Listening to Mr McCain it seems that the US got a 3 party system overnight: There are the democrats, his party, and then the one that is in power now and that is responsible for all that mess that he can not deny either.
I am amazed to no extend that this kind of orwellian reality bending has a realistic chance of maybe even working out.
At least they spare us with the orange alerts in this election cycle. Those were are big deal in 2004. At least in the media they took allot of room.
I had not heard of the monome before. I saw one today and it looks very nice. Could be so much fun. If I’d had the time + skills for it. Still a pretty awesome device.
It turns out that Google has fogiven twexus.com for its past sins. The site exists again according to Google. I forgot when the ban started. It was certainly justified back in the day. Long story. Anyway, now it is google-legal again. With a cute little page-rank of 3 even.
In honor of this I bumped the image resolution of its pair play mode up by a notch. Screens got bigger since 2002.
For the longest time I ran Firefox 1.5. 2.0 had nothing to offer and from what I heard was a real dog. Finally I switched my main browser over to 3.0 and it has been a nice experience. I love those little things. Like asking if you like to save a password AFTER you entered it (and therefor know if it worked or not). While FF3 seems to be worth it I have serious doubts about Safari 3.0. So many things behave now somewhat different. Quirkier. Surprisingly FF3 plays for instance much nicer with Quicktime than Safari 3 in many cases. One would expect the opposite. It might just be that Apple engineers test all sites that they know their boss will visit. Outside of that the importance probably falls off pretty quickly. I am sure that His Steveness thinks that the thing ‘scrolls like butter’. It probably does. For him. I wonder if his switch to MobileMe went well …
Got refurb iPod nanos from Apple for the kids. $99. Tooble is a somewhat buggy but overal working application that will get youtube videos and put them into iTunes and therefor the nanos. Handbrake takes care of DVDs and works actually much better. Overall it is pretty impressive with how little effort, config and engineering I was able to give my kids all the music videos that I thought would be interesting. Quality is dismal, but I heard no complaints.
while burning in a new machine with a 3ware 9560 adapter I got twice the following error messages:
kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: WARNING Character ioctl (0x108) timed out, resetting card.
kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: INFO Cache synchronization completed:unit=0.
Looking at the source it seems that 0x108 is TW_IOCTL_FIRMWARE_PASS_THROUGH
I had these errors only when smartd was configured to probe the drives on the 3ware card. This was under max load
during the burn in of the array. Not sure if there were any other errors etc. It seemed harmless enough, but then again
no errors are better than spurious warning etc. Once I have a couple of days of a clean running machine I probably will
turn smartd on again to see if the connection indeed exists.
DVDs are cheap. They can be. I picked up the habbit to have lots of unwatched DVDs around. My very own Netflix. With the upside that I get to pick from 50 unwatched DVDs one that I feel like and watch it right away. Last night I watched ‘Lolita’. Funny how black and white can feel more real than color flicks. Maybe it’s because color in movies was always exagerated. Pleasing to look at, but hardly a truthful representation of reality. Black and white does not even try to be real.
To contrast that long Kubrick flick I watched “Something Wild” today. Actually it was much better than I remembered it. Maybe I should write a web application that picks up all 48 tracks from the soundtrack and buys them via AmazonMP3. For about 30 seconds they fade in and out to “Pili Pili” by Jasper van’t Hof in the movie. It’s 15:44. iTunes wants only to give it to you if you buy the entire album for $11. Amazon has it for 99 cents. The way it should be. Actually I will be buying mp3s now from Amazon. Having no DRM is how things should be. Collecting DVDs is nice. Specially since they are no longer hindered by DRM. Being able to get music right away, and actually have the file and not some DRM-locked-crap is really nice. I guess I like collecting things.
By far the worst online user management is done by apple. I felt I could use an Airport Express. But I did not feel dealing with Apple’s broken password management yet again. iTunes kinda works most of the time. But their developer connection and online stores are plain pathetic. I am sure it works for Apple employees, and Apple devotees maybe get even a kick out of the interaction with their beloved brand. But I have better things to do. Like buying stuff on Amazon.
June 29th 2007: Apple releases the iPhone
August 8th 2007: INTERDUBS supports the iPhone
June 17th 2008: Beam.TV launches mode to support the iPhone.
As for all others companies in the space: Nothing. Yet.
The other day a colleague observed me wrangling some obscure firewall / ftp issue that came up for one of my clients. Once I had fixed the problem he proclaimed: “you really leave no bug behind”. I like that expression. It matches what I am trying to do with INTERDUBS. Actually so far each bug got fixed twenty four hours after it had been reported. Other feature wishes can take longer to get implemented: Some people had to wait months before they could create reels via drag and drop.
The ‘all bugs get fixed right away’ mantra has a huge benefit: Low support efforts. Actually I carefully evaluate each support call / email to see if the software / documentation could have helped with this. I sure don’t mind talking to my clients, but I agree with Don Norman that products need to designed so that they work with their users as well as they possibly can.