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EFI vs. BIOS

Will it be possible to run Windows or Linux on Intel-based Macs? ZDNet has a FAQ summarizing a lot of the discussion out there on the topic. The problem primarily comes down the boot-loader. Current versions of Windows use good old BIOS, while Intel Macs boot from Extended Firmware Interface, or EFI. Until Windows can boot from EFI, it’s not going to be an easy feat. But Windows Vista will include support for EFI, and a version of Windows Media Center already does. And some Linux distributions use Elilo rather than LILO or GRUB, and Elilo already knows how to boot from EFI.

Music: Iron & Wine :: Lion’s Mane
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Foobar Blog Turns Five

The first entry I ever made in this blog (back when it was on LiveJournal) was on January 20, 2001, right around this time of day, which makes today its fifth anniversary. Sometimes (often) can’t believe I’m still doing this — I’ve threatened to throw in the towel enough times. Must be something wrong with me.

To celebrate, I’ve spent the last few evenings going back to the start of the archive and unpublishing a ton of stuff — almost 1/4 of everything (work in progress – have only made it up to 2003 so far). For the first few years, it seems like I paid little attention to whether posts would be interesting to anyone but me. Heck of a lot of bloviating over the years, trying to trim some of the pointless posts. There’s probably still a lot of embarassing stuff left, but the archives are in better shape than they were.

Sweet Amy even called me on the way to work this morning to wish me a happy anniversary!

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Disk Inventory X

Diskinventoryx When a server at work that should have had gobs of free space suddenly claimed to be running on empty and we wanted more info than we could get from the find command, I discovered this little gem: Disk Inventory X, which quickly drew a map of files and folders on disk by type and space. Culprit turned out to be a 305 GB log file generated over the past few days by an out-of-control Samba process.

Pictured above is the main drive in my home Mac. Rectangles are files, and their containing rectangles are folders. Each color represents a different file type. Select a rectangle and it’s immediately selected in a corresponding file tree (not shown), and vice versa. The region selected in yellow represents my old unused OS 9 System folder. Trippy. And useful.

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Pandora

Been meaning to check out Pandora for a while, and reminded by two Birdhouse readers in a week that I really needed to jack in. “Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.”

Create a Captain Beefheart playlist, and it includes The Minutemen, Shellac, Pere Ubu, Iggy Pop, Love… Had similar experiences creating lists starting from Warren Zevon and Chet Baker. The associations it makes feel incredibly natural – uncanny even. Lather, rinse, repeat the experience starting from nearly any artist or song you can think of.

Pandora plays to your current mood like nothing I’ve experienced. Associations are not based solely on the usual “what other people who liked this song also liked,” but on musical analysis of more than 10,000 artists, building a database cataloguing tonality, syncopation, rhythmic style, vocal style, etc. But you can thumbs up/down individual tracks, so it’s an analytic database fine-tuned by associative listener impressions.

Free version is ad-supported, but subscriptions are affordable. Audio quality is a bit on the lo-fi side, but not terrible.

Tune into my Cheap Thrills station.

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Profit Plan

Trying to come up with a new business plan, something along these lines:

Step 1: Read email
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit

If you have any grand ideas, let me know (Yes, there’s a connection to South Park and garden gnomes in there somewhere…)

Music: The Boomtown Rats :: Like Clockwork
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Uncyclopedia

The perfect antidote to Wikipedia: Uncyclopedia — “The content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Seems to suffer some performance problems, but often worth the wait. From the Air Guitar entry, which comes complete with annotated air guitar diagram:

Air guitars are similar in shape to normal guitars, with the notable difference that they are made entirely out of air. Air guitars typically have 6 strings and 24 frets. Although acoustic air guitars are available, electric air guitars are by far the most popular.

One perspective: Way too many people have way too much time on their hands.

Another: Thank God for that!

Thanks mneptok

Music: The Streets :: What Is He Thinking?
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VW Van Jump

This looks like fun (though I cringe for that poor suspension). Indestructible, those things. Remember being fascinated as a kid by the fact that VWs were sealed on the bottom and could float, as long as the door seals held.

Music: Digable Planets :: Swoon Units
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Blogging for Educators

Tuesday, January 17, noon: I’ll be offering a one-hour presentation to UC Berkeley’s Webnet group (campus web developers and editors) on the topic of blogging in the educational environment, with emphasis on tech considerations. It’ll be a fairly rushed overview with Q&A on running high-traffic multi-blog installations, editorial concerns, audio/video blogging, RSS, dealing with comment spam, tweaking platforms to work as content management systems, etc. If you’d like to attend, contact me for details.

This will be my first public presentation using Keynote, which is a deep breath of sweet, compressed air compared to PowerPoint.

Music: Erik Satie :: Fugue Litanique
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HTML Email: The Poll

Reader Kiernan recently contacted me about my old (and apparently much-linked-to) Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea document, saying:

I do not believe HTML email is going to disappear any time now. In fact, I expect we will see an increase in HTML email which suggests we need guidelines, not proscription. I think in the interests of furthering discussion on this subject, a poll would be useful.

Personally, I care a lot less about this subject than I used to. I’m still no fan of HTML email, but it doesn’t bug me the way it once did. Formatting in email can be useful and attractive. The security concerns it raises aren’t very relevant to me since I use a Mac (though I’m still concerned for all the Outlook users out there). Even command-line pine displays the plain-text alternate properly for most HTML emails these days.

At its best, HTML email highlights the strong points in a message. At its worst (for me), HTML email is a minor annoyance, sometimes resulting in tiny font displays — but nothing I can’t get around by punching Cmd-+ on the keyboard. There are a thousand things under heaven and earth more worthy of getting het up about. What about you? Have your feelings about HTML-formatted email changed over the years?

Have your feelings about HTML email changed since 2000?

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