Damn you Steve Jobs

I’m weak…I admit it. I have a habit of kneejerk, gratuitous electronics purchases. So it’s with great shame and no real surprise that I admit tonight that I bought an Apple iPhone. Chalk up another $400 out of my pocket to fund the shareholders (you’re welcome).

Now that I’m over hating myself for caving into the pressure induced by the $200 price drop, I have to say that this is the finest handheld computing device I’ve ever owned. Better than any cell phone I’ve owned, my Zaurus and my Palm Pilot. The browser is better than any other mobile browser…mostly because it’s not a mobile browser. Really, the iPhone already won out over every other handheld I’ve owned simply because of the browser. That it’s also a phone, a music player, a portable organizer (I love having my iCal Calendar in my hand) and more is just icing on the cake.

Oh, and did I mention that the mail client is vastly superior to the WAP webmail (Yahoo!’s) I’ve been using? So much better and I can sleep at night knowing that I built and designed some of the technology that makes Yahoo! Mail on the iPhone possible.

Does it have 3G? No, but the 3G phone I own is a paperweight because the 3G isn’t that great when it’s tied to a shitty browsing experience. Additionally, my 3G data plan cost more than the iPhone data plan…so I’m actually saving money by switching phones (I’m going to keep telling myself that over and over again).

Does it have a physical keyboard? No, and thank god…my Samsung Blackjack has one and it’s awful. It was built for baby fingers, not the sausages I’ve got attached to my hands. And the larger screen afforded by all that saved space is fucking beautiful. Even with my fingerprints all over the glass screen, it’s so damn bright that I can’t even tell that I’ve got a CSI’s wet dream going on.

Perhaps best of all, it has to some extent cured my boredom. I’ll elaborate in a later post, but suffice it to say I’ve been hacking up a storm for a good portion of the day.

Damn you Steve Jobs…why must your products work so well?

Live Free or Die Hard

We gathered up the posse and hit the town last night for dinner and a movie. We had a few choices, but we were all unanimous in wanting to see Live Free or Die Hard. I’ve always loved the Die Hard series. Bruce Willis was basically born for the part of John McClane. The role suits him so well, you wonder if the writers didn’t adapt the character to Bruce rather than have Bruce adapt to the character.

As is proper with any Die Hard, there’s a ton of action, great lines, lots of McClane getting his ass whooped (but certainly dealing more than he takes) and plenty of broken glass (“shoot…the glass”). Plenty of stuff is destroyed, either through car crashes, explosions or aircraft “malfunctions” (I’m not sure a flying car should necessarily be considered a malfunction, but I’ll give the pilot the benefit of the doubt).

Justin Long (aka “Mac” in the Apple commercials and “Justin” in Dodgeball) does a nice job sidekicking McClane as a computer nerd. He provides a nice comedic balance without seeming like he’s just there to be in the way. I liked him in Dodgeball too, so I’m not surprised that I liked him in this movie as well.

Timothy Olyphant (not to be confused with Oliphaunt from Lord of the Rings) played the arch villain Thomas Gabriel. I certainly can’t say that he’s the best Die Hard villain, but then again he’s up against the likes of Alan Rickman (Hans Gruber…one of the best villains ever) and Jeremy Irons (Simon). He just doesn’t quite seem ruthless enough after all the crap McClane’s put up with in the past movies. Sure he makes a good effort at killing McClane with henchmen and his l33t computer hacking skills, but I did expect a slightly stronger villain. McClane does, after all, kill Gabriels woman in rather spectacular fashion and then proceeds to smack talk Gabriel for a good bit of the movie about how he killed her. There really is nothing quite like having a kill rubbed in your face by John McClane.

Overall I really enjoyed the movie. I think it’s the best Die Hard since the first one, although I think Die Hard With A Vengeance is close behind, mostly on the merits of the surrounding cast (the previously mentioned Jeremy Irons and, of course, Samuel L. Jackson). Through some sort of tragedy, I don’t think I have any of the first three Die Hard movies on DVD. Maybe I was waiting for the fourth one to come out on DVD in a quad pack with the first three.

The little hand says it's time to rock and roll

I took Lisa to see Hot Fuzz this weekend. It just opened here in the US on Friday, but it released in the UK at least a month ago (lucky Brits), so I’ve been waiting for a while to see it.

Hot Fuzz is brought to you by the same guys who did Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. If you liked Shaun of the Dead, you’re probably going to like Hot Fuzz. Subtle humor and awesome, over the top action sequences once again flow throughout the movie. Like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz starts out slowly, building the story and the characters. Some people may think it’s too slow, but I really enjoy these parts of both movies.

As if Pegg and Frost weren’t already going to make this movie absolutely amazing, Timothy Dalton plays Simon Skinner, a local store owner and all around deviant bad guy (if you can’t figure out that he’s a bad guy early on, check your spider sense). The only other cast member I recognized is Bill Nighy, who played Shaun’s step-dad in Shaun of the Dead. He’s now playing a London police inspector. His appearances are brief, but memorable.

There are a few homages paid to the modern american cop films, namely Point Break and Bad Boys II. I was hoping to get a little John McClain action (ala Die Hard) as well, but sadly there was no “yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” moment in the movie.

One Man Star Wars

Lisa and I caught One Man Star Wars at the Post Street Theatre up in San Francisco the other weekend. I vaguely remember seeing a video clip of the performance a year or more ago, but seeing it in person is totally different.

Charles “one man” Ross runs through Episodes 4-6 in about an hour, blazing through each one in 20 minutes. I was expecting a longer show, but he condenses the script considerably. It doesn’t hurt that he talks incredibly fast as well. True to the name of the show, Charles is the only person on the stage. He has no props, unless you include Charles himself. He makes do with personal sound effects and his four appendages. Try to imagine a five year old acting out Star Wars for the family. It’s kind of like that, complete with the *pee-ow* *pee-ow* of laser blasters and the *wom* *wom* of a lightsaber (or however you spell them). He does an amazing Jabba the Hutt, too. He pays extra attention to the well known lines and scenes from the movies, which is awesome.

After his show he mentioned that he was heading out of the country for some shows but that he’d be back in the Bay Area soon (April, I think). If you get a chance, I totally recommend seeing his show. One word of advice, however. If you’re not very familiar with the plot lines from the movies, you should take a refresher course. Lisa got lost a few times, mostly because Charles was just running around on stage acting out space fights with things blowing up. You really have to remember how those space fights go to figure out that he’s not having a seizure, he’s just acting.

Google Reader – Review

I was going to hold off doing this for a little longer, but I decided now is as good a time as any. I’ve had a lot of problems with Bloglines in the past. It’s been okay, but far from perfect. Anyway, I decided to circle back around and give Google Reader another try. I know, I know…I work for Yahoo!. The fact of the matter is, if Yahoo! had an aggregator worthy of my time, I’d use it. And yes, I realize there’s an aggregator in the product I work on. I’ll leave it at that.

I tried Google Reader a while back and I really didn’t like it. What made me try it again was a comment from someone on the Reader team to one of my earlier posts about drinking from the RSS firehose. The stats looked compelling, so I gave it a go. I exported my OPML from Bloglines and imported it into Google Reader. So far, so good.

I’ve decided I’m a fan of the “stream” model of reading feeds. Google mixes my feeds, displaying them to me in what appears to be chronological order with the latest items coming first. This is nice because I always start with the freshest content. If I begin to fall behind in keeping up with my feeds, at least I’m keeping up with what’s topical.

The keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader are also really good. Not only are they easy to use, but it’s very infrequent that the focus gets screwed up so badly that the shortcuts don’t work. In other apps I’ve used that make heavy use of shortcuts, I often find that it’s easy to have the focus lost so the keyboard shortcuts no longer work until you reestablish focus properly.

The sharing aspect is also nice. You get a sort of a linkblog where you can share interesting feed items. This is a neat way of sharing cool stuff you find with friends and coworkers. I’m always passing around links in IM and email, this is much better. I could bookmark it in del.icio.us or something, but I really like keeping these links separate.

So by now you’re probably thinking, “hey, Google Reader sounds awesome.” This is the part where I totally burst your bubble. I have a couple of issues with Google Reader:

1. It’s a hog. I’ve paired down checking my feeds to once or twice a day. That means I have potentially hundreds of feed items waiting for me. Google Reader does a sort of progressive loading in the reading frame. It loads the first X items for you to read. When you get to the bottom of the list, it appends another X entries and you keep scrolling. Over time, the number of entries can get to be quite large. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with why Reader is such a hog, but I’ve noticed when that frame starts getting really long that: a) my laptop fans start spinning much faster and louder, b) jumping from one item to the next sometimes hangs for seconds and c) tab switching in Firefox slows down considerably.
2. When I’m on a feed item, I sometimes decide right on the spot that I don’t like that feed anymore. In Bloglines, there’s a link at the top that will let me unsubscribe. In Google Reader, there’s no way to unsubscribe when you’re looking at the item. Instead, I have to click the “Manage Subscriptions” link and locate the feed I’m on so I can unsubscribe. I’m subscribed to over 200 feeds. Finding that feed isn’t easy. If it’s a search feed it might be near impossible. Just let me unsubscribe right there on the spot.
3. Here’s one I only realized tonight and it’s probably the one that offends me the most. When you’re viewing a feed item, you can use the “v” shortcut to open the original page of the feed item in another window/tab. This is useful for feeds that aren’t full-text or feeds like Ze Frank’s that point to a movie. This is a really useful feature. However…if you have a popup blocker you’re going to run into a problem. In my case, the Firefox popup blocker tells me that it stopped a popup. I say, “that’s okay” because I actually want this popup. So I allow it. Mother of god…what have I done? Google Reader is hosted off of www.google.com. If you want to allow popups for Google Reader, you end up ultimately allowing popups for all pages on www.google.com. Duh-umb.
4. The stats are okay, but I feel they could be more useful.
   • The percentage read stat is pretty much useless to me. They should really call it percentage seen. I scan the titles of posts and decide if I’m going to actually read them or not. Scanning the title is enough for Google to say you’ve read it. So Google’s percent read doesn’t really mean anything to me. At the end of the day, my percent read is 100%.
   • The frequently updated stat is also useless. They sort it by most frequently updated to least frequently updated and then only show you the top 10-40 entries. I’d like to see the least frequently updated, that would tell me which blogs aren’t publishing much of anything, which may be a sure sign it’s time to unsubscribe. There is a last updated report, which lets you see the list of the 10-40 most stale feeds…but that’s not quite the same.
   • What I’d really like to see is some breakdown of the least read and least interesting feeds. If I’m not reading the feed items (just scanning the titles and skipping the bodies), I want to ditch the feed. Likewise, if I am reading the feed items but haven’t found many (or any) that are interesting, I also want to ditch the feed. The stats are obviously in the Google system, they just need to surface them.

So what’s the verdict? Well…it’s better than Bloglines. I actually mostly like it. It fits with how I like to enjoy my feeds. If they could work on making the stats more useful and also take care of the usability issues involved in unsubscribing from a feed, it would be much better. Then, if they could make it less of a hog, it would make my computer so much happier. I’ll probably continue using it over Bloglines at this point.

Remote Desktop on an Intel Mac

If you’re like me, you sometimes need to return to your Windows PC to do something. In my case, I prefer not having to monkey around with a KVM switch, so I like using remote redisplay whenever possible. When I was still using a PC, I’d use the built-in Microsoft Remote Desktop client to access my other machines. Now that I’m on a Mac, I’ve been trying to find something similar.

So, doing a search, I found out that Microsoft actually builds an RDP client for MacOS. Unfortunately for Intel Mac users, it’s not a Universal Binary. I gave it a try under Rosetta and it was just awful. It was so slow, I’d click on the “Start” button and wait for upwards of 10 seconds before seeing any response. It was so awful I decided to give VNC a try. VNC was equally bad. I’m not sure if I was using a bad client, a bad server or both. But it was just as slow and unresponsive as the PowerPC RDP binary.

As a last resort, I turned to rdesktop. I’ve used it once or twice before from my BSD machine, but I’d never seriously given it a chance. I noticed that Fink happens to have distributions of rdesktop, so I downloaded Fink and fired away. You’ll have to add the test branch to your Fink setup. It doesn’t appear that rdesktop has made it into stable yet. There also doesn’t appear to be a binary distribution available for it yet, so you’re going to have to install from source instead. If you haven’t already installed software using Fink, that could take a while as you build all of the dependencies as well (anybody know if there’s a way to tell Fink, “install binaries for whatever you have, otherwise install from source”?).

I initially ran using the Xorg X11 distribution available through Fink. I was thoroughly unimpressed with it’s window management, so I’ve since removed that and installed the Apple X11 that comes with the OS installation CDs. It just feels better. Using Xorg felt like I was grinding gears all the time.

Using rdesktop over a tunneled SSH connection is great. Feels just as responsive as any time I’ve used the Windows client on a PC. My only difficulty with it is making sure I remember which keys on the Mac keyboard map to which keys on a PC keyboard.

As an aside, while Fink isn’t perfect, it is nice being able to use common UNIX utilities on my Mac (ones that aren’t already provided by MacOS, I should say). Recently I’ve also gotten ethereal and kcachegrind from Fink, both of which work like a charm.

Update: According to, well, everybody in my comments…it’s just me. Lots of people are reporting that the MS client runs great on their dual core MacBook Pros. I wonder why it sucked so much for me. Maybe I caught the corporate wireless on a bad day. Or maybe I caught the SSH servers on a bad day. Who knows. Regardless, rdesktop is working great for me.

The ISP dilemma

So I’ve been having issues with my Speakeasy DSL lately. It started on Thursday night and has been continuing since. I called them late Thursday night and they contacted Covad to run some tests. Covad confirmed a loop problem and put in a call to the telephone company. The telephone company told them they’d send someone to take care of it and that they’d have it taken care of by 10am Tuesday. Let’s ponder that more closely. Problem reported late Thursday night, should be fixed by Tuesday morning. Yeah, uh…I don’t think so.

I’ve had enough problems with DSL connectivity in my house, I can’t take anymore. Not for the $100/month I pay for it. So I did what any insane person would do, I picked up the phone and shamefully called Comcast. Yes, that Comcast. The same Comcast that had service so bad they drove me to Speakeasy in the first place. However, unlike Speakeasy, my Comcast connection never dropped when the garbage truck rolled by (I’m serious, it happens).

Now’s when the story turns sad…very sad. I went to Best Buy last night and bought myself a Morotola cable modem. I didn’t want to wait for Comcast to mail me a self-install kit and I wasn’t going to deal with another Comcast installer who’d ask to use my pristine, brand new bathroom and then dirty it up with the most disgusting dookie anybody has ever taken in this house (oh my god, what on earth did he eat?). So today I opened up the modem and hooked it up. A quick call to Comcast and I was all set…or was I?

I hooked up the Mac directly to the modem. I didn’t want my router to get in the way of any initial setup work. I pointed my browser at Yahoo! and got…the Comcast “capture portal”. Okay, no biggie, they want me to set up my comcast.net email address before I go any further. Oh, wait…this requires a download. What the hell? Okay, whatever, download their silly file and deal with it. Hmm…it seems to have downloaded a StuffIt archive. My brand new Intel Mac doesn’t have StuffIt installed. Okay, no problem…switch back to the DSL long enough to get it. Unpackage the SIT file and start the installer. Okay now, this installer is slow. Oh, that’s because it’s a PowerPC binary so I have to load Rosetta to run it. Whatever, just be patient because it’s going to install Internet Explorer. Wait…what? I have three perfectly good (i.e. not Internet Explorer) browsers already. What do I need that crap for? Enhance your calm John Spartan, just go with it. You knew there was a price to be paid with Comcast. Okay, it’s checking out the network and all to make sure we’re configured properly. Hmm…odd, it wants my password so it can change some admin settings. Whatever, it just wants to make sure my ethernet connection is set up for DHCP (right?). Okay, it’s restarting the software. Wow, evidently I didn’t get my own password right. You know, despite the fact that the MacOS dialog would have told me if I got it wrong. Okay, you know what? FUCK THIS!

So I switched over to my PC laptop. When in doubt, go to a platform they know how to screw up. I had to reboot the modem to get it to let the PC get a DHCP lease. Must be some sort of MAC address lock-in or something. I finally got the PC set up, got my account working and everything. Wonder of wonders, I’m able to hit Yahoo!. So after all that, I had to know if it was worth it. So I ran some speed tests using the Speakeasy speed test. The results were pretty astounding.

I pay about $100/month for my 6.0/768 service from Speakeasy. According to the speed test, I’m only getting 3.8/768. That’s pretty pathetic. I’m now on a plan for $50/month for my 8.0/768 service from Comcast. According to the speed test, I’m getting 7.99/713. Let me get this straight, I’m paying half as much money and getting more than twice the download rate. I can’t say I love the service Comcast gives you, but for the price you can’t beat the speeds. As long as I don’t have any of the past issues I had with them, this could work out just fine.

As for Speakeasy, I would like to say one thing. The $100/month is actually worth the service you get when you call them. They’re fantastic over the phone, I’ve never dealt with another company that hires such competent phone support. Unfortunately, I think they’re hampered by inferior technology (DSL) and the fact that they are so far removed from the hardware that they’re unable to fix many problems themselves. I think Speakeasy is a wonderful company and if they were to offer some really sweet wireless package (like WiMax, which they’re investing in) I’d be one of the first in line to check it out.

The Da Vinci Code

I waited until today to post this review because I didn’t want to ruin anything for people who were really wanting to see this movie. But if you didn’t see it on opening weekend, I figure you’re not all THAT into it…so maybe this review will save you the $10.

I will preface this review by saying that I have read the book. I liked the book and I thought it could make a decent movie. With that in mind, my wife, her aunt, her cousin and I went to see the 7:50 show on Friday. The movie had gotten some negative reviews from the early showings. I wasn’t going to let that affect how I went into the movie. Maybe they were just Dan Brown haters.

The movie starts out about how you would expect it to if you’ve read the book. But from there, the next 30-45 minutes goes into hyperdrive. The entire introduction to the story felt so rushed. There was no time given to develop anything at all. The lead character, Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks), is totally underdeveloped. You get virtually no backstory on him at all. In the books, his backstory is all that really endears you to him. That ends up leaving Hanks playing a very boring bookworm. Sophie (played by Audrey Tautou) shows up out of nowhere as a vanilla cop. They never explain that she’s actually a cryptographer in the law enforcement agency.

So, you get through the first 1/3 or so of the movie and then it gets slow. Painfully slow. By the end of the movie I was thinking to myself, “just let it be over.” It’s not that there wasn’t anything happening, there was. But it was just plodding on without interest or excitement.

I thought Teabing (played by Ian McKellen), the Holy Grail historian, was one of the few good characters in the movie. I was really excited when I heard McKellen had been cast to play him. I thought Bezu Fache (played by the awesome Jean Reno), the police captain, was awful. I don’t blame that on Reno, I thought he did well in the parts he was given. But in the book Fache plays a much more central role in his determination to catch Langdon.

My recommendation, do not pay money to see this movie. The book is okay (not great) but it’s at least an enjoyable read. The movie is just awful. Hopefully they’ll go back and make Angels and Demons, which I think is a better book, into a movie and they won’t sign Ron Howard to direct.

Mario Kart DS…fan-tas-tic

So, Lisa and I had Christmas a little early. She got me a new Nintendo DS with the Mario Kart DS package. It’s totally awesome. I loved playing Mario Kart on my old SNES, this is BETTER (yes, all caps better).

Let me start with the DS. It’s okay. I’ve got a nice racecar red one, fitting given the only game I have for it right now. I have some issues with hand positioning. The four buttons laid out in a diamond pattern are pretty small. I have a big thumb. You do the math. My only other complaint is one busted pixel on the upper screen (DS stands for “dual screen”…it has two). It’s stuck always on. Not a deal breaker, but I’m going to have to see what the situation is. Hopefully I can swap this one for one that doesn’t have the busted pixel. The screens (aside from this one pixel) are beautiful, though. If you ever imagined the most ideal dual monitor gaming experience, this is it…shrunk. In Mario Kart DS, the top screen shows you the race action while the bottom screen gives you an overhead map and the standings in the race.

So I played many hours of the game against the computer. It’s fun, just like the original Mario Kart on the SNES. Very addictive. Eventually I reminded myself that the DS has WiFi capabilities and that Mario Kart DS lets you play people across the internet. So I set up my networking, hopped online and found a game with 3 other people. Oh my god…so much fun. I got my butt handed to me, but I really enjoyed it. And finding a game couldn’t be easier. Let it know how to search for a game (regional, worldwide, friends, rivals) and it goes off and finds you a match. Very easy.

My only other complaint is the networking. The DS will only do WEP encryption. I have a newer access point and all of my wireless hardware supports WPA encryption…except the DS. So with my current setup my only choice is to put my access point back into WEP mode. I have a spare access point in the closet, so I might eventually delegate that to full time duty as a WEP access point just for the DS. But we’ll see. I may be too busy racing online to whip it out.

Bloglines is awful (still)

The other day I was completely locked out of Bloglines for a while as they appeared to be doing some mass migration to new hardware. Okay, whatever…I can handle planned downtime. They even had a link in the application to the announcement, so it’s not like it was a surprise.

Unfortunately, ever since they came back up the service has been a disaster. Every time I log in it seems, OS News has 50+ posts to read. That’s not the only feed with a problem, but it’s the most noticeable for me since it’s always at the top of my list. This isn’t the first time I’ve had issues with Bloglines. But this time it’s far and away the worst I’ve ever seen it. I’ve got a couple of projects to finish up before the end of the year, but after New Year’s there may be some definite hack-a-thon action to build something that works.