not an iphone
Here, fine, you wanna phone? ThinkGeek :: ThinkGeek Bluetooth Retro Handset
July 02, 2007
June 24, 2007
Amazon's service cloud
The question: O'Reilly Radar >how does a user of Amazon's computing and storage services deal with Amazon as a single point of failure? If there were 2 companies doing what Amazon is doing, the answer would be clear: use both, no single point of failure. It seems to me, strangely enough, that the best, most credible thing Amazon could do to grow its computing service business is to get some competition.
September 05, 2006
Turned on comment moderation
There's been a pretty big influx of comment spam lately, so I've turned off immediate posting of comments to the blog. If you don't see your comment appear right away, that's why. As soon as I see it, I'll post it. (Well, unless you're a spammer. I probably won't post spam comments. Sorry!)
August 01, 2006
Here's yer greenhouse
According to the carbon worksheet (cheesy name, I know), every hour I run my air conditioner, more than 5 pounds of carbon dioxide get produced. Ouchie.
May 07, 2006
Robots aren't good DJs
Ya gotta like zipcar. They rent you a car by the hour, a Japanese subcompact like a Mazda 3 or a Scion, they pay for gas and even throw in some satellite radio. It's a good package, though I'm not sure how they're making a buck.
Ok, one exception: satellite radio. It sucks, strangely enough. The wife and I flip the dial around among half a dozen or so channels that have music we like - Fred, Ethel, Lucy, Flight 26 - and get lots of tunes with no annoying DJs. After about 20 minutes of this, we realize something's missing. The music's flat, sorta boring. And it hits us: we miss the DJ. Not the annoying talk, but the sense that there's someone with a personality who's picking these tracks for a reason. Satellite radio sounds like it was put together by robots. Hey zipcar, if you want to make me happy, give me a jack to plug in my ipod. I'm done with broadcast.
March 25, 2006
Why aren't phones simpler?
37 Signals' discussion about the Moto PEBL points out that there are lots of people out there who want simpler phones, but the phone companies don't deliver them. I'm right there with 'em. My take on why there aren't more simple phones on the market? Phone companies want to steer us all toward high margin services like purchasing ringtones. The phone companies deliver handsets that optimize their revenue, not our phone experience.
March 17, 2006
Switched providers
I've switched hosting providers to Dreamhost. We'll see how this goes. More bandwidth, more (backed up) storage. Fun.
Update: Because dreamhost had newer perl libs than my old provider, I had to upgrade to the new Movable Type too. So far, v3.2 looks nice.
October 16, 2005
Paul Graham on where startup ideas come from
Paul Graham's released another great essay called Ideas for Startups (that I saw while reading Joel). It contains some really good, practical advice about what it takes to go from two guys staring at each other over a cup of coffee to two guys with an idea. Here's an excerpt:
The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.I heartily agree. And in the next steps, going from the initial question to a first product, the idea gets shaped by a combination of research, navel gazing, and talking to potential customers.
Wait, did I just say you should be talking to customers before you have something to sell them? Absolutely. Perhaps this is more true when selling to enterprises (as opposed to selling to consumers), but either way, it can save you months. I usually feel like the first couple conversations with customers are in a foreign language. The customer and I are talking about the same thing, but from very different perspectives. But it's vital to bridge the language gap in order to build up a model of how the customer thinks about the problem you're solving. And hey, he might even tell you that someone's already built the very idea you've been thinking about -- not a very pleasant thing to hear about, but it beats not knowing.
But how do you find potential customers who want to talk to you? What do you tell them? And when they inevitably tell you that your idea stinks, what do you do? Those are all hard questions, and I'll put off giving answers to other posts (and other people). I'll only say that it's difficult even finding customers to talk to (who wants to waste their valuable time on a product that doesn't even exist yet?), but the key idea is that it's more about listening well than pitching your ideas well.
August 09, 2005
Glare
Remember how monitor glare was like the worst thing ever and we all hated it? When was that, like 1996 or so? It's now 10 years later, and we're adding fake glare to icons/buttons/etc. to make them look "cool."
August 07, 2005
Quote of the week
"You end up saying, 'Gee, if we can't go into low Earth orbit, how can we beat Al Qaeda?'" Well, I suppose we could send the space shuttle on a mission to look for Osama. Couldn't hurt, could it?
July 05, 2005
Looking for a new calendar tool
I've been using Mozilla Sunbird for all my calendaring needs, and I can at this point assure you all that it is not ready for prime time. Not even close. It's corrupted my calendar file 3 times now. Possibly this is because my calendar file is over 300 KB, and possibly this is because I've been storing the calendar on a remote server via webdav. Really, I don't care why it is since the project hasn't released a new version in 4 months. JWZ also seems to dislike sunbird, calling it "crapware". As someone once pointed out to me, the whole notion of keeping all appointments in a single file is asking, no begging, for trouble, in the form of contention with multiple writers and corruption. So I'm thinking Sunbird's problems are more than skin deep and I shouldn't wait around for the next release.
I think I'm going to try keeping my calendar on paper for a while. I predict that I won't miss Sunbird.
June 07, 2005
Windows codependency
A couple months ago, I switched my laptop from a dual-boot Linux/Windows setup to a full-time Windows XP setup with a Linux virtual machine (provided through CoLinux, natch). I've been all set to write up the story of how happy I am in this world: suspend/resume work flawlessly, I have access to Google desktop search and Picasa, and dual-head monitor support finally works. Even my old favorites, Firefox, Thunderbird and Gaim, were there, and they seem to work better under Windows. And with CoLinux, I can still develop natively on Linux, which is what my research requires, without having to reboot.
So great, right? Well, no. My setup is unstable as all hell. I wind up rebooting after a hard crash about twice a week. The problem? All the little helper apps and features I use play really poorly together. Today I had a crash while moving a window between my laptop's screen and an external monitor (running at a different resolution) such that the window passed under a semi-transparent sticky note (ATnotes is the app I use for that). That's when everything went dark.
Ok, who do I blame? XP, obviously. I might also be to blame for having such an odd setup, but I can't decide whether that's me bravely facing reality or whether it's a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. And more important than who to blame, how do I fix it? Possibly it's time to go back to Linux. Or maybe I should stick with my (abusive) relationship with Windows, and try to get some work done without pissing it off too much. I dunno.
Fine print: I'm running XP service pack 2 on a Thinkpad X30 with an Intel graphics chipset that obviously blows goats. Under Linux, suspend/resume has never worked right on this machine with either Fedora Core 1 or Core 2, using either APM or ACPI. Finally, anyone who tells me that I should really get a Mac, please first ponder the fact that, while Linux and OS X are both Unix-like, they're actually quite different for the sort of work I do, which requires working with a bunch of kernel interfaces. And don't even try to sell me on Mac Linux, which seems like an even less reliable alternative, and one with the wrong endianness at that. Also, Macs are expensive and, I hear, break a lot. Despite all that, I obviously want one but hate myself for it. Sigh.
April 13, 2005
It's gonna be GRRRREAT!
In this NYTimes article about Apple's new OS, code-named Tiger, one Apple VP had this to say about his company's relationship to Microsoft: "We're becoming a tiny dim red light in their headlights." Oddly enough, it turns out that the very first page of the Public Relations Handbook says "never describe your company as a tiny dim red light."
(And about the title: The OS is called Tiger, so I thought of Tony the Tiger. And I happen to be eating Frosted Flakes right now. So sue me.)
April 08, 2005
Help with trackback problems?
Can anyone offer advice about how to configure MT so it doesn't send a trackback every single time I edit a blog entry? Anyone accepting trackbacks is likely to get like 6 pings for each post I write, effectively spamming their blog. In MT's web-based interface, I've tried clearing out the "URLs to ping" box before I save my edits, but that doesn't seem to help.
March 09, 2005
Why I hate Nextel
Nextel sells annoying phones. They're used by people (annoying people) to "direct connect" to other Nextel subscribers (tres annoying!). "Direct connect," for those not in the know, makes a cell phone act like a walkie talkie (or, imagine someone trying to use a speaker phone in a crowded room). With a normal cell phone, you only hear the guy next to you shouting questions about his grocery list to his wife. With Nextel, you get the additional privilege of hearing the guy's wife complaining back to him about the lipstick stain she found on his shirt (or whatever it is people talk about who are annoying enough to use direct connect). Finally, in case you've managed to tune out other people's shouting, Nextel phones all make a piercing double-beep every so often, lest the phone (or its owner) go 5 minutes without actively annoying anyone.
January 15, 2005
Spam spam spam spam
Sigh. Well, the comment spam has been arriving at the rate of 30 or so per day. Thanks to MT-Blacklist, the spam gets sent to my inbox instead of being put up on the blog. Is that an improvement? Possibly, but it's certainly damn annoying to me. This morning I installed Conversation Killer, which disables comments on old blog entries. That should help enormously.
Links are the coin of the realm on the Internet today, since they drive search engines and the search engines drive traffic. It's no wonder people try to add links wherever they can. Today, the spammers are so inept that we can do basic pattern matching to filter them out. Within a year or two, I'm sure the spammers will base their fake blog posts on text from the blog itself (or a google search on terms from the blog post), making it nearly impossible to automatically identify the spam. This is why comment spam is much harder to fight than email spam.
What are we to do? People talk about using captchas and the like to automatically tell real people from fake people. I'm not a big believer. We could only allow authorized users to comment, but that would take away a good amount of the fun of blogging. No, I think the best solution is what usenet did. Remember usenet? It was all the rage in the 90's, and then it became one huge spam-and-troll party. The solution? Most people gave up on usenet and moved to the web and blogs. Because spammers lag behind the early adopters by a good 2-3 years, changing systems works better than anything else. So, blogs are about to be over. What's next?
December 26, 2004
Hi Mom
Didja ever notice that while the college kids at games on TV have traditionally used "Hi Mom!" on their signs, programmer types use "Hello World" as the default thing for a program to print. Why is that? Could it be that programmers don't want to get caught showing anything remotely related to an emotion?
December 14, 2004
Beast Buy
So about that iPod I mentioned yesterday: I actually got it by exchanging a PDA that I received as a gift. It was a really neat PDA, with lots of cool bells and whistles, but I'm just not a PDA person. So I grabbed my gift receipt and waded into the throng of holiday shoppers at Best Buy. The person at the returns desk took a look at my receipt and PDA box and then said "I need to get a manager involved." I wondered: Were my papers not in order? The box was sealed, but maybe there was a restocking fee.
A few minutes later, another Best Buy employee who had been hanging around the returns desk approached me. He started quizzing me about why I was returning the PDA. He told me it was a great machine, lots of features, could really do anything and everything. Sort of a medium-pressure pitch for why anyone in their right mind would cling to this PDA like a druggie to his smack stash. I knew that I had to take drastic measures, so I said "I'm not sure this'll work with Linux." That did the trick, and after some final discussion about whether Linux runs on a laptop, he let me go. He said something to the cashier like "OK, he can go ahead" and 15 seconds later I had a Best Buy gift card for the amount of the return.
What I'd like to know is whether it's Best Buy's horrible, soul-sucking policy to interrogate customers that make non-Best-Buy-approved choices. If it is, this will be just one more example of how Best Buy hates its customers.
December 13, 2004
Fragrant Ornish
So, I got a new iPod, and I named it Fragrant Ornish. Why? I have no idea. But I'm sorta stoked that (as of this writing) Google has no matches for that name.
August 22, 2004
Everything's changed!
I've just migrated dullroar to a new hosting provider (Vervehosting), a new version of MovableType (3.01D), and a new comment spam blocking system (MT-Blacklist). If anything's broken, please send me a shout out (andy "curly a" dullroar.org is my address). We'll see if this world is any better than the old.
One thing that my old hoster provided but the new one doesn't is a lot of backed-up storage. So now I've got to find a good backup solution for my email and weblog contents. Maybe a shell script that has the right ssh keys to download files and then burn a cd.
June 29, 2004
Network-enable a series 1 Tivo without opening the box
I have a series 1 Tivo (i.e. a Tivo with only a modem, no USB ports) and, since I moved a few weeks ago, no home phone line. Of course, without a phone line the Tivo has no way to get new TV schedules. As Tivo-addicted as I am, I still am not willing to pay $15 per month to Verizon to keep a phone line around just for the Tivo to use.
There's a kit available to add an ethernet adapter to a Tivo. It only costs $60 (or $120 for the wifi version), but the real cost is in the installation. You have to disassemble the Tivo, extract the hard drive, hook the hard drive up to your computer, download and burn a CD of a specially-hacked Linux distribution, boot that Linux distribution on your computer, mount the Tivo drive, change the config on the drive, and put the Tivo back together. Oh, and I forgot the part where you actually install the adapter, which involves cutting a hole in your case. In other words, it's a day's work, even for someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with Linux and PC internals, and there are a variety of places for things to go wrong.
What was I to do? Pay Verizon? Hack my Tivo? Luckily, there's another way. Series 1 Tivos also have a serial port, and with just a slight change to the dial-up settings (see step 4 here for details), you can tell Tivo to use PPP over serial to download data. So I headed down to Radio Shack (yeah, freakin' Radio Shack!) and bought a null modem adapter, a db9 male-male gender changer (kinky!), and a serial to USB converter, for about $60 ($40 of that was the serial to USB dongle, btw). Putting all of that together along with the serial adapter that came with the Tivo gave me a cable that plugged into the Tivo on one side and my computer's USB port on the other. Then I started PPP on my laptop, which runs Linux, and turned on NAT and IP forwarding. (My PPP setup was inspired by this howto.) And weirdly, it all worked. Tivo was back in action, and I didn't have to touch a screwdriver or torx bit.
For the details on how this was all set up, click to go to the article.
Continue reading "Network-enable a series 1 Tivo without opening the box" »
June 28, 2004
Openbsd upgrade puts customers last
You might have noticed that comments were broken on this blog for the last week or so. That's because of an upgrade at my webhost, Jtan. It seems that openbsd switched its binary format, and by default, all programs in the previous-format would no longer run.
I wish to try to tell you how stupid this is, but I fear that I won't do it justice. I'll try anyway. But let me begin by saying that Jtan's been a good home for Dullroar.org for the last few years, and they've been easy to deal with. And let me also say that breaking comments on my blog is about the most minor issue in the world, given how unimportant my blog is and how few comments get posted. And I can see how the war against spam and denial of service attacks probably leaves sysadmins with a lot less time for delivering other services. Still, the whole sad situation does give me pause. Is this the webhost I want to deal with on an ongoing basis? Now on to the details.
First, Openbsd changed their default binary format starting with version 3.4 of the OS. Linux went through something similar a while back as well. The difference is that starting in version 3.5, Openbsd by default no longer runs old binaries. Every new version of Windows can run programs built for old versions. Everyone expects that sort of behavior. But over at openbsd, they say that running other binary formats exposes the system to malicious programs. Because, you know, all the really malicious programs were written for openbsd 3.3, and the malicious program authors haven't bothered to recompile for 3.5 yet.
Second, Jtan, my hosting provider, installed the new version without turning on legacy binary support. That's putting the openbsd paranoia way ahead of Jtan's customers' needs. With a little extra configuration, Jtan could have avoided breaking every customer-compiled application. Instead, Jtan forced us all to observe that stuff had broken, find the source, recompile, and then reinstall. It took me an hour, and that's only for a tiny little perl module that I'd completely forgotten I ever installed in the first place.
Third, Jtan didn't give us a transition plan. The usual thing to do in a "break the world" situation is to configure a completely new machine with the new OS, and give everybody a few weeks to build and test programs on the new machine. Then the new machine should be swapped in for the old machine. What Jtan did was take down the old machine for a few hours and install the new OS over the old. In other words, Jtan maximized downtime and risk.
To sum up: the spam problem left my webhost too frazzled to do a proper upgrade, which would have been time and resource intensive. And the proper upgrade was mostly needed because the underlying OS, openbsd, didn't have reverse compatibility for its binaries turned on by default. Yuck.
May 29, 2004
Comment spam sucks
Comment spam hasn't happened much on this blog, so I've been hand-deleting the spams and banning the IP addresses of the machines issuing the spam. (Not that these machines are owned by the spammers themselves - they're probably random PCs infected by a virus, but that doesn't mean they won't send more spam if allowed.) Then last night, 12 new comment spams appeared. That's way too much to clean up by hand, especially with Movable Type's comment administration workflow, which requires me to ban each IP address and remove each spam individually.
That's what finally convinced me to install the SCode plugin (which was written by James Seng). When you post comments now, you'll also have to input a captcha-style security code. I hope it's not too much of an inconvenience, but it was either this, or turn off comments (and life without comments would suck).
Please, give the new comment posting system a try and drop me a line if there are any problems. My email address is andy (curly 'a' thing) dullroar.org. (Yes, I know what an @ is, but I don't want to make things too easy for spammers that take email addresses off of web pages. Also, on a random note, do you know how tough it is to find information about @? You can't just google for it, believe me.)
April 05, 2004
Bush is behind (on) broadband
This CNN article, CNN.com - Bush wants cheap high-speed Internet access for all by 2007 - Mar 26, 2004, is all about how Bush wants us all to have access to broadband by 2007.
Ok, the first problem is that "broadband" is an almost meaningless term. Does he mean broadband like we have today, with downloads of a paltry 1 Mbps? I think it's safe to say that 1 Mbps in 2007 is going to be just like getting a brand new Pentium II today. In other words, so slooooooow that it's useless. And what does it mean to have "access" to broadband? Making sure the nearest library has a link? Or truly making it affordable for everybody? Who can say?
DSL and cable modems aren't fast enough for the latest apps (streaming movies, serving multi-player games, videoconferencing), and the result is that the best apps aren't being deployed (or even built!) because only a few college kids would have the bandwidth to use them.
What the U.S. needs is a real broadband policy, not just a promise to deliver late-90's technology to people by 2007. Whoever understands the technology best will be best able to make use of it. Take cell phones as an example. The leaders in the handset business are from places where cell phone use has taken off. Not the U.S., where cell phone penetration is comparatively low, prices are high, and the latest apps like mcommerce are still almost unheard of.
The U.S. needs a plan to get to (at least) 100 Mbps access as soon as possible. If we don't create the environment in which the next generation of network technologies can thrive, then we're going to see those technologies developed somewhere else. You think outsourcing is bad? (It's not, but that's another rant entirely.) Try watching another country innovate better than the U.S.
What surprises me about Bush is not just that his ideology is so foreign to me (I'm a Democrat, so I expected that). What surprises me is that he's doing a demonstrably bad job. Broadband? Please. Mars on a couple billion bucks? Yeah right. Adequate resources for rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq? Don't even get me started.
March 28, 2004
Keyboard vs. mouse
The other day in a zephyr(*) conversation, the old "I hate this interface because it uses the mouse too much" complaint came out. Almost immediately, someone sent us to this AskTog column, which points out that in studies, people get things done faster using the mouse than the keyboard. To some, this might seem obvious, but to me (and other linux/unix lovers), it seems counterintuitive. The mouse? It requires so much extra movement. But here's the cool part: the keyboard seems fast because the mental challenge of remembering and using all those shortcuts (in my editor of choice, just saving a document requires me to hit ctrl-X and then ctrl-S, and to quit I hit ctrl-X ctrl-C) is significant enough that the user experiences a form of amnesia. The user literally does not remember the (not insignificant) time spent trying to figure out what keys to press. The mouse, on the other hand, seems slow because it's so dead simple, the user can think of other things (like, say, the task he's trying to do) while using the mouse. I was totally blown away by this concept. If you were also, there are two more Tog articles on the keyboard vs. mouse debate: part 2 and part 3.
(*) Zephyr is an online chat system used at CMU. It's ancient, uses UDP, is tied to kerberos, and has no good support from mainstream IM clients. However, the one good thing it has is that each message sent in group chat has a subject as well as a body. This might seem dumb on the surface, but what it does is enable multiple conversations to go on at the same time without all the traffic running together in a nonsensical mess. Most other IM systems use multiple chat rooms to do this, so you wind up clicking back and forth between tabs (or windows, or however your IM client handles it) like crazy to keep track of several conversations. Hey, I wonder if the argument above about mousing being faster applies here too: the work of disambiguating a bunch of text via subject tags makes it seem faster/better than putting each conversation in a separate "place." In reality, maybe the non-zephyr way is better, even though it feels less convenient.
March 10, 2004
Site RSS tweak
Just tweaked the MovableType templates so that dullroar's syndication feeds contain formatting and links in addition to the raw text. That should improve things a bit for those who prefer using news aggregators.
January 11, 2004
fun with stylesheets and blogs
So over the past week or so I tried a stylesheet for this blog from Movable Style called "boxed". It looked great, but then I started noticing problems. The most significant: Internet Explorer greyed out all the text in some of my blog entries. According to W3C's validation service, my html and css were all completely valid, but Internet Explorer just couldn't hack it. I guess you get what you pay for (both in a stylesheet and in a browser).
Anyway, I'm back to a more supported stylesheet now (notice the swanky black/dark grey thing going on here). And I know a whole lot more about stylesheets (enough to stay very far away). Sorry for any inconvenience the previous style might have caused.
December 30, 2003
ipod as server
Gizmodo mentions a Steve Gillmor article talking about the ipod and its potential as a sort of hub device. To take things in a slightly different direction, what if someone built an ipod-sized dumb storage device with large capacity (120 GB or so) and a high-bandwidth version of bluetooth. Let's assume (big stretch here, I admit), that bluetooth becomes part of every device (headphones, car and home stereos, video and still cameras, even the tv). The result is that you've got all your files, music, pictures, and movies available anytime, anywhere.
When you get into your car, your whole music collection is available. When you take a picture or record video, it gets stored on the ipod-thing (and as a bonus, no more needing to find a new tape or an empty compact flash). Stand near a tv and you can view your movies and pics on a big screen. And while we're at it, use the ipod as storage for your laptop as well. When you get home, the ipod syncs with your home computer, so everything's backed up in case you drop it or it gets stolen. The ipod becomes a unified storage infrastructure. All the other devices that store stuff today could become simpler and smaller. And accessing all your data would be easier than ever.
Hey, it could happen.