This time I’m really going to write it.
Archive for the 'Computers' Category
As you may know I’m not on Facebook, I deleted my account over a year ago. Facebook says if you delete your account after 14 days they erase it. I logged into my supposedly deleted, erased account today. It’s still there. Asshats. I killed it again. I’ll try it again in another few months..
I just discovered that my email address book is full of holes & vile corruption and has had them for 5 years. and all my backups going back to 2001 have some of the same holes-I religiously backup my address book online, off line, and on 3 different media. So my email program has been allowing me to send email to names without addresses and not warning me when the message didn’t go through. and 25 names in the exact middle of the book have the email address of the first 25 names of the book.
LATER: And I discovered that it’s added multiple random email addresses to my most commonly used contacts.
Back in the 70s there was a networked computer system with flat panel plasma touch screens and networking. Yes, the screen was orange and white, and yes, the touch part was only 16 sectors, but it would be another 10 years before you could do that at home. Everything you spent the 90s and 00s getting used to we had in the 70s, on Plato. Man, makes me wish for a Papa Del’s with everything (no anchovy) or a Garcia’s whole wheat. Just deliver it to CERL, will ya?
One reason why they the new MacBooks suck, other then their name which I still think blows, is the lack of Firewire. This is chiefly necessary if you own a video camera, it’s how 95% of them upload the video to your computer for editing and DVD making. But it’s also necessary for target mode, which essentially turns your entire laptop into a hard drive. Pretty geeky? No, absolutely necessary, something Intel and M$ should have copied. Consider what happened to me last night.
Leaving out the backstory, I had to fix two dead laptops armed only with a OS X install DVD and a Firewire cable. That was it, not even my geek tool. Neither laptop would boot, the G4 iBook had a known bad CD drive, so I couldn’t boot off the instal DVD. I did however boot the G4 PowerBook off it. Running the disk utility couldn’t repair the hard drive-mechanical issues. But i was able to get the iBook into target mode, hook it to the PowerBook booted off the install DVD and run the disk utility, which resolved it’s problems for the moment (it would still need to be backed up, reformatted, and reinstalled).
Had the iBook been a MacBook with a dead optical drive, I wouldn’t have been able to get it going last night. Not without more equipment. I’d have need an external USB hard drive pre loaded with OS X, or one of those pricey emergency boot tool USB flash drives. Come to think of it, that’s a scenario I’m going to have to cover. Thank you Apple, more crap to carry in the 55lb pack of doom.
So that’s one reason the new MacBooks suck, they’re harder to fix at the Laundromat with just the stuff in your pockets.
Don’t even bother to read my post on Firefox 3.0, go read Andy’s post from the Chicago Sun-Times. Hell, go bookmark Andy’s column index over there, he’s a better writer then I’ll ever be (and certainly dig out out his blog from teh sidebar on the right). Worth a read if only for the last 3 paragraphs, which sum up much of tech writing and all the hype on Firefox.
UPDATED: Mozilla’s sites are being hammered, use this direct link to download. And Furbism has some optimized builds up already! No, I do not and will not provide links to Windows optimized builds (don’t know or care if they exist). Added mini review.
UPDATED: Firefox 3 has surpassed Internet Explorer 3.0′s download record of 1.5 million over 24 hours in august of 1996! 1.9 million already and the day is still young! Follow the numbers here.
UPDATED: Techcrunch reports Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times in it’s first twenty four hours.
According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, that gives Firefox 3 a four percent market share of browsers worldwide straight out of the gate. Mozilla’s servers sent out 83 terabytes of data during that time, and at the peak there were 17,000 downloads per second (with an average of 4,000 per second).
Ok, I’ll spare you hype. Suffice it to say that manana, the 17th of June 2008 is the release date of the freeware Open Source webrowser, Firefox 3.0. And the Mozilla foundation, developers of Firefox would like you to help set a world record for software by getting your free copy. If you’re on Linux, Mac OS X, or even Windows you should get it. For Windows users it provides a faster, more secure and more extensible browser, for the other operating systems it gives you the extensibility and choice-you might find you like it better then your default system browser. Get Firefox here.
I realize not everyone is as browser nerdy as me. I usually have 5+ browsers installed: Opera, Safari, Firefox, Camino, Webkit nightly builds and Firefox nightly builds. But you should have one browser set up as default with cookies turned off, and another one with cookies on (no third party) that you only use for your secure browsing (like banking, bloging, or any website with your billing info).
For the nerdly like me who use the links in my sidebar for browsers optimized for specific processors, you might want to wait a few days for the optimizers to recompile. Optimized browsers tend to be faster and less memory intensive, so us laptop lovers can have more tabs open. And yes, this post was written in Firefox 3.0 release candidate 3, PowerPC 7450 optimized which runs best on my loaner laptop.
MINI REVIEW. New look, blends better with whatever OS your running, can now search your bookmarks (and history) through the addressbar, smaller memory footprint, no more memory leaks, new privacy and security features, better and more standards complient rendering, Faster!
UPDATED: Frank (@comcastcares on Twitter) is on this this week’s TWIT podcast for a few minutes explaining what you can really expect from Comcrap’s boost technology. Leo’s going to bring him back for more explanations. Frank’s job at Comcast is to monitor social media and help- so use him. After he left the podcast to take care of his baby, they covered a story that the Max Planck Institute in Germany has proven that Comcast (among others) is still blocking peer to peer despite their statements to the contrary.
A Comcast employee on Twitter asked. So I’ll answer. You can’t can’t do anything. I don’t doubt your sincerity, you may in fact be the only honest person in your company. Your company needs to change.
Corporate culture doesn’t start at the bottom, it’s starts at the top When your leaders are greedy scum, it filters down. Greedy rapacious boards and management make scummy business decisions. They hire scum, although every now and again a good person sneaks in. In Comcast’s case, they prefer to hire contractors, who hire subcontractors. No insurance for the workers, and plausible deniability for management.
So start by replacing the current board and firing all management from assistant VP up (unless that applies to Frank). Hell, I’d cut all management salaries too.
Acknowledge you lied. All the lies, all the lies your contractors told, all the ones you told Congress. Even the ones you haven’t been caught on 
And stop doing the things you lied about.
Apologize for lying.
As an act of contrition, hire all those subcontractors. Unionize. Retrain them. Invest in infrastructure, like fiber or wimax or 700 spectrum, anything to get you away from the current one person on the cable loop eats all the bandwidth-because that will cut down on this (read it all the to the bottom and follow the link).
Stop flooding our mailboxes with junk mail. Plant some damn trees.
That’s a start.
(Part of my antipathy towards Comcast comes from dealing with them on behalf of my elderly parents. I spent hours every month on the phone. Hours after their contract finally ran out I switched them to AT&T-and I can’t tell you how much I hate dealing with those people. But so far, I’ve spent less then 8 hours in total dealing with AT&T.)
BTW, if you’re on Twitter and are having problems with Comcast, Tweet Comcastcares. John C. Dvorak even likes him 
I had been using Plaxo as my online backup address book and contact manager. Then they sold themselves to Comcast today. I’ve spent months of my life on the phone with those idiots straightening out my parents account with them, until their contract ran out. Comcast’s craptacular billing and customer service is just part of their problem: lying is part part of their corporate culture. Not just to you and me, not just in ads, but to Congress. Screw them, they lie about service, they lie about blocking ports, they lie about your bill. I do not trust them with any of my data. If you use Plaxo, delte your account NOW, before Comcast has a chance to change the terms and conditions-right now Plaxo removes any and all traces or your data form their servers.
Obviously if you use Plaxo’s syncing tools, sync one last time. Then back up your data locally, and remove their syncing software. Then remove your Plaxo account-you can use this link to delete you account. (Thanks to Leo Laporte for the link!)
Before Halo 1, 2 and 3.
Before Oni. Before Myth.
There Was Marathon, the legendary first person shooter game for the Macintosh. FPS are games like Doom, Quake and Halo where you run around and shoot things, playing from a first person perspective. I don’t know if it ws the first FPS for the Mac, but it and it’s sequels were the best. And it put to sleep once and for all the old notion that Macs weren’t for gaming. Game play was great, the story was great, and it looked great. And it had multiperson online play.It was from Bungie, a small Chicago software company located in the Pilsen neighborhood, in an old church building on Halsted. Eventually they got fed up with their landlord never fixing the flakey building power and moved into the loop. This was right after they released Myth, a great take on real time 3d strategy games (kind of too real time for me, I couldn’t manage all the characters, gameplay was really intense). Shortly thereafter they were bought by Microsoft (Bungie’s version of this story starts here, with the parts I’ve covered here (the dilapidated Pod building on Halsted), here (Marathon), here (Myth, more on the Pod space) and here (the M$ buyout)).
Jump ahead ten years, and M$ has spun Bungie off. And Marathon is now open source and available for the Mac, Linux and windows. Get it here or if your on OS X, get a simplified one part download here thanks to Macbreak Weekly podcast, using password “macbreak”. Alex Lindsey from Macbreak Weekly and Pixel Corp is setting up a Marathon online tournament game Monday, for more info listen tot he end of this MBW podcast (you should listen anyway, it’s one of the funniest podcasts they’ve done, it includes Andy Ihnatko and Merlin Mann parodying unix geeks talking tech) Alex also put up a screencast on how to set up Marathon, it’s a little complicated.
(Dissclaimer: I didn’t own Marathon back in the day-I didn’t have a Mac that would run it till I came into a Mac II FX back in the late 90s, and my copy of Myth was given to me by the marketing guy at Bungie right before they moved to the loop)
