Allow me to perform one of my common services, and explain a tech issue to the lay person who probably would (and should) care about this if only it wasn’t such a complicated mess. I get a lot of questions about this from people who (understandably) don’t follow any of this stuff.

I’ve been holding this post in for awhile, but I think we just hit an important milestone in the next-generation high-definition disc format war. Blu-Ray (henceforth “BRD”, or Blu-Ray Disc) and HD-DVD are two formats both vying to be the replacement for regular old DVDs. Why do we need to replace DVDs? It seems a lot of casual consumers don’t know this, but DVDs are not high definition. They’re really good looking standard-definition (SD), but they’re not HD; BRD and HD-DVD are HD, and once you see them you’ll immediately notice the difference.

Background

BRD was developed primarily by Sony, while Toshiba did HD-DVD. They are both physically the same size as CDs and DVDs, and they both are capable of displaying the same quality HD video. The difference is that BRDs have a higher capacity, but are more expensive to produce. Their players are more expensive to make as well, requiring a blue (imagine that) laser. HD-DVD has a lower initial storage capacity — meaning long movies or movies with lots of special features will need a second disc — but is supposedly going to be upgraded in the future with higher storage densities. HD-DVDs are much cheaper to make, since they can be stamped with the same equipment that makes regular DVDs with only minor changes, and HD-DVD players are much cheaper as well. In fact, Toshiba HD-DVD players were on sale for as low as $99 this past holiday season — the cheapest Blu-Ray players are still over $400 even on their best day; a year ago, all this stuff was about $1000 a pop.

So why is there a war and why should you care?

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t use the dashboard in OS X much, to be honest, but certain utilities have a place there — this is one of them. This dashboard widget for OS X allows you to monitor what your TiVo is up to and download recorded shows to your Mac. I love it…it’s simple, easy to use, and now that I have a TiVo HD and might actually want to save some of the recordings, I’m finding this extremely convenient. It includes the TiVo File Decoder binary, which converts the video files to standard MPEGs as it downloads them so you can play them with pretty much anything — QuickTime, VLC, Frontrow, etc. If you’ve got a TiVo and a Mac, you have to check this out — it’s definitely one of my top Mac Apps!

TiVo: Now Playing dashboard widget

Some good info has surfaced about 2008 plans for Google, which is a little unexpected from a company that’s almost as unforthcoming about future product releases as Apple. The discussions in which Scott Johnston, VP for Product Development, was participating were concerned mostly with Google Apps.

First, Google Sites is apparently an upcoming evolution of the (somewhat lame, IMHO) Google Page Creator. Sites will be based off of tools from JotSpot, a company Google acquired, and will allow businesses to create intranets, extranets, and (hooray) project management tracking. I can only assume that such project management tools would integrate with the your Google Calendar, which I already use and love.

The other big piece of news is that Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Spreadsheets will all soon work offline via Google Gears, a technology that can transparently store a web application on your computer so you can use it when you don’t have an Internet connection. In the case of Docs’ and Spreadsheets’ collaborative capabilities, it sounds like it will use a smart versioning system to integrate the changes into the group document once you come back online. Very cool. If you’ve never used Google Docs before, you should check it out. For most people, it’s all the Word and Excel they ever need — and it’s free, and it stores your stuff online so you can access it form anywhere. It also allows you to easily share documents with others, and even (as mentioned) have them make additions or revisions.

For those not aware (and I always like to tack this on, because not enough people are), Google Apps is one of the coolest free things on the ‘net. It allows you to use all of Google’s services — Gmail, Calendar, etc — but with you own domain name. For example, all of my whatever@rogersmj.com email addresses use Google Apps. It gives you the power and reliability of Google’s systems for your own domain. It’s much better than any lame mail service offered by your web host. And it’s completely free. Get your own domain name for less than $10/year, and then you can have Google handle your mail. Imagine how cool it is to be able to hand out a totally unique email address, and know you’ll never have to change it again because you graduated/got a new job/changed ISPs.

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 »

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?

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…

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.

I know it’s been a few weeks since my last post, and I apologize. Things have been crazy. I couldn’t let this story pass by though.

Lots of planets have been discovered in the last few years thanks to some great advancements in detection techniques. Few, however, are as exciting as the one discovered earlier this year: a warm, rocky planet, with average surface temperatures of 0-40 C (just the right temps for liquid water…and life), located just 20 light years away from our solar system. It’s about 1.5 times the size of Earth, and although it is quite close to its sun (14 times closer than Earth, actually, resulting in a “year” that’s only 13 Earth days long) the temperature of that star is substantially cooler than our own, generating the reasonable temperatures mentioned previously despite the proximity.

This is, by far, the planet most resembling Earth out of all non-Sol planets discovered so far, and it’s practically in our back yard, astronomically speaking. 20 light years is still…well, 20 years away even if we could travel at the speed of light, but considering that our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years in diameter, and the known universe is hundreds of billions of light years across, 20 light years is virtually next door. This kind of proximity means that if there were to be intelligent life on that planet, we could actually send a message and get a reply back in less than 50 years! Far fetched, yes, but fun to think about.

What do you call the ‘@’ symbol? Although some people mistakenly call it an ampersand (which is actually the ‘&’ symbol), it may surprise you to know it doesn’t actually have a name. For something we use so frequently — it has to be one of the most often-used non-punctuation symbols in the modern world — it’s amazing that we haven’t come up with a slicker name than “the ‘at’ symbol.”

While designing a user signup screen, a buddy of mine at work asked that very question: what’s the actual name for the @ symbol? We were shocked to realize that none of us knew. A quick Google search turned up some interesting speculation on the symbol’s history; for one thing, there are a disproportionate number of cultures whose nickname for it is animal-related (e.g., the “hanging monkey”). That must mean something…but what, nobody seems to know.

Another theory is that it was developed by medieval monks as a shorthand to writing the word “at”, since it saved them two pen strokes when transcribing books. Man, and I thought modern technology made people lazy.

Finally, my personal favorite is the historical use of the @ symbol as an abbreviation for a unit of measurement, the amphora. It first appeared in a letter written by a Florentine trader in 1536. The amphora described the amount held by large terra cotta jar that were used to transport grain, spices, wine, and probably a whole host of other goodies.

Since the latter story is a much better-sounding explanation than a bunch of slacker monks, and the word “amphora” is just kind of cool by itself, we hereby declare that the @ symbol’s official name shall be “amphora.” Just in case we actually have any power to declare such things. Which we don’t. But hey, this is the Internet…weirder things have happened.

Read: What do you call the @ symbol used in email addresses?

Sharp has just unveiled a new 3.5″ multi-touch display (similar to the one used in the iPhone…in fact, Sharp, is an iPhone display provider) that is only 1mm in thickness and — here’s the real news — sports scanning capabilities. This will allow it to scan fingerprints, bar codes, and business cards right on the display, eliminating the need for any other hardware. I’ve lost count of the number of times I scoffed at a movie or TV show when a character placed their finger or a piece of paper on the screen of a phone or PDA and the device magically scanned it. Well, now it really can. Very cool. Sharp plans to also create larger versions of the technology, up to 12″, making it suitable for point-of-sale operations or subcompact notebooks.