broken mac

Some time after I got my Macbook, a CD got jammed in its DVD drive. Blast! As it happens, we had a refurb Macbook at the office so to avoid spending a week or more without it while Apple fixed the drive I swapped hard drives and continued using the other Mac. Things got busy at the office and my Mac stayed with the jammed CD for a few weeks -- since I had a replacement there wasn't a reason to rush it.

Now, a few weeks ago, the Macbook started hanging. First, it wouldn't come out of sleep. Then, it started locking itself up even when waking up the display (i.e., it was connected to the adapter and so only the display turned off). It started doing this once a day. Then twice a day. Then it started to lock up mid-use, sometimes even a few minutes after rebooting.

Don't get me wrong, when I talk about locked up I don't mean I could Force Quit whatever was dead. I am talking about a complete OS-wide lockup that left the colorful spinning thingy spiraling as if the machine was trying to hypnotize me. The only solution was to hold down the power button for 5 seconds and do a hard-shutdown that way.

Yup. Not good.

A couple of times, both Safari and Firefox (not simultaneously) had gone out to lunch and for some reason were consuming 100% of CPU (usually just one of the cores, but that seemed to be enough for the machine to stop responding). That was my leading theory until lockups happened without the browsers loaded. Then I decided that the refurb had a circuit that was berserk. So we got the original Mac fixed and I swapped the drives again. Yes! Now everything would be alright. All the original parts were reunited.

No such luck. After a few hours I was back in lockup land, and if anything things were getting worse. I couldn't understand what was going on -- I use exactly the same software on my Mac Pro at the office and it's never locked up like this. I looked online and found references to lockups due to a corrupted "sleep image file", which if deleted could restore sanity.

So this morning I decided that enough was enough, and that if I was going to try anything else radical now was the time. I didn't want to try the image file thing since sometimes lockups could take hours, and I was in no mood for waiting. I backed up everything (easy process between Apple's Backup software and the fact that I've centralized my data in my home directory for years), and I reinstalled OS X.

I did a clean install, which took about 2 hours total, mostly unattended. Most of the install didn't require my attention, and installing the OS updates at the end, while still a bit of a pain, was a single-step process, compared to the multi-hour nightmare that is Windows Update right after you do a clean install of XP or even Vista.

Another big difference with reinstalling a machine, compared to Windows, is restoring the apps you use. I just went to the Applications directory, TARred each ".app" directory that I wanted and copied it off to the network server, then uncompressed and moved back in each dir to the newly installed copy when it was done. The whole thing took about 20 minutes (then of course, I had to re-add all the license keys and such, but I keep good track of those). Windows would have required endless hours of switching CDs and DVDs, one after another, until your setup was complete. I know. I've done it.

Anyway -- the machine now appears stable -- it hasn't locked up all day. We'll see if this continues, if not, I'll try the sleep image file thingy.

I feel like I've gone through some sort of twisted rite of passage. OS resintalls! Looking forward to the time when I have to reinstall the software on my coffee table. :-)

the next blog you'll add to your feed reader...

...is Marc's.

Yup. Go read, and stop wondering what I'm talking about. :)

ubuntu server 7.04's paltry default packages

There are some basic packages that the basic distro of Ubuntu Server (as of 'Feisty' 7.04) does not include. I was just documenting a bit the sequence of apt-get commands I used right after the install was done:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install ssh
apt-get install lynx
apt-get install links
apt-get install vim
apt-get install gcc
apt-get install make
apt-get install sun-java6-bin
apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
apt-get install subversion
apt-get install smbclient
apt-get install smbfs

The update and upgrade commands are to update apt-get's lists and then upgrade packages that were just installed from CD, respectively.

Some of these are perhaps a bit less common -- smbfs maybe. But vim? gcc? make? Really? Not to mention ssh. The client of SSH comes in pre-installed, but you have to install the server.

I imagine there's some weird reason that has to do with copyrights or encryption, or the copyrights of encryption, but it's still a pain. Especially if you forget about doing it...

jpc: holy emulators batman!

JPC is a pure Java emulation of an x86 PC with fully virtual peripherals. You can go to their site and run the applet demo, which runs FreeDOS and then lets you execute various classic PC-DOS games such as Lemmings or Prince of Persia. And it supports protected mode, so you can run Windows 95 and --gasp!-- Linux.

Because it's an emulator and not simply a hypervisor, you can run it anywhere in which a Java 5 or higher JVM can run.

Mindblowing.

ps: in the same vein, check out this Browser emulator which simulates the experience of older browsers within your... browser. Right.

at javaone tomorrow!

Martin, Brian and myself will be at JavaOne tomorrow presenting Building a Web Platform: Java Technology at Ning. We'll talk about the evolution of the Ning Platform over the last two and a half years and how Java and some specific design choices let us continually grow and expand the platform, replacing and upgrading infrastructure, without affecting users or developers.

The session is TS-6039, in Esplanade 301, at 4:10 pm, so if you're around come say hello. I'll post the slides after and talk a bit more about that and other interesting things. :)

128-bit storage: are you high?

As Reverend Lovejoy would say: "Short answer, Yes with an if.... long answer, No, with a but."

Nevertheless: great article on ZFS and storage limits (theoretical and otherwise). Recommended!

yes, you can use that which you had paid for

[via Slashdot]:

Up until now, manufacturers have been wary of building a device to allow this type of usage because they've been afraid a lawsuit. The DVD Copy Control Association had claimed this was contractually forbidden, but now a judge says otherwise [...].

Up next: the Department of Justice decides that it's ok to put a PC in the living room and connect it to a TV, solving the problem that has puzzled many a tech geek.

Radical notion, that of us being able to decide how to best make use of our own property... :-)

Ubuntu Feisty on OS X and VMWare Fusion

So I tried running Feisty on Parallels but no dice -- it would boot but go no further. Additionally Parallels doesn't seem to know Ubuntu exists (they know about Xandros, but not Ubuntu?).

So I tried it in VMWare Fusion (Beta 3) and it worked perfectly. The VMWare Tools installed flawlessly as well. Performance is great, but then again, the machine does have two dual core Xeons. :-)

Running Ubuntu inside OS X is mostly useful if you want to test browsers for example or verify something platform-specific. OS X is too good a UNIX to make me miss Linux. Parallels does come in handier for XP/Vista tests, which also run pretty fast. Most of the time, though, is OS X all the way. Right now the only disadvantage that has is the lack of an official, final version of Java 6 (which we all assume will come with Leopard...), but you can get the developer preview from Apple's Developer Connection, so API-wise, at least, you're mostly covered.

Edgy -> Feisty

So it turns out that the upgrade to Feisty Fawn was actually fairly simple, even in a headless environment. I happened to check out the Ubuntu Upgrade page and it was fairly simple.

I ran

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Which failed, even though I had just installed Edgy yesterday. I figured all apt-get needed was a refresh, so

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update

did the trick. After that

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

worked fine, followed then by

sudo do-release-upgrade. After that, I left it running for a couple of hours, and at the end (naturally) it rebooted, but didn't come back. Horror! All was lost!

Well, not so much, I hard-rebooted the machine and it came back happily. All is well. Pretty good!

OS X -> Edgy

So during my migration of old server to new stuff, I decided to experiment with using OS X as a server environment. With Apple Remote Desktop, it wasn't half bad really (although ARD is really crappy, speed-wise, compared to Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection, thanks to its VNC roots).

It took a while, especially since I was unfamiliar with a lot of the OSS-on-OSX subculture in the Intertron, but in time I had everything set up including Fink, a LAMP stack, and such, but weirdness remained. For example, I kept fighting mysqld and its tendency to decide to not startup on boot, no doubt my own lack of knowledge of some particular OS X magic rather than an inherent lack of the feature by the OS or Mysql.

Anyway, so I was talking to Russ the other day and he very reasonably said that I was nuts for not using simply Debian or something of the sort, and last night I decided to give it a try. I was very impressed. In about 45 minutes I had Edgy server installed, with a full LAMP stack, Mysql properly configured and everything migrated. I shutdown, reconnected everything to replace the Mac, and I was done!

There is some sluggishness when posting right now, probably as a result of the crappy disk or perhaps not enough memory (although the machine seems perfectly happy), or maybe it's the fact that I'm using LVM. I will try a switcheroo to Feisty (which came out today) at some point next week when I have another hour to spend on this and perhaps I'll also try out a couple of different options. :)

a couple of great tools

At Ning we use JIRA as our bug-tracking system (when we started a couple of years back we were originally on Bugzilla, but we switched to JIRA fairly quickly), and it's really a great tool, part of our development and release process really (I'll talk more about that in another post).

For intranet doc-keeping we have mostly been using Confluence (also from Atlassian) and it's good enough, but about a month ago I discovered Clearspace from Jive Software (the guys that wrote Wildfire, now Openfire) and we've been evaluating it since, well, really using it. It's a fantastic product, seamlessly integrating discussion boards with a wiki, simple ways to turning a discussion into a wiki doc, group and individual internal blogs, etc. Also, it has some nice features like searching inside PDFs that you uploaded.

Confluence is a bit more wonky than Clearspace, but it still does the job if all you need is a Wiki. However, for the combination of blogs, forum, and wiki docs, Clearspace wins hands down (except in one point: Wiki syntax in Confluence is better).

Regardless, depending on your needs, all great tools. Highly recommended!

mowser!!

So, Russ has taken the wraps off his project Mowser!

It's a "mobile browser" plus a mini mobile portal, including useful links, feeds and commands (which he calls keywords) all rolled into one.

He's still polishing some details, so you should expect some minor things to be weird for a while, but it's all there!

He's been working on this for months-- so congratulations Russ! It's awesome.

and the prize for most misleading headline of the day goes to...

... News.com, with their article "Yahoo to give away email code", from the article:

The move to open up the underlying code of Yahoo Mail--used by 257 million people--is designed to spark development of thousands of new e-mail applications built not only by Yahoo engineers but by outside companies and individuals.

Hmm... now, let's see what Jeremy has to say about this:

Our Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth) is a generic mechanism that will allow users to grant 3rd party web-based applications access their Yahoo! data. There's already a similar mechanism in place on Flickr and used by services like MOO. BBAuth is the protocol that's going to open the door to doing the same thing for many Yahoo! branded services in the coming months. Stay tuned for those announcements. :-)

The first two Yahoo! services supporting BBAuth are Yahoo! Photos (API) and Yahoo! Mail (API only available to Hack Day attendees at the moment).

Okay. So, Yahoo is opening up its authentication API, and probably other APIs to be able, to, well, do something useful with the Yahoo auth API aside from signing on. This isn't peanuts, it's definitely interesting, but ... "giving away email code"? Please. Someone needs to talk to the News.com guys and explain the difference between "giving away code" and "exposing an API", pronto.

did you know...?

... that Ning is hiring? But of course you did! Well, here's a reminder then. :) If you're looking for something, go check out our list of current openings at http://jobs.ning.com/. From Java developers/architects to QA engineers and product management, there's something for everyone!

(Did I say Java? Wasn't Ning about PHP? Well, the apps are written in PHP. But there's a ton of Java in there --some really cool stuff-- even if it's not obvious... but that's a topic for another post).

And, hey, if you don't find what you want in there, but you think you want to work with us, send us an email anyway. :)

microsoft gets it

I think it's about time we dropped the "Microsoft doesn't get web 2.0" meme. Scoble today has a post responding to Kaliya in which she says that to Microsoft we're just "customers". Please. Everyone tries to do what is best for both their customers and company. MySpace may "invite dudes to contribute" but trust me, News Corp. doesn't give a damn if they are called "customers" or "enablers" or "contributors". Microsoft still has some vestiges of its predatory behavior in the past (particularly on pricing of most software that hangs to stratospheric monopoly heights, ever notice that Office and Windows are the only two Microsoft products that are not at lower prices than before? Look at the stuff where MS has competition.) But on the other hand they'd probably be sued by shareholders if they lowered earnings "for no reason". Anyway, that's not really at issue here.

Look at Bill Gates at Mix06, talking to Tim O'Reilly and Mike Arrington. Look at Windows Live, and the stuff they're doing with gadgets. Look at the integration in Vista. Look at Channel 9. Look at On10.net -- whatever that's about, it's certainly not the Microsoft of old. Look at what Microsofties are discussing in blogs, from Ray Ozzie, to Scoble (of course :)), to Dare, to Mini-Microsoft, to hundreds of others (Quiz: Assumming you don't work for Google, how many high-profile Google bloggers can you name vs how many from MS? I'm not saying it's good or bad, btw, really, to each his own, I'm just pointing out the difference in, um, "engagement"). Look at Ray Ozzie's LiveClipboard stuff, which from what I've seen underwhelmed many but it just blew me away. This didn't look like a Microsoft demo at all! It looked like the demo of some dingy startup, three guys just kicking cool stuff around! Is it small, perhaps a bit of a trifle given Microsoft's resources? Maybe. But damn! There it is: A screencast, done on Flash, and running all on FireFox, using standard Internet formats. Three years ago, you'd probably had to endure some insane ActiveX plugin and a demo of how IE and Office could do stuff together using COM or some such.

If anything, that's what tells me that Microsoft as an entity gets that it must adapt, and it gets where it should go, and it's trying, really, really hard. They've opened up the floodgates to some degree -- Microsofties are doing a lot of stuff that may not be necessarily "sanctioned" or perfectly aligned with the different BU requirements of Windows or Office. This was done by necessity rather than out of some high-minded pursuit of "innovation," but that's ok, that's how these things work.

Microsoft may not be out of the woods yet with respect to the threat that web 2.0 (and, let's not forget Google) represent to their "traditional" business. But let's give credit where it's due. They're moving.

And they didn't need an "Internet Tidal Wave" memo to get them going. So hats off to them!

PS: Btw, let's not get hung up on whether web 2.0 is hype or not. Is there some hype in there? Sure. Is there something real behind it? Yep. Does it accurately describe a market space? At this point, yes. Ok. Good. :)

plugging the dns recursion hole

Via this Slashdot article I was reminded about a vulnerability in DNS configs that allow recursion and therefore let the server act as an open relay that could be used in a DDoS attack. I verified my DNS using DNS Report and this matched what I saw in my config files -- my DNS server was open. Rogers had a post last week on the topic which outlined the steps he took and served as a quick guide, and along with this page of the BIND9 manual I had the whole plugged in a few minutes, confirmed by the DNS Report tool. Phew!

evernote

One app I've been trying out for a few days now is EverNote. It's truly, really well done. It does what it's supposed to do, and it does it well. Great UI, including some cool UI concepts like their accelerating scrollbar. I've also tried OneNote, but I've been underwhelmed. Too much complexity really, for a simple task like taking notes. EverNote also has good integration with browsers, including a plugin for FireFox 1.5. If you need a good piece of note-taking software, look no further. Highly recommended.

Update: Russ tries out EverNote but is confused by the non-standard UI. Good point, I forgot to mention my take on this. EverNote does use a different UI than we're used to, and it definitely has a bit of a learning curve. My opinion, however, is that our current UI paradigms are broken. They just don't work. So we will need to change into new ones, and given that pretty much anything new and more efficient will involve some sort of shift and relearning. I think EverNote pushes the envelope enough to make things better but not so much that you have to spend hours learning what to do. That's my 2c at least. :)

filebox: a quick way to share files

Many many times I want to quickly send a file to someone for them to look at, and I can never remember the names of the services that let you do this. But there's Ning! :)

So my 1-hour hack for tonight was to create filebox.ning.com, which allows you to upload files and then share the link with others, and it's deleted after a few days. Basically I cloned Brian's filedrop, modified some things in the code, made the uploads private, added messaging, and made it a little easier on the eye. The power of Ning at work. :)

windows vista: me likey!

For about a week now I've been using Windows Vista (CTP, Build 5308) in my machine at the office--at home I am still running XP-- which we got through MSDN. The CTP is of the "Windows Ultimate" flavor which includes Pro+Media Center+Tablet PC functionality. Nice. I dared to install it at the office because if that machine couldn't handle it, I wasn't sure which one could (Dual Core P4, GeForce 6800, 3 gig of RAM... you get the idea). It's an early beta (they're probably still six to nine months away from release) but it's pretty stable save for a few wrinkles here and there and the occassional slowdown. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The installation process is really, really good. Pop in the DVD, click "install" and wait for a couple of hours. In my case, I did that as I left the office one night (yep, perhaps I'm a bit kamikaze that way) and when I got back the next morning, the machine was botted on Vista. That was it. No clicks, no questions, it just worked.

Once I booted the first thing I loaded was IE 7. I wanted to see how well it worked. Boy, was I impressed. Network transfers were super-fast. We huddled around it and wondered if IE was doing something funky, but whatever was going on also extended to FireFox, which loaded webpages at least 50% faster than before. I use FasterFox, so I know I wasn't dreaming. We compared the speed of loading the same pages on similarly configured machines (both Linux, Mac and Win) and Vista blew them all away. Sometimes twice as fast. WOW. I guess that the rewritten TCP/IP stack does make a difference after all.

There were a couple of problems with the install. First, I had Norton Antivirus running and it just can't be uninstalled for some reason. I can't stop it from getting in the middle of other processes, such as downloads either, and I haven't had the time to look for a solution. Probably a registry setting. At any rate, it's very annoying. The really annoying feature is the new user security they put in, essentially downgrading user privileges so you have to "sudo" for some operations. What's frustrating is that my user is an Administrator, there is apparently some hidden Administrator user that I don't have the password for, and there are folders that I can't delete. Period. I can't even look into them. That is just plainly idiotic. It's MY machine. Give me all the warnings you want, but let me access my own files damn it! I could bet that NAV is getting confused with that too, since it plugs in at a pretty low level. Other minor problems: the video driver Windows installed on its own was old -- but getting the update for Vista from nVidia fixed that. Then Powerarchiver wouldn't work at all, but WinZip did just fine. Oh, another tiny thing: when I shut the PC down, it bluescreens for just a second. I'd bet it's Norton again. But it doesn't affect anything. So it's fine. :)

Those wrinkles aside, the experience has been pretty good. Vista is fast and stable. Search has suddenly become useful. I can now search Outlook messages from the OS (and open them) faster than from within Outlook, and I didn't have to install or configure anything. Good one.

The hardware requirements are pretty steep at this point to run it properly, but I think those will come down as it gets optimized. As I understand it, build 5308 is the first one that is close to being "feature complete," so there still must be a ways to go in the optimization front.

Let's see, other cool things. The new sidebar (a copy of Konfabulator) is cool, and there's a fairly web2.0-ish site that deals with "gadgets" that apply (the site, not the gadgets) to both Windows Vista and Windows Live. The famous "Flip 3D" view is pretty cool and even (gasp!) useful. But, I searched aaaall over the place to see how to use it, and everyone talked about how cool it was but NO SITE said how. So here it goes: Windows Key + Tab. Alt-Tab is the regular switch, but with "live views" of the windows scaled down. WinKey+Tab is the Flip 3D thing. There. I said it. The secret's out (hold on for a million comments telling me where the obvious place to look was). :) You'll need a spiffy video card to use it, but it will work well if your system can handle it.

So far then? Aside from the ludicrously bad file permissions thing, I am very impressed by vista -- in fact, I'm sold. No WinFS, true, and it took a hell of a lot longer than it should have, but Vista is definitely going to be a good upgrade from XP I think (damn, I sound like Scoble!). Anyway.

As the Firefly characters would say: "Shiny." :)

A free VMWare?

Now that would be cool. VMWare, for its reliability, features, and simplicity, is one of my favorite sofware products of all time. News.com says the free server edition is just around the corner. Now what about the workstation? I'd bet that half the development world would rush to download it and start tinkering with it. Speaking of tinkering. VMWare APIs, anyone? :)

opera mini: awesome

On Tuesday Russ sent me an SMS with a link to get Opera Mini as soon as it came out and I have to say I was massively impressed. This is not really a review but just a small comment -- Russ has more here. Even considering the install was a bit wonky due to the typical hoops we must jump through to install non-carrier-sanctioned stuff on a phone, and that afterwards it ends up being shoved into the "games" section (at least on my RAZR) it's still worth it. Fast and usable, finally a browser for phones that doesn't suck. If you have high-speed data services for your phone and were wondering what to do with all that paid-for bandwidth, check it out.

blogs and discourse in software and politics

Salon's Scott Rosenberg muses on What journalists can learn from software developers and points to my recent exchange with Mike Arrington as an example. Thanks!

Which reminds me of what I wrote a while back in rethoric, semantics, and Microsoft and some of the stuff (such as the "rules to posting") in my introduction to weblogs.

Political discourse definitely feels a bit shrill these days. Then again, when reading the history about other times of relative upheaval (about, say, the late 1700s/early 1800s period in US history, the Civil War, or World War II) it's striking to see that they weren't all that "nice" back then either, in fact the early days of the republic were pretty vicious in terms of political rethoric and even backstabbing (witness the falling out among some of the Founding Fathers). I think it's just that it was much harder for tempers to flash out of range, since by time involved in sending messages back and forth allowed for some cooling-off period -- and live debates weren't watched by millions of people at once, who also had to respond asynchronously. I wonder if it's just a matter of slowing down a bit then... :)

movable type 3.2: best MT yet

I've been meaning to post this for sometime now, but I keep forgetting: MT 3.2 rocks. The comment/trackback spam management is excellent, and pretty effective at stopping 99% of spam coming in. The new template management was a bit confusing at first, but all's well now (I still haven't converted everything or even all that much, and only this morning I fixed search, which was broken due to misconfiguration). I remember the conversion to 3.2 to be mostly uneventful except for a few minor hiccups. All-in-all, a must-have upgrade. :)

quote of the day

10:40 Outside, a guy talking into his phone: "Well Steve Jobs is a fucking Jedi Master of this shit compared to these other clowns." from Engadget's coverage of Yahoo's CES Keynote this morning.

movabletype 3.2

I recently switched over to MT 3.2 (which came out in August I believe) and it's been an improvement on a number of fronts. In particular spam management for both comments and trackbacks has become way easier, not painless, but less of a pain. There are some new features in it that I haven't had time to explore (the template setup is different) and for example search within the blog is now broken and I'm not sure why (an "alternate template" is missing). I guess I'll have to do some digging this weekend.

xbox 360: a review

While I am indeed pretty busy that doesn't prevent me from, say, sleeping even less and every once in a while using that "extra" time to to play games, on an original xbox. Initially I wasn't going to get an x360, but it so happened that a nearby Best Buy decided to allow preorders and off we went last Friday.

booting up
By now I've got a fairly good handle on the dozen or so different ways to connect A/V systems (composite, component, Svideo, DVI, optical or not optical sound input and all the variants they create), and more assorted lengths of wire than Professor Farnsworth. So once I got home connecting the system was fairly painless. On first boot things looked pretty good, although the image quality was a little off, even with HD settings (my TV supports 480p and 1080i)--but more on that later.

Before that: oh, the power brick. It feels like a brick, both in size and weight. Probably a third of the volume of the xbox itself (on the left in the picture). It is completely anachronistic next to the sleek design of the rest of the system, but so be it. Power has to come from somewhere no?

The controllers themselves include a few crucial improvements over the original xbox controllers, most notably the option buttons that used to be to the left and right of the joysticks are now better distributed -- start in the center, and the white/black option buttons are now on the front, above the triggers. Much better. The remote control (included as a bonus right now in the pro configuration) is also pretty good, although for some strange unfathomable reason the remote is infrared whereas the control is wireless.

Simple things, like being able to turn on the xbox from the controllers or the remote, are actually big improvements. The dashboard can be accessed easily from within a game, navigation is easier, etc. The network setup was buried behind several screens, but I was glad to see that it supports both WEP and WPA, WPA-PSK in particular (although they call it "WPA password" for some reason).

Overall, the initial setup experience was fairly painless, but I think that non-techies may find it confusing, particularly for the wireless setup options, and especially if they've got secure wireless setup by someone else.

that media center thing

Configuring the 360 to do streaming off my PC's music collection took about 10 minutes, although a couple of false starts were involved (PC not finding the xbox, then the xbox not finding the PC), and I think that people without PC experience will probably find the process fairly confusing, but in my case it worked out well. The XP-based application is easy to install and configure (at least by MS standards, again - having to dive into the control panel to change settings is something that will confuse a lot of people methinks). So suddenly I have a single repository for my music and photos--not bad!

Video support seems to be limited to Windows Media Center (I have XP pro), but I don't have high hopes on that, I assume they support MPG2 and WMA, which is not usually the format in which I store video anyway. Strangely enough, there's a section for "movies" but it contains a few trailers that come built in, and that I can't seem to be able to get rid of. GIven that the x360 comes from the factory with only 10gig free of disk space, that's pretty bad. If they hadn't included PC integration, no one would use it for media playback -- there's just not enough space there to do anything useful.

But I digress. The integration, once set up, is pretty seamless, although I'm so used to the ipod's waterfall menu mechanism/navigation that the linear behavior on the xbox felt somewhat clunky. Regardless, it was really cool to get more juice out of the music on the PC as a bonus (you could do that with the original xbox, but you needed another CD and I never took the time to set it up--or you needed a modded box).

the games

Holy moly, the difference in game experience with HD and surround is amazing, particularly with a large screen. Project Gotham Racing 3 is fantastic ... once you actually get HD set up. I mentioned above that I configured the box for HD/widescreen within the dashboard, but there was another (annoying) step to get through: flip a tiny switch on the video component output cable from "TV" to "HDTV". In setting stuff up and naturally not reading the manual you miss this crucial step and things look good but not that good. Anyway, with the switch in its proper location, the image was just gorgeous. For once, the game trailers really reflect well the astonishing quality of the graphics. The menu navigation of the game is actually more confusing than PGR2, but they've made some small improvements that make gameplay better.

As for first-person shooters: Call of Duty 2 is excellent, but it suffers from lack of a cooperative multiplayer mode. After having tried Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike on the original xbox, I'm much more interested now in those kinds of games than in standard deathmatch (although that's definitely fun :)). Quake 4 is good, but nothing shockingly new: think Doom to the nth power. Then there's Perfect Dark Zero, which has some interesting new takes on the FPS genre, and looks great as well.

The surprise for me was the "Arcade" game category in the xbox live section: you can access lists of games and download trials or buy full versions of classics with "microsoft points" (on this topic, btw, I agree with Russ: I don't like them for multiple reasons, but I don't think they'll get rid of it anytime soon).

backwards compatibility

The x360 runs a good amount of original xbox games, but not nearly enough. When they do run, however, it's pretty amazing. Halo 2 for instance looks better and runs perfectly well. This is definitely an achievement considering that the original xbox ran on a P3/Celeron and the x360 one runs a multicore PowerPC. There definitely seems to be some fairly complex emulation code there, assumming that what they're doing is indeed pure or mixed emulation.

final thoughts

Overall, the x360 is really, really well done and the games are excellent. Microsoft has definitely done a good job with it, wrinkles notwhitstanding. There's been some discussion for example on this slashdot story (and then echoed all over the place) on how the 360 is "very unstable." If shreds of anecdotal evidence is all we're going with, I know of 5 xbox 360s, 3 pro and 2 core systems, all of which run without a glitch. It very well maybe a heating problem. That would not be surprising considering that this little box packs as much processing power as a modern PC (and look at the fans and heat exchangers on those things).

One thing that does bother me a bit is that there seems to be a lot of information about what you're doing and what you've done broadcast by the system to others (just entering into an xbox live game once seems to grab that list of people forever, and then you can see their status) with no obvious way of turning that off. I assume privacy settings are in there somewhere, I'll have to look for them later.

Anyway, given the price and supply issues it's certainly not a device for the masses yet, but it's definitely something worth trying if you can. The next big game to be released will be IMO Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. But that's in February... in the meantime, there's a bunch of cool stuff to try out :).

grokster shuts down

Grokster has shut down as a result of the Supreme Court decision a few months ago. The website now reads:

" There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them.

Grokster hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon."

Right. Because that strategy worked great with Napster didn't it? Even if the new, "safe and legal" Napster continued limping along, its user base was completely gone, and so it will be with Grokster. I honestly cannot understand how the RIAA and others think this plays out in the end. You can't uninvent technology, and all the lawsuits accomplish is to push it further underground... and through these aggressive moves they only stifle investment and research on the topic, which is really the only way a happy balance can be found.

There's no way out, there's only a way through.

synergy: wow

Here's something really cool: synergy. A GPL'ed tool to share mouse and keyboard across different systems with Windows, Linux, or OS X. A virtual KVM, if you will. You need two monitors, and two machines. But if you've got that, this tool is a must-have. Most excellent.

@ foo!

Got to Foo Camp relatively late, around 8:30 pm, after picking up Drew Endy in SF (he was at a conference there, and since I was on the way north, I gave him a ride up to Foo Camp. Drew (and those in his lab at MIT) are doing mind-blowing stuff in trying to figure out how to code DNA to make it do what they want. "DNA on Rails". So even though we got here late, that unique part of Foo had already started, at least for me (maybe not so much for Drew, since I basically pestered him with questions the whole time). I was thinking that what I'd like to do from the top down (make software behave more like organisms) is what they're working on doing from the bottom up (figure out how to code to the software that organisms already have). From one end it's getting the black box and tries to figure out how to make it do what you want. From the other, it's trying to emulate the external behavior of the black box and make other things do what the black box does. Box are way too interesting to make them justice at midnight after an exhausting day. :)

I did miss Tim's kickoff presentation, which was incredibly interesting when I saw it at EuroFoo last year.

All rooms have been taken and I couldn't get a hotel, so I'll be sleeping in the car. Since I won't be sleeping much, I don't anticipate it will be too bad. :)

how to install comcast high speed internet: a quick guide

I would generally not post about something as specific as this, but after seeing the vast amounts of confusion and misinformation that's out there on the topic I felt that my 2c in this case would be worthwhile.

Today I got cable along with Internet service from Comcast, and one of the potential that I wondered about was the setup. I've got a Linksys WRT54G for both wired and wireless routing. Most of the comments out there mentioned a process that usually included first connecting the computer directly to the cable modem, then registering it, then disconnecting it, then connecting the router configured to spoof the MAC address to that of the computer.

However, this didn't seem to make a lot of sense. While the MAC address of the cable modem does need to be registered with comcast, it seems less obvious why they would need the MAC address of the PC itself. Maybe at some point it was necessary, but as I discovered today that's no longer the case. )As a sidenote, the cable guy that did the install of the line also said that the "pc first, router later" process was a requirement... so maybe that's how this got started).

To make sure this remains a quick guide, here's what I did (as far as I can tell the procedure would be the same anywhere in the US for a Comcast high speed Internet install):

• First, I got my own cablemodem, a Linksys BEFCMU10 since the price was equivalent pretty much to a year of renting whatever Comcast was going to give me, it seemed like a good investment. I don't think this makes a difference though.
• Once the connection was complete and running, I connected the Coaxial cable to the modem, then connected the modem via ethernet to the WRT54G's WAN input, and the PC to one of the ethernet ports of the WRT54G, then I powered up both the cable modem and the router. (The router must be set in DHCP mode).
• After a bit of waiting, the router directly obtained a dynamic IP and all seemed well. Loading up any browser page in the computer redirected me to a comcast page which included a link to download the software that comes with the Comcast self-install kit. I don't even need to insert a CD!
• Downloaded the software, then executed it. It turns out it's basically a specialized IE window, doing HTTPS requests to Comcast in the background. Here they actually activate routing for your cable modem, but at the same time they're assuming that the PC is connected directly to it, and so they seem to reconfigure the modem to talk to the PC's network card (which isn't connected directly to it). When the registration and configuration is done, they reboot the modem automatically, at which point nothing works.
• Aha! The reboot seemed to be key.
• So, I did a hard restart on both the cable modem and the router (first disconnected the router, then reset the modem, then reset the router, then reconnected the router) at which point the cable modem seemed to find the router agreeable once more.
• And that's it!

From what I gather the modem does attach itself to one MAC address, but that is reset when it reboots, so spoofing the MAC address (which sounded like a weird requirement in the first place) doesn't appear to be an actual requirement. The MAC address of the cable modem itself is registered with Comcast, so you'll need to let them know if you get it replaced.

After all that, speeds are pretty great, 3 Mbps down, 768 Kbps up (or more), and it's working well so far, keyword here being so far since there were some signal strength issues that made installation more tedious than it should have been, and those gremlins have a way of showing up again...

PS: I also got HDTV with Dolby Digital. Not that many channels, but one word: Wow.

back to PST!

I just realized that the weblog was still "on" GMT (where I have spent most of the last 4 years) but now it's time to switch that, too. And done!

Sure that was easy. But I wonder, now. MT seemed to be intent on rebuilding all entries based on the new target time, but that was just appearances. It offered a rebuild but did nothing of the sort. No changes. All the dates that were wrong are still wrong. I wonder if there's a button to push somewhere. Has the timezone info been lost?

And what's the right etiquette? Plus, the timezone in itself contains some interesting information (for me at least), but only if it's accurate. Accuracy there would be hard to guarantee though, the browser can obtain some of that information from the OS, but that's not even accurate sometimes... Hm. Now if a GPS was permanently connected and feeding data into the system permanently and seamlessly...

quote of the day

"What I really need is minions." -- Russ.

geography, software, and context

While I've been sort of away from blogging (and keeping up with blogs as well, I'm now beginning to catch up) as always I've spent time running around looking at the new apps and ideas that are thrown out there all the time. Of these, I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about mapping applications, for one reason: they puzzled me.

All that follows is probably obvious to many people, but hey, I won't mind that much for arriving late at the party and just be happy I showed up at all. :)

The puzzle was the sudden explosion of use and why it had caught me blindsided. Blindsided, in the sense that they'd be so popular. I've been looking at geolocation apps for a while now (the wireless ad hoc research community, where I spent some time during my thesis research, has been babbling about geoloc for quite a while now). But it had never caught my attention all that much. Partially the blinders that come from focusing on one topic are responsible, but on the other hand I found it hard to see them as more than niche applications. GPS: useful if you're traveling but most of us don't spend our lives in the car or train, and usually quickly develop enough knowledge of our transportation paths that a GPS can become redundant quickly when a route is coupled with habit. This is less true in the US, given that there's higher mobility and greater distance between places, but still you can't see using geolocation as something more than something that would be use ocassionally at best. And so on.

Geolocation is cool, I thought, but it's not massive, as say an RJ-11 plug is massive or as the Internet is massive. True, there is value is niches, and we could start yet another socratic discourse on the long tail, but...

When I started thinking about this, I began by questioning whether these apps where actually niche apps. In the end I realized that the apps are niche apps, but not just any kind: they connect meatspace with cyberspace.

That is, they provide context. Many people (me included) enjoy the geography of the virtual. We can see the towering structures, or as Gibson put it on Neuromancer, "lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." But that's only one half of the story.

If there's anything truly unique to pervasive computing, sensor networks, clothing with embedded circuitry, and a million other things that are going on right now, it is that they seek to provide a seamless bridge between the real and the virtual. Not a one-way connection mind you, but bidirectional. The ability to interlock devices with what's around us in a way that creates something that neither alone can provide. Example: object geotagging. Leave a marker using a webservice, automatically labeled with your Long/Lat, and others that walk by can find it. Have your clothes keep track of your movements and of who you meet, and let your shirt buzz softly against your skin when it realizes that you have an appointment in 30 minutes across town and you are still at a cafe, sitting still, with someone you know nearby ("someone you know" being defined in quick and dirty fashion as the same marker showing up in your travel history for the last 6 months, which makes it likely you won't just get up and leave that easily).

It's all about context, and it's not just geography--geography is just what we've suddenly got a critical mass of data on and the APIs to go with it). Geolocation is the tip of the iceberg. In itself, it's interesting, yes, and useful to varying degrees depending on your habits. But it's way more interesting for what it portends: finally, the emergence of real-world applications of context to software, and of software to the real world.

the age of the mix

William Gibson, writing for Wired: God's Little Toys:

[...] I already knew that word processing was another of God's little toys, and that the scissors and paste pot were always there for me, on the desktop of my Apple IIc. Burroughs' methods, which had also worked for Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard, were built into the technology through which I now composed my own narratives. Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data.

Yep. Technology is freeing creativity in part because it makes the collage technique much easier. What we create (write, compose, paint, even code) obviously has some precedent in our lives--one way or another. Woody Allen does collage with his own life, and what we usually call a reference in literature walks a thin multidimensional line between collage, homage and inspiration.

My favorite paragraph from the article, however, is this one:

Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.

Concise, yet encompassing. Pure Gibson.

The age of the mix is here.

nvu

An open source website editor: nvu now in 1.0. Pretty good CSS integration (a bit clunky, but useful) and straightforward UI. Plus, it's available on Linux, OS X, and Windows. Nice.

lemmings!

[via Dare] DHTML Lemmings. Perhaps predictably there are legal questions surrounding it (even if no one has bought that game in years, you'd think that the owner of the copyright would be rushing to buy this thing and put it online...). It's really, really cool. Go check it out.

the network is the disk drive

Sean McGrath: "XML is not - repeat NOT - a 'file format' in the sense that most people use the phrase 'file format'."

Here's his article. Of course he's right. XML is a specification for formats, not a file format itself. It has high-level semantics for defining specific semantics.

But, in any case, when so much of the data we consume flows across the network without ever settling in a well-defined filesystem location, the idea of a "file" stops being so important methinks. Even on the desktop side we are thinking more and more in terms of pieces of information, emails, IMs, webpages--not files.

I am reminded of a short-term backup system someone once described to me: every number of hours a backup would be created, then sent out through SMTP to the company's subsidiary in Australia, where another program would pick it up and then, through direct streaming, send it back. At any point in time there were a number of copies flowing through the system--and if something happened and you needed a certain copy for a certain date, all you had to do was wait for the right piece of data to circle back to you, and you were done (there's a case where a super-fast network would actually be a liability). The same could be easily done today through a couple of daemons and webservices running on top of apache--Rather than Sun's "The network is the computer" it would be "The network is the disk drive".

I forget what my point was.

Ah yes: "A keyboard! How quaint!" (That's Scotty speaking for all out there not fully up to date on your Star Trek arcana).

Let us all put the quaint notion of files and formats behind us and think about where that may take us...

msr's "bittorrent killer"

Kevin Schofield, on the recent brouhaha surrounding Avalanche. Quote:

Um, let me get this straight. In six days, a research project went from some algorithms in a paper to Microsoft's competitive answer to BitTorrent, to "vaporware" to an evil conspiracy."

MS/MSR is getting a bad rap on this one. They've been working on p2p for some time now, it's just that they've never gotten attention for it. Pastry for example is a well-known (at least within the p2p research clique) overlay network project that has been around for more than two years. And their stuff is pretty good, too.

Now that I'm getting an education on certain effects of sensationalist press coverage, I can't say I'm that surprised. At least weblogs help in getting the other side of the story out there...

anne's consulting practice

Anne now has a new website for her consulting practice. Ethnographer, anthropologist, ui-social-network-wireless-pervasive-computing-thinker-designer (yeah, buzzwordy, but true), all in one. When she's done with your project, she can also explain the social structure of the Incas, which apparently didn't have computers, cellphones, or wore Nikes. My theory is that this is why they couldn't stop the Conquistadores, but she says I'm wrong for some reason I can't quite follow.

Anyway, if you need someone to analyze and improve whatever cutting-edge product you're cooking, she's your woman!

the AlwaysOn/Technorati 100

Congrats to Russ on his appearance in the AlwaysOn/Technorati 100 list in the 'practitioners' category! Also to "the Scotts" (Feedster), Om, Jon, Rael, Jeremy, Robert, Matt and... well, everyone else on the list -- I'll stop before I just duplicate a list that seems to strangely match my aggregator subscription.

Russ comes first, yes. He's a good friend. Plus I want to be on his good graces for the next Halo match. :)

24 hour laundry: the view from inside

Well, well, well. :)

There's been a lot of discussion recently about a certain new startup called 24 Hour Laundry. It pretty much got started with this CNET article, then as highlights we've got Om,