Archive for November, 2007
Posted by peelman on November 28, 2007 at
9:20 pm
I hope you all enjoy this insightful commentary by one of my first guest writers in quite awhile,
Nick Peelman.
I read an article in this month’s issue of Wired (23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1000), and before I could even finish it I mailed out the link with this summary to a few of my friends and family. Matt asked me if I could post it here for the benefit of his readers.
There is a company in Silicon Valley now who for $1000 will take a (rather large) sample of your spit, splice out your DNA, map your genome, then tell you based on a rather large library of things we have defined as _bad_stuff_ any conditions you are predisposed to. Just imagine knowing that you did inherit that heart disease gene from your maternal side, or that colon cancer gene from your paternal side. The medicinal impact of such information is huge. You would know to adjust your diet now to minimize your chance of getting heart disease, or imagine now how long it will be before we start seeing preventive treatments that start attacking the stuff before it even gets off the ground. They say if you catch cancer early enough it’s easier to beat…what about when you know 5, 10, or 30 years before it manifests itself that there’s a 70% chance you’ll develop it?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Matthew on November 26, 2007 at
8:13 pm
The mid-season movie/long episode of Battlestar Galactica aired over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Fans of the show may be interested to read a review of Razor I wrote for Indy.com.
Overall, it was pretty good. A somewhat different feel than the episodes in terms of pacing (it felt like producer Ron Moore might not have gotten all the time he wanted in the editing bay), but very entertaining and a fascinating look at, for the most part, what made Admiral Cain tick. Great writing, of course, and cinema-level special effects, as always. The quick homage to the 1978-80 show’s very classical robotic Cylons (complete with the voices) was pretty cool. And of course the scene where Cain deals with her XO’s refusal to obey an order is every bit as chilling as you’ve imagined. Razor is disturbing, gritty, and intense — all the things we love about this show. Check it out.
Posted by Matthew on November 14, 2007 at
3:38 pm
John C. Dvorak, everyone’s favorite cranky tech geek columnist, has written a quick piece that attempts to get at the root of why Windows Vista sucks so very, very hard. Although Microsoft claims that Vista is selling well (what else would they say?), the numbers indicate that a large number of users are sticking with XP or defecting to another platform entirely, notably Apple’s Mac. While Vista has been struggling, Macs have experienced their greatest growth ever in the past year or so. Dvorak, a die hard Windows user, indicates he is starting to feel the inclination to abandon the maligned operating system. It’s too expensive, there’s too many different versions (see above), it delivers almost none of the things that were initially promised, the interface is just short of awful, and the new “security” system is really, really damn annoying. In short, it’s a half-baked, lame attempt to put out something just for the sake of having something “new” (Windows Millennium Edition, anyone?), and what they wound up with was a Hindenburg-level disaster.
The article basically says that the product strategists at Microsoft are idiots (most of Dvorak’s articles revolve around calling someone “idiot”). As usual, his analysis of the situation and the options Microsoft is now faced with is mostly accurate, if a bit over-the-top in some cases (one of his options for the company: “Microsoft can scuttle the entire product.” And then we’ll go dance on the moon without spacesuits). There’s pretty much no denying the fact that Vista has been a half-decade’s waste of work and billions of dollars more or less down the toilet for the world’s biggest software maker. Since it took them so long to build the pile of crap that is Vista, how long is it going to take them to build something that people want to buy?
Posted by Matthew on November 13, 2007 at
11:29 am
I’m pulling out the geek hat…I just posted a new article about my recent experience switching from the Samba file-sharing protocol to AFP. If you’re remotely interested in sharing files between more than one computer, or getting to your files at home when you’re on the road, check it out.
NERD ALERT: This one’s going to be pretty bad. If you aren’t interested in servers, file protocols, and the geeky ability to access your files anywhere, turn away now.
Those who know me know I run a decently big file server at home. It’s an AMD system running Ubuntu Server with about 1.6 TB of hard drive space (that’s 1,600 GB). I store most of my stuff on that server — personal documents, client projects, web site development code, TV shows, movies, pictures, music, software backups, you name it. None of my Macs actually have any documents stored on them — it’s all on the server, which I depend on having access to wherever I go.
On the road, I typically would use the somewhat klutzy method of downloading files I need via FTP, working on them on my MacBook Pro, and then re-uploading them when I was done or when I got home again, to keep the server up to date (this excludes code, for which I use the Subversion version-tracking system). At home, I have until now used the Samba protocol (the file-sharing system native to Windows) to mount the shared directories and work on them directly over my gigabit network.
I recently had an epiphany about the way I was doing things. My Samba setup was a holdover from when I had all Windows boxes. I continued to use it when I moved to Macs because it pretty much works with everything — Linux, OS X, Windows. However, while compatible with many things, it excels at nothing. It is slow, it is limited to Windows filenaming conventions (UNIX/Linux is much more flexible about file names), it has an extremely limited permissions system, and it can’t really be used over the Internet — hence why I was using FTP while away from home to access my files, because using Samba through the Internet is about as fun as pulling your fingernails out with pliers. It’s just so slow, if you can get it to work at all.
Then I discovered AFP. Despite having had it operational for less than 24 hours, I think it’s safe to say that AFP has changed my life.
Read the rest of the article…
Posted by Matthew on November 7, 2007 at
3:50 pm
A 13-year-old girl in an Illinois middle school got two days of detention as punishment for hugging a couple of her friends at school. The punishment was administered because the student, Megan Coulter, supposedly violated the school’s policy against public displays of affection.
Megan explained, “I was just giving them a hug goodbye for the weekend.” Her mother added that they weren’t even full-body hugs, just the arm-around-the-shoulder-and-squeeze thing. The superintendent, Sam McGowen, said he thinks that the punishment is fair and that the school administrators were adhering properly to the policy in the student handbook. In other news, Sam McGowen is a complete idiot.
This crap is really getting out of control. We had anti-PDA rules when I was in school too, and I don’t remember the exact wording but it was pretty well understood that they meant no kissing and no getting it on inside the band locker room. But this girl got in trouble for hugging her friends. Is this the message we want to send to kids these days? That hugging is bad? That you can never, ever show any sort of emotion or affection for someone while in public? I don’t want to see anyone else’s make-out session, but hugs are friendly, casual, and for most people completely non-threatening to the social fabric of their lives. I still hug most of my good friends, both men and women, especially when I haven’t seen them for a long time, and I’m all grow’d up (supposedly). I’ve never heard of anyone objecting to seeing friends hug or clap their arms around each others’ shoulders.
This is yet another case of kids’ lives being more and more micromanaged, of rules for the sake of rules; too many of these rules and they’ll never figure out anything on their own, never develop independent social skills, never learn anything “the hard way”…which for some things is the best way. See also “Grade school bans tag” for more reasons to hate school administrators practicing the CYA policy rather than allowing kids to be kids.
Posted by Matthew on November 3, 2007 at
6:38 pm
I fired up Windows XP (via Parallels on my iMac) this evening and was greeted by the popup balloon you see above.
“Update Java Now… and get OpenOffice FREE!”
Does the “special offer — act now!” vibe seem weird to anyone else in this context? It’s a fracking software update. Not only that, but Java and OpenOffice are in rather two separate realms of the software world — Java is a programming language/runtime environment, and OpenOffice is an open source office suite (like Microsoft Office, but free). It’s a fine piece of software, but I just find it damned odd that it’s being “marketed” by Sun through Java software updates. It’s like…um…ok, I just sat here for more than 5 minutes trying to come up with a good analogy, but for once I can’t think of anything that asinine.
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