Life is a State of Mind : ideas, thoughts, rants

Apple iPad canvas thoughts

OK, I confess I was wrong about the Apple iPad canvas. I thought it would be a laptop and netbook replacement only for the non-technical majority… internet and content consumers. I figured it would be a very sleek and sexy design, I anticipated that people would want them, and I figured out that once the hype and launch dust settled it would be a vastly successful device filling the niche market where the best candidates would be those who never needed to type much more than occasional blog comments, URLs, and passwords; and those who are developing applications and content for them. I figured it would be an awesome display device for professional presenters provided they had a tech-geek supporting them on a full sized computer back at the home office and supplying the canned presentations over the cloud.

I was wrong. It is sleek and sexy. People do want it. But I was wrong to assume it would be difficult to input data/content on the device… oh boy was I wrong. This device not only has an optional docking station keyboard, but it can be paired with a bluetooth keyboard. It comes with Pages; which means writers can use this as a portable writing and geeks can code on it with a full sized keyboard… this is (unexpectedly for me) a netbook killer!

I can’t cost justify one myself, as I have a MacBook Air already, but if I were in the market for a netbook or Air – this iPad canvas would be a serious contender. I still hate the name and think Gruber is right and it should have been the Apple Canvas.

Personal Computing History

My first computer experiences where through printer/terminals to mainframe computers. A Multics system at Rome Labs that we got access to as members of the local Explorer Post; and a DEC-10 running TOPS-20 at Syracuse University. The common language on both was UCI Common LISP 2.0 – and LISP may have permanently warped my programming brain.

It was years before I had a personal computer; though others had TI-99/4A, Coleco Adam, Apple II, Atari 400, and Commodore 64 machines. I even dabbled extensively with a friend’s TI and another’s Commodore – but neither could afford even the tape drives… so all programs had to be keyed in each time we powered the machine on; and BASIC is pure crap compared to LISP – so I was frustrated in the extreme… One of the more interesting was a DEC Rainbow 100 that could boot either MS-DOS or CPM and had several programming languages. David, the friend with the DEC, even had a floppy drive! So I refused to buy my own computer long after I could afford one until one effectively simulated the mainframe time-sharing servers I was used to.

I contemplated one of the first 386 machines in 1986/1987… BYTE magazine built it up with so much hype… but the OS still sucked. I ended up buying myself an Amiga 500 after playing with a friend’s Amiga 1000 extensively and discovering the first personal computer with preemptive multi-tasking. The filesystem security sucked, and there was no concept of protected memory nor different users; but I could run multiple programs and effectively communicate between then with an RPC stack entirely written in C – and that was amazing at the time. Later the RPC calls got replaced with A-Rexx for inter-process communication (same language as Rexx on IBM mainframes). Games were plentiful for the Amiga, but TCP/IP networking and ethernet were very expensive; so it was years before I was able to do client/server coding over anything other than SLIP lines. I continued to use my Amiga (500 became a 3000 then a 3000T with ethernet card and 1/4″ tape backups) daily for nearly all tasks until Mac OS X was stable with 10.1.

With the advent of OS X, my PowerMac Cube (which I’d owned and not really touched for a year) suddenly became very useful with preemptive multitasking, MACH micro-kernal, BSD based OS and UNIX command line.

Perhaps I am too stubborn, and should not have held out for the Amiga… I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d owned an Apple II or C64 with a floppy drive and learned more programming languages earlier. Like Sandro, I have a soft-spot for underdog/alternative systems. I was spoiled with multi-tasking, multiple sprites, rich multi-media graphics and sound; but only after getting a solid text only server core. Standards compliance remains very important to me so that the kind of computer does not matter.

This post was inspired by Sandro‘s story about his TI-99/4A. Thanks Sandro! I am also slowly cleaning out my computer storage room/lab and re-conditioning some old machines or recycling the stuff that is not useful anymore.

Media Bias or Propaganda?

Criticism does not equal threats, violence, and vandalism. When liberals were pissed about the theft of the 2000 election and the following 8 corrupt years, we criticized.

Tea Party threats, violence, and vandalism is NOT the same thing and the media shows it’s clear right wing bias by portraying it as “violence on both sides” or “public reaction to health care reform” – it’s neither, we all know it’s neither, and propaganda needs to be called out for what it is.

2010 03 26 snolan News
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Vintage Ruby iMac G3/400 repair project

I have a niece who has inherited an old Ruby iMac G3/400 (new in the Summer of 2000) with a broken handle and CD-ROM only (rather than the preferred DVD-ROM).

Lowendmac and Everymac have been very helpful in guiding me through the how to cheaply max out the capabilities of this old machine. I do not want to through much money at it, as the entire machine is not worth much; but I would like to give my niece the nicest, newest machine experience she can get for the very low budget. It only has to last a couple years, when she goes to college she’ll get a shiny new MacBook.

If you have any slot-loading iMac G3 machines collecting dust, I’d love to talk to you about recycling:

a handle, this one is broken. the handle screws into the top rear plastic case
a DVD drive, to replace the CD inside this one
a quiet, ATA5 hard drive of between 10 and 120 GB (there is no point putting a larger drive in this old machine, and the 60GB I have is really noisy

I looted a pair of 512MB PC100 memory sticks from my old cube (which I eventually need to replace). That brings her machine to 1GB.

I looted an old 60GB Maxtor drive – but am considering dropping back to the original 10GB Quantum Fireball as it was much quieter… looking for a quiet 30-80GB drive if one is really cheap.

I upgraded classic OS to 9.2.2 and used that to upgrade firmware. With new firmware this machine can load 10.4.11 or 10.3.9 just fine – so I am working on that .

I’d be willing to buy a complete Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Retail Boxed Set if you have one… I cannot find mine (which is really frustrating).

Update: eBay to the rescue; several auctions later (some won, some lost) – I’ve managed to replace the internal CD-ROM with a DVD-ROM drive; upgraded the memory to 1GB; replaced the 10GB drive with a silent 80GB Hitachi 180GXP drive; and I allegedly have a replacement handle on the way.

I’ve installed Mac OS 10.4.11 with 9.2.2 for classic games and apps, MS Office 2004 student edition, several old games, a few TV shows, some music, and iLife ’05 for iPhoto and iTunes (’06 requires a G4, GarageBand and iMovieHD require 600MHz or better). The G3/400 is pretty slow compared to what I’ve become accustomed to, but it can read and write Word/PowerPoint/Excel for school work and she can watch DVDs on it with a headset and manage her iPod through iTunes 8.2.1 (the most recent version for a PowerPC G3). This should tide her over until she is in college and gets a modern MacBook.

2010 03 09 snolan Computers
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AppleTV update 3.0.2 and XBMC, Boxee, ssh

A few days ago I noticed that Apple had released update 3.0.2 for AppleTV and I managed to get in front of the new update. I upgraded my AppleTV to v3.0.2 (which wiped my XBMC, Boxee, and ssh hacks as usual). So I downloaded the 3.0.2 update image directly to my laptop:

http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-7495.20100210.TAVfr/2Z694-6013-013.dmg

I snagged the latest ATVUSB-Creator (recently upgraded to v1.0b13) and installed it on my laptop:

http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

I plugged in my 1GB USB memory stuck (which has the old patchstick software, but that will be erased).
I ran df -h in a Terminal window to figure out the disk path, on my laptop, that is “/dev/disk2” – but it varies so check carefully.

I ran the ATVUSB-Creator software, made sure it was set to create an ATV-Patchstick and that ssh-tools was checked (which also gives you bin utils, Software Menu, and XBMC/Boxee for Mac). It is critical to Choose a DMG and find and select the 2Z694-6013-013.dmg downloaded earlier. It is also critical to select the correct USB device, in my case /dev/disk2 to match my USB patch stick.

I unplugged my AppleTV, inserted my new USB patch stick, and plugged the AppleTV back in. That booted a little tuxedo penguin and ran the install scripts that install ssh, XBMC, Launcher, Software Menu, and Boxee. This does not remove your media files (which concerned me).

Once the install script is finished, I unplugged the AppleTV and removed the USB patch stick, plugged the AppleTV back in and waited about 3 minutes for it to boot.

I reset Networking Settings to use Ethernet and static IP settings (it comes back after the Apple update with DHCP settings). I made sure the AppleTV settings were all still good.

I used Launcher/Downloads to:

upgrade to Launcher 3.2.4, unless it is already at 3.2.4 – check with About
upgrade to Boxee 0.9.20.10708
upgrade to XBMC 9.11, this took a few times to work successfully

Restart AppleTV, test Boxee and XBMC functionality.

2010 02 24 snolan Computers
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Yahoo Spam

So, like everyone else, I have been getting a lot of SPAM emails and malicious web link emails allegedly from friends who are users of Yahoo’s free email service.

It turns out that the email is not from those friends (of course), and their Windows PCs are probably not infected with a virus as most of us originally assumed. It appears that the spammers have figured out a way to reliably hack into two parts of Yahoo’s free email service:

they are or were at one time able to harvest the contacts stored on the Yahoo service for each Yahoo email member and they can continue using those harvested contacts
they have figured out how to inject SPAM into Yahoo’s mail relays and get Yahoo to send the mail to the targeted lists pulled from stored contact list and forge the FROM and REPLY TO headers to be that of the Yahoo email user

This creates a hole that SPAM can come through all my own filters because it appears to be from a legitimate friend on Yahoo’s email service.

Yahoo as a mail service provider needs to be spanked by their customers and by all the businesses who also run large mail spools and who have more SPAM than usual to deal with since the end of January. I suspect that is being done already by Yahoo customers and business partners. Yahoo needs to close BOTH security holes.

I am more interested in what can be done by Yahoo users of the free service to mitigate the problem while Yahoo drags it’s feet fixing the security holes.

If you have ever had a free Yahoo account, please do the following as a courtesy to your own friends:

Sign into your yahoo email account, copy all of your contacts that are stored on the Yahoo service to some other place (your PC, a notepad, or the fridge door)
Then carefully delete every contact stored on the Yahoo service.

This means Yahoo email users will need to use a contact list (address book) stored local to their laptop or on a notepad rather than Yahoo’s service provided contact list… sorry.

That will prevent future target lists of your friends being assembled. Sadly there is nothing you can do if the spammers are storing their own list of targets and trusted senders like you; but at least they cannot harvest new ones.

Gradually this will fix itself, but in the short term expect problems with Yahoo’s mail service and Yahoo mail to get less usable for a while as other companies reject all Yahoo mail (an inappropriate over-reaction).

2010 02 23 snolan Computer Security
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Expanding Mac Mini Disk through iSCSI and big cheap drives

We use a Mac Mini with OS X 10.5 to serve our whole house with music, movies, television shows, and photographs. The Mini is perpetually out of disk space because it only has room for one 2.5″ internal hard drive (two if you remove the optical drive) and those notebook hard drives have smaller capacities, are slower, and cost a lot more than big capacity 3.5″ drives.

I also wanted to practice by Linux server skills, Xen virtualization skills, and use a server placed in our basement to house several big drives and serve it’s storage up to the Mini over the network. My initial plan was to use NFS and simply serve the big disks up over the network to the Mini (and other systems) using the nearly ubiquitous NFS protocol (NFS is available on all OS X, Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems). A friend recently challenged me to learn to do this with iSCSI instead and enjoy better performance as well as learning some small SAN technology.

Details for Geeks below the fold…

2010 02 22 snolan Computers
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Sad but True

Does it seem right to you that honest consumers who buy or legally rent DVDs are forced to wait for several minutes while clicking next through crappy advertisements and annoying FBI warnings before they can actually watch a movie they paid for while pirates simply get to watch the movie?

Perhaps one should pirate all their own movies that they legally bought so they can simply watch the damned things… Or perhaps we should boycott everything the companies that produce these DVD-CCA discs with the unskippable flags set all over the place.

pirates enjoy watching movies, honest consumers are forced to click through several minutes of crap advertising and FBI anti-piracy warnings before being able to watch a movie

BoingBoing is the source for the infographic and an article with more details.

2010 02 19 snolan Movies Comments (2) Permalink

Snow cleared again

I noticed that it had stopped snowing at 3:00pm, and decided to clear the snow from the driveway, fire escape paths, hot tub, and front steps. Either I am getting really good at this or there was less snow, because despite the howling wind (which continues to this moment) I was able to clear everything in a moment less than 90 minutes…

It is important to layer, that wind really bites through a single layer of anything. We are getting gusts to 50 knots pretty regularly by my estimate; and the stream from the snow-blower had to be directed down wind or it hurt.

I suspect the Apple store in Tysons Mall is closed, no one is answering the phone, so I cancelled the free Aperture class I had signed up for last week. Time for a caramel latte and more cat petting.

2010 02 10 snolan Local
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A new danger to be mindful of

Where I finished school we were all used to keeping an eye out for icicles forming on second story roof lines; and we knew to occasionally open a window and knock them down over an empty sidewalk so they did not fall when people were on the sidewalk.

In the greater Washington area I am concerned that not enough people know what a danger these pretty water based stalactites can be… that 3′ long icicle hanging from the second story roofline or gutter might weigh in at 40 pounds, has a sharp end, and can fall suddenly without warning. So brush them aside when the area is clear below, and be wary of them.

2010 02 10 snolan Local Comments (0) Permalink

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