If you’ve been paying attention, I’ve had two trips in three weeks. As a result, I’ve been missing my family, and it was quite nice to be home today and watch the super bowl together as a family. Since I’m not much of a sports fan, I was more interested in the ads than the game itself. One of the more entertaining ones was the one from E*TRADE. You can check it out at their site.
I’ve been trying to keep up on blogging and haven’t written anything in a bit. At the moment, I’m sitting in my room at the Cupertino Inn as I’m at Apple participating in three day training for Xsan. It’s the second of such trips I’ve done in two weeks. Sure, I kinda digg traveling and part of me doesn’t mind being stuck in a hotel room as I can get a reasonable amount of work and surfing done, but really, I’d rather be home with my family.
I did just hear about www.5ives.com by Merlin Mann. I just added it to my reader. Some of them are pretty funny.
I’m here again tomorrow. I’ll try to come up with something more interesting.
While finding the EyeTV link for my last post, I discovered that El Gato has, in my opinion, the best take on a 404 page (the one that comes up when you request an invalid URL). Sure, generally everyone has a "we’re sorry we couldn’t find the page you’re looking for." They go a step further and give you a 10% off coupon in their store "to make things right".
That’s pretty cool.
Yesterday was the opening day of Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The keynote ran from 9:00 to around 10:45 but I did not have a pass for it and considering the extreme interest and attendance, I wasn’t bothered by that. Since registration wasn’t open until after the keynote, I went across the street to the Metreon and followed Engadget‘s live blogging of the presentation.
My take on the announcements? "meh" I like the iPhone upgrade (GPS-like locater, web clips, multi-person SMS, song lyrics, and movie chapters) but am still quite put-out that they still don’t support tasks. I was hoping they were going to discuss the development kit for the iPhone and perhaps bring some vendor out to show a upcoming app, but I suppose that isn’t quite the venue for it.
I am also so-so on the iTunes movie rentals. I really like the concept and while we subscribe to NetFlix, I think we’ll use iTunes occasionally for those movies we don’t want to wait for. Since I am a bit frugal by nature, I would have liked it to be $1.99 and $2.99 (back catalog vs. new releqses) instead of $2.99 and $3.99 and am also disapointed by what has been called the "guy tax" of $1 extra for HD versions (if available). What’s worse, it appears that the HD versions can only be viewed on the Apple TV which leaves my Mac Mini in the SD cold. I’d bet big money that the studios required that restriction so that you can’t easily get to the file to strip the DRM and pirate like everyone strives to do.
Lastly, Apple announced the MacBook Air which is an ultra-light 13" laptop that is quite sexy in person. I have to admit, if I was in the market, I’d strongly consider one but I’m not coveting it. Many have criticized the non-user replaceable battery but having seen the unit in person, I don’t see how they could have made it removable and still keep the laptop thin. The replacement cost for the battery is reasonable, but it’s not clear if it can be replaced at an Apple Store or if it has to be sent in for servicing. Granted, you don’t really need to replace the battery often, but I’d rather not be without a laptop for days to do so.
Other than that, I spent the afternoon in the West hall which is made up of mostly smaller vendors. Some of the highlights include Skullcandy (a vendor of urban tech accessories), Budclicks (clip-on accents for earphones), Fluid Mask 3 by Vertus (alpha mask creation with a unique UI), Blurb (individual softcover and hardcover printing service), and of course Drobo by Data Robotics (a personal RAID device with very impressive features that I’ve been drooling over for a while).
Today, I’ll be hitting the South hall which is the big one. I’ll twitter what I can and do a day 2 wrap up tonight.
Becky and I have both been noticing that our Internet connection slows down whenever a significant amount of output data is moving through the pipe. Officially, our DSL is supposed to be 3000/768 kbps but any time I run a speed test, I get around 2500 kbps down which is acceptable but only get around 165 kbps up. Normally this isn’t a big deal as there isn’t normally much upstream data going on, but when Becky’s mother comes online, my systems start backing up to her system via CrashPlan. Even running "full out" I only get 165 kbps up which is far short from the expected 768 that I should be getting.
In trying to isolate this, I disconnected my entire home setup (eight devices connected via three routers) and hooked a laptop up directly to the modem. A repeat of the test gave me spec’d performance and restoring my setup (after resetting the router) gave me a good test as well, but any subsequent one was poor. I am nearly 100% certain it isn’t due to another device filling the pipe (I monitor all my systems via Cacti). Even if one was, it still is capped out at 165 kbps. I’ll need to repeat a few tests to try and isolate and identify the cause.
Everything else works as expected. I get frustrated with strange problems like this.
Update: Based on Matthew’s comment, I made sure that each of the three inside instances of CrashPlan are throttled (only one was connecting to an outside server). That made no difference. Tonight, I tried swapping out my main router with another Linksys and got the same results. I then connected my laptop directly to the modem which also had the same results. I reset the modem and am having good performance, but as I did that in the past, I’m expecting the outgoing to become poor again based on past tests.
This upcoming Monday afternoon, I’ll be flying up to San Francisco to spend a few days at Macworld 2008. Back "in the day" when I worked for a small software company (Gryphon Software, makers of Morph) we exhibited at Macworld all the time, but I haven’t been there for years so I’m really looking forward to it.
The reason I’m attending this year is my company’s increasing use and support for Macs as well as me becoming more involved in supporting our cinematics group’s Shake renderfarm.
I’ll probably post one or two blog posts of my experiences and will try to also twitter what I can just for fun. You can follow me on Twitter by going to my page there.
My work traditionally gives us the week between Christmas and New Years off and this year is no different. Not only do I get 11 days off (12/22-1/1) but the real advantage is the fact the entire office (with the exception of one of the game studios who is behind on their schedule of a springtime game) is also off which means I don’t have to worry about work piling up.
Aside from getting together with friends and family for Christmas, one thing that we are all planning is a Harry Potter marathon on Thursday as we just got the Harry Potter 1-5 box set for Blu-Ray. That should be fun.
Yes, I know it’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged. I do plan on rectifying that and I want to commit to at least do one post a week.One way that will happen is by adopting the Getting Things Done method and specifically a software package by the OmniGroup called OmniFocus. It’s currently in public beta but has been rock solid for me and there’s a new build almost every day which adds features.
If you’re in the the whole "GTD" thing and use a Mac, you may want to take a look.
While I have gotten quite moved in and adjusted to my iPhone, one thing has come to leave me wanting. Apple has long advertised iTunes as the “hub” for your personal media. You can rip or purchase your music, shows, and movies and sync them easily to your shiny new iPhone or iPod with ease. It’s quite impressive, in fact, how seamless it all works. PDF files, on the otherhand, aren’t considered first-class citizens in the media world (at least how Apple views it).iTunes allows you to add Adobe PDF files to your library and, in fact, provides many of the liner notes for iTunes Music Store purchased albums in PDF format. Unfortunately, they do not get synced to your iPhone or iPod Touch even when set up to do so. Even stranger is the support that the iPhone has to view PDF files when attached to an email message. So, you have a device that supports the format, a program that also supports the format, but a disconnect between the two.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not viewing the 480×320 screen of the iPhone and iPod Touch to be the ideal presentation of “printed” media, but I see significant value in the possibility of having all sorts of “portable” documents with me in my pocket. Off the top of my head, I can think of several:
I’m hoping that the disconnect is just an oversight and a future update of either/both the iPhone or iTunes will resolve this. The screen is quite decent on the iPhone and if you format a page properly, it would be very readable and go one more step further to becoming the “one device” that it is quickly approaching.
I was listening to one of my long-time podcasts, Geek News Central, and during the most recent episodes, one of the listeners wrote in to share that he has been boycotting Sony ever since the whole Sony Music “rootkit” fiasco back in 2005. This has come up a few times as well as the general concept of boycotts, and each time, I can’t decide my thoughts on it.
Let me preface this with the fact that I currently work for Sony Computer Entertainment America, which is the Sony division responsible for the Sony Playstation in the US territories.My trouble is that, at least with Sony, my division, which is under Sony Computer Entertainment, is only affiliated with Sony BMG by name and a common parent. Part of me is embarssed by the BMG misstep but wonder why should my particular part of the Sony “family” be punished for their behavior. I’m nearly 100% sure that nobody within SCEA, at even the highest levels, had anything to do the decision to include any form of software on the published CDs.
Don’t get me wrong, if you want to punish “Sony” it’s easier to boycott anything Sony regardless of how close they are (or aren’t) to the group you have issue with. I just wonder if that is going to effectively send the message you intend.I suppose a parallel (weak as it might be) is the thought that you’ll boycott oranges from southern California or sourdough bread from San Francisco (forgive me, I thought of this as I drove home and was hungry) just because you object to the subject matter of a movie out of Hollywood. They’re all from California, right? The message will work its way to the governor and he’ll crack down to give you satisfaction, right? I’m not so sure.
Sony is a quite large company. I’ll give you an example. You’d think that Sony Online Entertainment (the developers of Everquest) and SCEA are common siblings due to the fact we produce games. Heck, here in San Diego, our offices are only about 5 miles from each other. In reality, SOE is under the Sony Pictures banner and is (organizationally) only loosely affiliated with us. It’s not a perfect example, as our two companies do work together in some respects, but not much differently than we might work together with other companies.When it really comes down to it, regardless of how you choose to draw the line when you decide to boycott a company, the thing you have to do before all else, is to inform the company that you are not giving them your money and why that is the case. I personally would suggest contacting the group you have particular issue with and do your best to determine their one or two immediate “parents” and inform them as well.
Will Sony Music hear the message just because you chose not to purchase a Sony Electronics’ DVD player or Sony Computer Entertainment’s Playstation 3? Perhaps. A direct letter to the CEO of Sony BMG (Rolf Schmidt-Holtz) would probably have a much better chance.
Ultimately, I’m not particularly worried about my job as a result of any such boycott. I am just frustrated to explain to people when I mention what I do that “I work for Sony ‘Playstation’ and have nothing to do with rootkits.”