Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Slashdot just pointed me to a cool new publication called O3 which is a magazine dedicated to open source software, implementations, and technologies. The first issue; which is available through bittorrent; covers Google honeypots and data security, lighttpd, and much much more.
A lot of the topics are not really applicable to a home enthusiast like me, but it’s really nice to see more and more information about open source getting out there for the enterprise.
Lighttpd looks the most interesting in this article to me. A light weight, security focused webserver would be perfect for home users (and my Mac Mini server). With MySQL and PHP or Ruby on Rails you could do some nifty things. I’m going to take a stab at setting it up this weekend.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Today was not half bad at the office. I got a lot done, and the sales team took off early. It was very nice to get out of the office a few hours early and go home to snuggle up on the couch with Skype watching my new Star Trek: TNG collection. Skype certainly was glad to see me home so early as he has been alone longer and longer of late and has been relishing the time he gets to spend with me on weekends and evenings.
I’m struggling to keep up with the economy at work and I’ve been doing my best to avoid getting stressed out a little stress here and there is unavoidable. I’m glad that I’m going to have four days to kick back and relax.
I have over 150 hours of TNG content at my disposal and I plan to watch as much of it as possible. It makes for a great background distraction to some of the PHP stuff I’m working on. I’m continuing to tweak with Wordpress, and I’m also working on some web based applications to run on my mobile phone du jour.
Back to the puppy cuddles and soap opera in space!
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
A quick video remix of our favorite California Governor: Arnold vs. DJ Disco. Talk about solid family values and strong moral leadership.
Warning: not safe for work, includes audio.
Via Screenhead.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
So I’m very underwhelmed with the Xbox 360. After getting home and eating some food I got to spend a few hours with Brien’s and I can’t really say that I’m all that impressed. Yes the graphics are better than the original Xbox, but not by the leaps and bounds that Microsoft has been promising. If you look at the leap Sony took from the Playstation 1 to the Playstation 2 it was impressive - significantly better graphics and more fluid motion.
The textures are better, as is the lighting. The gameplay is neither extreamly fluid nor terribly innovative. Luckily I think a lot of that blame falls on the game developers rather than on the platform itself, but it is still inexcusable. It’s as if the platform and launch titles are the Xbox 1.5 rather than the next generation Xbox.
An interesting limitation - the core system ships with neither a memory unit nor the hard drive accessory. Sadly Microsoft did not even include enough flash RAM for a user to get an Xbox Live account. This means that even if a user is willing to spend the $60+ a year for an Xbox Live account they will be unable to sign on unless they spend an additional $20-100 on storage for the unit.
I almost feel sorry for the people that have spent 36+ hours waiting in line in the cold to get their hands on an expensive device that fails to impress. Brien spent well over $500 between the console, an extra controller, and three launch titles. He won’t admit it but privately I think he wishes he had waited until the frenzy had died down and the costs had come down.
Microsoft’s marketing department really knows how to work it. They have managed to sell out on a pathetic release and get the general public in a frenzy over the console thus virtually guaranteeing they will sell out every shipment until the 2005 holiday season is over.
Update: Speaking of bad usability there is a switch on the actual component video cable marked “HD”. If you select HD then the cable transmits 1080i rather than 480p. Strange they could not make it auto-detect. Selecting HD did improve the graphics a surprising amount, but I still stand by my underwhelmed rating for the platform and launch games.
Monday, November 21, 2005
I’m actually surprised at how painless the reinstallation of OS X and all my software was. It took about 3 hours including copying all of my data over from the background, installing all of the applications I use, and getting my PHP/MySQL development environment set up.
I’m again very glad that I use IMAP for everything. I didn’t even have to restore Thunderbird or my mail from a backup. I just pointed it at my mail server, clicked synchronize and poof - 45 minutes later all 4Gb of my mail was back and ready to go. Because I use WebDAV to store all my personal settings and spam filter training data I was even able to copy those back over. This combined with using IMAP for all of my mobile email has cemented my relationship with IMAP as a protocol.
It’s getting late and I should get to bed. I’m excited about getting to play with dev stuff tomorrow. I have a few projects in mind that should really get me back into things. I am halfway tempted to wait up for Brien to get back with his brand new Xbox 360, but given that he has to come from Lacey and stop at Fry’s for an HD cable he is probably going to be getting back way after my bedtime so I will have to check it out tomorrow morning.
Monday, November 21, 2005
I’ve been getting more and more into the creative process and configuring and hacking Wordpress has inspired me to get back into web development from not merely a design perspective, but also a development one. In an effort to set up a clean development enviroment I’m wiping my powerbook and reinstalling a lot of my software. I have a full HDD backup so I won’t lose anything, but I don’t plan on reinstalling any of the things I had played with in the past but don’t really use. I’m also going to try to stick to open source software as much as possible. I’m going to ditch NetNewsWire and try out Vienna, as well as change around a few of the other editing tools that I’ve been using. Pretty much the only closed source software I’m going to be using (aside from parts of OS X) is going to be Adobe Photoshop. I’ve played with Gimp in the past, but I just can’t do as much as I want to design wise with it.
My new development efforts are going to be based on PHP and Ruby. I’ve done a lot with PHP/MySQL in the past so getting back into that has been easy, but Ruby is something that I have not worked with. From what I have seen in playing with Ruby it’s a fantastic little language and I can’t wait to get more involved with it.
Wish me luck and pray that by the time tomorrow morning rolls around my powerbook will be rocking and ready to go for work!
Monday, November 21, 2005
I must say that yoga was a smashing success. I got to see several friends whom I have not seen in a long time, and learned a lot about Yoga. Tonight was a far cry from the previous time I had been to bikram yoga and really injured myself in more way than one. Theresa of Taj Yoga was wonderful and she really had a focus on helping everyone do the best that they could, but not pushing things at all.
I think I could get in to a very regular yoga practice if I ease myself into it. Going to an advanced uber-yoga for my first time was obviously a big mistake. If I work myself up to it I can see this helping improve my strength, stress levels, and flexibility.
Brien should be here in about 5 hours with his brand new Xbox 360. I’m still trying to decide if I want to stay up for that, or if I should just check it out tomorrow after work. I’m kind of excited to see an Xbox 360 in person, but the platform as a whole just has not got me on the edge of my seat like some gadgets - the HTC 8125 for instance.