Archive for the 'Geeky Stuff' Category

Confessions of a Mac User Stuck in Windows World

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 30, 2008
in Geeky Stuff and Life
. 2 Comments

Introductory Material: I am a hard core UNIX/Linux guy and a Mac user. I really don’t care for Microsoft, and I’ve always hated Windows. I was an advanced DOS user in the eighties, and I avoided Windows 3.1 when my dad installed it on his PC. I learned C++ in the comp sci program at NC State University on UNIX workstations, and I love it. I started using Linux on my personal computers in 1997 because I hated Windows 95 so much, and started using a Mac in 2001 so that I could run Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. and still have my UNIX-y command line. I am the president of the local Mac users group (I might not be for long once my members read this). It has been over ten years since my primary work or personal computer has run Windows of any variety. All four of the servers my business operates run Linux, and I’ve got seven virtual servers on two of those servers, all running Linux. In short, I am not an apologist for Microsoft in any way, shape, or form.

The hard drive in my trusty Powerbook began to fail last Thursday afternoon. I have now been without my Mac for about six days. Since I spent Saturday (and a little time on Sunday) trying to make up for the 1.5 days of work I lost on last Thursday and Friday (getting another machine ready to use), I’ve had plenty of time to get used to working on Windows.

I’m using the laptop that I purchased for my brother to use as a mobile workstation. It’s a dual-core AMD Turion 1.6GHz machine with 2 gigs of RAM, running Vista Business. While I’m missing a number of applications I rely on, I’ve been able to get along pretty well.

Up until this point, I’d just dabbled with Vista on this laptop and the Dell Dimension workstation that Philip uses, which also runs Vista Business.

Honestly, I don’t see why so many people are complaining about Vista. Yes, I know it requires more horsepower than XP to run, but hey … XP was released at least five years before Vista … to expect that Vista would have pretty much the same requirements to run properly is sheer lunacy. As far as I’m concerned, Vista is a significant improvement over XP, and is the best operating system Microsoft has shipped to date.

Now … I have turned off the Aero stuff because I find it distracting, but besides that and Vista’s refusal to place nicely and share files with the XP box in the house, I don’t have anything to complain about after spending somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 hours working on this machine.

Just to list some things I like about Vista:

  1. The search box in the Start menu is a really nice touch; it helps me find stuff without having to go through the wild array of folders and subfolders under “all programs”
  2. The icons look much better than the “toy” icons on XP (for a type-A appearances-are-important Mac user like me … this is a big improvement)
  3. There are tons of useability improvements that make using Explorer to browse the filesystem much easier (I can’t even begin to list them all)
  4. I like the new System Properties window (right click on Computer, select ‘Properties’) … it is much more informative than anything they had previously. The “Windows Experience Index” is especially helpful for understanding where performance bottlenecks are.
  5. Windows Defender actually looks to be useful in finding and removing malware

That’s just off the top of my head.

OK … I did just remember one more complaint. You can’t use Windows Update via IE any more. I personally don’t like using the built-in application.

Mind you, if I had to use this in a networked environment where interoperability between Vista and XP/2000 was important, I probably would be much more annoyed.

So … I hardly find Vista repugnant, and if I found myself Mac-less at some point in the future, I would still be able to be quite productive in Windows. That being said, I am eager to get my new hard drive in my Powerbook and be back up and running. I’m not about to switch to Windows.

Why I Love NetNewsWire

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 25, 2008
in Geeky Stuff
. 0 Comments

I’ve been using NetNewsWire as my RSS feed reader for a while … maybe a year or more. Prior to that I’d tried Vienna and another reader (NewsFire, I think). Vienna was OK, and it was free, but then they changed the interface and it got fugly fast, and since I’m a type-A personality and can’t stand applications with ugly interfaces, I bailed (I’ve dropped iGTD in favor of the much-cooler Things for the same reason … I loved it at first, but then the author went tab-crazy, and it looks like a bad dream.). NewsFire was better … but I never could get into it.

So today, as a result of my hard drive failure on my Mac, I’m finding myself having to work in a Windows world. Living without the RSS reader has been interesting. If I hadn’t spent the whole day getting thisyer Vista machine up to speed so I could use it, I would have been more productive, probably. But, on the other hand, I do get ideas for what to blog about from the ninety-six feeds I subscribe to now. Plus, I miss some of the specialty news sources I subscribe to.

A few minutes ago, I remembered something … when I set up NetNewsWire, I had to register for an account at NewsGator. Plus, every time I shut it down it pops up some message to the tune of “We’re saving changes to your NewsGator account …”

Hmmm.

Maybe there is a way I can read my feeds online?

Why yes there is! Sweet!

So now I’ve got my RSS feeds back. This will keep me busy for the next few days while I’m waiting for my new and improved 7200 RPM laptop drive to arrive …

I loved NetNewsWire yesterday. Now I love it even more. If you’re in the market for a RSS reader for the Mac, NetNewsWire is the hot shizzle. Plus, it’s free now, so you don’t have to pay for it like I did … not that it bothers me at all that I paid for it an it’s now free … in fact, I think it’s fantastic!

newsgator_beta.jpg

Best Networked Device Ever: Your Alarm Clock (No, Really!)

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 10, 2008
in Geeky Stuff and Humor
. 0 Comments

You may think the idea of a networked alarm clock with access to the internet is just plain silly, but hear me out …

This one (the SnūzNLūz - Wifi Donation Alarm Clock) donates a set amount of money to a charity or organization you hate every time you hit the snooze button. I seriously need to get one of these, and have it donate money to the Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards campaigns. I’ll be getting up at 6:00 a.m. in no time …

Hat Tip: 43 Folders

Airnet 1/4 Rack In Full Effect

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 5, 2008
in Geeky Stuff and Small Business
. 0 Comments

Tonight Philip and I got our servers moved to our new 1/4 rack spot at Airnet, installed our fourth server, and moved out the old eight-port switch in favor of a twenty-four-port replacement.

The third server that has been sitting unused for so long now is officially our Zimbra mail server. The fourth machine is our (local) backup machine, and also is running Tomcat plus the eXist XML database (which is a Java web app).

Moving the mail, backup, and eXist services to full machines (from VPS machines) allows them to leverage more disk I/O, and I can already tell a difference in how fast things load. I expect that we’ll continue to use virtual machines for things for the time being, especially for things like Subversion and web hosting.

The fifth member of our family should be arriving next week and going in by mid-month. It appears we could be adding a sixth soon as well …

Palm’s Awful Tech Support

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on December 29, 2007
in Geeky Stuff
. 0 Comments

Tristan Lewis recently had an encounter with Palm’s tech support that’s caused him to abandon them. Reading his experience makes me glad I did so as well.

In the midst of reading it, I remembered a long-forgotten experience I had with their tech support myself … one that had led me to abandon them in favor of a Handspring device (and of course I had to go back to Palm once they merged with Handspring a few years later).

I had a Palm V that had quit working for some reason or another about ten months after I’d bought it. It was my second PalmOS device.

I dutifully called the 800 number provided for support and waited on hold for approximately an hour or so. I then spoke with a guy who spoke poor English, and eventually he realized I’d had the device for more than 90 days. He then informed me that the 800 number was only for people who’d had their devices for less than 90 days, and I’d have to call another (non-Toll-Free) number.

So, I dutifully (but begrudgingly) called the other number he’d provided, and waited on hold (once more) for an hour or so. When my call was answered, the name I was given and voice sounded familiar. Then, much to my surprise, once he’d gotten my name, he said something like “Oh yes, we talked earlier!”

I was peeved, to say the least.

They did ship me a replacement device, and it broke about 15 days after the warranty period was over. So, I got a Handspring Visor Edge, which lasted me until some time after the Handspring/Palm merger.

AOL Kills Netscape (the Browser)

Published
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Jeremy Clifton
on December 29, 2007
in Geeky Stuff
. 0 Comments

I still remember the first time I launched Netscape. I was in one of the NCSU computer labs (in the basement of Leazer Hall, to be exact) in late 1995 using a DEC 2100 workstation, and Mosaic crashed on me. When I complained audibly about it a bit, the guy next to me asked “Why aren’t you using Netscape?” Once I found out what the heck he was talking about, I fired up Netscape 2, and was happy.

For the next few years, I was a Netscape fan (except for a brief dalliance with IE 3 that quickly ended once I saw how poorly it rendered HTML I’d coded to the standards of the time). I put “Best Viewed With Netscape” buttons on the web pages I designed (what was I thinking?).

At the time, I was angered that MS would dare give IE away for free and thus try to put Netscape out of business (though in retrospect I recognize that MS was simply being shrewd). When all hope for Netscape’s survival seemed to be lost, AOL stepped up to the plate in 1999 and bought them. I tenaciously kept using the 4.x branch of Netscape even as IE more or less took over the internet world.

AOL then open-sourced the Netscape codebase (which has been pretty much the only good thing they did), and after what seems like about two long years, we got Netscape 6. I loved it. Well, actually I used the Mozilla branch, not the “official” Netscape branch.

Then along came Firefox, and Netscape and the Mozilla browser (or Seamonkey, as it’s now called) quickly became irrelevant. I kept thinking though, at the time, that maybe Netscape was still a player.

The final insult was when AOL released Netscape 8 (link is to a screenshot). The interface was apparently designed by folks on a bad acid trip. Unfortunately, this monstrosity apparently inspired the hideous interface of IE 7 in some ways too (that’s my best explanation, anyway).

And now comes the news that AOL has finally abandoned development of the Netscape Browser. Surprisingly, I don’t care. In ten years, I’ve gone from unswerving support to complete apathy.

The truth of the matter is that Netscape wasn’t all that great. NS3 was pretty darn good, but it innovated in regards to the standards. NS4.X was really awful … the only thing that saved it was that it was better than IE, up until IE6. It rendered HTML in bizarre ways, only made the pretense of supporting CSS, and made coding JavaScript positively painful (as did IE). The codebase of what would have been NS5 was so bad that the developers abandoned it completely and started from scratch with NS6/Mozilla 1.

So, really, the Netscape browser has been dead for the better part of eight years now. I am happy the people that rallied behind it and developed Mozilla did so, because now we have Firefox (and God knows I can’t live without Firefox + Firebug when I do any sort of serious web development).

But there was one great contribution Netscape made to the computing world … the about:mozilla page (which existed at least as far back as NS2):

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror. - from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

That was from the “new” version … I forget what the pre-NS6 version said.

In the end, the quote is right. Everybody had written off Netscape. From the ashes of what had been the Netscape browser rose the new Mozilla project, and its rendering engine became Firefox. Microsoft had gotten lazy, and had let IE sit without any real development … and then along comes Firefox.

Chick-Fil-A + Wi-Fi = Nirvana

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on December 21, 2007
in Geeky Stuff and Twitter Updates
. 0 Comments

Yesterday, on the way to Raleigh, we stopped off at a Chick-Fil-A in Morganton, NC to eat. This particular Chick-Fil-A was offering free wi-fi, and from the looks of the stickers on the doors and windows, it’s a corporate thing, not just something this one was doing. So, maybe we’ll have wi-fi at the locations in Chattanooga soon …

Blogging on I-75

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on December 20, 2007
in Geeky Stuff and Twitter Updates
. 0 Comments

I’m on my way to my parents’ house near Raleigh, NC, and Rachel is driving … and I’ve been doing some work from the passenger seat for the last hour or so. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to really try out the Verizon BroadBand Access wireless internet service for a long period of time … and it’s working really well. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s a little harder to concentrate on the screen on a bumpy section of road, I think I could get a lot of work done this way …

Mainframe Funeral

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on December 19, 2007
in Geeky Stuff and Just Plain Random
. 2 Comments

And now for something completely different … a break from the serious. The University of Manitoba held a funeral for one of its ancient IBM mainframe computers.

(Thanks to Dr. Biggly for the heads up on the link.)

Kids & Cell Phones

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on December 17, 2007
in BlackBerry and Geeky Stuff
. 1 Comment

You know what they say about kids and electronics … they know more about them and are more comfortable with them than their parents. Well, this morning, my daughter taught me something about my BlackBerry that I hadn’t figured out in the three weeks I’ve had it.

Thing is, she’s 14 months old.

I keep the phone on my nightstand because a) I get alerts from my monitoring services about my servers and such letting me know that they are down or just not working quite right, and b) I use it as my alarm clock in the morning.

Some days Autumn is awake before I am, and Rachel lets her wander around on the floor (and watches her) until I awake. Most days she picks up my phone and plays with it.

I’m going to have to be more careful, because today she managed to unlock the keypad, dial a couple of numbers (none valid, fortunately).

Plus she managed to re-arrange the icons on the BlackBerry. I hadn’t even considered that such a thing was possible. I wasn’t happy with the default arrangement of things, but I had been living with it because I figured that was the way things were. As a result of her meddling with the phone, I figured out that I could change the order, and even create folders to categorize icons. So, I’ve now moved my lesser-used apps and options into folders, and gotten things to the point that I have only 14 icons available at the “main” level, and I’ve got my five most used icons on the “home screen” (or whatever you call it).

Thanks, Autumn!

I suppose in a year or so she’ll be teaching me new things about programming …