Blackstone to Hampden-Sydney to New Orleans to San Antonio to Houston. And Back
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The whole Network Neutrality issue is really annoying. I’m sure its confusing for people who do not understand how the Internet works, or how important it is for it to continue working in the same way The old pipes=bandwidth, water=data analogy does not really work for this issue, but fortunately there are Ninja’s who care about the future of the Internet, and one of them has made a video to help those people understand:
Google just released local maps for several European countries. Check out the Arc de Triomphe and The Eiffel Tower in Paris, St Marks Basilica in Venezia, and the Cathedral in Florence
Maps are available for France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Check out the announcement on the Google Blog. This is so cool!
It’s hard to remember what the web was like before Google came along.
A few months ago I discovered that the Apple PowerBook that I use daily was only recognizing 512MB of RAM, rather than the full 1GB that was installed. After searching around a little I discovered that other people were also experiencing this problem. Several week later Apple posted the issue on their website and initiated a repair program.
I was not excited about having to send the PowerBook away, especially since it is my only computer. I finally took the plunge last week and called Apple. I was able to get to take care of everything over the phone, and they scheduled the repair right away. The next day a box arrived for me to pack the PowerBook in and send it back via Airborne Express/DHL next-day air. Apple received the box on Monday, March 20, repaired it, and sent it to QA/shipping on the same day. It shipped on Tuesday and I received it back on Wednesday. Had I known that it would have happened that quickly I would have shipped it on Monday instead of the previous Friday.
Being without an Apple computer was actually pretty difficult. When I switched from Linux to Apple two years ago I remember that it seemed pretty nice, and things just seemed to work without much effort. But going back was much, much more difficult. While the PowerBook was away I had a loaner laptop from helpdesk that was a Dell Inspiron 1100 running Windows XP. Wow, I really don’t know how people use this setup every day without going postal. When I was using this computer I found it was very frustrating to do just about everything, but it was particularly painful doing anything on the Internet. The last version of Windows that I used regularly was Windows 98, but I had heard that Windows XP was better because it didn’t crash. That’s a load of crap because this machine crashed on me 3 times during the first 2 days I had it. But since I am on-call I needed something at home, so I just dealt with it.
Meanwhile, at the office I took my development machine that was running Debian Sarge and installed Kubuntu on it. I had heard great things about Kubuntu (and Ubuntu in general) from a lot of people, so I figured it was the least painful route. Sure enough, the install was easy and I had a relatively nice looking desktop from the very beginning. But…
The previous week I had ordered a Dell 2005FPW 20″ widescreen flatpanel for my desk at work (since that’s where I spend most of my computer time). The monitor arrived on the same day I mailed out my PowerBook, so I had not yet used it with that. After a day of using this monitor on the Kubuntu box with a video card that wouldn’t support the correct resolution, I went searching for a better video card at the office and found a Nvidia ti 4200 based card with DVI and VGA outputs. I descended into the hell that is configuring Xorg and eventually got the monitor running at the right resolution, but I was never able to get the dual monitor setup to work. (I later found out what I was doing wrong). But this little experiment served as a nice reminder of why I love using Apple computers so much.
When my PowerBook arrived back at the office on Wednesday I felt like a kid in a candy store. There was a slip of paper in the box stating that while they were repairing the PowerBook they noticed that it qualified for a replacement battery, so they gave me a new one. Score! I immediately plugged it in to the new monitor and, suprise, it all worked immediately!
To be fair, there were things that I liked about the software I used while the PB was away, so I’ll list them here:
Since I had the Linux machine connected to a 17″ Dell flatpanel, and the PowerBook running dual monitor with the 20″ widescreen flatpanel, I wanted to use them all together with Synergy. I had been running a similar setup before, but I was using the PowerBook as the server and the Linux machine as the client. This was a pain for various reasons, so with the new setup I decided to run the server on Linux and the client on the PowerBook. When I initially set it up I noticed that there was a lot of lag with the mouse when it was on the Apple screen. To remedy this I started synergy on the Linux machine with the highest priority using “nice”:
sudo nice -n -20 /usr/bin/synergys
Now the synergy process takes priority over pretty much everything else on the system and there is no more lag when the mouse is on the Apple screen. 
On a related note, yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the release of Mac OS X. If anything, I am more appreciative of it now than ever.
This hurts my soul.
All kidding aside, it will be pretty awesome to be able to tri-boot Mac OS X, Linux and Windows on the same machine, and that machine being made by Apple.
This blog still looks like crap in IE after almost a year mainly because I don’t have easy access to a computer running Windows. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if IE didn’t go out of its way to avoid implementing standard CSS, but I digress.
Exciting times indeed.
Apparently The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are now available through the iTunes Music Store. This is great news for me since I love these shows but I do not subscribe to cable television.
With all the content now available through iTunes, its becoming more tempting to get a Mac Mini for my living room. I have a Griffin radio SHARK so I can listen to and record KSYM and KSTX through the computer, and I can use my Airport Express to stream music to an iPod HiFi in my bedroom. And with the remote that comes with the Mini and the HiFi, I can control all of this from the couch or anywhere.
So tempting…
While researching the answer to a question that a coworker posed today I came across Wikipedia‘s page on the Domain Name System. I have to say, that is an incredibly thorough description of DNS. Normally pages describing DNS are so full of BINDisms that its hard to seperate the protocol from the application. Wikipedia also has a page for comparisons of DNS server software.
I think most people feel that DNS is pretty boring, but for some reason I have always really loved working with it. I got my first real experience working with DNS after college when I worked at Spire Network Services in New Orleans. That’s where I met my friend Mike who later introduced me to djbdns, which is when I really became fascinated with DNS.
For years I read and participated in DJB’s DNS mailing list where I learned a tremendous amount the DNS protocol and DNS software. Perhaps my favorite message from that list was when Matt Simerson (DNS admin at Interland) detailed their migration from BIND to djbdns. I also think it is pretty awesome that EveryDNS uses djbdns.
Fortunately my love of DNS is not wasted, as I get to spend 8+ hours a day dealing with nothing but the Domain Name System. I know this would bore some people to tears, but not me.
When I bought my first Apple computer about 2 years ago I almost exclusively used Safari for browsing the web. But at that point there were still a lot of sites that did not work with Safari, and I eventually switched to Firefox. Since that time I’ve switched back and forth between Safari and Firefox a few times, usually after a couple months of using one or the other. Occasionally I would try out Opera and Camino, and while both were very nice browsers, neither seemed ready for prime time.
Well, a couple weeks ago I noticed that the Camino project had finally released version 1.0 of its browser after several years of work, so I decided to give it another shot. After using it for a little over a week I think its safe to say that Camino is now my browser of choice. I’ve even removed the Safari and Firefox icons from my dock! Gasp!
Basically Camino is a browser that combines the powerful Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla with Apple’s interface style. It is not simply a port of the Firefox GUI to native Mac OS X widgets, but rather it is a seperate browser project. There are features from both Safari and Firefox, as well as some original ones. I liked the ability in Firefox to selectively choose sites to allow popups (CORE), but I also liked the Keychain integration from Safari. As you can imagine, Camino implements both of these features and many others in a single browser. Sweet!
If you are using Mac OS X, consider trying Camino.
Recently I made the remark that if I were to choose new blogging software, that I would probably go with Typo. I’d like to retract that statement.
Over the past week I’ve been using Typo for an internal blog at work. I’ve only had to make a few changes to the code, and while that was much less painful than digging through the WordPress source, the credit there goes to Rails, not Typo.
My problem with Typo isn’t with the code, its with the admin interface. The page to post an article in Typo is years behind WordPress’s sleek UI, and suffers from several obvious design mistakes. For example, the textarea for composing an article is hardcoded to 40 columns. That means adding a link to just about any page on the Internet causes the textbox to wrap around and then things get ugly. I changed the number of columns to 100 on my installation, but that broke something else. Typo updates a preview div with your content as you type, and this div is normally located to the right of the 40 column textarea. When I expanded the textarea the preview div began pushing down the textarea as the article grew. Very, very annoying.
Another issue I had was that by default articles are posted as soon as they are saved. No, stop that! I normally write a few drafts before publishing an article. To change this with Typo you have to click on a link that exposes a div, then uncheck a box each time you edit the article. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the link to expose the div is at the very bottom of the page and you must scroll down to find it.
And with all the awesome admin interfaces that were introduced with WordPress 2.0, I really have no real reason to switch at this point.
I’ll admit it: I really enjoy writing Javascript.
I’ve recently had to write some Javascript for one of my projects and it reminded me how much I like working with the language. Browser compatibility issues aside, writing Javascript can be a lot of fun. I have been using it for about 6 years now, and over the course of time I have written some seriously complicated JS, but it always seems to be enjoyable. Oh, and my favorite? Dynamically generated Javascript, ohhhh yeaaahh….
There, I said it.
I realize that this is pretty geeky, but whenever I hear news like this it just makes me happy.
Market share for Apple’s Mac OS X continued to grow again last month and is now up to 4.35%. While this is no huge number, its the trend that I am happy about. Windows XP also gained, but it looks like as people retire their Windows 95/98/Me/2000 machines that a portion are dropping Windows altogether. Mac OS gained every month except February last year, and it will be interesting to see what next months statistics look like after all those people who got iMacs for Christmas get online.
With more people using Apple computers, the more demand there will be for software for Mac OS X. The more software there is for Mac OS X, the more people who will be able to switch over. And that means fewer tech support calls from that family/friend/pet who reminds you every so often that his computer is running slow and he thinks he has a virus.
In other news, Firefox also closed out the year strong with almost 1 in 10 people using it to browse the web. Firefox gained almost 4 percentage points over the course of the year, and Safari rose from 1.66% to 3.07%. Internet Explorer usage is now down to around 85% from 90% at the beginning of the year.
Unlike many people, I’m not in the camp that hopes Microsoft goes bankrupt. I want web developers to be forced to recognize that Internet Explorer is not the only web browser. Its extremely frustrating to visit a site that won’t work on anything except the latest version of Windows and the latest version of Internet Explorer.
For an online store, this sort of thing is just plain bad business. This is like Wal-Mart refusing to let a customer into the store if he was born in January or February (about 16% of a year). By creating a site that 15% of the people on the Internet can’t even go to (the non-Internet Explorer crowd), online vendors who choose these technologies are basically doing just that and blocking potential customers. Find an owner of a brick-and-mortar store and ask them to close their doors for two months each year, and then see if they understand the analogy.
Web Developers: One of the major (only?) benefits to writing a web application is that you start off with a universal platform. If you want to write something that only works on Windows, then why not just write a freakin Windows application to begin with? You might as well save yourself the trouble of dealing with HTTP, sessions, cookies and all the other crap that comes with the bag-o-glass that is web development.
Whew, I feel better.
