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Virginia Primary June 9th

The state of Virginia has it’s statewide general election on November 3rd, 2009; it’s an opportunity to select our next Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Delegates to every house seat in the state, and roughly 1/3rd the state senators. Most localities also hold their county and city elections at the same time. Aside from the US National elections, this is the most important election in Virginia’s four year election cycle.

The primary elections for the Democratic and Republican parties will be on June 9th, 2009; and this could well be the most important primary in state elections in many years. We have a three way race to chose a Democratic candidate for Governor, and a four way race to chose a Democratic candidate for Lt Governor.

Governor:

    Democratic Candidates:

Republican Candidate:

Lt Governor:

    Democratic Candidates:

Republican Candidates:

Attorney General:

    Democratic Candidate:

Republican Candidates:

State Senators and State Delegates, there are far too many for me to list here, but start figuring out who is running in your district please. Kenton Ngo has begun the job of ranking the House of Delegates races, you can check out his House Race Rankings post on the NewDominionProject.

The filing deadline for primary election candidates is April 10th, so this list will probably change a little!

You must be registered to vote by May 11th to vote in this June 9th Primary.

In 2011 the General Assembly will redraw district boundaries based on the results of the 2010 U.S. Census; the balance in the assembly at that time will be critical for determining how gerrymandered our districts will be for the next decade. Start figuring out who you want in office now, for Reapportionment is a big deal impacting U.S. National elections as well as our state-wide local races.

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Lots of technology news today

As expected, Apple had their iPhone SDK event today where they announced version 3.0 for iPhone and iPod touches is coming this Summer (developers can get the beta SDK today). It will cost $9.95 for iPod touch owners, and it’s free for iPhone owners (probably subsidized by the subscription revenue from your phone plan).

It great news is that the new iPhone OS will finally have several features it should already have:

  • finally support cut and paste both within an application and between applications
  • finally support synchronizing notes between the iPhone and a Mac desktop via iTunes (probably PC too)
  • finally support search, globally through the core applications (Mail/Notes/iPod/Calendar) using spotlight

There are also some pleasant surprises:

  • CalDAV support for any CalDAV server, not just MobileMe; could be useful for some SOHO operations with shared calendars
  • stereo bluetooth; very useful for ballroom dancers, one partner wears iPod/iPhone and wired headset, 2nd partner wears bluetooth headset and both can dance to music and ignore the other music sharing the studio floor
  • landscape keyboard now available in all main applications, was already in Safari, it will be nice having it in email, notes, etc; this is a big deal for those of us with big fat fingers
  • support for MMS messages, I think this lets you “text” a photo directly to someone’s phone (that also supports MMS), or a voicemail, or a sound file

Update: Wow – how could I have missed the addition of peer to peer connectivity via Bluetooth!? Potential for security lapse here, but also potential for lots of new applications. Very interesting.

I am sad that there is no apparent change on the “please allow my Apple bluetooth keyboard to work with my Apple iPhone” front; not sure why this would continue to be blocked.

I am unsurprised there is still no Flash and no tethering; for Flash is a security nightmare, and I am glad we don’t allow flash on the iPhone; and tethering is a problem with the carriers (AT&T and others) who want to collect more money for tethering because they are greedy bastards and don’t understand that data is data regardless of wether it lives on your phone or your TV or your tethered laptop.


In other news, Cisco (the networking company) is getting into the server blade and server blade chassis business with their new device. I am very glad there will be more competition in this space as Sun, HP, and IBM have been a little stuck in the mud lately. A healthy competitor could shake things up a little and encourage them to think more efficiently. InfoWeek story on the Cisco announcement has the details, but it looks like you can do up to 4 full length or 8 half length blades in a chassis.


The really big news to me is that an Australian company is making ultra low power server blades using Atom 330 servers (at less than 30 watts each blade)! Check out the DreamMicro Atom Fanless Blade x10 NetServer if your company is interested in super low power server gear. Throw Xen and your favorite 64 bit Linux distro on these blades and you’ll have some pretty sweet servers!

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Rasmus.com auction of Ruckus gear is almost over

I am stunned at some of the prices a few of these old pieces of gear are fetching…

$700+ for old dual G5 XServes!?
$1000 for old Dell Poweredge servers!?
nearly $500 each for Dell Latitude D630 laptops!?

On the other hand, $851 for a Sun V440 with four processors and 16GB of memory is a steal – retail for that is over $20,000!!!

In fact, all the Sun V210, V240, V440 gear is vastly underpriced.

Only minutes remain!

rasmus.com

Marketing Fail!

Doh! Apparently, every Intel based Mac since early 2006 has had a new feature that Apple has completely failed to market. I have owned a few of these Macs and never knew about this feature, and others have probably skipped Apple products not knowing it was available.

The feature I am referring to is the “combined optical digital audio output / headphone out” that shows up on MacBooks, MacBook Pros, Intel based Mac Minis, and Intel based iMacs that are made after early 2006. This little tiny port works fine as a headphones jack (which we all expected) and works well to put analog stereo output into a stereo system via a little splitter/adaptor cable available at any electronics store. What I failed to notice was that the same tiny little port can also be used with a $3 adaptor and an optical TOSLINK cable to output digital 5.1 channel sound to any amp/receiver with a TOSLINK input on the back!

Surround sound out of nearly every Mac made since 2006?! Cool. I thought it was only on the Mac Pro models (which come with full sized TOSLINK ports on the back, and did even in the PowerMac G5 days).

The forehead smacking continues while I order either an adaptor or an adapting cable:
Amazon has several options at adaptors, or adapting cables

This will enable my Mac Mini to deliver 5.1 surround sound to my receiver, and since there are DVI to HDMI adaptors, I can also display high definition video to the big screen.

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Apple has an event next Tuesday (17th)

Looks like it is some sort of announcement/preview of a new iPhone SDK or perhaps a new iPhone OS upgrade/update.

I gotta say, if they are considering releasing a new major revision (iPhone OS 3.0) without global search, cut and paste, the ability to synchronize notes between iPhone and Mac desktop; they need to delay.

Network tethering (allowing a connected laptop to use the AT&T dataplan for mobile networking) is important too, but that can be a separate application pretty easily.

My very, very old Palm devices all have global search, cut & paste, and the ability to synchronize text notes between desktop and PDA. Nearly every smart phone can do these things… it is shameful that this otherwise amazing ultra-portable computing platform we call the iPhone cannot do these basic things.

Yes, I have installed PhoneView (commercial application) to sync my notes between Mac and iPhone (and it works pretty well). Yes there is a hack that lets cut & paste work in a few applications; but these are essential to any PDA and should be part of the platform and universally implemented. The absence of global search is downright crippling; it means I can only afford to put so few notes on my phone that I know exactly where to find them. It also means that I continue to carry my Palm Tungsten C.

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New Honda Insight looks like a Prius, costs less

In about two weeks dealers will begin getting model year 2010 Honda Insight hybrid cars. This will be a completely renovated Honda Insight that looks a lot more like a Prius than the old Insight; and it will cost less than $20,000 brand new!

LA Times Article, with pictures

I originally wanted an Insight, but I wanted it to be four passenger and four door; it was not… now it is.
Since I own a reasonably new Prius, I am not in the market now, but new car shoppers might want to compare this new model to Prius and/or Civic hybrid choices.

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Wow, this is quite stunning


World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

The old Ruckus gear is on auction now

Rasmus.com is the official auctioneer and reseller of all the old Server, laptop, and desktop gear I was talking about – now they own it all.

http://rasmuscatalog.com/cgi-bin/mnlist.cgi?rasmus324/category/ALL

I have no idea what this stuff will finally go for – but it’s sad to see it all online.

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Wow, new Mac Mini is much better

The new Apple Mac Mini is much better than previous models. It’s improvements are subtle, and anyone making a quick glance might miss the changes, but here is a summary:

  • The switch from embedded Intel graphics to NVIDIA GeForce 9400M is a huge energy savings; the new Mini uses only half the power of the old one, and gets much better graphics performance as a bonus. It also has two display connections out of the box; which is a big bonus for people wanting small nettop servers and desktops.
  • Maximum memory configuration is now 4GB using 1066MHz DDR3 sticks; that is a big boost where it is needed for small servers.
  • Firewire 800 port means that you can externalize your storage to your favorite high speed RAID array or even just a bunch of really cheap, really large capacity drives; but you get the fastest speeds available via the Firewire 800 bus.
  • With both Mini DisplayPort and Mini-DVI video out, and “Combined optical digital audio output/headphone out” this should be an excellent contender for a media center if you can convert the A/V outputs to HDMI or Component Video and Digital Audio out for an amplifier.

The entire new Mac desktop line includes NVIDIA graphics for lower power consumption and better graphics. Nice.

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15″ MacBook Pro for sale

Erci has a 15″ MacBook Pro with 2.16GHz Intel Core2 Duo, 2GB memory (2 sticks of 1GB DDR2 memory at 667MHz), ATI Radeon X1600 graphics (128MB VRAM), 112GB SATA drive, and Mac OS X 10.5 cleanly installed. Her machine is pretty mint, having never really traveled outside the family room.

She’d love to hear from you if you are interested in buying this sweet machine.

Update: It has been sold.

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