Check out OutFoxed, a video expose of Fox News (as if just watching it wasn’t enough to reveal its silliness and hipocrisy). You can watch the trailer, and download a bunch of clips, and they even support BitTorrent (yay!). Here’s my favorite still from the trailer, harking back Mike Moore’s ‘Bowling for Columbine’ premise about keeping the public in fear… “1) STAY INSIDE“!
I bought a server last night from a guy off Craigslist. Great deal, but there’s one thing I forgot about… “real” servers are “real” loud. It’s been a while since I had a 2U box cranking all its fans in a home setting, and it’s making me wonder about the viability of this solution as a “throw it in the closet” server. Hmm.
Oh, the machine specs are dual-P3 550, Intel LX440 motherboard, 1G RAM, SCSI (9G and 36G disks installed). I’m planning to toss a 250G IDE or two in there as well and make it the superduper LAN mp3/file/cvs server/linux development box/mysql slave (backup) to prince.org’s dataset.
The guy who had it previously tested it with NT, and that lasted on it about one hour at my place. Which is about 45 minutes longer than it would have been, had I been able to find a floppy disk (ANY floppy disk) to turn into a Fedora boot floppy. I needed that because I only have Fedora on DVD, and this server of course just has a CD-ROM drive (that may change in the future…) Anyway, I finally just burned a CD with the boot.iso image off the dvd, pointed the localhost config on Apache on my windoze box at the Fedora DVD, and booted into a HTTP install on the new server. Took a while (for kicks I said “Everything”… so now I even have Russian support for KDE, etc.), but worked fine.
A little disappointed that the Bogomips for each processor is just over 1000 (according to /proc/cpuinfo) and on my rented prince.org server the single CPU is around 4000 (P4 2Ghz). I’ll have to experiment with a sequence of mysql and apache operations though, and see how they compare under “real” situations, or a vaguely reasonable fascimile. Probably the performance of this thing, properly configured (utilizing 3+ spindles, instead of the 1 IDE device on the real server now) will still kick the rented box’s ass. I’d love to be able to buy a few more cheap boxes like this and throw ‘em in a local colo, so at least I could control my own servers, instead of relying on folks 1000 miles away… and even then, not being able to throw a bigger harddrive in, etc.
Oh, back-to-back hardware rants! Whee!
So my wife’s buddies “all” seem to have these mac webcams, and so she needs one too, right? Well, ok, it sounded cool so I didn’t need a lot of persuading. So I drop by Fry’s and pick one up (they’re essentially $150 no matter where you buy them), and plug it in. Nothing. No iChat love. No, well, much of anything! Which is kind of weird.
I do a little reading and realize that actually, you need iChat AV to make use of it. Which comes “free” with the Panther upgrade (OS X 10.3), which costs $129. Or, you can get iChat AV alone for $29. Well, I know I want some of the goodies in 10.3 anyhow, but was hesitant to upgrade before because I didn’t want to risk anything going wrong to her beloved Mac. But, I decided should just go for it…
So I’m off to the Apple store (happened to be going by on the way to the bagel shop in Burlingame, actually) and decide to play stupid to the sales staff, and see if I can get any useful help. Oh, it humbles me to do so… but here we go (my side of the conversation in bold). “Need any help?” “Yeah, I’m thinking about getting 10.3 upgrade from 10.2, but wait… when will 10.4 Tiger be out?” “Not until next year” “OK. I’ll take it. Now how do I back up my data before upgrading, just in case?” “Oh, well, do you have an external firewire drive or some blank CDs?” “Sure, I have an external FW HD”. “OK, copy some stuff from your home dir onto it first”. “Uhhh… like what stuff? Everything? What if it wipes my drive and I need to do a full restore after the upgrade” “Uh, that won’t happen.” “But I thought 10.3 had a habit of doing that with there was an external FW HD attached?” “Oh, yeah, well, you want to detach that drive before upgrading.” “Oh.” “Yeah, but actually, the version in this box is probably a slightly newer version than just 10.3, so it’ll not have that problem.” Riiiight. So, out I went, for the second time in as many days having tithed Apple $130+..
After uninstalling and deleting some junk, in an attempt to free up some diskspace on her Mac (it was down to about a gig free), and apparently convincing Finder to no longer be clueful about blank CDRs inserted in the slot (”No volumes that can be recognized” instead of the usual “Do you want to initialize this new disk”), which made it difficult to copy stuff off onto CDR… I finally bit the bullet and started the upgrade. This actually took a couple of tries, because the first time it couldn’t find the internal drive on the notebook to install from, even though it had been thrashing on the CD and disk for a while up to that point. Anyhow, about 90 minutes and 2 CDs later, it was done. And the CDR-recognition thing was fixed, and lots of niftiness ensued… Panther is cool. Although of course, it was stock 10.3.0 on the CDs; it needed about 150M of additional software updates to be downloaded and installed (and a magic file trashed to convince it to install Java 1.4.2, because it didn’t believe me that 1.4.1 was installed, even though it clearly was during the upgrade; this was 20 minutes of hunting on the net to figure out how to make this work, and 3 times downloading 28M of updates… more money for Speedera I suppose.)
So, on to iSight / iChatAV. It works well enough, but got a little tiresome. Let’s see, let’s use the iSight camera to make an iMovie. Nope, not possible. Only your DV camcorder via firewire can be used for that… what? OK, well, maybe I can take snapshots with it for iPhoto… well, if so, I can’t figure out how. So basically, there is a $150 webcam, and I do mean webcam, usable only for iChat, sucking down a bunch of current (and getting a bit hot, I might add) on the notebook’s solitary firewire port. Hmm. It’s now sitting the drawer, actually. I guess she’ll hook it up when she really wants to chat with someone, but… that’s kinda lame. It won’t even work with iMovie?! Come on, Apple, really!
So, I buy a Microsoft wireless desktop (mouse+keyboard) from Costco the other day, and gave my old optical mouse to the wife for her Mac. Everything seemed fine, software installed OK, la-di-da… the mouse worked OK on the fairly reflective white keyboard tray on my el cheapo Ikea desk (a problem in the past), etc. But then… I noticed something odd. Like a bad smell, but only faint, it crept up on me until I realized, what the hell? What have they done with the Inser/Delete key area?!?
On most PC/104 (I guess they’re still called that) style keyboards, there are six keys to the right of the main QWERTY section, typically above the inverted-T arrow keys. These keys are Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down. Makes sense. Logical layout. Easy to learn.
But on this new keyboard I bought? Nope. Rearranged. Minus one key. WTF? “Insert” is just gone. Delete is now twice as high (including essentially the space where Insert used to be, ohhh now that is handy!), and Home and End are no longer in the same column. Whaaaa? I suppose 80% of users never use the insert key; they probably don’t use home and end much either. But the other 20% of us do… so stop penalizing those that DO use something, for the supposed benefit of those that DON’T!
Now I understand why the link entitled “Learn how Microsoft leads the industry in the design and production of ergonomic hardware” on this page goes to a 404 error! This sucks ergonomically. Now to do cut/copy/paste, I need to use these one-hand-bending ctrl+x, ctrl+c, ctrl+v keystrokes, instead of the easy-to-reach (left hand on ctrl or shift…) tap insert or delete. That’s not better from an ergonomic standpoint! Oh, wait, maybe I’m supposed to use the function keys that are now assigned to ‘cut’ ‘copy’ ‘paste’… yeah because reaching up there to learn NEW keys, that are ALREADY assigned functions in most apps, is useful. Did I mention you need to put on “F lock” to use the function keys as regular F keys? So I guess learning F2 for ‘modify’ and F5 for ‘refresh’ and ‘ctrl+f4′ for close, etc. etc. were a waste of time. Grrrrr.
I would blame Microsoft for all of this, but it looks like maybe this keyboard is just a rebranded Logitech device. I wouldn’t be surprised, as my previous Logitech keyboard also had this F-lock stupidity which was another reason I wanted to get a different keyboard in the first place! At least this one does let me reprogram all the silly ‘multimedia’ keys at the very top… although I have never used them on previous keyboards anyhow. But, I suppose assigning a key to Firefox, to iTunes, etc. is OK… but it’s not like they’re not always loaded, anyhow.