RSS UPS Tracking

As a note to myself: UPS package tracking via RSS .

Roku SoundBridge

My dad and I got my mom a Roku SoundBridge for her birthday. I hooked it up today, and was really impressed with it. Once connected to your home network (via wired Ethernet or WiFi), the SoundBridge finds all machines with iTunes sharing enabled and makes their music libraries available to be played on your stereo. You can browse your library using the remote, and when you find a song, you can either play it immediately or queue it. Everything just worked, even a software update (the SoundBridge unit downloads and installs updates seamlessly). It will be nice to have the SoundBridge when I go home for Christmas, because as soon as I connect my G5 to the network, my entire music library will be accessible in our living room.

If you are looking for a way to play your iTunes library on your home stereo, I highly recommend the SoundBridge.

Quantrix Modeler

Last night, while reading some comments on Slashdot, someone mentioned that Lotus Improv for NeXTSTEP kicked ass. Intrigued, I read the Wikipedia article on Improv. The article linked to me to a modern day ancestor of Improv named Quantrix Modeler . The idea behind Improv and Quantrix is to create a better spreadsheet paradigm - one which allows you to easily work with multiple representations of the same data.

Check out the Flash demo of Quantrix. I was pretty impressed.

What the Bubble Got Right

Paul Graham has posted another excellent essay, What the Bubble Got Right . I love the way Paul Graham bucks the conventional wisdom and cuts through all the crap to give reasoned analysis. I really need to pick up Hackers and Painters .

Josh's New PowerBook

Josh is blogging about getting started with his new PowerBook . It's always fun to see someone (re)enter the Mac fold, and learn about the types of things that new Mac users like and dislike. Welcome back to the Mac community, Josh!

Dell 2001FP

I decided to spend some of the money I earned over the summer on a new display. As sexy as the Apple displays are, it's impossible to beat the value of the Dell 2001FP , so that's what I ordered. 1600x1200 goodness, here I come...

IT Conversations

I have recently become aware that IT Conversations rocks. I heard about the site a few months ago, but didn't have an opportunity to listen to any of the conversations until recently. When my flight from New York to Raleigh was delayed 10 hours, I had plenty of time to listen. Then I listened to some more on the way back to Ohio from Durham. Now that I'm living off campus, I have about a 30 minute walk to campus, so I've been loading up my iPod with conversations. So far my favorites are Paul Graham , Ben and Mena Trott , and Tim O'Reilly .

IRC Client

I don't use IRC much. Usually, I just lurk in #geeks on irc.cwru.edu. Thus, I just need a simple IRC client that's free. I've tried 2 or 3 different clients for Mac OS X, but they've all either sucked or been non-free. Recently though, I've come across a really nice, free client called Colloquy . It's got an elegant, unobtrusive interface, a plugin architecture, and it's open source. It's also got support for AppleScript and DCC file transfers. It seems positioned to become the IRC client for Mac OS X. I'm glad to finally see an IRC client that's a free and worthy companion to Safari and Mail.

New Google Groups

Google has posted a beta of their new Google Groups service. It offers a mechanism for creating your own mailing lists (@googlegroups.com). Looks like there may finally be a way for non-technical users to create mailing lists that don't suck.

Hardware RAID for Power Mac G5

Lately I've been thinking that I should take better care of my data. A hard disk in an old PC of mine died. Fortunately the data on it wasn't important, but it made me think how much data I'd lose if my G5's drive died. I'd like to setup a RAID mirror on my G5 to protect against data loss. Apple has software RAID support in Mac OS X, but I'm wary of software RAID. There are often compatibility and booting issues with software RAID. Also, according to XLR8YourMac.com , using Apple's software RAID to create a mirror can reduce disk performance by up to 40%, which is unacceptable.

As for hardware RAID, there seem to be a number of external Firewire solutions , but most of them are very expensive, and overkill for what I want to do. I'd also prefer internal RAID, since I plan on making the RAID mirror my startup drive. The only product I've seen that fits my needs is the Acard AEC-6890M . It supports hardware RAID 0 and 1 using Serial ATA drives. The problem is that I haven't been able to find many reviews of the card. Also, the company's web page is a bit difficult to navigate, and doesn't inspire total confidence that updated drivers will be available (if needed) for future Mac OS X revisions. I have seen a few good reports on the card on messages boards, though.

Anybody ever dealt with Acard, especially with their RAID cards?

Gallagher and IBM

Here's a nutty story about some comedian named Gallagher, and his watermelon smashing show at the IBM booth at Comdex 1993.

(Via inessential.com )

Internet2 DirectConnect Hub

I was just informed of a new DirectConnect hub, for Internet2 users only. If your school is on Internet2, then I highly recommend that you check out i2hub.com . And remember, as i2hub.com states:

We are all from universities, so it's obvious that this service is for educational purposes only.

Bram Cohen

The New York Times profiles BitTorrent and Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent) in today's edition. According to the article, BitTorrent traffic accounts for 10% of all traffic on the Internet2 backbone.

Notacon

Froggy just announced Notacon on cwru.general.

It's "not a 'con". Well, it kind of is. But it isn't. Kinda. Sorta. Not really.

It sounds like it's going to be a cool event, and if anyone can pull this off, it's Froggy and his staff . Spread the word about Notacon!

Sidenote: I didn't know it until tonight, but Froggy has a blog .

Groan

Foxtrot: Query Eye for the Database Guy

Floppy RAID

Floppy Drive RAID . Screw the Segway, THIS will be the next big geek lust item. :-)

Lotus Notes Sucks

Lotus Notes is shit. This page explains why.

Case and Heatsink

I got my new Antec SLK3700 case and Thermalright SLK800U heatsink (odd how both companies chose to use 'SLK' in their product numbers). I took a few pictures for my friend Phil since he is considering purchasing this case. You can view the pictures at photos.uncledirtae.com , part of the burgeoning Uncle Dirtae empire. (Yes, my photography sucks.)

Quiet PC

I'm extremely picky about PC fan noise , as many of you know. In an effort to quiet my PC (Athlon XP 1800+) I'm making a few modifications:

• Moving the machine into a new case - the Antec SLK3700 . This case can take two 120mm fans (bigger fans tend to produce less noise), has a rubber grommet mounting system for hard drives (reduces vibrations), and has a front door (reduces optical drive noise).
• Replacing the stock CPU heatsink with a Thermalright SLK-800U . This massive heatsink can take an 80mm fan. I'll use a Panaflo fan.
• Removing the northbridge chipset fan and replacing it with a heatsink .

Future modifications could include a quiet power supply, video card heatpipe cooler , and use of Fan Mates . We'll see how happy I am with the noise level after the first round of upgrades.

Sunset

p. Cringely has an interesting column about the dire straights that Sun Microsystems is in: bq. Even Java is becoming superfluous. Java is the Dan Marino of software. Just as the former Dolphins quarterback, Java affected the world so much that history cannot be written without its mention. But nonetheless, neither Java nor Dan ever won the big one. p. I wish Sun would stop suing Microsoft and instead use that money to encourage developers to produce killer Java apps. DVArchive , a Java Swing app, just released a new version. On message boards, end users were asking where to go to download the JRE. That's the kind of support Sun needs. Forcing MS to bundle Java with Windows is a waste of time if there are no Java apps that people want to run. It's all about the apps - if you build it, they will come.

Google buys Blogger

Google bought Pyra , the company behind Blogger.

Ben Hammersley sums things up nicely:

Google lives or dies on fresh links - and processing the million or so weblogs will give them an awful lot of fresh links a day. No matter where you host your Blogger based blog, the posting will still go through a machine on Google's network: it'd be easy peasy to scrap each posting for URLs and add them to the spider-now list. Not every link, perhaps, but if a certain number of bloggers link to the same thing in a certain time, Google grabs it. It's a distributed early warning system for Google's spiders. One million zeitgeist monitors just signed on to Google's staff. A bargain for them, whatever the cost.

Read the rest of his post here .

(Thanks to NSLog for finding this quote.)

esr

Eric Raymond gave a talk at work yesterday. He was an excellent speaker - informative, entertaining, and unassuming.

One of his points was that the factory model of software is a delusion (sorry, Metrowerks). Eric's argument drew on the concepts of use value and sale value. The use value of software is its value as a tool which allows you to accomplish some task. The sale value is the value of software as something which can be sold to others (e.g. at a retail store). Most people assume that sale value is proportional to use value. According to Eric, this is not true.

Consider the following: RandomProduct sells at CompUSA for $200 on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the producer of RandomProduct discontinues the product. On Thursday, RandomProduct is in the discount bin at CompUSA for $10, even though the product still has the same usefulness as it did two days ago. Eric claimed that this is because the price a consumer is willing to pay for software is determined by the "expected future value of vendor service". Thus, the software industry is a service industry. Eric went on to explain how software publishers screw consumers when they operate under the false presumption that they are in a manufacturing industry. For example, you want to have your best people doing the things that make you money. In a manufacturing model, this means having your best people pump out code like there's no tomorrow, while those who can't cut it get sent of to man the support desk. Hence, the crappy support prevalent in the software industry.

Although I'm inclined to agree with Eric's argument, I still have some doubts. It seems as if the same argument could be applied to just about any product, thereby making every industry a service industry. Still, he only had an hour or so to speak, and this was just one of many topics covered, so I'll give him a chance. I just ordered a printed copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar from buy.com (yes, it's all available on his website, but I hate reading from a monitor).