T dead zone. A bit of testing has proved that I do not live in an AT&T dead zone (5 bars on the sidewalk outside), but the building’s stucco and concrete with rebar construction dampens reception considerably, to the point where I get no service closer to the middle of the building and just 1, maybe 2, bars next to the window. I did a bit of Google and Twitter querying and found a local Atlanta company called Wi-Ex that manufactures a set of cell phone signal boosters.

Before: This is what I typically see on my iPhone 3G.

After: 4-5 reception bars within ~6 feet of the zPersonal’s boosting antenna.

After a bit of prodding around their product line-up, I decided on their $169 USD zBoost zPersonal YX300 cell phone signal booster (although it can be found for $59 USD on Amazon at the moment). Most of their other products rely on an antenna mounted outside your building or in your attic, which I can’t do due to living in a leased property.

The Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 packaging claims a lot, but does it perform?

How it works

The premise behind cell phone signal boosters, the zPersonal included, is pretty simple. There are two antennas. One goes nearest the area of the room where there is some cell phone signal reception. That signal gets processed and amplified through the powered unit and gets pumped out the other end, which you place close to where you need reception. Both antennas are used for receiving and transmitting, with the one mounted where there is reception being the actual end point talking to cell phone towers. It’s important to understand that such a device cannot just make a signal. It has to use at least a weak signal to boost.

This particular zPersonal YX300 is a dual-band unit that receives and amplifies the 800MHz and 1900MHz bands and is compatible with all U.S. carriers regardless of technologies (GSM, GPRS, CDMA, TDMA, AMPS, EDGE, EVDO, HSDPA, 1xRTT) except iDEN (ex: Boost Mobile, Nextel, and Sprint’s Direct Connect) and 1700MHz AWS (T-Mobile US 3G). That means it works with my GSM iPhone 3G.

Installation

Depending on your room layout, setting up the zPersonal YX300 should be a painless process. The zPersonal is made for a single user at a personal workspace and as such has a small range of 6 feet (radius from the antenna). I chose to install it near my desk. The first step is finding a place on your window where you get the best signal and mounting the main unit there. Contrary to popular belief, the plugged in unit goes on the window while the external antenna goes near the workspace.

The Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 unit and booster antenna

After I spent a while moving my phone across the window like a stud finder and found the optimal reception zone (2 bars), I mounted the YX300 base unit… only to have it fall down on its own minutes later. This happened a few times until I cleaned both surfaces and dampened the suction cups. I suggest the next version of the zBoost use one large suction cup like automotive GPS devices.

The Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 unit and booster antenna installed.

The last steps of the installation process involve placing the external antenna somewhere near your workspace and connecting the base unit to a power outlet. I chose to place the antenna on my desk.

Wi-Ex recommends that the antenna be placed at least 10 feet away from the base unit to avoid interference. This might prove to be an issue for people with smaller work areas. I received the depressing blinking red LED a few times, which means that the antenna needs to be placed further away from the base unit.

5 bars baby!

Experiences

Once installated and powered up, the YX300 should display a green light that means everything is okay and it’s idle. When you’re on a call the light will flash to indicate it is handling the call. If it turns solid green while you’re on a call, you need to be closer to the antenna for it to continue processing the call. That being said, it works. There were a few times I experienced where my iPhone, when idle, will revert back to low signal but when I unlock it and start doing stuff it goes right back up to 5 bars.

When I first started using the zPersonal I had many frustrating experiences where the base unit would show the green light and I would get a good signal, but then 10 minutes later it would start flashing red. I would power cycle it and it would show a green light again, and then show the same flashing red light. After this happened a few times, I experimented with the location of both the antenna and base unit. I haven’t had any issues since then. Location is everything with this cell phone signal booster.

As Wi-Ex states, the zBoost zPersonal is meant for workspaces and provides a “personal cell zone.” I found this to be accurate, and sometimes a little bit of an underestimation. I get 3 bars in the kitchen about 15 feet away when I used to get 1 bar. The bedroom which is another 15 feet past the kitchen still gets “No Service” but I didn’t expect the zPersonal to help me out there.

Concerns

My biggest concern with using a cell phone signal booster in my everyday work environment is whether or not being next to it can be detrimental to my health over time. We all know cell phones emit radiation of their own, so one might be led to believe that a cell phone signal booster might produce even more radiation and not be regulated by the same FCC SAR radiation limits. In other words, I don’t want to nuke my brain.

I did a quick search of the YX300’s FCC ID (SO4YX300-PCS-CEL) and found an RF Exposure Certification Test Report:

If I wanted to nitpick, I could say that the EPA power density equation is for isotropic antennas which technically can’t exist for a number of reasons (good read) (and for which they use decibels relative to isotropic radiator), but I digress.

So you’re probably thinking that this is no biggie because you work next to about 25 Wi-Fi networks. Take for example my Linksys WRT54G2 wireless router. It has a “typical” transmitted power output of 18dBm, compared to the peak of ~20dBm of the YX300; pretty similar numbers. The difference is that the YX300 zPersonal is meant to be next to your workspace and transmits more power, where as my router is several feet away. That being said, this is only something to be slightly concerned about if you’re on the phone a lot. If not, the idle power transmission and various cell phone tower handshakes won’t come near the YX300’s peak output.

In short, don’t put your head within ~8 inches of the YX300’s antenna when you’re on a phone call.

Verdict

After a proper installation, which takes some tinkering, the Wi-Ex zBoost zPersonal YX300 successfully turned my 1-2 bar cell phone signal reception into a 5 bar, 6-foot reception zone around my desk. Call quality was as if I had a normal 5 bar signal. While having a device with wires hanging off my window and running a 10+ foot cable to another antenna can be rather unsightly, I will do anything for 5 bars.

At a regular price of $169 for the dual-band version of the YX300, this signal booster is not cheap. If you are suffering from poor reception inside your building and can find the YX300 for cheaper, I’d definitely recommend it. The YX300 gets 8.5 out of 10 Stammys.

How’s your reception at home? Who is your carrier? Could you benefit from a cell phone signal booster like the zBoost zPersonal YX300?

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Review: 2009 Lincoln MKS with Microsoft SYNC

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:54:42 +0000

Those of you that have been following me online for the past few years might know that I maintain a healthy interest in cars in ~~addiction~~ addition to my tech obsession. It wasn’t too long ago that I was in Detroit attending the North American Intl Auto Show, and it was just a year ago that I was on a roadtrip through New York to Washington, D.C. following 17 college teams that re-engineered SUVs to be more sustainable (I even got to drive a fuel cell powered SUV). I could go on and mention how I was at the SCCA Nationals last weekend at Road Atlanta or talk about my involvement with the Fiesta Movement, but I think you get the point. I’m a car nut. So when Lincoln called me and wanted to see if I would review their 2009 Lincoln MKS luxury sedan, I couldn’t say no.

Disclosure: While I was provided this car on behalf of Lincoln as a loaner for 5 days, I was not told to present the MKS in any biased, false light. Everything you’re about read is coming straight from the Paul you’ve been reading for 4 years.

Note: As usual, click on any of the pictures to load a high-resolution version. Photos taken on top of the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center parking deck in Midtown Atlanta with a Nikon D90 and a crappy tripod. Screen pictures cropped using the Photoshop CS4 perspective crop feature I now love.

MKS 101

The MKS is Lincoln’s mid-level luxury sedan, poised just below their flagship Town Car. Lincoln has been facing some steep competition in recent years and they have recently launched a new marketing campaign. I’ve been hearing endless MKS commercials on the local hip-hop radio stations recently. The MKS is at the core of this campaign, with their focus on pumping out new features to attract a broader crowd. Buick did something similar a few years ago with their Tiger Woods campaign, trying to breath new life into the staggering brand.

That being said, the 2009 MKS is now competitive with other entry/mid-level luxury sedan offerings. This review aims to show why.

Price as Tested

The loaner I was given had a standard vehicle price of $39,105 but that number grew to $45,570 with the included Ultimate Package and delivery. Here were a few of the interesting features included in this car:

Microsoft SYNC with integrated navigation system
Dual Panel Moonroof
THX-II Certified Audio with 5.1
“Intelligent Access” with push button start
Adaptive HID Headlamps (headlights turn as you turn)
Air-conditioned front seats

While not included in my particular MKS, adaptive cruise control is an available high-tech option.

The MKS competes with the likes of the Lexus GS, Cadillac CTS, Acura RL, Infiniti M and Volvo S80. While not in the price range of the Audi A8, it is roughly the same size.

Exterior

For a car that is supposed to breathe new life into the Lincoln brand and bridge the mid-sized luxury sedan gap in their line-up, the MKS is aesthetically at a great start. The rear of the car was an instant hit with me. Why? It looks almost exactly like the rear of a last-generation Maserati Quattroporte. Coincidence? Maybe.

On the other hand the chromed-out front grill and chrome window trim is a lesson in gaudy that takes some getting used to. Big 19-inch (optional 20’s) wheels help fill in the wheel wells and give the MKS a good overall road presence. The tires don’t exactly produce the popular low profile look but I think Lincoln made the right choice here as anything thinner would have definitely made a negative effect on ride quality.

Unfortunately there’s not much to see behind the wheels other than small, ugly brakes. The 2009 MKS is equipped with mediocre 12.25-inch front rotors with 2-piston calipers and 12.75-inch rear rotors with single piston calipers. Considering that the MKS only performed “ok” in various brake tests, it could use larger 4-piston front brakes. Lincoln should take a note from Acura – their competing RL has black 4-piston calipers adorned with the Acura logo.

I first heard about adaptive headlights in 2004 when they were the big feature in the Lexus RX330 (debuted in the LS430 first though) and featured a commercial with a guy driving around a winding road to see a deer in the road that he couldn’t have seen if his headlights didn’t turn with the car’s steering. Needless to say, I don’t live out in the country but adaptive headlights in the MKS are a joy to drive around with. The feeling is a bit creepy at first but a pleasant addition to the MKS. The quick video below shows off how they work, and as you can see the headlights turn considerably (realistically about 15 degrees) even given minimal steering input at parking lot speeds. It might need to be scaled back a bit.

Combined with automatic highbeams, I can say that the MKS is a breeze to drive safely at night. As the name implies, automatic high beams is a feature on the MKS that automatically flips on the HID high beams when the car does not detect any other sources of light on the road. When it detected other cars and/or street lights, the high beams turned off.

Angled tail-lights, a beveled license plate holder and not so subtle chrome trim screams Maserati styling.

Performance

Unfortunately the 2009 Lincoln MKS does not feature the powerful 355 BHP EcoBoost V6 engine with direct injection and twin turbochargers that is purported to get 17 mpg city, 24 mpg highway. That engine will debut in the 2010 Lincoln MKS. The 2009 MKS I tested came with a 3.7-liter V6 engine (churning out 273 bhp at 6,250 rpm and 270 lb-ft of torque at 4,250rpm) mated to a 6 speed automatic transmission and an all-wheel drive system. As for the engine’s sound at full-throttle, well it wasn’t exactly music to my ears. It sounded more like a hair dryer. My first thoughts were that this is a subpar powerplant for a car of this size, price and weight. After driving it around town for a few days, I still believe that it needs more power. The fact that the 2009 MKS doesn’t even have a V8 option is shocking when compared to similarly priced, competing luxury sedans. Hopefully the powerplant in the 2010 MKS will put this engine issue to rest.

The MKS sports an all-aluminum Ford Duratec 3.7-liter 24-valve DOHC V6 engine.

With a curb weight exceeding 4,200 pounds, this AWD MKS is roughly on par with the weight of Lexus GS and AWD-equipped Volvo S80 offerings. Combined with the underpowered engine and sluggish automatic transmission, the MKS did not do much impressing in the performance category. The transmission is laggy to upshift while downshifts are jerky. While the all-wheel drive system did a decent job of fighting understeer (oh and there’s lots of it with the big MKS) and helping pull the car through turns, it was also plagued with torque steer under moderate to full-throttle acceleration, requiring the driver to keep steering in line.

Considering that the MKS is heavy (a typical AWD system adds 200+ lbs) and has a high center of gravity as it sits fairly high — 19-inch wheels (P255/45R19) and a tall suspension setup will do that — there’s no surprise that the MKS is also a mediocre performer when it comes to the twisties. The MKS handling reminds me a bit of when I first drove a similarly-sized Chrysler 300C. I overestimated the 300C’s abilities while running through a high-speed curve and oversteer took over and gave me some squealing tires.

Fuel economy is a bit on the low side, as one might expect with a heavy car with an automatic transmission, all-wheel drive system and underpowered Duratec 37 engine that must struggle to get that mammoth moving (that you can find rebadged in the Mazda 6 and CX-9). The MKS received an EPA fuel economy estimate of 16 MPG city and 23 MPG highway but after 5 days of city driving I got around 10.1 MPG with spirited driving and 14.8 MPG with me trying to drive like a normal person. The MKS has a sizeable 20 gallon fuel tank with ‘Easy Fuel’, which Ford describes as a “capless fuel filler that uses an integrated spring-loaded flapper door to eliminate the need for a fuel tank screw cap, saving time and keeping hands cleaner at the pump”. The 2011 Ford Fiesta I am also testing has a similar capless fuel filler feature.

0-60 MPH in 7.5 seconds (7.4 with ~1600 RPM power braking)
0-100 MPH in 19.9 seconds
1/4-mile in 15.5 seconds @ 90.0 MPH

While I did not have the means to measure brake distances, there was noticeable room for improvement with the MKS. As mentioned earlier the MKS has 12.75-inch front rotors with 2-piston calipers. My 2002 Mustang GT had a similar brake setup, which I found so under-performing (on a car that weighed almost 1,000 pounds less at that) that I eventually upgraded to a 4-piston Brembo GT setup that I’m now happy with. But I digress, I would just really like to see 4-piston calipers on the MKS.

MKS ride quality is far from cloud-like but definitely acceptable for its price range, if a little firm. Ride quality felt very similar to that of the current-generation BMW 545i and M5 (in P400/non-M mode).

Interior

Moving inside the MKS I can see where Lincoln tried to garner itself some brownie points. Seats are made from “Bridge of Weir” leather from Scotland and are perforated. This allows heating or cooling to come through, and on hot days in Atlanta, the air-conditioned seats felt amazing. The front seats have 12-way adjustments including variable lumbar support where you can not only vary the lumbar pressure but also its vertical placement. One small complaint is that the seats did little to “hug” me and I felt like I slid around them while carving corners. It could really benefit from adjustable side bolsters found in other luxury sedans.

At highway speeds, the MKS cabin is eerily quiet thanks to copious amounts of well-placed insulation. Unfortunately, my praises end there.

The first thing I look at when entering a car is the gauge cluster, and the one in the MKS is disappointing. The needles are too fat, the typography says “I’m old and busted” instead of the “new hotness” message that I’m sure Lincoln is going for, and the chrome trim doesn’t help. For an example of well-designed gauge clusters, Lincoln should look at anything recent by Lexus. Even their entry-level luxury sedans have excellent gauges, with their last generation IS sedans sporting terrific chronometric gauges.

The MKS comes equipped with an intelligent access system with push button start. That’s a fancy way of saying you just need to have the key in your pocket to open the door and turn the car on; a feature becoming more and more common on all vehicles, not just luxury cars. Unfortunately, the implementation in the MKS requires a clunky, horribly-styled keyfob. It does not have pocket presence. Lincoln needs to take a step back and look at the keyfobs that BMW, Mercedes and Acura are selling with their sedans, because they don’t look this cheap.

Plastic yuck.

Other complaints with the interior include a small trunk opening, small compartments throughout the car (you’d think a huge car would have a huge center console and glove box.. nope) and generally sloppy fit and finish (for example, some of the gaps between panels were uneven) throughout. Also, the front cupholders are almost unusable. They cannot be individually adjusted and make it near impossible to use both at the same time. Adjustable cupholder technology has been present in minivans since the 90’s, I’d surely expect it to make its way to a luxury sedan such as the MKS by now. I should give Lincoln some props though; the top dash cover is nicely stitched and not plastic looking as I’ve come to expect with domestic cars.

The dual panel moon roof in the MKS is definitely noteworthy. While the back section can’t actually open, it still provides a beautiful view of the sky for your rear passengers.

All nitpicking aside, the MKS is a big car with loads of space. The word “boat” comes to mind. In this case, that’s a great thing. Loading up the car with 5 adults was trivial and no one had any complaints about cramped leg room or a low ceiling.

Microsoft SYNC

Once turned on, the beautiful center display toting the THX certified audio system logo greets you.

Here we go, now this car is getting interesting. It’s called SYNC by Microsoft and it’s coming in more and more Ford vehicles. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer drives a SYNC-equipped Ford car (2010 Fusion Hybrid) when he’s not whipping around Redmond guzzling gas in his Range Rover.

In a nutshell SYNC ties together all the tech tasks one might need to do in a car — everything from navigation functions to phone and music — into one seamless system that can be voice controlled. Technically-speaking, the SYNC system is powered by an ARM 11 processor with 256MB of RAM, 2GB of flash memory (which the MKS in particular might have ditched for its hard drive) and Microsoft Auto OS version 4.0.

But SYNC isn’t the only thing about the MKS that makes its technology so powerful. Hidden away under the skin of the car there are 16 speakers, including a 10-inch subwoofer, all powered by a 12 channel amplifiers for a total output of 600 Watts. But it’s not all brute force with the MKS sound system – everything is tied into a digital signal processor within the amplifiers that keeps things from getting out of control. The result? A THX II certified car audio system that supports 5.1 surround sound and sounds amazing (unless you’ve heard a Bang & Olufsen system in a recent Aston Martin or Audi Q7 or A8/S8).

Want to know why the MKS has a stellar sound system? It was designed by THX themselves.

The THX II Certified Audio systems all feature the THX Configurable Speaker Array (CSA) and THX Slot Speaker technologies located in the center of the vehicle dashboard. The THX CSA is comprised of several small, powerful speakers, and uses dedicated amplifiers and THX digital signal processing (DSP) to widen the sound image before precisely distributing it throughout the car’s interior.

Almost invisible to the eye, the THX CSA and THX Slot Speaker allow for better control and directivity of the sound image, delivering a spacious sound stage throughout the vehicle cabin. The result? Music on CDs and MP3 files feel natural, like you are listening to the live performance or recording session.

Source: THX

The SYNC system can be controlled by the MKS’s touch screen, buttons on the center console or via voice controls activated by a button on the steering wheel.

The image above shows some of the available voice commands. While I’m not a terribly big fan of anything voice controlled (I remain scarred from my foray into crappy voice-recognition/dictation software in the late 90’s), the SYNC voice control implementation is pretty accurate but I can never get myself to use it when a simple tap or two in half the time would do the same. The biggest annoyance I found with SYNC voice controls is that most commands have a confirmation screen, requiring you to say (or tap) yes or no. That screams Microsoft innovation right there.

The navigation features of the MKS prove equally impressive, with the exception of one huge annoyance: you can’t add a destination or change anything relating to your route until you come to a stop (technically less than 3 mph I believe). I know that is supposed to be a safety feature, but what if you have a passenger in the car handling that stuff for you? Since maps are stored on the integrated hard drive, route calculation is speedy and maps have sufficient detail. When you are nearing your destination, the screen splits vertically to display a close-up map of your exit and final turns. That is quite handy. Also, when the system speaks to you it cuts out other audio sources from using the front speakers so you can hear what it is saying.

GPS updates are fairly responsive so you don’t have to keep waiting for the map to update before you start guessing if you need to take a left or right at the next intersection. However, one feature I have come to love in my Dash Express GPS unit is missing in the MKS system. I’m of course referring to the Internet connectivity that allows the Dash Express to communicate with Yahoo! Local Search and let you search for any business, restaurant or whatever, and get basic information about the destination, such as store hours.

While the MKS has basic points of interest stored on the hard drive, there’s not much you can do without an address. That’s where Lincoln decided it would be a good idea to add some extra functionality by integrating SIRIUS Travel Link. One of the coolest features about the Dash Express was that it could find fuel prices for gas stations near you. The MKS can do the same thing with Travel Link, in addition to accessing traffic and weather data. Sadly, my particular MKS did not have an active SIRIUS subscription (runs about $7/month) so I could not tinker with any of the Travel Link features.

Once you pair your phone with the SYNC system over bluetooth, it downloads your phone’s address book and allows you to use voice commands to call people by name. The handsfree phone integration and call quality is flawless on both ends and I did not find the need to speak louder than usual for the person on the other end to hear me well. As a bonus, if you have a supported phone (my iPhone 3G wasn’t) SYNC can read your text messages aloud to you as they arrive. It also has 15 common text messages (such as “Why?”, “Too funny”, “Can’t wait to see you” and of course “I’m stuck in traffic”) stored into the system so you can quickly reply to your texts, as long as you are going “less than 3 mph (4.82 km/h)”.

Another SYNC-specific phone feature: if you’re walking to your car and you’re already on the phone, you can tap a button on the steering wheel to move the conversation to the car’s system. Not that I’m on the phone for more than 5 minutes a day but I’m sure there are some people out there that enjoy talking on the phone where this feature would come in handy.

Also, SYNC can automatically call 911 (technically not present in my particular MKS, but available through a software update) with a pre-recorded message after an accident severe enough to trigger an air bag. I have not been able to find too much more information on this feature so I’m wondering if it shares the vehicle’s GPS location with emergency services. It’s trying to provide capabilities found with GM OnStar, BMW Assist and Lexus Link services, each of which have their own call centers on the other end instead of going directly through 911.

Last but not least – the audio features of the MKS. There’s the simple radio screen that pulls together station info via RDS. Nothing special here, no HD radio support (although Lincoln has mentioned that it is coming as a factory-installed option in 2009…) or anything of that ilk.

The radio screen with station display and various options.

Oh but what’s this.. a jukebox? Yup, the MKS SYNC system gives the driver access to 10GB of storage. You can actually rip CDs to the car (or transfer them from your mobile device) and it adds the proper CD track information with its integrated CDDB/Gracenote database. But if you’re reading my blog right now that’s probably not as interesting as just playing music off of your mobile phone or MP3 player.

If your phone supports stereo (A2DP) bluetooth, you’re good to go (iPhone doesn’t unless you have OS 3.0, so you’ll need an adapter) and can play music in high quality over the THX sound system. Otherwise you can use the USB port or aux line-in jack. When playing over USB or bluetooth, SYNC also displays the proper track information. Regardless, the point is that wherever you store your music on the go, you can rest assured that the SYNC-equipped Lincoln MKS can play it.

If I may nitpick once again, I was quite disappointed with the audio visualizer. There were absolutely not style settings – just on and off. I would have loved to have it display some interesting visualizations. Also, for a THX-designed system it is shockingly devoid of advanced equalizer settings. It just has bass and treble sliders. For a person like myself that can end up spending 20 minutes at a time fine-tuning an equalizer preset in iTunes, the MKS left me a bit miffed.

Wrapping up, the THX system sounds fantastic once you feed it a proper digital signal. The center speaker ties everything together. Treble is crisp and clear, while bass remains powerful. However, I did notice that the system in general was too bassy even at lower levels and at anything near upper levels the trunk starts rattling, similar to the improperly insulated trunk subwoofer installs you might see rattling around your neighborhood.

Verdict

There are a lot of things I really don’t like about this car, especially as a person that values performance over everything. However, the clean Microsoft SYNC integration is a strong redeeming factor with the 2009 Lincoln MKS. The interface isn’t as polished as it could be, but it does everything as promised. If only they could invent a touch screen that wasn’t a fingerprint magnet.

While the SYNC system is generally only a $395 option on other Ford vehicles, with the MKS it is part of the larger navigation package that will run you close to $3,000 USD.

Comfort: 8.5/10
Technology: 9.0/10 (leaves room for really cool BMW Night Vision/Mercedes Night View Assist)
Aesthetics: 7.0/10
Performance: 5.5/10
Value: 8.0/10

Hopefully the 2010 MKS and it’s powerful 355 horsepower EcoBoost engine will put the ball back in Lincoln’s court. Until then, I would have a hard time recommending the MKS to too many people. I suggest Lincoln start by redesigning their keyfob because I wasn’t getting any looks from girls at Starbucks as I was playing with my keychain while waiting for my latte… (of note are the Land Rover, Bentley and Mercedes keyfobs).

Thoughts? What do you think of Microsoft SYNC? and the MKS? Can you see someone in your family driving one?

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Photoshop Quickie: Perspective Crop

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:22:09 +0000

I take a lot of pictures for reviews on this blog, most with a Nikon D90 DSLR camera. A good chunk of my time on larger reviews is actually spent reviewing hundreds of images, then fine-tuning the best ones in Photoshop (case in point, my upcoming car review is taking forever). I’ve been using some version of Photoshop since the Mac OS 8 days. However, I mainly used it for the same basic image manipulation techniques — cutting people out of backgrounds while I was on my high school’s yearbook staff, and lots of cropping, levels tweaks and some basic filter work for this blog.

Whenever a new version of Photoshop comes out, I generally upgrade fairly soon (well, when I had my student discount), tinkered with some of the new features and then went back to my old workflow. I would not consider myself terribly proficient with Photoshop. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised (and shocked that I didn’t notice this sooner) when I recently discovered the perspective crop option.

Perspective Crop, Huh?

Perspective crop is like a regular crop, except that when done properly it can readjust the perspective of an image to look as if the picture was taken head on, if that’s the look you are going for.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Below we have the before and after of the dashboard of a 2009 Lincoln MKS for an upcoming review. Let’s ignore how I was even able to take such a bad photo in the first place, and move on to the after picture, with the perspective crop successfully (for the most part, I didn’t measure) executed.

Before:

After:

Yes, my iPhone gets abused.

Prior to my discovery of perspective crop in Photoshop, I did the best I could with rotating the crop but that still leaves the perspective untouched. Typical symptoms were that bottom of the object I was cropping was nicely horizontal but the top remained skewed due to the perspective of the shot.

Perspective Cropping is Easy

Step 1: Select the crop tool and begin doing a crop like you usually would, rotating your crop boundary as necessary.

Step 2: Click on the Perspective box in the options bar.

Step 3: Drag each crop boundary corner around individually! Hit enter and you’re done!

Overall

I realize this post might not be relevant to everyone, but when I learned about this yesterday it was a definitely a wow moment that I thought I should share. I wish I had known about this a long time ago! Thanks to my Twitter followers that answered my question and pointed me to the perspective option.

What simple Photoshop tricks do you use on a daily basis?

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PSTAM Update: Moving, DirecPath ISP Still Rocks

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:26:18 +0000

Things will be a bit slow around here until I find my bearings again. I just moved to another apartment this past weekend. There were a few reasons for moving, from wanting to find cheaper rent with upcoming expenses (which is also why you’ll see me experimenting with different ads on this blog) like paying for my own health insurance and starting to pay student loans, as well as wanting to live in a pet-friendly place so I can adopt a big dog/running companion (currently looking at labrador mixes).

I found a nice loft-style apartment that had the same amazing fiber ISP I’ve had for the last year. I’m happy to report that the pipe is just as fat as my old place. If you ever find yourself apartment hunting in midtown Atlanta and DirecPath/PurDigital/Biltmore Communications is listed as one of the available ISPs, you better seal the deal. They’re the best ISP I have ever dealt with. When was the last time you paid for a service rated at 10 megabits and got over 70 megabits download speed and 45 megabits upload speed? I’m never going back to Comcast.

Holy Bandwidth Batman!!

That being said, with a static IP the service runs about $70 a month. Somehow I only paid $22/month for the same service at my old apartment; I believe it was subsidized by the building community.

As for the move, I was concerned with how I was going to move (and not break) my 50-inch plasma HDTV. I was especially worried as plasmas are notoriously prone to cracking with even subtle flexing, much more so than LCDs. I hired professional movers that touted themselves as being good at moving large televisions. Well, I didn’t have this in mind…

Despite that shoddy padding, the HDTV survived the massive 5 block trek.

With the new place I also decided a desk upgrade was in order. I went to Ikea and got the largest desk I could find. A 63″ by 47″ Galant desk was just the ticket. The most important aspect of this desk is that it’s deep and I don’t have to be so close to the monitor. I originally sold my old 30-inch Dell LCD because my desk wasn’t deep enough to comfortably use it. I’ve been using a 24-inch since then, but we’ll see if a 30-inch is in my future again.

Living Room/Office area

Unfortunately, I now live in a dead zone. I’ll see how much of an issue this is over the coming weeks and then decide from there if I need to research cell phone repeaters/boosters. It could stem from a variety of issues from building construction, AT&T network coverage or just weak iPhone 3G reception. Either way, it’s very frustrating. Text messages work okay, it will just grab those when it gets a little signal. Otherwise, I miss a lot of calls.

What are your experiences with cell phone “dead zones”.. any remedies?

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Review: Roku Digital Video Player

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:27:58 +0000

From time to time, I have confessed my love for the Vudu set-top box that instantly streams up to 720p quality HD movies (or 1080p quality non-instant) over the Internet to your TV. The Vudu player is not subscription-based, so in addition to ponying up for the hardware, you have to pay an average of $3-5 each time you want to rent SD or HD quality movies. After a while of spending over $50 a month with the Vudu box, I decided check out the instant streaming landscape and take a look at the popular subscription-based Roku player. While the Roku player is often called the Netflix player, that is starting to change as it supports more services, most recently with the addition of Amazon Video on Demand.

Notice: During my review of the Roku player I was using an 80Mbps down Internet connection. Obviously this plays a huge role in the performance of a bandwidth-dependent streaming device. Your mileage may vary.

Roku 101

At only $99, the Roku player is one of the most affordable instant video streaming media boxes currently on the market. The Roku player launched just about a year ago, and has had frequent software updates such last December for Netflix HD streaming support and recently in March for Amazon Video on Demand support.

The rather plain Roku Box

Unboxing the Roku is a rather trivial event; there’s not much inside the box other than the Roku player, remote, cables, remote batteries and charger. Everything about the Roku experience is simple.

Roku Unboxing

First Impressions: The Roku player is light and small.

That can be attributed to Roku’s decision to spring for a flash memory approach instead of using a hard drive. There are three reasons why Roku went the flash route: 1) cheap!, 2) reliable compared to hard drives, 3) no need for active (noisy) cooling solutions.

Second Impressions: It’s a bit of an ugly duckling. Fortunately it’s small enough to hide behind my 5.1 receiver, PlayStation 3, Vudu box and HTPC.

Roku Player – Front

After unboxing the Roku and starting to hook up cables, I was quite impressed at how much this unit actually does for its size. It has all the connections you would expect – Component, Composite, HDMI, even the pretty-old-school-and-rare-these-days S-Video, alongside optical audio and Ethernet. But what caught me off-guard was the included 802.11b/g Wi-Fi support — something that Vudu makes you pay $80 to get in the form of a wireless dongle for their media box.

Roku Player Ports

Roku Player versus a Blu-ray disc case

Roku Player Remote

Ergonomically-speaking the Roku remote gets the job done and is the perfect size for natural placement of your thumb in the middle of the control. While I slightly miss the scroll wheel of the Vudu player’s remote, the large Roku remote buttons provide ample tactile feedback with a soft yet noticable clicking feel. Only 9 buttons inhabit the Roku remote and all are self-explanatory.

However, there is no power button on the remote. You can’t turn off the Roku player. It just intelligently goes to sleep on its own.

Showtime

Setting up the Roku player is a breeze. After plugging it in and hooking up the typical audio/video connections, there’s a simple on-screen wizard to follow. Chances are it will prompt you to update the firmware right after you setup your Internet connection, either via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. I tested out both connectivity options and had absolutely no issues with either. The Roku player supports WPA, WPA2 and WEP encrypted Wi-Fi networks along with networks that do not broadcast their SSID. Others have reported issues getting Wi-Fi connections to pass the “connecting to the Internet” step of the wireless configuration in the past; I’ll assume recent updates have allayed any such issues.

Roku Player Setup – Select Resolution

Roku Player – Netflix Getting Started

The next step is linking your Netflix account to the Roku player. I was supplied with a confirmation code to link to my Netflix account. That required logging into Netflix on my computer, but was all of a 15 second affair. A similar procedure is also required for linking the Roku player to Amazon for Video on Demand support. Regardless of these requirements, setup took just a few minutes.

Browsing Netflix & Amazon

Roku Player – Activate Netflix

The first “ahh, that sucks” moment I had was when I realized the Roku player does not let you actually browse and explore Netflix “Watch Instantly” titles. Instead, you must go to Netflix.com on your computer, browse around there and then add the movies or TV shows to your Netflix instant queue. Those titles will appear on the Roku player a few seconds later. A huge advantage of the Vudu player is that you can browse their entire collection of 10,000+ titles all from your TV — including searching by genre, title and actor.

After doing a bit of research, Roku’s decision to not allow Netflix browsing on the player was almost intentional. They wanted to keep everything about the Roku simple, and leave the complex bits to the Netflix website, which it’s very capable of handling already.

Roku Player – Browse Netflix Instant Queue

Roku Player – Browse Netflix, Movie View

Roku Player – Browse Netflix TV Show by Episode

Roku’s implementation of Amazon Video on Demand is a bit different. You have some limited browsing ability but not searching. Filtering options include sorting by new releases, genre, popularity and alphabetically, but if you’re looking to find something that isn’t really popular you will have to do lots of annoying side-scrolling.

Roku Player – Amazon Menu

In addition, Amazon purchases require a PIN code confirmation that you setup with your Amazon account upon linking the Roku.

Roku Player – Amazon HD Shows

Amazon Video on Demand content gives you several options, typically ranging from purchasing the video in either HD or SD, as well as renting it for 24 hours and previewing the first 2 minutes in HD.

Fast-forwarding and rewinding through both Amazon and Netflix movies and TV shows can be burdensome due to the streaming nature of the Roku player. Whereas the Vudu player would buffer the entire movie on its hard drive, making rewinding and fast-forwarding quick and seamless, the same cannot be said about the Roku player. To get around this issue, Roku engineers implemented a visual timeline of sorts. After selecting the frame you want to jump to, there is a 5-10 second loading delay, obviously dependent upon your connection. It’s an innovative solution, I’ll give them that.

Roku Player Scrolling. Yeah, LOTR Return of the King Extended Edition is no joke – 263 minutes long.

Pricing

Unlimited Netflix streaming plans start at $9/month. Amazon Video on Demand content on the other hand is a more like Vudu’s pricing model and has a pricing structure as follows:

TV Show (HD): $2.99
TV Show (SD): $1.99
24hr Movie Rental (SD): $2.99 – 3.99
24hr Movie Rental (HD): $3.99 – 4.99
7-day Movie Rental (SD): Some (crappy) movies can be rented for a week for $1.99
Movie Purchase (SD): $4.99 – 14.99

Quality & Performance

Before playing a movie, the Roku buffers for around 10-15 seconds. I have never had any network or connection issues during playback that resulted in halted playback and more buffering. Unfortunately, regular 480p Netflix offerings do not come close to MPEG-2 DVD quality. Noticeable compression artifacts can be seen below:

Example of Roku SD Quality – Still frame from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Extended Edition

Amazon and Netflix HD streams are considerably better but not quite on the same level as Vudu and Apple TV HD offerings, both of which tout surround sound.

Example of Roku HD Quality – Still frame from Parks and Recreation

Another thing to note is that 5.1 is supported by the Roku player itself, but Roku reports that content providers (namely Netflix and Amazon at the moment) have yet to provide 5.1 audio encoding with their streams. You’ll have to get used to stereo sound for now. That being said, TiVo HD’s implementation of Amazon Video on Demand support works with 5.1 — so the Roku hardware itself is a bit to blame. TiVo downloads the entire file to its hard drive and plays from there, resulting in better picture quality and sound than the Roku video player. Just another drawback of a stream-only device.

That makes me wonder what would be possible if the Roku had a few gigabytes of flash memory on-board.

Talk Nerdy to Me

To satisfy my penchant for taking gadgets apart, I decided to open up the Roku player and snap a few pictures. While doing this, I learned a few things about the Roku player itself. For one, you can see flash RAM chips it uses for buffering (64MB) as well as the Nexperia media processor at the middle of the motherboard. The Roku player is actually based on the Phillips Nexperia set-top box platform (STB225), which revolves around a custom Linux OS in the case of the Roku player.

Roku Internals – Motherboard

As you would expect with a digital video player, the Nexperia media processor has support for hardware H.264 video decoding as well as WM9 among others. You can blame Netflix’s sub-par streaming quality to the Windows Media 9 codec they’re using, presumably to take advantage of its DRM features [sic].

Roku Internals – Motherboard

On top of that set-top box platform, it appears that Roku expanded to a daughtercard via a USB header to introduce 802.11b/g Wi-Fi support with the Atheros chip. Interestingly enough, there are connections for external antennas. If you are getting bad wireless range with your Roku, you could try hooking up two antennas to those (you’d likely need two U.FL-RSMA pigtail cables).

Roku Internals – Wi-Fi Daughtercard

The Verdict

The Roku digital video player is a grand slam of affordability, ease of use and convenience. However, this all comes at the expense of video quality and limited selection (only about 10% of Netflix’s massive 100,000 DVD collection is available for streaming). This is slowly changing though. The recent addition of Amazon Video on Demand (40,000 titles.. if you can find them) was a huge step forward for Roku and one of the main reasons I considered purchasing a Roku player. It has also been reported that Roku will release an SDK in the coming months for web video providers to add their content to the Roku player.

I give the Roku video player 8.5 out of 10 Stammys. It has its fair share of drawbacks but damned if it isn’t cheap! The Roku hardware itself supports 1080i streaming, so hopefully a future software update will bring this to fruition.

Are you a Netflix customer? Do you have a Roku video player? Would you consider one after this?

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Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters Ads: When Will They Stop?

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:05:16 +0000

If you haven’t caught wind of Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters advertisements by now, well you’re lucky. They’re a series of (hopefully only) six ads meant to take a jab at Apple’s successful “Get A Mac” commercials. So far four of these ads are out and they are based on the premise that some person is looking for a particular computer for their needs within a certain budget. If they find what they’re looking for, Microsoft pays for the computer. True in Microsoft spirit, these commercials are all full of issues. The first ad was filled with controversy after people discovered an actress was used instead of a regular person looking to go computer shopping. Also, while the ads are supposed to be “fair” and have the regular people consider Apple products as well, it was discovered in the first ad that the actress never even went into the Apple store. Looking at the clip shows the same person walking by as she enters and exits, and that’s just the first ad.

So what’s the point of this post? Nothing really. This is just a rant. As with any diehard computer geek like myself, the errors in these advertisements are just so irksome that I must voice my opinions. For example, in the video (the fourth ad) posted above, “Sheila” is a filmmaker looking for a laptop “that’s going to be able to cut video.” She ended up with an HP HDX laptop. For one, you don’t get a laptop with the intention of doing intense video work and you certainly don’t get a PC for video work (Final Cut Pro for OS X has the majority market share for video production and is the de facto standard). You get some ridiculous dual quad-core processor Mac Pro with loads of RAM.

Sheila does briefly consider the Apple MacBook Pro but quickly ignores it saying that it only has 2GB of RAM. I’m assuming she also ignored how Macs are ever so slightly more efficient with their RAM usage than Vista. And then there’s the fact that regular Vista can’t handle more than ~3.2GB of RAM regardless of how much physical RAM is installed in the computer. Let’s not mention either that RAM is ridiculously cheap so that MacBook Pro could have 4GB for $40 and actually be able to use it unlike the Vista box.

This video criticism wouldn’t be complete without highlighting some spot-on YouTube comments:

You are a professional film maker and you are at Fry’s getting advice about video editing, really?

“it’s got a widescreen” — which laptops these days don’t have widescreens?

So, the computer she settles on is crap. I own a Mac, I’ll go ahead and throw that out there, so I am biased… But here are the specs:
She settled for this:
HP 16-inch HP HDX 16t
4 GB of DDR2 RAM (600-1066MHz)
2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
GE Force 9600M GT 512 Graphics
and a 1366 x 768 max resolution display.

My MacBook Pro has:
2 GB of DDR3 RAM (800-1600MHz) (Faster+lower voltage)
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Identical discreet card+optional integrated graphics
and a 1440×900 resolution display

PWN

Idiots!
15′ macbook is better for video editing!
New macbooks haves DDR3!!
HP HDX has DDR2….. wtf??

iMovie, Final Cut are best videoeditingsoft ever! And only for MAC-users! )))

Microsoft sucks!

Okay, that’s my rant for the month. Carry on.

What do you think of Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters ad series? At least they’re better than the odd Seinfeld-Gates ads..

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Site Redesign: Everything’s Bigger In Texas Edition

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:04:07 +0000

It has been almost 2 years since the last time I had a significant redesign of this blog. I figured it was time to start tinkering again. Instead of relying on the same blog theme and code base I have been working with for over 3 years now, I decided to use Chris Pearson’s Thesis WordPress theme as my base. For one, Chris Pearson is also a fellow Georgia Tech alumnus. Second, the Thesis theme boasts a lot of features and is built from the ground up with SEO in mind. That being said, it’s not free. I ponied up 164 greenbacks for the developer’s option so I could deploy the theme on as many sites as I wanted. (Psst: If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, you’ll want to click-through this time.)

I purchased the theme last week and have been learning the ins and outs of the hook system and going about using custom CSS and functions. It took a little while to grasp but after 2 or 3 late night sessions I came up with the site you’re looking at now. As you can tell from the title of this post, this version of PaulStamatiou.com is all about big. The highlight is increased readability through larger fonts, smooth typefaces and a wider layout. I’m looking forward to being able to put larger images within posts. I’ve been using Cabel’s Fancy Zoom for a year now but it will be nice to also view large images without clicking.

The redesign isn’t completely over, it has just gotten to the point where I can show it off. I’m considering incorporating Facebook Connect into commenting. However, the biggest hurdle will be optimizing this theme for performance. I’ve already put some things on Amazon CloudFront, then I’ll setup WP-Super-Cache and combine a bunch of the CSS files into one CloudFronted stylesheet. Oh and I’ll need to revisit my CSS/image sprites tutorial to combine several images I’m using into one.

I’ve also been interested in creating a sneeze page or two to help people easily find great articles hidden in my archives. And I’m thinking about removing post dates from URLs to make them shorter and a bit more search engine friendly, as outlined by Bruce Keener.

So that’s it. Browse around, let me know what you like, what needs work, what’s missing, et cetera. Thanks for reading all these years!

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I Don’t Like URL Shorteners

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:57:50 +0000

The other day I was talking with local entrepreneur Sanjay Parekh about a domain I had recently purchased. He commented on how it was rather short and could be also be used as a URL shortening service. That triggered a few responses on my end: 1) I feel that URL shortening services are very much a crowded “me too” space and 2) relatively few URL shorteners provide real benefits other than their primary utility.

URL Shorteners 101

By my count, there are somewhere between 90 to 100 URL shorteners that are even remotely used. There’s no doubt in my mind that at least 500 URL shorteners/redirection services exist in some working form online. We all know the premise behind them; you have a long, nasty URL that you need to share with someone either in some limited space, more recently Twitter, but originally from old email clients that hard wrapped lines and broke links in emails.

Thoughts

First off, my title for this post employs a bit of sensationalism. I’m not entirely opposed to URL shorteners, I just know they have a time and a place. I don’t like all of the blatant me too URL shortening services that offer no value-proposition over its competitors, other than just a really short URL.

Second, as Joshua Schachter seemed to focus on last week, URL shorteners add a delay to the end-user who clicks on them, with an extra DNS lookup. However, chances are all these common domains are already cached by the user, but the real issue for me is the uncertain lifetime of shortened URLs. I don’t feel this is a huge deal if shortened URLs are used properly. In the case of Twitter, how often do people read your tweets from last year and does it really matter if that link is dead? However, this is a big issue when shortened URLs are used in the ‘wrong’ types of situations – such as saved to your delicious or tumblr account, or posted on your blog – places that make it easier to find and follow URLs than Twitter. And when that happens search engines will start indexing those types of shortened URLs (bad URL shorteners use a temporary 302 redirect, causing search engines to place value on the shortened URL, ugh!); and that’s a problem when the URL shortener stops working.

Third, I like URL shorteners that do something in addition to shortening my URLs by 40 characters or what have you. Bit.ly is one of these services. At first I was jokingly shocked to find that a 6-character-long URL shortener received venture funding, when there are several 5-character-long URL shorteners online. Then I actually checked out bit.ly. They’re doing some impressive stuff including keeping detailed URL statistics in addition to making it easy to share shortened URLs and aggregate conversations around such URLs.

Example stats page of a bit.ly shortened URL

Unfortunately, many Twitter clients do not yet utilize the bit.ly API so you lose the stat tracking, but I digress.

In a more perfect world, two things could be different:

Twitter would have a separate area for links of any length, that do not count as part of the 140 character limitation, similar to how the late Pownce.com handled URLs.
Sites would have their own URL shortening services. I actually had my own URL shortener on this website back in 2006 after hearing about Shorty on Derek Punsalan’s blog and now I see Derek is using another method of shortening his URLs. As he points out, you get to maintain your own personal brand by having the shortened URLs come from your site, without risking anything.

Verdict: URL shorteners are a necessary evil. I only shorten URLs for Twitter and will only use a modern service that uses 301 redirects and does not have a middle-man interstitial advertisement or ad/iframe-bar, all the while providing me with some bells and whistles. For now, that is bit.ly.

Do you think URL shorteners are laying the groundwork for a future Web filled with dead links? What URL shortening service do you use? What do you use it for?

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How To: Optimize Your Apache Site with Mod Deflate

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:54:07 +0000

The title of this post might be a little cryptic to those not familiar with the Apache webserver, but this post is a sort of followup to Paul Buchheit’s recent post “Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step” as well as a response to a recent Skribit suggestion. The step he’s referring to is getting your web server to utilize gzip encoding.

Check to see if your site is gzipped with gzipcheck.

Paul Buchheit goes over the reasons why you should use gzip encoding — from 4-to-1 compression of HTML files to the reduced costs associated with serving smaller files. However he doesn’t mention the specific ways of how you can get that running on your site or blog.

Using these numbers, we can estimate that it would cost $1.88 to gzip 1TB of data on Amazon EC2, and $174 to transfer 1TB of data. If you instead compress your data (and get 4-to-1 compression, which is not unusual for html), the bandwidth will only cost $43.52

There are a myriad of server software setups but I’ll address one of the most popular HTTP web servers: Apache.

So just a run-through of why you should consider enabling mod_deflate:

Enabling gzip compression will reduce file sizes at the expense of slightly increased CPU utilization (I find that to be negligible).
Smaller files served to your clients means less bandwidth used, as well as faster transfer time which means the client gets the page faster and your server can proceed to serving the next client.

Notice

This article might not work for you without some tinkering. Apache install locations can vary by your setup or that of your webhost. For the purposes of this article, I am using a Media Temple (dv) server which has a Cent OS and Plesk setup with Apache installed in /etc/httpd.

Enter mod_deflate

As defined by Apache documentation, the deflate module “provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.” In other words, it compresses files without you having to explicitly compress individual files on your own. However, this could become a problem if Apache ends up compressing files you have already compressed or if it decides to compress images in your blog posts, potentially making them look worse. For that reason, it’s important that mod_deflate is configured properly.

Configuring

First we need to load up the actual mod_deflate.so module. If you are using Apache 2, then you likely already have mod_deflate installed. Just to be sure though, go to your Apache httpd.conf file (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf for me) and place the following line if it’s not already there:

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

Look for this section and place the line above anywhere within.

The next step is telling mod_deflate how to work. Instead of working with httpd.conf, we will want to place the upcoming lines in the appropriate vhost.conf file, if your server uses a vhost configuration. For example, I created my vhost file in /var/www/vhosts/paulstamatiou.com/conf/vhost.conf.

If you’re not sure, you can put it in httpd.conf, but the custom mod_deflate logging I created won’t work due to this issue outlined by Apache documentation:

If CustomLog or ErrorLog directives are placed inside a section, all requests or errors for that virtual host will be logged only to the specified file. Any virtual host which does not have logging directives will still have its requests sent to the main server logs.

We’ll start by placing these lines in the appropriate vhost.conf file to configure mod_deflate:


   SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

   # example of how to compress ONLY html, plain text and xml
   # AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml

   # Don't compress binaries
   SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|iso|tar|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary

   # Don't compress images
   SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|jpg|ico|png)$  no-gzip dont-vary

   # Don't compress PDFs
   SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary

   # Don't compress flash files (only relevant if you host your own videos)
   SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.flv$ no-gzip dont-vary

   # Netscape 4.X has some problems
   BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

   # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
   BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

   # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
   BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

   # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
   Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

   # Setup custom deflate log
   DeflateFilterNote Input instr
   DeflateFilterNote Output outstr
   DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio
   LogFormat '"%r" %{outstr}n/%{instr}n %{ratio}n%%' DEFLATE
   CustomLog logs/deflate_log DEFLATE

Before you save the file, I’ll explain what these lines do. There are two ways of settings up deflate filtering:

allowing ONLY certain types of files (AddOutputFilterByType)

allowing ALL except certain file extensions (SetEnvIfNoCase)

If you aren’t too sure what types of files you’re serving, it’s a safe bet to use AddOutputFilterByType and only compress a few known filetypes. Otherwise, keep those lines as is and alter what file types you don’t want compressed with the SetEnvIfNoCase lines. I have it setup for my server to exclude common image file types, PDFs, FLVs as well as common binaries, so this will likely be fine for your uses as well.

As for those BrowserMatch lines, they are recommended client compression exclusions outlined by Apache documentation, but if you ask me I doubt you really have to worry about breaking Netscape 4 users’ experiences.

The last bit of those lines deals with a custom log for mod_deflate. While not necessary I find it to be one of the more interesting things you can do with mod_deflate. The log shows all HTTP requests and displays the file sizes before and after compression, as well as listing that ratio. If you’re so inclined, you can do cool things like run through your logs with a perl script and find out how much bandwidth you’ve been saving each month by using mod_deflate.

Example deflate log snippet. (sudo tail -f /etc/httpd/logs/deflate_log)

Save that file when you’re done tinkering and restart Apache for the changes to take effect.

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Visit gzipcheck to make sure Apache accepted the changes and is serving up compressed files! From there, you can tinker with some more interesting mod_deflate configurations. For example, if you have a beefy server you can set a higher compression level with DeflateCompressionLevel and save even more bandwidth.

Tip of the Iceberg

This post was meant to highlight an easy way to speed up your site and save money, but mod_deflate is not the be-all and end-all site optimization trick. There are tons of ways to speed up your site from both the server side of things and by optimizing the actual website itself. If you want to read up on some Apache tuning tips, O’Reilly has some good books worth checking out.

Related Resources:

Do you use any compression tool like mod_deflate with your current server setup? What else do you do to ensure your server and site run efficiently?

Update: Grzegorz Daniluk suggests an alternate BrowserMatch setup to avoid compressing files for Internet Explorer 6 as it sometimes has an issue with compressed files. However, I did some testing on my own and wasn’t able to reproduce any issues where a gzipped site loaded a blank page in IE6.

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The Pirate Bay Founders Headed to Jail

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:31:19 +0000

The world’s largest and most popular BitTorrent tracker used for finding everything from music to movies and computer applications has always had its share of high-profile legal issues. Despite snags like their 2006 server raid to incessant cease and desists from media companies, The Pirate Bay has always come out fighting, recently hitting a 25 million unique peers milestone. This time, however, the four Pirate Bay founders are headed to jail in what is being called a landmark case. In addition, each founder will have to pay $905,000 USD after they serve their 1 year sentence. That’s a hefty fine considering The Pirate Bay only accrued ~$100,000 USD in ad revenue per year.

What’s interesting though is that the case found them guilty of “providing a website with sophisticated search functions, simple download and storage capabilities, and a tracker linked to the website.” Ha – sounds a bit like Google doesn’t it? Granted Google regularly scans YouTube for copyrighted content and pulls it offline, while The Pirate Bay does no such thing. As with all BitTorrent sites, the actual files are not hosted on the servers, so they could not overtly be charged with hosting material illegally. That being said:

Friday’s verdict did not include an order to shut down The Pirate Bay site.

-CNN

What does this ruling mean for the future of public BitTorrent trackers and piracy in general? I think there are two sides to that issue. For one, other sites that aren’t The Pirate Bay will eventually flake off. They don’t have the resources, abilities and nonchalance the Pirate Bay founders exude. The Pirate Bay will continue to do what they’re best at – being resilient. They have no respect for authorities and have even had fun with things like replying to cease and desist and shutdown letters. At one point, they even tried to buy the micronation of Sealand to move their servers offshore. It is expected that The Pirate Bay will continue their legal battle and appeal today’s ruling.

Regardless of your thoughts on piracy and The Pirate Bay’s position in the entire issue, we can all thank them. Why? Do you use free-content sites like Hulu or South Park Studios? If it weren’t for the vociferous nature of online piracy, these sites most likely would not exist.

On another note..

I find it extremely funny that Time Warner removed its bandwidth caps on its cable internet offerings coincidentally at the same time as the Pirate Bay ruling.

What are your thoughts on the ruling? Do you pirate regularly, or visit Hulu when you want to catch the latest Office episode? What about the future of piracy – where’s it headed?

As for myself, I haven’t used BitTorrent in quite a long time. I’m quite happy with Usenet.

Related Articles:

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Thoughts on Netbooks

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:42:01 +0000

With all the noise about netbooks over the last 2 years and a Skribit suggestion on the same matter, I think I’m overdue for a post divulging my thoughts on netbooks. First off, what are these so-called netbooks? You’ve no doubt heard the term countless times. It refers to a small, generally affordable (I’m looking at you overpriced Sony Vaio P) and ‘connected’ lightweight mobile computer. Netbooks are made for browsing the web, anywhere. This pure mobility naturally comes at the expense of system speed and comfort; keyboards are generally 10-20% smaller than a regular laptop keyboard and the most common display resolution is a mediocre 1024×600.

The typical netbook will run $300-400 USD, have an 8-9 inch LCD display, 1.3-1.6GHz (with Intel Atom being all the rage) processor, 512MB-1GB of RAM, 802.11G, anywhere from 16GB of SSD storage to 160GB of hard drive storage anda battery life of at least 3 hours. It is rare to find a netbook with an integrated optical drive.

I love the idea of the netbook. Yes, I have an iPhone and many people will argue with me that a netbook is a cheap computer made for the web and if it’s the web I want, well an iPhone can do most of the same stuff and it’s with you everywhere. That still a moot point; netbooks obviously offer more uses in that they can run full-fledged operating systems and have keyboards.

But I Already Have a Laptop

And if you’re anything like me, it isn’t as mobile as you’d like it to be. On top of that my MacBook Pro is always docked to my external display and keyboard. The cycle of disconnecting/reconnecting power, audio, 2 USB cables and ethernet (much faster MBP <-> NAS/HTPC transfers) and then readjusting windows on both displays has become such a burden I can hardly find the motivation to move to the couch much less take it out of my apartment.

Netbooks are portable enough that you don’t have to think about whether you want to lug it with you to the coffee shop down the street. While performance vs mobility is generally taken into consideration when picking out a full-size laptop, netbooks aren’t meant to be your primary computer. Netbook users know there are compromises that have to be made in the name of cost and size. That’s that.

Intermission: CrunchPad

While not technically a netbook and more along the lines of a cheap tablet, TechCrunch has engineered what they call the CrunchPad. With a 12-inch touch screen and rumored price tag of ~$300, I feel that it will share much of the same audience as netbooks.

As Michael Arrington pointed out, the touch screen CrunchPad is ideal for Internet consumption, not data entry (try typing with an on-screen keyboard for more than 10 minutes). We won’t know what it’s like until they start selling, but I have a feeling the form factor will inherently lend the CrunchPad to not being quite as useful as a regular netbook. Holding the CrunchPad all the time or using a stand seems like it would get annoying. Then again, I’ve never been a tablet fan so I’m coming in with a little bias.

The Problem I See: Software

So far we have learned that netbooks are affordable computers with enhanced-mobility ideal for secondary computer use. But we haven’t talked about software yet. Over 90% of netbooks shipped to date come with some form of Windows XP. Others use slightly modified Linux distributions like Ubuntu. While netbooks are built for Internet use hardware-wise, they are still using the same desktop OSes. That just doesn’t pan out too well when you have small displays and OSes that were built assuming you’d have no problem clicking on a tiny taskbar icon. And with newer netbooks boasting impressive resolutions like 1280×800 on 8.9-inch displays (or the 1600×768 resolution on the Sony Vaio P’s 8-inch screen), this issue will only get worse.

But change is coming. Microsoft is working on Windows 7 Starter edition, geared for netbooks with such limitations as only being able to run 3 applications at a time. That’s interesting but what I’m really looking forward to is platforms built early-on with mobile in mind. For example, Google’s Android platform wasn’t made with only mobile phones in mind; it plans to work with any device.

And then there’s Jolicloud. Under the direction of Netvibes founder Tariq Krim, Jolicloud might look something like the screenshot below. A trusty Linux backend with a netbook-friendly interface taking note of iPhone-like design methods.

Jolicloud Netbook OS

Netbook OS initiatives like Jolicloud will be crucial to the proliferation and seamless adoption of netbooks in the near future. Netbooks are kind of like the awkward PDA back in the mid-90s. They can do some stuff but without new software applications and OSes designed with their constraints in mind, they won’t reach their full potential. Going back to the PDA analogy, I would really, really like to see netbooks start coming with WWAN connections like current 3G offerings as well as new technologies like WiMAX.

What You Said

I did a little experiment, similar to what I did with my location sharing post, and asked my ~10,000 twitter followers what they thought about netbooks. I figured including their thoughts would provide a clear view of the netbook landscape. Here’s what they said:

Chanathan: @Stammy ideal for students, good as a 2nd computer, not powerful enough feature wise to be a primary machine, can see the appeal for certain lifestyles

lashakrikheli: @Stammy Quote from my blog: It cannot be your primary work machine, and it probably should not…

Penguin: @Stammy Paired with OS X, Web sync & a Cloud Life; Dell’s Mini 9 is the perfect travel weapon. The price of a MacBook Pro buys 10 of them.

dbarner: @Stammy buy on value, period. To some a MacBook pro is a must, to others a netbook provides total value. Diminishing marginal utility is key

bleikamp: @Stammy Dell Mini with Ubuntu and 2GB of RAM = nice on the go dev machine + local server :)

jakebellacera: @Stammy I like them, they come in handy when I need to quickly meet up with clients and I have a mini projector nearby.

mustangman311: @Stammy new round of of them seem a lot more promising than the original Eee and such. Actually usable machines now, maybe.

amdev: @Stammy generally I like netbooks but i can’t get over the realistic inevitability that once i buy one, i won’t use it. MBP all the way..

Twaites: @Stammy — I personally think they’re useless… Under powered, basically no storage. And for email or surfing I always have my iphone.

Twaites: @Stammy … and my macbook is just as portable as any netbook in my opinion. So they’re is no need for a netbook in my life.

michaelper22: @Stammy Netbooks are definitely ready for prime time, hardware-wise. Now software vendors need to push apps that take full advantage of them

skalnik: @Stammy Netbooks rock for small day to day tasks, but seems like a bit of a waste of money, I’d rather just have 1 laptop for everything.

kearneykd: @Stammy Until the prices come down I don’t see how they can compete with the smart phone and laptop combo.

WiLLGT09: @Stammy are you thinking about getting one? have one already? I’d get one, but currently don’t have a need for one. macbook is plenty small.

patrickryan: @Stammy I wrote a blog post about my experience w/ the hp mini 1030nr

elliothere: @Stammy At least for me, impractical. If I need to work, MacBook. Need to quickly check email/the interwebs, iPhone. Why add another device?

titanium_geek: @Stammy I’m a one computer girl (macbook 13in) for budget reasons- netbook=light, but wouldn’t want to rely on one as only computer.

aravindjose: @Stammy Very handy. A netbook + a smartphone = ultimate combination for mobile warriors. On-the-go presentations and demoing etc.

cconover: @Stammy I think they’re a great idea, especially for students in class. However, I’m inclined to wait for a Crunchpad vs. a netbook :)

gjhickman: @Stammy I’ve been reading reviews about putting os x on the lenova s10 and dell 9. my buddy is doing the 9 right now. I like the lenova…

squawkbox: @Stammy I use NC10, brilliant device for teaching, much less bulky than l.top which I don’t really use now.

adnymarc: @Stammy netbooks are improving and gaining popularity but still require a significant tradeoff in usability and performance for portability

tommcfarlin: @Stammy great device for web browsing, not so good for writing or development. high on portability, low on keyboard and resolution quality.

Verdict

I don’t have a netbook (although having one strictly for couch/bed use is enticing) and won’t be in the market for one until more operating systems are available that really make use of the unique constraints and affordances netbooks bring to the proverbial table. I expect that will be in 8-12 months.

For further netbook reading, Wired has some interesting articles about the success of netbooks and the current landscape of netbook OSes.

Related: Hands on with the OLPC “$100″ Laptop – March 2007

Netbook – yay or nay? If you’ve got one, which one and how do you like it? What do you use it for?

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First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 01:10:46 +0000

BackType is aiming to solve a long-standing problem that reared its face when blogs met new forms social media and news sites. The problem I’m referring to is comment separation anxiety. Comments have feelings too. They don’t like being separated. BackType’s Connect WordPress plugin uses their Connect API to suck in all comments related to your blog post, whether they’re on Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News and more. The end result is one big conversation on your blog post. Comments are stored in your WordPress database too, so there’s no worrying about some remote service having downtime and your blog not displaying all comments.

BackType Connect Plugin settings

The plugin has some basic settings right now. Things like selecting which sources you want comments to come from. For example, you might — with good reason — not want your blog to display comments from Digg. Then you can select if you’d like comments to be sorted according to their timestamp, or just have all external comments posted after your regular comments. Each new comment BackType brings in receives a small “This comment was originally posted on Hacker News” type banner to let readers know its origins.

However, in this age of threaded comments, BackType Connect seems to break some of the immediate cognition that comes with threaded comment layouts. That being said, BackType Connect is brand new and has much development ahead of it. For example, the plugin only goes back through posts from 2009 as BackType didn’t start indexing FriendFeed and Twitter until then. Regardless, it’s definitely promising and I’m looking forward to what it will become.

BackType was a Summer ‘08 Y Combinator startup that recently raised $300k from True Ventures, which has some ties to Automattic, so that might have something to do with BackType’s interest in developing a WordPress plugin. You can read up more on what BackType is and follow my comments on my BackType account.

To see example BackType Connect WP integration, click through from your RSS reader.

What do you think of bringing in commentary from various sources regarding the same article? Does it dilute the conversation or unify it and make it easier to follow?

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Review: ImHonest.com Lost and Found Service

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:00:54 +0000

The year was 2004 and I was 17. I was on a Boeing 747 jumbo jet headed from Houston to Amsterdam on my way to Athens. It was a rather empty flight so I had 4 seats in the middle section all to myself, and naturally I spread out my stuff a bit as I made it a makeshift bed. Unfortunately, when the flight was over I left my brand-new-at-the-time Sony Cybershot DSC-T1 on the plane. I never saw it again. That story might have had a happy ending if I was using ImHonest.com.

According to their website, ImHonest is essentially a service facilitating the whole lost and found concept:

ImHONEST.com is an identification and recovery service for items of value. ImHONEST solves the problem of lack of identification and lack of a convenient return process.

How It Works

ImHonest revolves around their custom labels which they sell for $14.99 for a pack of 6. Each label has a unique ID number and their phone number along with the text “Its RETURN will REWARD you.” Each label has a 1 year subscription associated with it. However, if you would like to extend the protection period of your registered item, costs are rather trivial (3 years of coverage for $5, 2 for $3.50, 1 for $1.95).

After your labels arrive, you just need to stick them on the gadgets and such you want to protect, create an account online and register those items. When you create an account, ImHonest gets your typical information including 2 of your email addresses and physical address, ensuring you can always be reached.

My ImHonest-equipped Canon SD990 IS

Registering the item requires handing over the unique ID on the label as well as the serial number of the device and a short description.

The last thing asked for is your shipping preference. An interesting question but for a great purpose. Should someone find your lost item and see the label, they will be assisted to the nearest UPS store (or arrange a pickup with a courier service) to return your item and shipping will be paid by you according to your shipping preference.

View of registered items. Note “expires” text, which refers to the included 1 year of coverage for each label.

The Next Step

So you enjoyed a great night at Club Opera (they’ve got some slick CO2 blasters) in midtown Atlanta, snapped a ton of pics of you and your friends.. including a few your friends will instantly detag themselves from when you put them on Facebook. Nice. But then you woke up in a strange bed and can’t find your socks let alone your camera. Crap!

Fortunately someone at the Waffle House you apparently visited at 3am found the camera. They quickly spotted the bright blue ImHonest label that mentioned something about a reward.

All that person had to do was visit ImHonest.com, click on “report found item” and fill out this information:

The next step is actually getting the camera to you. ImHonest has a parternship with UPS, so the finder just needs to find their nearest UPS location (ImHonest will help them do that), stop by and tell them it’s for the ImHonest.com corporate account.

Meanwhile ImHonest contacts the owner to ask them to verify that their device has actually been lost.

Through some sort of magic, UPS will know where to send the found item and will package it as well. The owner will happily have the camera back in their possesion shortly. As for that reward the finder was promised? It’s a set of ImHonest labels.

Thoughts

ImHonest.com is a simple service aimed at taking care of an everyday problem faced by everyone at some point in their lives. Their solution combines a reward incentive with a convenient return process, not to mention a way of finding the owner. If I had any feedback, it would be that the finder should have a bit more assistance. I found it somewhat confusing that the return process provided a UPS address and little else. Perhaps something like saying how the UPS person will know where to send it and will package it for free.

Overall, I’m loving how powerful these tiny labels can be and I love how every lost-found cycle gets the finder a set of labels for themselves.. that’s a nice user acquisition strategy.

I give ImHonest 9 out of 10 Stammys.

Disclosure: ImHonest.com is an Atlanta startup created by Joël Núñez, whom I have met a number of times at various local tech events.

What gadgets have you lost? Did you ever get them back? Do you have any precautions in place so you don’t lose your gadgets forever?

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Full-time Startup: Skribit Week 12 (Scaling)

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:20:11 +0000

My last startup update discussed Skribit’s recent redesign and entrance into the GRA/TAG Business Launch competition. Since then a few things have been keeping us busy. For one, we have had more and more server issues. While Skribit doesn’t use much in the way of CPU resources, it can take all the RAM it can get. That being said, we’ve had a few annoying downtime episodes in the recent past.

Scaling Step 1: Find Your Bottlenecks (Assess Your WTFs)

Up until now (well still now but not for long after this post is published) Skribit has been using a MediaTemple (dv) server with 1.3GB of physical RAM, 40GB of hard drive space and dual dual-core Xeon processors in an HP Proliant G4 server running Ubuntu. With each mongrel and mysql instance using around 60MB of RAM each, Skribit easily came to be very memory hungry.

Of course there are always things you can do before upgrading hardware that will help you scale, and that’s best practice. Things like memcached as well as caching frequently accessed items or slow queries. We actually ran into an issue of fragment caching too much and it was eating up a good bit of RAM, but I digress. The first thing you need to do is find out why your app is getting slower and slower and your server can’t keep up anymore.

For that, we use a myriad of Unix system administration and Rails monitoring tools:

I love htop.. put it on all my linux boxes.

Monit tracks processes and restarts them if they get unruly.. which happens often. For example, it will restart a mongrel that meets this criteria: “If Memory amount limit (incl. children) greater than 66560 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then restart else if passed 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert”

We used to use exception logger but switched to Hoptoadapp after exception logger started using some resources (we started seeing some items from the slow query log coming from exception logger), and we like Hoptoad.

Hoptoad App telling us what exceptions need to be fixed. Click the image for more detail.

Some example reports from the free version of New Relic RPM

Fiveruns TuneUp telling me what takes up the most time on a page load and breaks it down by MVC. It also lets you click on any action and opens up the responsible file to the exact line in your default text editor. Calvin has a guide for using TuneUp in a separate environment.

Do you use any similar server/app monitoring tools?

Scaling Step 2: Drink What does it all mean?

So you have more information than you know what to do with, now what? If your data is anything like ours, there isn’t just one magical fix. It’s an ongoing process and there are tons of individual cases where certain pieces of code could do things in a more efficient manner. Or you might be realizing that your entire code base needs some restructuring and a better database design. Sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were looking for; scaling isn’t easy. Fortunately all of those tools make it pretty easy to identify where things are slowing down.

And if you are on top of your bug fixes and small performance tweaks and your app/server combo is still failing you, there are more intricate setups involving things like Varnish HTTP accelerator, database denormalization, database sharding, master-slave database setups, load balancing, global queuing and other such terms that will make your lead dev/sys admin/DBA want to hit the bar. Skribit is still pretty young so we have yet to tackle any overly-complex solutions for the sake of performance, but it’s definitely in our near future.

While we’re on the subject of scaling, I’d like to point out an old but tried and true post by Rails creator DHH. The context is that it’s cheaper to pay for more server resources and a developer that’s more productive from using enjoyable and easy-to-use tools and languages like Ruby:

The point is that the cost per request is plummeting, but the cost of programming is not. Thus, we have to find ways to trade efficiency in the runtime for efficiency in the “thought time” in order to make the development of applications cheaper. I believed we’ve long since entered an age where simplicity of development and maintenance is where the real value lies.

Getting back on track, some things don’t change and sometimes you just need better hardware as your web app grows faster than you can speed it up and squash slow queries. We have been working closely with Media Temple (shameless plug… the same and only host I’ve been using since 2005) and we are now configuring a new 2 server CentOS setup. More on that later as Calvin gets it up and running. With our new setup we will be trying something completely different and give Apache with Phusion Passenger a shot, alongside Ruby Enterprise Edition.

In a nutshell, one box will run the bulk of the app server while the other will doing the database grunt work in addition to running a little bit of the app as well.

What should you take away from this? Not much. I’m just spewing stuff that’s flying around in my head. We are at the tip of the iceberg for Skribit scaling and I’m sure I’ll have more interesting things to say about future scaling headaches. But if you like reading about technical issues like scaling like I do here are two presentations on scaling: one from Scribd themselves and one from another Rails coder.

Have you ever had to deal with scaling issues for your app or site?

On the business side of things..

The business plan due date (April 7th) for the GRA/TAG Business Launch competition is nearing. When not battling Microsoft Word 2008’s annoyances (I started writing in Google Docs but needed some more advanced Word features unfortunately), I’m describing who we are, what we do, how people will find us, why people will use us, how we’ll make a return on investment and how we are different from our competitors. I started off with the competition’s judging criteria and began filling out the sections:

I. Market
a. Clear pain in the market
b. Market Overview
i. Size of the market
ii. Initial Target market
c. Competition
i. Current solutions
ii. Future solutions
iii. Barriers to Entry
iv. Competitive advantage
d. Sales and Channel strategies

II. Technology
a. Differentiation
b. Source of Intellectual Property
c. Protection of Intellectual Property
d. Development plan
e. Scalability

III. Management/Organizational structure
a. Management
b. Board of Directors
c. Advisory Board

IV. Money
a. Financials (3 years)
b. Revenue Model
c. Investment Needs
i. Current investors
ii. Fundraising
1. How much do you need
2. How long will it carry you
3. What you plan to do with funds
iii. Exit strategies

And now I’m going back and adding detail; I’m somewhere around 14 pages now and I have yet to stick in relevant graphs and screenshots that illustrate how Skribit works. The next step is getting business plan draft feedback from Lance Weatherby (Skribit uber advisor) and Scott Burkett (assigned competition mentor and local entrepreneur of StarPound) and overhauling the business plan. I have a tendency to dumb things down a ton, which can be good at times, but I have a feeling the type of people that will be reading this business plan will expect it to be formal and have fancy words like synergy, core competencies, mission-critical, incentivize, supply chain, rollout, SWOT and paradigm shifts.

For those in the same boat, Mahalo has a ridiculously comprehensive How to Write a Business Plan page.

Overall

Skribit is in a pretty interesting position right now and I’m eager to see where we’re headed. If I had one complaint though, it’s that I can’t clone myself (yet) and get things done faster. This business stuff is interesting and I love writing down everything we plan on doing in detail and elaborating on our bigger picture, but I want to get back to coding.. I was just getting the hang of this Rails thing.

Thoughts? How is your startup going?

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Review: MailChimp (Email Marketing)

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:53:24 +0000

Before I left for SXSWi I created and sent Skribit’s first email campaign to a subset of our users. There are quite a few email marketing solutions on the market but I went with MailChimp. I didn’t really research any competitors or look elsewhere; MailChimp has a cool logo (great logos go a long way for marketing) and they’re also a local Atlanta startup, so I figured why not.

Needs

First off – what did I need MailChimp for? Skribit has been ticking around for over a year and we haven’t really contacted our users with the exception of running a survey (facilitated by Google Forms) by a batch of users. I figured it was time to let everyone in on what we’ve been working on and other such recent developments.

That being said, I used MailChimp solely for getting the word out. I did not need any of the much more advanced reporting features that MailChimp offers. That’s why this is more of a “first impressions” post instead of a full review.

Lists

The next thing I needed to do was create our email list. When it comes to email marketing, it’s of utmost importance not to spam people that have already said they didn’t want to be emailed. Fortunately we’ve already had some contact preferences in Skribit’s account settings so I just had to make a query to grab those specific email addresses. I ran a simple MySQL select and made use of “into outfile” to dump the results to a text file.

Creating the email list with MailChimp was a trivial event as they support various formats including Excel, Salesforce and Highrise imports as well as a regular file upload. I used the latter with the text file I got from MySQL.

Email list settings

In hindsight, it would probably be better to build out something on our end to also return full names so those can be used to personalize emails. Also, there is an issue with having essentially two lists; that in Skribit’s database, and the one created in MailChimp that intelligently removes emails that bounce as well as unsubscribes. Currently, I will have to go back into the Skribit database and manually remove the users that unsubscribed via MailChimp. In the future, we could just link to a special Skribit unsubscribe link instead of the default MailChimp one. (Although I did link to the Skribit profile page where email preferences are found but that requires a login) Fortunately, their upcoming API list synchronization update will solve this issue for those interested.

Campaigning

There are several type of email compaigns MailChimp lets you make, including ones designed for A/B testing, but I just ended up with a normal HTML email campaign. Upon starting a new HTML campaign I was delighted to see that MailChimp somehow visited Skribit and discovered some of the dominant colors and automatically used them. After a bit of tweaking, copy writing and creating my own header image in Photoshop I came up with this email (180KB PDF of full email). Annoyingly enough, after reading it countless times and bouncing a few drafts off of others, I still managed to make a grammatical error.

Creating the HTML email

Email Preview

I ended up emailing a few drafts to myself before wrapping up the email and sending it to the list I created beforehand. MailChimp also let me customize a plain text email that it sends to clients that don’t like HTML email.

Before Sending

Before you can send off your new campaign, your account has to be approved and MailChimp staff would like to see your campaign. Unfortunately this is a human process on their end so it’s not instantaneous, but it wasn’t much of an issue. In particular, these are some of the requirements you must meet before buying any credits or sending any campaigns:

* Where’d you get your list?

Normally, when people sign up for an email marketing tool, they have a website
with an email collection form, or an e-commerce site, or some way for
customers to sign up for a list. But we don’t see any obvious signs of that on
your website. Or we do see a sign up form, but your current list(s) content
doesn’t appear to have been collected through the process we can see. Could
you please reply, and give us some insight into how you’ve collected your
email list? If your account area only contains testing content, make sure you
update this area “Lists ==> Change list settings ==> Abuse Info & Permission
Reminder” to best reflect how you collected your recipient data. Pretend one
of your subscribers forgot who you are, and is about to report you for
spamming. How would you remind him about how he got on your list?

* No test/draft campaign containing final content was sent or saved yet.

We like to review actual final content before allowing users to send full
campaigns. That way, we can check for unacceptable content, or any violations
of our terms of use and/or the Federal Can-Spam Act. Also, we’ve found that
people who send full campaigns without testing first tend to make embarrassing
mistakes. Then they actually get angry with us. So could you please send
yourself or save a test/draft campaign containing final content before
attempting to purchase credits?

We’re sorry if this is an inconvenience for you. We know
that sometimes, you just gotta get a campaign out ASAP, so
approval processes like this can be a pain. But we have to
do it to keep our servers clean.

Pricing

MailChimp has monthly plans as well as pay as you go options. Calvin and I weren’t too sure we would be sending out more than one Skribit email every couple of months so we decided to go the pay as you go route. We were only looking to sent out emails to around 6,000 users so we paid $150 for 7,500 credits, which comes out to 2 cents per email.

First thoughts – wow, this can get expensive. Imagine what it’s going to cost when we start emailing five and six digits of people. Oh well, just testing it out to see what happens.

Results

So I sent the email. I left my personal email as the reply-to so I could read through everyones replies. I wouldn’t recommend that if you have a larger list. It filled up my inbox pretty quickly with replies.

As I mentioned above, MailChimp has quite a few different analytics add ons for those interested in finding specific information about their email campaign. I didn’t opt for any of those so these are just the basic reports you get.

First thoughts – only 20-something percent of the people on the list even opened the email!? Wow. I will have to think long and hard about sending out another campaign compared to some, likely more effective and definitely cheaper, social media push.

Campaign Report Details

Email Opens by Location

Email Domain Performance

Overall

I didn’t mention it earlier, but MailChimp has an amazing interface. I love the way they tackle various forms and such. If not for anything else, give MailChimp a shot because it’s a breeze to work with. As for the pricing point – after looking around, most competitors seem to be around the same area so I can’t really complain about that. But from a startup perspective – email marketing isn’t cheap. I’ll be watching from the sidelines from now on.

Thoughts? Have you ever run a large email campaign? What service did you use? How did you like it and how much did it cost?

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Thoughts on SXSWi 2009 from a First Timer

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 07:59:51 +0000

I just got back from Austin, Texas the other day and I’m still recovering. I was in Austin for the famed South By Southwest Interactive Festival. This was my first time. You can describe it as “where San Franciscans go to meet other San Franciscans” or “spring break for web developers” but either way it was still a wow. I think I put it best in one of my tweets midway through SXSW:

I quickly learned the scale of SXSW. It’s huge. So many iPhones in Austin that the 3G network was crippled more or less the entire time. Phone calls failed constantly. When the network did work, there was always Tweetie or Foursquare (the new dodgeball you could say, it was launched during SXSW) open on someone’s iPhone.

The next thing about SXSWi – it’s nonstop. At times there were in excess of 20 panels going on at the same time. Lots of people relied on sched.org and subsequentely Happy Hour to see what was going on. Panels very often had standing room only. That being said, and combined with waking up late, Mike Malone and I didn’t get too many panels under our belts.

Among others I attended Gary Vaynerchuk’s amazing keynote. He packed an entire ballroom. If you’re not familiar with Gary’s work, take a look at his bio page. He is his own business/PR/marketing/branding powerhouse.. and doing a damn good job at it.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s must-see keynote

One of Gary’s motivational tidbits:

And this bullshit that if you do something you love you’ll end up not making as much money as something that you could do otherwise is completely horseshit. The problem is everybody is a sprint runner not a marathon runner. Sure at first it won’t make as much money as being a lawyer for $150,000 a year but I promise you my man if you do something you love everyday, you will put in the 18 hours a day you have to to win and then you will kill it and make way more more money because if you live for the weekends and vacations, your shit is broken.

ZDnet did a good job covering Gary’s keynote – definitely worth a read if you can’t watch the hour-long keynote above.

@garyvee @kevinrose @stammy @ajv

But now I’ll get to the real point of SXSW. Networking. It’s all about meeting your Internet friends and new friends who love doing the same stuff you do. For the most part, networking at SXSWi was facilitated by parties night after night. Everyone had one — Facebook, Tumblr, TechSet, Media Temple, Digg, PureVolume, Mashable, Gawker, Brightkite, Squarespace — and so on. The nights usually started at 7 and ended up at 3 after hopping around to a couple of parties.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking. More in my SXSW 2009 flickr photoset.

Ricky Van Van of CollegeHumor and yours truly.

Paul Stamatiou, Jim Louderback of Revision 3 and Akshay Dodeja

@stammy @juliaroy @architek1 @atlnav

@stammy @mashable (Pete Cashmore)

@iheartdzgn @netik @cscotta @justinthiele @stammy @mjmalone @dodeja

@cscotta @stammy @dodeja @iheartdzgn @justinthiele with the creator of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie

The Media Temple Mansion

@justinthiele @dodeja @cscotta @mjmalone @stammy at Media Temple’s Secret Mansion Party

I have no idea.

It wouldn’t be Texas without Rudy’s BBQ

Voxtrot playing at Media Temple’s SXSWi 09 closing party

Lights Resolve playing at PureVolume.com’s Party

Overall

SXSW Interactive was an amazing experience. For my first time though, it was a bit overwhelming. After Sunday I was indescribably tired from walking all around Austin and being out and about every night prior. I can’t imagine the people staying an extra week for the music portion of SXSW.

There are probably a few of you reading this at home and thinking SXSW is just a bunch of nerdy parties strung together night after night. And while that may be part of the picture (and what else would you expect when thousands of Twitterers gather in one city for a week?), SXSW Interactive truly is a valuable experience. I’ll see you there next year and you’ll see why.

I realize this post does sound kind of fanboyish but damn did I have a good time at SXSW.

I give SXSWi 2009 10 out of 10 Stammys.

What did you think of this year’s SXSW? Thinking about going in 2010?

Note: The majority of these pictures were taken with a Canon SD990IS I purchased for SXSW. I’ve been quite happy with it.

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Meet Me at SXSW Interactive 2009

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:04:50 +0000

This year I will finally be attending the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. I’ve always wanted to attend but school has been in the way. SXSW has been called “spring break for web developers” by Valleywag, but it’s essentially a 5 day festival/conference filled with interesting panels at the start of the day and then rounded out with loads of parties and mixers hosted by big names like Digg and Facebook.

“The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!”

Back to the title of this post. I just landed in Austin and will be here for the next 5 days so if you’d like to meet up with me, just let me know. It will probably be easiest to follow me on Twitter and see what I’m up to. SCHED.org has a handy SXSW 2009 guide detailing panels and parties. I will probably be at the Radar / Hack College party tonight.

I have a lofty goal of hanging out the majority of the 500 business cards I came with. I’ve already handed out 7 just from SXSWers I met in the airport (@matto @andrea @mattallica @jaymoney @robblatt @iKrissi @theambershow). We’ll see what happens.

Are you at SXSW now? What do you hope to get out of the festival? What events would you recommend I attend?

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Review: Boxee Media Center (or Going HD: Part 4)

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:02:40 +0000

When I wrote that I couldn’t live without my Vudu box, I already had a Linux HTPC hooked up to my TV and still thought Vudu rocked. Why was that? There was no easy interface for me to work with all of the media files I had on the HTPC. Using a keyboard and mouse to navigate through Nautilus and manually play videos through VLC player isn’t exactly the best living room experience. Enter Boxee.

I’ve had a Boxee account since June but only started using it in the last two weeks that I’ve had it installed on my HTPC. In the last several months, Boxee has received $4M in funding so they’re definitely going somewhere. But let me backtrack a bit – what is Boxee? As you can probably already guess, it’s a media center front-end of sorts for your computer. They describe it as the “open (based on XBMC), connected, social media center for mac os x and linux.”

Test Setup

While I have yet to fully settle into a true Boxee setup with a wireless remote control (perhaps just a simple Apple remote if I can get a USB IR receiver and write a driver for it), I’ll still be using my same HD setup to test out Boxee. The Linux HTPC currently runs Ubuntu 8.10, an experimental Nvidia driver for the motherboard’s integrated graphics and has the same Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz processor and 2GB of RAM.

In the background, the HTPC runs a hellanzb daemon that is configured with my giganews newsgroups (aff link) account, making it a near-perfect media box.

First Impressions

Installation was a breeze and you folks are smart, so I’ll just skip talking about that part. There are a few issues here and there depending on your hardware and software setup and for that a bit of poking around the Boxee forum should help out.

After installation, I just added a few folders as media sources (supports Samba network and UPnP shares too) and Boxee had no trouble listing my content, even downloading album/media artwork when it automatically recognized some of it. I’m not certain if Boxee looks at metadata/ID3 tags only or if it also tries to infer titles based on filenames, but it only recognized a few TV shows and movies out of a terabyte of my media. That’s not a big deal though, playback is fine, you just can’t tap into Boxee’s special sauce – sharing things like recent plays with friends, rating media and viewing media information such as movie summaries.

In addition to Boxee helping your friends make media recommendations for you, many users flock to Boxee for it’s native support for many online video streaming services (unfortunately Hulu was recently pulled). However, that’s not why I’m using Boxee. I’m using it to painlessly manage the stockpile of media I already have on my HTPC. That being said, this post comes from my usage of Boxee and as such I won’t be mentioning much of Boxee’s Internet video streaming, built-in BitTorrent client, Python plugin system and other such features.

But I digress.. Firing up Boxee for the first time is quite an experience. Slick as hell comes to mind.

More Thoughts

I navigate Boxee with a keyboard but I only need to use the arrow keys and enter/escape buttons so if you have a wireless remote control, mapping keys should be a pain-free process.

Pro Tip: Setup another Boxee account as your “guest” so your Boxee friends don’t call you out on watching a Beyonce music video when your guests use your Boxee machine. I learned the hard way.

Boxee User Login Screen

The Boxee home screen is your typical dashboard showing off recent activity within your Boxee network.

Boxee home screen

Most of Boxee’s navigation is done with a few left and right sidebars. The left sidebar splits up media types and settings while the right sidebar (not shown) lets you change up view options when inside a directory.

Boxee sidebar navigation

Lots of Boxee Settings

Internet content on Boxee

Friends on Boxee and their recent activity

A typical in-directory list view for Boxee. With long directories, scrolling down quickly brings up the current letter you’re on (like the iPhone), however I would have liked a way to just start typing the name of the file/folder I’m looking for and have it auto-scroll there.

Boxee video list view

Content that is recognized by Boxee will have several additional actions aside from just playback functions. In this case, it let me read more about the trailer I was watching, rate it as well as recommend it to friends.

Additional actions menu during video playback

Boxee – Adjusting volume while playing a video

Boxee’s “core” video player advanced playback features will allay any worries media freaks might have. You have access to scaling the video as you like, cropping black bars, adjusting brightness and so on.

Detailed Boxee Video Playback Settings

And don’t you just hate it when the the sound is off by ever so much? No problem, Boxee lets you fine-tune the audio offset (as well as with subtitles too).

Detailed Boxee Audio Playback Settings

Performance

I should start this section by saying Boxee is alpha software. Depending on your setup, you could have quite a quandary on your hands. I have run into various issues with sound dropping out (usually sudo alsa force-reload and then restarting Boxee fixes it), Boxee and Ubuntu hard crashing, as well as just complete Boxee sluggishness when navigating the menu and trying to play media (for some reason small MPG files do not like being played back with Boxee).

But once you do get it working and assuming you have at least respectable hardware (unfortunately video hardware acceleration is not yet supported), Boxee flies. Boxee’s video player can pretty much tackle any type of non-DRM-protected media you can throw at it:

Supported formats/codecs:

Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs (including DVD-Video, VCD/SVCD and Audio-CD/CDDA)

Container formats: AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3gp, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support)

Video codecs: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (SP and ASP, including DivX, XviD, 3ivx, DV, H.263), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264, including Nero Digital), HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak,

Audio codecs: AIFF, WAV/WAVE, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey’s Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC/Musepack/Mpeg+, Speex, Vorbis and WMA.

Digital picture/image formats: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa/TGA

Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, SMI, SRT, SUB, VOBsub, VPlayer

As briefly mentioned above, the biggest complaint I have is the occasional sluggishness I get when loading videos. After a while they play just fine though. I also experience this sluggishness when attempting to fast-forward through a movie. Tapping the right arrow key a few times doesn’t always work. However, from my experience scrolling/seeking through large video files is a resource-intensive task so I can’t place too much blame on Boxee for that. I’ll update this post if/when I upgrade my HTPC to a quad-core Intel Core i7 setup and see how that changes things.

Overall

I give Boxee 8 out of 10. This is still an alpha product; I can’t imagine what the final version will be like. If you have an Apple TV you can get Boxee running on it as well, just don’t expect HD content to work.

What do you use for your media playback? Do you have a dedicated HTPC?

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Recap: 2009 Georgia Technology Summit

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:35:59 +0000

In January I mentioned that I was invited to come aboard the selection committee for the Technology Association of Georgia’s Top 40 innovative companies competition. As part of the 15-person committee, gave my perspective and thoughts on the applicants as well as provided my evaluation of how each company’s technology was innovative. The month and a half of judging, meeting with applicants, hearing their pitches and providing them presentation feedback wrapped up with today’s Georgia Technology Summit.

This was my first GTS and damn, I had no idea how huge this event was.

Dennis Zakas addressing 700 people at the 2009 GTS.

It attracted tons of venerable attendees, companies and speakers. The morning started off with famed author and journalist Thomas Friedman’s keynote speech about how American can lead the green revolution. While it started off a little slow, Thomas brought in solid numbers and statements that really help put things into perspective.

Then Ron Clark spoke. He was awarded Teacher of the Year, had a movie made about his story, has been on Oprah twice, wrote a best selling book and has a remarkable school in Atlanta with an interesting, technology-heavy teaching style.

You try taking a picture of Ron Clark. The guy is never still! He’s standing on a table in this picture.

One heck of a presenter; jumping on tables, flailing his arms about.. very inspiring. Here’s a clip of him in action:

Starts off with him singing an order of operations song to the Rihanna – Umbrella beat.

The Top 10 innovative companies got the chance to present to the audience for 3 minutes. These companies are listed below, and details can be found on David Cohen’s live blogged post.

Acculynk – use a pin with your debit card online
Asankya – web acceleration
CCP North America – EVE Online game
NanoLumens – flexible video displays
PlayON! Sports – affordable video streaming
Pramana – invisible captcha
Purewire – security software (SaaS) sits between company network and the Internet
SecureWorks – leading security as a service provider
Suniva – high-efficiency silicon PV cells
Unicoi Systems – embedded devices & software

NanoLumens stole the show with their flexible OLED displays. I had the chance to checkout their display during their TAG Top 10 audition and this thing is the real deal.

To my understanding the box to the left is pretty much just a laptop providing video signal and some power to the display – a real implementation would not need such a large device attached directly to it.

However, it is important to note that NanoLumens is building these displays primarily for large-scale advertising/etc purposes. That being said, if you go up close to one of these displays, the resolution is not comparable to your typical laptop screen. It’s only until you start getting up past a 100-inch display that it can be considered HD. Regardless, when was the last time you saw a light-emitting color display you could fold?

NanoLumens: Top 10 and Winner of People’s Choice – Coolest Technology and Breakthrough Technology

CCP North America:Top 10 and Winner of People’s Choice – Best Presentation and Best Display

There were other parts of the Summit that I left off, like Tino Mantella’s State of the Industry Report, and are better read in detail here.

Thoughts? I want a NanoLumens display for my entire bedroom ceiling so I have something to watch before going to sleep.. they (jokingly) said it could be mounted with velcro.

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Shotput Ventures to Grow Tech Startups in Atlanta

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:34:40 +0000

Shotput Ventures is a new technology startup accelerator fund (some might call it an incubator but technically it’s not since, among other things, the companies don’t work out of the investor’s space) sprouting in Atlanta. Backed by an impressive team of serial entrepreneurs, I think SPV is poised to grow promising tech startups in Atlanta.

The concept is similar to Y Combinator:

We invest $5,000 per team and $5,000 per founder as part of a coordinated program that will have eight companies in the summer of 2009 in Atlanta.

This has been a long time coming. While Skribit won’t be applying (we’re only just starting to sip funds from our recent investment), I’m anxious to see what startups it will create. I remember an email conversation I had with Wayt King (of Shotput Ventures) dating back to October 2006:

I want to fund/help young GT hackers (recent grads, or still
in school) start web services businesses. My premise is that building such
businesses is easy/cheap now (see YCombinator.com at Stanford), and that small teams can accomplish lots with a little funding and some startup advice.

His description back then still rings true today with what Shotput Ventures is looking to accomplish.

Shotput Ventures held an Open House event yesterday evening; essentially a meet and greet held by the SPV founders for friends and potential applicants. It was held at David Cummings’ Hannon Hill offices in Buckhead Atlanta. Shotput Ventures starts accepting applications this Friday, March 6th, so get in touch with them if this is relevant to your interests.

TechDrawl has a great Shotput Ventures overview that’s a must-read for anyone considering applying for Shotput Ventures.

Thoughts? I propose we revive Startup Drinks once the program gets off the ground and Atlanta has 8 or so more tech startups.

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Full-time Startup: Skribit Week 8 (Redesign)

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:52:39 +0000

The last few weeks of working on Skribit have been proved to be rewarding. It’s finally gotten to a point where it’s noticeable that we are making some progress with product development. This past Friday I pushed live the new redesign of Skribit.com. A few weeks ago we hired graphic designer Justin Ruckman to pump out some mockups for the next iteration of the Skribit website design. Justin was already quite familiar with Skribit — he was at the original Startup Weekend that spawned Skribit.

He drove down from North Carolina for an extended weekend stay and we turned my living room into a makeshift office.

So what got done that weekend? Justin started off by tweaking some of the colors in the Skribit logo to provide better contrast. Let it be known that the Recolor tool in Adobe Illustrator comes in handy when trying to adjust the colors of groups of linked objects together (Edit -> Edit Colors -> Recolor Artwork).

From there, Justin started with a blank Photoshop document and employed the 960 grid system. From that we began with logo placement and menu structure. We spent a while deconstructing the site’s current site map and reordering pages based on utility. For example, we decided that there should be a noticeable separation of pages related to the currently logged in user, compared to other pages not directly related to the user. This lead to a “Me” menu, making it easy to find links to things like account and profile settings.

Eventually, these mockups below were created and established a visual language that could be used to style any page, regardless of content.

The next few weeks were all about me applying the design of Justin’s mockups to the Skribit code-base. While the process was tedious — 96 commits, 216 modified files (6021 insertions, 2744 deletions) — it felt great being able to see Skribit grow up and become more like what we had originally envisioned. However, I wasn’t just doing a bunch of CSS and XHTML work. I made better use of tagging in this release. Blogs can now be tagged, in addition to groups and suggestions, making it easier to find related content that might interest you. Also, there are more pages that allow users to explore blogs, suggestions and groups on Skribit. Previously these things were scattered around the site and hard to find. The next step will be full-text search and we’re looking into Sphinx for that.

I also added sections for featured users, groups and blogs as selected by Skribit staff. From time to time we see some interesting uses of Skribit and we’ve always wanted a way to highlight those people. Now we have a way.

Calvin has spent a great deal of effort working with Amazon Flexible Payments System to help Skribit accept payments for paid Skribit Pro accounts.

Before pushing the new features and design live I went through an Internet Explorer debugging and testing session. Painful is the only way to describe it without using profanity. Needless to say, there are still a few Internet Explorer 6 and 7 issues running in the wild that will be fixed eventually.

This is more or less what you’ll see if you visit Skribit.com now:

The hardest part of pushing the new design and features live was deciding when to stop coding and just get it out there, instead of waiting for it to “be perfect.” This upcoming week will be filled with lots of tiny updates and fixes based on feedback received from Skribit users.

Other Skribit Happenings

Aside from the redesign, Skribit is now an entrant in the Georgia Research Alliance/Technology Association of Georgia Business Launch competition. The application needed an executive business summary and outline of the backgrounds of everyone involved with the company. The next big deliverable will be a complete business plan, which is a great thing to have on paper regardless of the outcome of the competition. In the next few weeks I will need to meet with some people with advertising and publishing backgrounds to help flesh out the details of our business model. The competition is limited to companies with less than $500k in funding, which makes Skribit look tiny in comparison, so I’m not getting my hopes up about the $100,000 cash prize.

Calvin and I have started getting hold of our “books” and will be receiving some QuickBooks 2009 training from a small business consultant. We also received our bank account checks and I wrote off a few to pay our outstanding bills for legal and business work. In addition we now have Skribit business debit and American Express charge cards that I’ll soon tie to our Amazon S3/CloudFront and 37signals Basecamp accounts to pay off monthly charges.

Thoughts? Thanks to the several Skribit suggestions that inspired this post about my recent Skribit status. So that’s what has been keeping me busy recently. I’m trying to find a way to get more energy after work to write more here instead of just going to sleep early. ;-D Ideas?

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First Impressions: Safari 4 Beta

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:31:54 +0000

Those of you that have been following this blog for a while know that I have been in a cycle of switching between Firefox and Safari as my primary browser almost regularly. I’ve even gone way of Flock back in the day. However, I have always ended up coming back to Firefox. Firefox is like an ex-girlfriend — bear with me — you know it has some flaws but it’s comfortable and lets you experiment with various add-ons. You know something’s up when restarting Firefox has made it into my daily routine.

I need not mention that Apple released Safari 4 Beta — to much fanfare — yesterday. If you’re interested in a detailed list of what’s new and innovative in this release, check out the lengthy press release or any of these comprehensive reviews:

Thoughts

The purpose of this post isn’t to list features or discuss the aesthetics of Safari 4 beta’s features like bookmark/history Cover Flow or the automatically generated Top Sites page that lists your most frequently visited websites. I’m here to impart my thoughts on Safari 4 beta as seen from a developer’s point of view.

Obligatory screenshot of Top Sites in Safari 4 Beta

First, I do have a few general comments to make. I’m not quite sure why everyone is running towards placing tabs at the absolute top of the window. It might be the cool thing to do ever since Opera came on the scene and then Google’s Chrome made it hip, but I am not a fan. It truncates the full website title and it takes more time to mouse over to the top to switch tabs than previously. Although if I recall correctly, Apple did make the tab cycling shortcuts easier to use (Control-Tab goes right, Shift-Control-Tab goes left).

And while I’m on the subject – do you find Cover Flow useful for browsing your web history and bookmarks? I have the majority of my bookmarks on Delicious so I have yet to discover the power of it.

Oh and if you have a multi-touch trackpad on your MacBook, try pinching it like you would an iPhone – Safari 4 beta now zooms just like the iPhone does. Don’t worry if you don’t have such a trackpad, just Command+ or Command- away!

PaulStamatiou.com zoomed all the way out in Safari 4 beta

Aside from Apple’s jabs at Google’s Chrome with the aforementioned usability “features”[sic], Safari 4 beta does tote some impressive bragging rights.

Bragging Rights

Safari 4 beta sports some ridiculous JavaScript execution speeds. If you once thought that Mozilla’s JavaScript-C engine “SpiderMonkey” was impressive, you’re gonna start bouncing off the walls when you take a look at Safari 4’s “Nitro” engine, which runs at the bytecode level. That being said benchmarks show that Safari 4 beta is some 3X faster than Firefox 3. However, Safari 4 beta is only a tad bit faster than the recent Firefox 3.1 beta (which uses the TraceMonkey JS engine with native code compilation – similar to Nitro)… browser wars, what can I say.

I’m more impressed by Safari 4’s support for CSS 3 and HTML 5 (with offline storage! – that’s the databases tool in the Web Inspector) – both of which can be attributed to Safari’s Apple-established, open source rendering engine WebKit.

What I (Kinda) Like

Let me start this by saying I have never been a fan of doing web development in Safari or WebKit; Firebug has always held a special place in my heart. After playing with Safari 4 beta’s new Web Inspector and the updated elements and resources views, I can say that Firebug isn’t so far ahead anymore.

Safari 4’s Web Inspector – Elements View

Safari 4’s Web Inspector – Resources View

Most of what I do with Firebug in Firefox is editing live XHTML and CSS, along with the occasional JS debug and creating watch expressions to see if my JS actually works. Live editing in the Safari 4 Web Inspector is fairly self-explanatory. Tinkering with the DOM and CSS? Double-click their values on the right pane in Elements view to edit them live. Well, that’s how it should be. Simple, mundane tasks like live tweaking CSS properties do not yet work properly in the Safari 4 Web Inspector. As for markup, just double-click the tag you wish to edit in the left pane. Not quite as easy as Firebug — I enjoy the anything-goes “Edit” view and while I’m on the subject of live editing, the Safari “Snippet Editor” is pretty darn useless. How often do I edit completely independent code snippets? Never. I’m always tinkering with some code that ties into the grand scheme of things with elements throughout the page. But I digress..

There’s a lot more to the Web Inspector than what I’ve mentioned, but it’s all the same ol’. Safari 4 isn’t worth my development time until Web Inspector can painlessly do what I would primarily use a development tool like it for (live editing of CSS/XHTML/JS).

Overall

If this were a real review and I were to bestow Safari 4 beta with a Stammy rating, it would come in at around 6.5-7 out of 10 with emphasis on its stability and speed. So what’s Safari 4 good for? Browsing the web, not tweaking it. Let’s not forget that Safari is the king of private browsing mode *wink wink*… well not for long, Firefox 3.1 gets native support for that too.

If you’re using Safari 4 Beta take a look at some of the hidden preferences (OS X only), such as putting the tab bar back where it belongs.

Safari 4 Beta: yay or nay?

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Thoughts on Winning @juliaroy’s Twestival Charity Auction

Paul Stamatiou — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:59:23 +0000

The title of this post might be a little confusing for those not up on their Twitter happenings. First off, Twestival was an event facilitated by Twitter users with parties held in different cities (over 180 cities) around the world on February 12th. The goal of Twestival was to raise money for charity: water. The Twestival movement was extremely successful, raising $250,000 for charity: water in one night. Julia Roy explains it better:

I had the pleasure of working and brainstorming with charity: water (along with many other amazing nyc volunteers) to organize the Twestival in New York event. Twestival was initiated by @amanda, and as her message spread through Twitter 100+ cities began to organize, independently planning twitter-powered events for February 12th to benefit charity: water. On the night of the event Twitterfolk partied, tweeted and donated more than $250,000 to the cause. When a powerful social network comes together to make a difference, it does.

To help out with the charity: water fundraising, various web celebs from the likes of iJustine, Julia Allison and Meghan Asha all the way to Peter Shankman and Chris Brogan created charity auctions on eBay. In particular, Julia Roy held her own Twestival charity auction on eBay, offering a 6 hour dinner and drinks experience with her.

So why am I writing about this?

Yours truly was the winning bidder at $1,549; exceeding other Twestival auctions by a longshot – for example, an evening with Julia Allison, Mary Rambin and Meghan Asha went for only $586 (and Julia was on the cover of Wired magazine a few months ago..).

Why?

Aside from the obvious reason — helping out charity: water (seriously, take a few minutes to visit their site and you’ll see what I’m talking about) — I did this for a few reasons. First off, being able to pick Julia Roy’s brain for 6 hours will be quite an experience. Some of you may not be familiar with her background so let me give you the JR101.

Julia was the first hire for my friend Josh Spear’s digital think tank, Undercurrent. I met Josh over the summer when we both had the opportunity to speak at the TTI/Vanguard Generation Techs conference in Rome. Josh is one of the most successful, remarkable and well-traveled people I have ever met. As you can guess Undercurrent is doing just fine. I could explain all of the great things they’ve done for their big-name clients but that would take some time.

Julia Roy’s role at Undercurrent is head of the Social Life department. She’s helped CNN get embeddable videos, launch CNN’s headline t-shirt initiative, worked with Pepsi Co for their Dewmocracy campaign and more. On the side, Julia runs a popular show called “Tweet Week” on Youtube. That being said, $1,549 is a drop in the bucket for an experience like this.

Julia’s most recent Tweet Week episode.

What do I hope to gain? Julia won’t be getting out of this one easily. I’ll have a bunch of questions prepared. The answers to which I hope will help me take Skribit to the next level in terms of branding, marketing and how things are run.

Julia and I haven’t set a date yet but I have a year to redeem this. It will probably be sometime after I attend SXSWi.

Thoughts on Twestival? What questions should I ask Julia?

If you live in NYC drop a note and I’ll make sure to ping you when I’m up there so we can grab coffee or something.

Hat tip to Lance Weatherby for bringing this auction to my attention.

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Startup Riot 2009 Recap

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:07:20 +0000

Startup Riot, a day-long networking and startup pitching event organized by Sanjay Parekh, was held at the Twelve Hotel today and much like the last one, was a huge success. Startup Riot is one of the glimmering examples of the growing startup, tech and entrepreneurship communities in Atlanta. In addition to the larger size of the event this year, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and listening to this year’s keynote speaker – Chris Wanstrath. Chris is one of the co-founders of the amazing GitHub.

Sanjay amid his creation, with Scott Burkett in the background pitching the phenomenal Wi-Fi Cat.

GitHub Talk

Update: The full text of Chris’s talk is now online.

I’ve mentioned GitHub here and there before but for those unfamiliar with it, GitHub is a social code hosting website for collaborative development based around the open source, distributed version control system git. Skribit moved to git and GitHub almost entirely because of GitHub – it’s a great developer environment, and of course it doesn’t hurt that git is superior to every revision control system out there. Chris spoke about the story of GitHub and how it was always a side project while Chris and PJ Hyett were hacking away at their startup FamSpam. Eventually what would become GitHub got to the point where FamSpam itself was hosted on it and became useful in development. Chris explained how FamSpam was a failure. FamSpam was a “kind of cool” idea, but not for them. For their mothers yes, but it wasn’t something they could work passionately on. The time came for them to make a decision and only a month after FamSpam launched, Chris and Tom Preston-Werner decided to focus their attention on GitHub.

“I want to make people happy, and I want to be happy doing it, and I’ve found that’s a good way to make money.”

-Chris Wanstrath

To date GitHub is all bootstrapped and its founders and employees (4 full-time, 1 part-time) retain all equity. This falls inline with Chris’s definition of success – being able to take his girlfriend out to nice dinners and not having a boss. At the end of his talk Chris posted his take on the “should I take VC/angel/etc investments?” query posed by many startups. In essence, he said “do whatever you feel is necessary.” Bootstrapping has worked well for companies like GitHub and 37Signals, but that is only one particular take on it. You can’t assume your startup needs millions of dollars because [insert-name-of-ridiculous-valley-startup] got $X million.

“Spend money on employees to keep them happy.”

-Chris Wanstrath

Chris also touched on some marketing techniques they employed; perceived scarcity – limiting user registrations – (he referenced the GMail invites system) to build value for accounts, as well as wining and dining others in their industry not to get them to try out their app but to have them as a connection for future not current business.

So what’s GitHub working on next? More enterprise features like a local “firewall” install.

The Pitches

Around 51 startups presented 3 minute or less pitches at Startup Riot. Of those I enjoyed hearing about the following startups (in no particular order):

Cloudsurance – backup web applications
TyFish – OTA mobile phone backups with remote-control abilities (lock your phone, tell your phone to “shout” via their site)
Fuzzy Logic Toys – Chumby in a bear for educational purposes for children
KidKey – OpenID for kids, COPPA compliant
Accelereyes – Very, very cool GPU computing technology.
Simatra – Develops software and hardware that solves complex math fast.
Lizzer – “the easiest way to add links and embed content in web-based email & blog posts”
Offload.me – Online personal assistant for $495 per month

Wi-Fi Cat

This particular pitch needed its own section. Wi-Fi Cat is a revolutionary cat collar that acts as a Wi-Fi signal repeater and cat tracker. No more fading Wi-Fi signal throughout your house! Unfortunately, Wi-Fi Cat is not real but a joke played on Sanjay.. and they ran with it. It was quite the pitch to see. Here are Scott Burkett’s slides:

After revealing that it was a joke, Scott went on to explain how Atlanta’s tech and startup community is thriving and pointed out Startup Riot’s success in particular.

Overall

Startup Riot 2009 was a impeccable success (I’ll ignore the Wi-Fi connectivity issues) and fantastic networking event. Mad props to Sanjay. If you were at this year’s Startup Riot, what did you think? What pitches did you enjoy the most?

If you’re not in Atlanta, are there any events like Startup Riot in your city?

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Review: Iconfactory xScope

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:11:48 +0000

I may be rather late to the party but I recently discovered Iconfactory’s xScope last week while graphic designer Justin Ruckman was in town working on the next version of Skribit. I saw him using xScope’s Dimensions tool to painlessly measure distances between on-screen elements. I was hooked from then and started using the xScope trial. In the last week xScope has proved so immensely useful that I had no hesitation paying the full $26.95 to buy it. Let me show you why.

First off

The xScope menu mapped to its handy menu bar icons.

xScope is comprised of 7 different tools and the biggest difference between it and other measurement tool suites (commonly just popular Firefox add-ons) is that xScope works for anything on-screen. It doesn’t matter if you’re working with some elements in OS X itself, or within Firefox, Photoshop or what have you. It just works as an overlay.

Dimensions

This little gem is almost worth the price of xScope itself. Once enabled, just hover over anything and it will display the distances between each element. Remarkably useful. But what about the one-off situations where elements you want to measure have no interior area that xScope can pick up on? Hit Command+Shift+5. It creates a red screen overlay which you cut through to find the area of the elements you want to measure. I have yet to find a situation that needs this.

Rulers

As you can guess, this feature pops up a nice set of adjustable (you can rotate CCW and CW too) rulers with calipers for precisely measuring various on-screen elements.

Screens

Want to see what kind of space you have to work with in various browsers for your designs? Enable xScope’s Screens tool and you get an overlay that lets you select which browsers you’re looking to use and presents an accurate window to give you an idea of what the user will end up seeing in a browser (space-wise only, obviously no rendering done).

Why is this useful? While a user might have say a 1024×768 screen resolution, browser and OS tool bars take up space. Screens makes it easy to find out what your above the fold real estate looks like.

Loupe

Loupe magnifies a small section of your screen where your cursor is (options: 200%, 400% and 800% zoom) and gives you the color information in HEX, RGB and HSB at the pixel level.

Pro Tip: Hit Command+D to freeze loupe’s selection.
Tap Shift+Command+C to copy the currently selected HEX color to your clipboard (extremely convenient).

Guides

This screenshot is a bit overkill but shows off what can be done with guides. Each individual guide can be moved as you please.

If you’ve ever worked with an application the likes of Photoshop or InDesign, xScope’s Guides needs no explanation. Just as you use guides to line things up in those applications, xScope lets you do the same over your entire desktop.

Pro Tip: Hit Command+G to use the Guide Wizard and create a grid.

Frames

I haven’t yet found a need for Frames but they’re adjustable boxes that display size information, along with options allowing you to specify locked size ratios and display various grids. Frames also lets you capture screen shots of framed content as well as duplicate the frame.

Crosshair

No need for explanation, the Crosshair tool is useful for checking if elements line up.

Mix & Match

With the exception of the dimensions and crosshair tools, any of the xScope tools mentioned above can be used together. Popular combinations for myself include setting up guides and using the ruler as bounds for the dimensions tool.

Overall

xScope is definitely worth its price. As for complementary applications, Justin Ruckman pointed out that he uses Color Schemer for Loupe-like tasks. I give xScope 10 out of 10 Stammys.

Do you use xScope or anything similar for your graphic and web design needs? What are your must-have design apps?

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Location Sharing: Yay or Nay?

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:52:16 +0000

The location sharing bubble might have started back in ye olde Loopt days but now everyone is on the bandwagon: Yahoo! with Fire Eagle (Fire Bagel as once internally called by Y! employees), Google with their recently announced Latitude, BrightKite, Whrrl, Groovr, Moximity and bundles of others. Alongside all of these products, there are developer-oriented tools like Mozilla Geode that help developers find their users’ locations (once asked) from their computer and do whatever with it. However, this all begs the question why?

First off, I’m not opposed to location sharing. It’s not even that crazy an idea when put in the perspective of Twitter and its whole “what are you doing” prompt. I’m just playing a little bit of devil’s advocate right now. Privacy is the central issue with any information sharing service and each offering has their own way of making location sharing “safe.” Still, would you use location sharing?

From a technical perspective, I think location sharing is pretty neat. Apps/services like Google Latitude can grab location data from either GPS, WPS (Skyhook-like; mentioned here), or via cell towers. The issue is that only a few of my wired friends would even consider using it, so what’s the point of knowing the location of only 3 of my friends? Granted many said the same thing about Twitter but now even non-techies love it. In an ideal world, I think a near perfect implementation of location sharing services would notify friends (perhaps via SMS) of their direct proximity to each other, such as if they happen to be shopping at the same mall et cetera, without having to load an app or check a website.

But I digress, the point of this post is to find out what the consensus is for location sharing services. I posed this question on Twitter and received a few interesting responses:

All of that being said, I don’t have a problem making my location public 24/7 and even considered building a small PC with GPS and 3G to put in my car when I’m out and constantly update my location on a live Google Map embedded on my blog (as done by some startup founder in San Francisco whose name currently escapes me). I’m aware that most people definitely don’t have this same stance, so feel free to chime in with your thoughts.

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100 Applications and Services I Use Daily

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:33:14 +0000

Almost a year ago I wrote a now somewhat outdated article titled Startup 101: Tools for the Job. A suggestion on my Skribit account asked me to delve into the software I use on a regular basis, so I decided to put the two together and briefly discuss some of the tools that keep me going. Many of my solutions are very common, but in writing this I’m hoping to hear about what you use for your needs.

Development

Skribit has since stopped using Assembla for SVN and Trac hosting, and we’ve made the great decision to switch to git and use GitHub. For ticket tracking we started off with LightHouse but since it really is just myself and Calvin, we have adjusted our workflows to include using local to-do list app Things (as discussed here). It’s important to note that since we both continually communicate most days via Campfire, it’s not as big a deal that we don’t use ticket tracking as much as we should.

While Campfire can be considered glorified IRC (for which I use Colloquy), it is accessible from my iPhone (although there is now a Colloquy iPhone app) and remarkably easy to setup compared to IRC. Conversations are logged and searchable. To make Campfire even easier to use I created an SSB for it with Fluid.app and employed a userscript to remove Campfire’s oft-annoying user notifications. I keep going on and on about Campfire but it is truly the most useful service I use every single day. The cherry on top? GrabUp. Pasting an automatically-created image URL via GrabUp into Campfire actually loads the image within the chat window.

Sharing a GrabUp-created and uploaded screenshot of a business card idea on Campfire

When it comes to project management, we still pay for a Basecamp account although similar to Lighthouse I have found that it’s not exactly something I access daily or even weekly. I recently created a Highrise (CRM) account to make personal notes of people and past conversations that I don’t want to lose within my busy inbox, and I quite like it. Of note is the email dropbox feature which lets you BCC a special Highrise email address and have it log your conversations. Highrise also lets you email it to add tasks to your to-do list (if only it synced with Things).

No development tools list would be complete without the typical Firefox + Firebug mention. I also use FireRainbow (JavaScript syntax highlighting in Firebug), Inline Code Finder for Firebug, ColorZilla (eyedropper and color swatch tool). In addition, S3Fox is always welcome in my Firefox browser, particularly with its recent support for Amazon CloudFront management. The Inquisitor search add-on for Firefox is a must-have as well.

Speaking of Amazon, I have two scripts that backup this blog and Skribit to S3 every night.

And lastly, TextMate needs no explanation. It’s just a shame how many people use TextMate and don’t realize how powerful it is, passing it off as a simple text editor. If you fall into this category, you should consider purchasing this Pragmatic Programmers TextMate book:

Photoshop CS4 usually makes an appearance in my daily workflow, either for tweaking a button for Skribit, cropping photos for my blog or using it to select hex colors (even though the Colorzilla Firefox add-on does this, I’m a bit set in my ways with Photoshop).

And if I am so unlucky as to need to test something Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8 beta, I can quickly fire up Windows XP in VMware Fusion (thanks in no small part to the Intel X25-M SSD in my MacBook Pro). I did run into an issue where the VM did not like accessing http://localhost:3000, which is address of locally-hosted Ruby on Rails web applications. I got around this by using the IP address provided by the following OS X Terminal command:

ifconfig vmnet1

In my case, I use a 172.XX.XX.X:3000 address in VMware and it works just fine, although I have to manually change the URLs of some files to avoid errors (and then change them back when I’m done editing in VMware). As for how I am able to use Internet Explorer 6 and 7 simultaneously, I employ IE7s.exe – a standalone IE7 browser.

Testing a Skribit page in IE7 with VMware Fusion

And of course, who can forget Terminal.app. I usually have a few tabs open: one for running Rails script/server, a bash prompt for git work, a MySQL session for poking around tables and usually one other tab for miscellaneous *nix tasks.

Play

It took me a while to get used to using something other than simply Twitter.com, but I have fallen in love with TweetDeck. The Adobe AIR-based application does have its obvious performance drawbacks and crashes at least once per day, so there are better alternatives. EventBox is becoming popular but I did not like the RSS aggregator-esque interface when I tried it out.

TweetDeck

As for feed-reading, I use a mixture of Feedly (as reviewed here) and FriendFeed. If you don’t know who to follow on FriendFeed, you can start with me, Steve Rubel, Louis Gray and find your way out from there. With FriendFeed important/popular stories tend to float up to the top with frequent comments and activity, so it’s quite hard to miss a big item. Feedly is more along the lines of an RSS aggregator but it’s unique layout highlights stories recommend by your friends and other Feedly users, making it easy to skim through your feeds.

Browsing my car-related feeds in Feedly

When something noteworthy comes through the tubes, I quickly Cmd+D to save it to my Delicious account via the Firefox Delicious Bookmarks plugin. If it’s not too important and more short term than long, I’ll click the star in the Firefox address bar and deal with it later.

For my music needs I have several Fluid.app browsers setup for music sites like the Hype Machine and Mugasha (Startup Weekend Portland).

This doesn’t look like 100 items..

That’s where you come in! What applications (web or local) do you put to work daily?

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Startup Goals for 2009

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:17:10 +0000

Not too long ago Calvin pushed out the suggestion for this post to the Atlanta Startups group on Skribit. I figured I would tackle this post now that it is still early in the year. Unfortunately, you probably already know what I’m going to say. I think every startup’s primary goal for 2009 is survival. The economy sucks and we’re reminded of that almost every day. Microsoft just laid off 5,000 employees and they are definitely not alone.

Survive? Could you elaborate..

Even with our investment and minimal burn rate, Skribit can only remain my full-time job for an amount of time that is counted in months, not quarters and definitely not years. Usually most startups can trim costs here and there, and there’s no shortage of articles detailing how this can be done. But what if you have almost no costs aside from living expenses? You’ll run out of money eventually right?

This leaves us with the typical startup company; little to no outside investment, just sweat equity and consulting/freelancing full-time to keep the bill collectors at bay. Running a bootstrapped startup is no easy feat as the founders can’t devote 100% of their time and energy on their company. As a result, development cycles get longer and tasks that should take a day can be stretched out to three. I will do whatever it takes to avoid having to take too much of my time away from Skribit. Being the only full-time employee, our development cycle isn’t exactly rapid and if I had to work another gig to pay the bills, I shudder to think what would happen to Skribit.

Fortunately, I have a fail safe in place. Revenue from this blog for the month of January is approaching $1,600. That’s enough to cover all of my primary monthly expenses. It’s not quite enough to cover student loans (the repayment of which doesn’t become mandatory for a year) or taxes (how much are those things anyways?) but I can definitely keep living like a college student for a while before I start freaking out about my empty retirement fund.

This means I should be able to focus all of my time on building out Skribit for the foreseeable future.

Secondary Goal

What else is on my mind in regards to the startup life? For one, I have the longest to-do list in the world. Every day I knock out a big task and then I add two more to the list. I’m not talking about feature creep here. There are many aspects of upcoming Skribit ideas that must work together to ensure that a) Skribit actually does cure writer’s block as our slogan says, b) the Skribit community has what it needs to thrive, and c) businesses find enough value in Skribit to work with us and our users (left vague intentionally – in regards to our primary business model).

Getting traction for Skribit is the next big goal for the coming months. Of course, if I was Josh Harnett in the movie August (movie about dudes struggling with a startup), I would be saying something like:

Traction.. you’re missing the point. Traction really isn’t the issue because Skribit is not a vehicle. Skribit is the road itself.

But traction is worthless without knowing which direction to go in. Direction in this case is our primary business model. From what I can assimilate, this seems resembles a very basic understanding of Skribit’s master plan:

1) Develop more functionality.
2a) Continue fine-tuning business model on paper.
2b) Initiate Skribit marketing plan (wearing Skribit t-shirt at SXSWi).
3a) Nurture growing Skribit userbase/community.
3b) Approach potential clients for feedback on business model. Gauge interest. Repeat 2a.
4) Prepare metrics that show traction. Begin courtship with various potential investors. Explain the need to hire more developers and someone with an MBA that can say synergy, core competencies, deliverable, best practices, mission-critical, incentivize, supply chain, value added, SWOT and paradigm in the same sentence.
5) Build out primary business model.
6) $$$

Right now the biggest challenge will be developing all of the functionality (in an acceptable time frame) necessary for Skribit to attract bloggers and prove useful. Only once Skribit has a solid number of active users will our primary business model really work.. but I guess that can be said about every startup.

What are your goals for whatever you do full-time right now?

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TAG Top 40 Gearing Up in Atlanta

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:30:32 +0000

There aren’t too many notable annual tech events in Atlanta (okay I lied there are all of these and SoCon) but one of the big names is the Technology Association of Georgia’s annual summit and Top 40 competition. The competition selects forty of the most innovative Georgia-based and technology-focused companies. Unlike all of the business plan competitions floating around, the TAG Top 40 competition judges companies based on their “degree of innovation, scope and financial impact of innovation, likelihood of success, and promotion of Georgia’s innovative efforts nationally and international” as selection committee member Stephen Fleming put it.

With that being said, I have recently been added as the 15th TAG Top 40 selection committee member and will aid in reviewing applicants. If you think your Georgia-based company matches the criteria above, the Top 40 application deadline (the largest Wufoo form I’ve ever seen) is February 1st.

Companies selected to be in the Top 40 will make an appearance at the showcase at the massive Georgia Technology Summit on March 3rd. Out of those Top 40 innovative companies, the Top 10 will have their shot to present their companies to Summit attendees.

So why limit it at 40 innovative companies? TAG Top 40 Chair Dennis Zakas told me the story of how it all got started. The first competition only had enough floor space for 40 companies and it has been like that ever since.

Do you know any other competitions like the TAG Top 40 outside of Georgia?

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Full-Time Startup: Skribit Week 2

Paul Stamatiou — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 03:56:47 +0000

As a follow-up to my post detailing my first week of full-time work at Skribit, this post will talk about my adaptation to the working from home lifestyle as well as how work is going. I have slowly gotten into a work routine and generally start work around 8 or 9am until around 5pm, when I take a few hours off and then do an hour or two of work in the wee hours. Unfortunately I have a habit of going to sleep at 3-4am, but I catch up on sleep on Sundays.

The Home Office

It became painfully clear to me how important it was to have an environment supportive of long hours of work and conducive to productivity. I rearranged my apartment to help out with this.

Step 1: Remove all clutter
The less junk there is lying around me, the clearer my mind feels and less distractions I’ll have. Getting rid of clutter was my New Year’s Resolution for 2008 and for the most part I’ve done that. I only have what I need and if there is any left over stuff that I can’t get rid of right now, it’s stashed in my pantry (anyone want a 14-inch CRT TV, 2004 Mustang Cobra front brakes or 6 quarts of 5W-20 synthetic motor oil?).

Step 2: Separate the bedroom and the office
Unfortunately I do not have enough rooms in my apartment for a dedicated office. The best I could do was move my desk from my bedroom and move it into the living room. That was a great choice as the bedroom was much more cramped and having a big bed next to the desk made it too tempting to take naps while working.

Step 3: Create an area for taking breaks and escaping from work
Half of my living room is designated as the work area. There’s my desk and a bookshelf with all of my technical resources. The other half of the living room is setup as my break and play area. There you’ll find many soft things to lounge on (Sumo Sac, Sumo Omni, a two couches) that I use to stretch out and watch 15 minutes of TV or play PS3 while taking a break from sitting at the desk for the last few hours.

Step 4: Good Lighting
There is only one source of natural light in my living room, making it hard to illuminate the entire room naturally. I prefer “white” light as opposed to orange “daylight” bulbs so I outfitted 3 lamps with CFLs – one desk lamp and two floor tower-style lamps.

Before:

Cramped desk and work area in the bedroom

After:

My “office” setup in the living room.

Some of my technical books kept near the desk for easy access.

The Break Room

Skribit Work

Week 2 has (still) been a lot of playing catch-up and learning. While I have been involved with Ruby on Rails for the last year, I spent most of my time in the front-end/view playground. Now that I’m taking a more active development role, I have been spending equal amounts of time in the M, V and C of MVC. Most of my time is not spent thinking about the logic behind how some piece of code will work, but rather finding out the particulars of the syntax. It’s a lot of Googling and API reading (RoR API.com is great). I expect this will be much less of a time sink within a month.

We are gearing up to redesign Skribit.com, as well as release professional accounts, in the near future. As such I have started using Little Snapper to manage screenshots of interesting sites that may prove helpful as design inspiration in the upcoming design phase. The next step will involve creating wireframes with OmniGraffle Pro enhanced with Konigi’s Wireframe Stencils.

Most days are spent at home, with the occasional change of scenery at a local coffee shop, meeting with someone or attending a Friday morning Gang of 5 meeting. Gang of 5 is “a unique network of local roundtables for the support of startup entrepreneurs.” It’s a group of roughly ~5 people that meet up every week to discuss challenges they have faced with their startup as well as just sharing experiences. I was part of a Go5 last summer and it was a great learning experience. It is always worthwhile to unplug and network with people that come from a different background (ex: marketing and business instead of technical). Some people in my Gang of 5 group work on these Atlanta-based startups:

Thoughts?

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Review: Kingmax Super Stick 8GB USB Flash Drive

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:22:09 +0000

Over the last few months I have spotted more and more people toting diminutive USB flash drives, similar to 2005’s oddly failed SD Plus form factor memory cards. The flash drives I am talking about are literally one chip with no additional USB adapter. They fit inside the actual USB port. Around two months ago I found Kingmax selling such a contraption. At a whopping $12 I could not resist (edit: price seems to have increased to $25) picking up a few of these 8GB wonders.

Form Factor

At the time of its launch, the Kingmax Super Stick was heralded as the world’s smallest USB flash drive (and at 1 gram I wouldn’t doubt that it’s the world’s lightest USB flash drive too). I can’t confirm if that is still the case but one thing is for sure, it’s tiny. I’ll let these pictures do the talking.

Several Kingmax Super Stick 8GB USB Flash Drives and their packaging.

Kingmax Super Stick vs PSTAM business cards (it’s 5 cards thick)

Size Comparison (Clockwise from Left): SD card, 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro, Compact Flash card, Kingmax Super Stick.

Of course, this flash drive is extremely easy to lose. It comes with a gimmicky case and mini-strap but I don’t think many people will actually use that.

Technology

So what actually makes this flash drive so small? Kingmax has managed to integrate DRAM into the TinyBGA form factor (although the rest of the industry calls it MicroBGA). They call this technology PIP and it has nothing to do with the PIP your HDTV has. Instead, it stands for “Product In Package” and refers to the fact that the flash drive is essentially the same thing as the packaging/case. What you see is what you get, literally.

To put this into perspective, I coaxed the actual chip out of the small plastic case.

The benefits of this type of packing include natural resistance to temperatures nearing 100 degrees Celsius and -40 degrees Celsius, as well as being waterproof. I wanted to put the Super Stick to an extreme test and see how long it could last and retain data as well as maintain acceptable performance once dipped in liquid nitrogen, but I no longer have any LN2 (as I did in this post).

Over the next few days I plan on putting the Super Stick to the test by letting it go through a wash and dry cycle, as well as boiling it. Depending on how well it performs, the Kingmax Super Stick could end up being the preferred USB drive for felons looking to ingest 8GB of sensitive data before the authorities arrive.

Performance

Transferring a single 550MB MKV video from my SSD-equipped Macbook Pro to the flash drive took 1 minute and 22 seconds. Transferring 550MB of 116 3-6MB DSLR photographs from the MacBook Pro to the Kingmax Super Stick took a bit longer at 1 minute and 39 seconds. Flipping things around, it only took 17 seconds to transfer the 550MB MKV file from the Super Stick to the MacBook Pro and 26 seconds for the photos.

Based on these iphone-timed-and-not-exactly-accurate limited test cases, that equates to a 5.5-6.7 MB/sec write speed and a 21.1-29.4 MB/sec read speed. To get a better idea of the performance of the Super Stick, I ran an Xbench hard drive test on it:

The benchmark proves that the Super Stick, as with all flash-based storage systems, isn’t terribly good at random activity. The good news is that unless you’re running an OS off this thing, you won’t experience any slowdown. With sequential writes hovering around the 9-12MB/sec range and reads tapping close to 35MB/sec with larger files, the Kingmax is pretty speedy. However, I have no clue as to whether the Super Stick uses MLC or faster SLC flash memory.

Numbers mean nothing without a frame of reference. To the best of my googling, the fastest USB flash sticks currently on the market offer read speeds of around 40MB/sec and write speeds around 30MB/sec. That means that the Kingmax Super Stick is pretty damn fast.

ReadyBoost

And on that note, it should be no surprise that the Super Stick is advertised as being Windows Vista ReadyBoost compatible. ReadyBoost is Windows’ attempt (and most would say success) at pre-caching application data for frequently-used programs. The benefits of ReadyBoost don’t become apparent until several repetitive tasks and “cycles” of using similar applications, even through reboots. When fully primed, people have reported application loading times for applications like MS Outlook dropping from 11 seconds to 2-4 seconds. However, don’t expect ReadyBoost give you those type of speed improvements if your machine already has a great deal of system RAM.

I was able to get it up and running as a ReadyBoost device in my Windows 7 Beta 1 VMware installation, but I’ll refrain from offering performance numbers as they wouldn’t be accurate in real world situations.

Setting up the Super Stick as a ReadyBoost device in Windows 7 Beta 1

Overall

I haven’t used a USB stick in quite some time, especially with my whole online storage and “cloud” fascination, but I will gladly add the ridiculously cheap and well-performing Kingmax 8GB Super Stick to my hacker arsenal. Maybe I’ll keep it in my wallet and fill it with dummy files of launch codes, confidential FBI files and other ominous data in the event I’m ever mugged.. will keep them guessing.

What have you been using for your USB flash drive needs as of late? Do you think this Super Stick would make for a nice upgrade or would you rather not use anything too small to fit on your keychain?

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Going HD: Part 3 (Blu-ray and Surround Sound)

Paul Stamatiou — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 07:40:54 +0000

It has been a while since I have written about my move to an HD home theater setup. Going HD: Part 1 detailed the arrival of Samsung’s 50-inch plasma HDTV while Going HD: Part 2 with discussing the build of an HTPC. Part 3 will discuss the addition of a 5.1 surround sound system and PlayStation 3.

HTPC Update

Working with my HTPC has been a bit of an uphill battle. I equipped it with a Blu-ray drive and assumed all would be well and I could simply play Blu-ray discs with software like VLC Player in Ubuntu. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

I won’t go into details, particularly since playing Blu-ray movies in Linux consists of bypassing DRM and is considered illegal in the United States, but it consists of compiling the kernel to support UDF 2.5, grabbing the AACS key from a Blu-ray disc and getting an application to rip and decrypt the data. It is “possible” to play the Blu-ray without ripping but requires an advanced setup and enough system resources to be able to decrypt on-the-fly. Then there is the issue of when the disc was produced and if that encryption key hasn’t already been found and put into a database, it is necessary to use a tool to find the Volume ID manually and other such cumbersome tasks. I may revisit this later on but at the moment it’s just not worth messing with Blu-ray in Linux.

Many headaches later I resorted Windows, hoping that would alleviate the problem (Windows solving a problem? *irony*). To my dismay that proved to be a dead-end also as HDCP issues required I get an HDCP-compliant video card before playing Blu-ray discs with CyberLink Blu-ray playing software.

After that turn of events I decided to forget my dreams of playing Blu-ray discs with my HTPC and put Ubuntu back on the HTPC. Ubuntu is my OS of choice for the HTPC for a few reasons. First off, it is easy to setup Samba shares so it can network with my Mac (Finder » Go » Connect to Server » smb://192.168.1.101 in my case). Also, I have a highly-configured installation of the hellanzb newsgroups downloader installed, which could help with acquiring TV shows and movies quickly if I ever had the itch to do such a blatantly illegal, copyright-violating act.

As for interfacing with the HTPC when hooked up to the HDTV, I don’t use any fancy remotes or HDTV-friendly media front-ends. I just have a wireless mouse. To allay any fears about plasma burn-in issues, I have the task bars autohide and use a black desktop background.

I am currently dealing with some bottleneck issue that causes the playback of 1080p movie files to stutter and hang intermittently. It’s not a hardware issue; the CPU doesn’t get maxed out nor does the hard drive (10,000RPM Raptor – bad choice for an HTPC as it is incredibly loud) have any issues reading off the 50GB files. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is an Nvidia driver problem that will need to get sorted out. In the meantime, 720p movies play just fine on the HTPC.

No More DirecTV

I canceled my DirecTV service today. I simply don’t watch enough TV to warrant the $50+ monthly bill. Furthermore, my building does not have the 5-LNB dish setup necessary to look at the satellites that broadcast the majority of DirecTV’s HD programming, making the HD package worthless. If it’s not HD, it must go.

Bye Bye Wii

Tacking on to that last sentiment, I sold my Wii and accessories. It was a neat system but playing it on an HDTV was painful. The Wii’s 480p resolution on a 1080p display was unbearably ugly, not to mention a white console did not fit in aesthetically with my black equipment.

Going Blu

The next step was to add a Blu-ray player. After some research, I came to the conclusion that the best value for a Blu-ray player on the market right now is the PlayStation 3. If you are going to spend upwards of $300 for a good Blu-ray player, you might as well invest in a PS3. The software is upgradeable ensuring that it will always be able to play the latest Blu-ray disc profile. I opted for the 80GB $399 version and picked up Gran Turismo 5 Prologue while I was at it.

Little known fact: Georgia Tech is working with Sony, Toshiba and IBM to promote and keep developing their cell processor, of which a 3.2GHz-equivalent variant is found in the PlayStation 3.

5.1

My first comments about the Samsung 50-inch plasma mentioned how the integrated speakers were sub-par and rear-firing, making for an unusual sound perception. A surround sound system is a must for any good home theater setup, however I did not want to spend too much money. I decided to stick with Samsung and purchase their HT-TZ512T system for under $400 USD.

The main selling points of the 512T system are the inclusion of wireless rear speakers, iPod compatibility, an upscaling DVD player (5 disc changer), FM radio and XM-ready receiver. With 1200 watts of power, I find it to be a great value. However, it does not have many audio inputs, which led me to purchase a 3-way digital audio optical switcher.

Nyrius Toslink Selector Switch

My optical audio cables have yet to arrive, but the switcher will connect the 512T receiver to the PS3, Vudu box and potentially the HTPC if I decide to get a sound card for it.

Samsung HT-TZ512T Home Theater System Unboxing

That being said, I have not listened to these speakers with a 5.1 source yet. I was adequately impressed with this system’s sound quality with a 2-channel source with Dolby effects enabled. They have much more range unlike the HDTV’s integrated speakers, and unlike the Logitech 2.1 computer speakers I sometimes used with the HDTV, the 512T system does not flood you with bass (even with the lowest setting on the Logitech Z-2200 2.1’s, there was way too much bass). More on the sound quality when I setup the optical inputs.

The wireless rear speakers are a bit finicky. At the moment I can’t get them to connect to the main unit, although they were working just fine for the past 2 days. I believe I need to do an “ID set” to get the speakers working on the same channel as the wireless transmitter in the main receiver. Initial impressions prove that the sound quality from the rear speakers is acceptable, but they have yet to wow me.

The overall build quality of the HT-TZ512T system is mediocre and screams of cheap plastic like an American car interior. My biggest issue with the entire system is the flimsy nature of the front left and right tall speakers. They’re too light and move too easily.

The (almost) Finished Product

Questions? What is your HD home theater setup like? Thoughts on the PS3?
Previous Home Theater: How To: 100-inch Uber Theater on a Budget

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