April 23rd, 2011
As you can see, I’ve done a lot with it since last year. Maybe next year for its sweet 16.
Uselessness of web product reviews
September 13th, 2010
When I first made the switch to Ubuntu over a year ago, I installed it on and older, smaller hard drive. Why? Two simple reasons: it was just a test to see if preferred it over Windows and it was the smallest drive that I had lying around not being used for anything else, so I didn’t have to spend time moving data around, reformatting drives, etc. I was aiming for convenience, not performance, and didn’t want to take up an entire afternoon or evening futzing around with it.
Suffice it to say, the fact that I’ve booted this machine into Windows only once in the past year has shown that this test was a runaway success. But now I have a problem. This older, smaller drive being used as my primary Linux partition is, well, old and small and now, nearly full. It’s a 150 GB Western Digital IDE drive that is either as old as the machine it’s in (a circa 2004 Dell) or from the year before. I probably paid waaay too much for it at the time, but it’s been reliable and I have no complaints apart from how it’s now old and slow. This machine has Maxtor, Western Digital and Seagate (with the original Windows partition) drives in it and all three have given me no trouble. The only problem with the machine is that it too is becoming old and slow, but hey, six years is an eternity as far as desktop hardware goes and it’s held up okay.
I started looking at new drives at Amazon and Newegg and it struck me how useless the online reviews are. Apart from the lower-ranked Seagates, everything is around a 4 out of 5 stars, more or less. Most of the reviews are 4 or 5 star ones stating that yes, the drive worked fine, no problems. The 1 or 2 star reviews are usually screeds about something or other, how it was DOA/RMA/died within a month and so forth. There’s always someone complaining that the transfer rates are too slow or such-and-such benchmarking program gives it only a 83%. Finally, there’s the frustrated loyal user who flips out and says that all the complaints that “
It’s like asking people about cell phone plans. Either you get someone who really, really loves his newest cell phone (but still seems to get a new one every six months) or someone who absolutely loathes his carrier – often a combination of the two. The average ends up being “meh.” It works, it probably costs too much per month, but in general, meh, it’s a phone. Meh, it’s a hard drive. You store stuff on it. It works, I guess.
USA Today stresses digital operations
August 28th, 2010
This is rarely a good sign in the publishing industry: USA Today to Remake Itself to Stress Digital Operations
I give them credit that they’ve realized that a general-interest newspaper distributed mostly at airports, hotels (the only two places I’ve ever read it) and restaurants can no longer compete with free papers like the Metro that repackage much of the same content or sites like Google News that allow online readers to go directly to the source. I also give them credit for not engaging in finger-pointing and blaming the Internet for their problems while at the same time announcing that the Internet will be their industry’s savior… once the Internet is changed to fit the industry’s decaying business model. But this still seems like a pretty steep climb for USA Today.
Google kills Wave: is anyone surprised?
August 4th, 2010
The news today is that Google is ending Wave development and only committing to keeping the Wave site up until the end of the year. Was anyone surprised by this? I was skeptical of Google Wave from the beginning for the simple reason that if someone tells you that their hard to describe product will revolutionize everything, no, it’s not going to do that. It reminded me of the hype that preceded the introduction of the Segway. When you are told that an invention is so amazing that they will be rewriting laws and redesigning cities for it and the product turns out to be a Segway, you can’t help but be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the Segway is an amazing piece of technology, but it’s no wheelchair that can climb stairs or an ultra-efficient Stirling engine.
What would your reaction be if you were told a company was about to release a revolutionary robot personal assistant, something right out of science fiction and new home builders would be smart to scrap their traditional designs in exchange for ones that favor this innovative robot, and it turned out to be a Roomba? You can’t help but be disappointed.
That’s how it was for me with Google Wave. Wait, all the cheering and hype for this? First off, what the heck is it? It’s not email, it’s sort of like a Wiki but it seems a heck of a lot like a chat room. Is it a chat room? Is it one of those over-hyped “collaborative” things? Collaboration is great, but do we really need to be able to edit the same document all at the same time? The inability of Google to answer the simple question “what’s it for?” with a simple, straightforward answer ultimately doomed Wave to be another failed Google experiment.
Postfix + vmailboxes + procmail
July 3rd, 2010
I needed to do some mailserver reconfiguring tonight and found this Howto to be very useful. Of course, I have a goofy directory structure for virtual mail that still made it a bit of a chore, but not too badly.
A year on Ubuntu!
June 20th, 2010
I knew I switched sometime in June 2009, so I dug into some log files today and discovered that it was a year ago today that I switched to Ubuntu. w00t! I can’t say that I miss Windows at all. The only time I have had to boot into Windows on this machine was to diagnose exactly which piece of hardware was causing the machine to randomly hang by swapping each out one at a time. (it turned out to be the DVD-ROM, which had been misbehaving for a long time)
The switch itself was pretty seamless. I could access all of my NTFS drives, both internal and external ones, my mobile broadband USB modem worked immediately as did my Wacom tablet. Even my ancient scanner worked as soon as I plugged it in, the same which could not be said with XP or Vista. For that, the manufacturer wanted to sell me the updated drivers. Software-wise, I have everything a web developer/designer/automated QA engineer/whatevertheheckIam needs: GIMP, Inkscape, vi, Firefox. I could install MySQL and Apache without it seeming like some bastardized unholy union. w00t x2!
That isn’t to say that I’ve been completely Windows free the past year. My work laptop is a Mac with three guest instances of XP for QA purposes. Even then, I spend most of my time on that machine at the command prompt – the Selenium server is the one that gets to muck around with the fancy GUI and the VMs. My personal laptop is still 64-bit Vista partly for non-work QA purposes, partly as a games console, and partly just in case I get the full screening again by the TSA. I suspect a security checkpoint isn’t exactly the best place to preach the virtues of FOSS… I have resorted to using Wine when there’s a piece of software I’d like to use that lacks a Linux version (would it kill you to have one, Evernote?) but it’s rare that I cannot find a suitable alternative.
Has switching made me more productive with my various personal projects, one of the primary reasons for the switch? Er, um, well, y’see, it’s like this… not really. But that has less to do with OS and more to do with work & family and overall motivation for and interest in said projects. Do I find my day-to-day use of this machine less aggravating and more enjoyable? A thousand times yes, and that is reason enough in and of itself.
Magazines on an iPad
May 28th, 2010
When I heard that the Wired iPad app was 500 MB, my reaction was pretty much the same as this, namely, “what year is this? 1999?” It’d be a tenth of that size or less if it was just a wrapper around a PDF formatted for the iPad’s screen resolution with a set of XML files for extra features, search, etc. 500 MB? That’s larger than the PDF sent to printers for a lot of smaller or less image-heavy magazines. Even for an image and layout heavy magazine like Wired, 500 MB is still pretty massive for a PDF downsampled to the typical screen resolution. Several years ago I bought a magazine archive on CD-ROM with 250 issues going back to the 1970′s, full text, decent image resolution and nicely indexed and bookmarked. For that, 500-600 MB seems an appropriate size. 500 MB for a single magazine issue seems like a great way to make the iPad/iPhone network performance complaints even worse.
I keep hoping to see a killer app for digital magazines but they all still seem to be glorified PowerPoint presentations (“look, page transitions!” “look, it’s a video ad embedded into the magazine page!” yeah, nice, I was doing all that 5 years ago…) with a few extra features like search and, if you are lucky, bookmarking or sharing. They want to nickel and dime you for each issue of that? I’d much rather have a PDF in its original format with full text and an archive that goes back decades. I’ve purchased a lot of gaming material as PDFs and guess what? The world doesn’t end if I’m able to extract an image or cut & paste the text into another document. The world doesn’t end if there’s a pixel out of place.
Happy 14th Birthday, Webgurus.com!
April 23rd, 2010
Yes, 14 years ago today I shamelessly swiped the name “webgurus” from the other web developers at TIAC and, uh, haven’t done that much “worthwhile” with it since, according to some people. (no, I will not sell it to you)
How to tell your readers to go read something else
April 12th, 2010
Or rather, how not to. I saw a link on Fark to an article at TIME.com that seemed to suggest that the “average” American diner was dead. I wrongly assumed they meant the restaurant and not the person dining, so the premise seemed odd enough to me to actually read the article for a change. Diner culture is alive and well in New Hampshire, in fact diners are said to be crucial to the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. There are at least 5 “average” (ie, old-fashioned) diners within a 20 minute drive of my home, all independent local places that are not part of any national chain, all serving basic, straight-forward diner fare to mostly locals. No hipsters dining on equal slices of cherry pie and irony in these places!
The article instead is about the increasing sophistication/boredom of the American palate, moving away from meatloaf, hamburgers and mac & cheese and towards tripe like… bacon-wrapped tripe. Meh, times change, America is a huge melting pot, learn to make meatloaf yourself if The Four Seasons or Spago are no longer serving it. Then I noticed that each paragraph was followed by a link to other content within TIME’s site. Interrupting an article like that is a little odd and a bit annoying but hey, if that’s how they want to lay out their site, that’s their choice. They already have lists of other articles flanking the text for this one along with the obligatory massive Flash skyscraper ad, so why not embed even more other links in the interior content, too. You obviously don’t expect the reader to finish the entire 8.1 paragraphs anyways, so you might as well grab them while you can.
I stopped reading at the second link, “See YouTube’s 50 Best Videos.” What the heck did that have to do with anything in the preceding paragraph? It’s like some new variant of link spam. It might as well have read, “you, hey you! Don’t bother reading this article, go to this slideshow of 50 videos on YouTube and generate us some pageviews! Yoink!” The links in the paragraphs themselves were at least relevant to the article, but the links after them sure weren’t. “See a TIME video on a man cave.” Well, you did mention ‘man caves’ in the preceding paragraph, so… “See the 100 best TV shows of all time.” Uh, ok? Just because you mentioned Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason and The Love Boat, sure, show me TV Land’s upcoming schedule… “Comment on this story.” But there’s still two paragraphs left to go! Can I finish before I comment or would you like my impressions of it so far? “See Rachael Ray in Praise of Burgers and Our Culinary Tastes.” Ok, fine, I give up. Whatever point the author might have been trying to make has been sabotaged by these “calls to action” inserted in the middle. We don’t expect you to actually read this or any article, we just want you to keep on clicking. Click more. Click more now. Click. And be happy.
Microsoft finally decides to support SVG
January 6th, 2010
I’m certain they have the best of intentions and will not attempt to break the format, patent it, or split it into multiple incompatible varieties to confuse and muddy the marketplace while promoting their own new and improved version. And I’m certain that their implementation will be perfect and won’t do something completely stupid like mangling transparent PNGs or anything.
