Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
At MacWorld I stopped by the Stalker booth to talk Communigate for small hosting companies. The rep saw UC Berkeley on my badge and mentioned that they had just won a huge contract with them. Sure enough, this week we got word that campus email is moving to a much-improved system. I migrated today, and bingo:
Received: from [128.32.58.212] ([128.32.58.212] verified) by calmail-cr.berkeley.edu (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.1.8)
Same as birdhouse hosting uses :)
A heating/cooling unit is mounted to the ceiling above my head. It is responsible for the climate both in my office and in a suite of offices next door. The thermostat to control the shared unit is not in my office, but next door. To access it I need to leave and lock my own office, unlock the suite next door, remember the combo for the inner hallway door, and then use yet another key to get into the office where the thermostat is mounted. That’s four doors. It’s like I work at Get Smart HQ.
Did I mention that the heating unit above my head sounds like a jet taking off? Well, not quite, but it’s very loud. Loud to the point where it’s hard to concentrate when it’s on. Loud enough that I’d rather heat and cool myself with sweaters and shorts, windows and doors. Because the people next door don’t have to hear it, they apparently don’t feel the same. They’d rather turn it up. Turn it way up. Turn it up to an ungodly (and utterly wasteful) 78 degrees. No typo.
Did I mention that there’s seldom anyone in the office next door? It’s used by visiting scholars and for special projects, and most of the time when I go in, there’s no one there. On the other hand, I’m at work most of the time.
Despite the fact that people are seldom there, someone has been going in and turning the heat up to 78 and disappearing. I walk into my office, it’s roasting and loud. Do the Get Smart thing, turn it down to 68, return to my desk.
An hour later I hear it go on again. When I go over I never see anyone. So I decided to leave a note. A really nice note. Not a nasty note, but an honest note, with my name and phone number. Ring me up. Let’s talk. I posted the note. An hour later I heard the jet taking off. Went next door. The thermostat was on 75.
I guess this means war.
Update: My “war” found its way to administration. They are going to address the issue by sealing the thermostat in a plastic shell that no one can touch, not even me. The temp will be locked at a comfortable and energy-friendly 68 degrees.
As part of an ongoing XML/RSS conversation, just delivered an RSS presentation to the campus webmasters group. My piece was on using mt-rssfeed.pl to integrate external RSS feeds into MT-driven sites. Also covered working the db cache path so that mt-rebuild.pl can do its work via cron. Went well.
There sure are a lot of people reinventing the wheel out there, building XML/RSS systems from scratch when there are already a zillion perfectly good tools. I think a lot of the duplicated effort is less a result of need and more a matter of geeks scratching itches. Nothing wrong with that.
Pick up the January ’04 Wired for a nicely done list “101 Ways To Save the Internet“. Excerpts:
2) Dump the DMCA.
4) Appoint Larry Lessig to the Supreme Court.
8) Declare spammers are terrorists.
38) Simplify URLs.
39) Upgrade to IPv6.
45) Verisign must die.
58) Microsoft: Take the blame for your own bugs.
71) Add a recall function for email messages.
73) Google: Add a search for legal MP3 downloads.
82) Safari for Windows.
91) Stop forwarding email jokes.
97) Celebrate diversity (more operating systems, more browsers, more mail clients).
98) Ad a “Skip All Flash Intros” to Macromedia players.
And so on.
Back to MacWorld today, but wasn’t able to get into the FireWorks session — bulldog at the door making no exceptions for press badges, though there were only 10 people in the room. Instead sat through an hour of the LDAP conference, but kept falling asleep. Headed back to the exhibits to take Ben Van Houtte’s recommendation and check out Synthetik Software’s Studio Artist.
We’re all jaded from a decade of easy access to graphical and video special effects, but this software is incredible. Examples on the web site are great, but you have to see the software in action – images under constant, unbroken transformation as controlled by a stylus on a Wacom pad, burbling through genres and styles as fast as the dude could swirl his wrist. 3000 presets, or generate your own and distribute them as plugins. All the effects work on video as easily as on stills.
Found myself itching to take a month off, make a short film, and run it through Studio Artist — create my own Waking Life. In fact the crew of Waking Life is now working with Synthetik to add custom features for their next movie. Anyway. I was blown away.
I once gave an interview to a college paper and they asked what my advice to students was and I quoted George Clinton, “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”
What got printed was:
“Free your mind and your ass will fall out.”
OK, so here I am with towel in hand, wiping egg from face. I’ve been making this prediction for a year. It hasn’t come true yet, but it will, because it makes sense, and because so far all we’ve seen are underfunded entrepreneurs chipping away at the edges of the concept, rather than tackling it head-on.
Instead we got Mini iPods that don’t make any financial sense at all. Jobs claimed they were trying to go after the upper end of the Flash-based player market, but I think the real deal is that this is a play for teenyboppers who love to accessorize. Crap deal or not, they’ll sell a zillion of them.
G5 XServe, darn right. Glad to see it, but no surprises there. Had to do it. Kudos to the engineers who figured out how to cool the beast in a 1U space. Some cool footage of the G5-based Virginia Tech supercomputer. 1100 G5s. 2200 processors. 3rd fastest supercomputer in the world, at a tiny fraction of the cost of the next fastest. Apple has completely rocked the supercomputer world. The guy who called Apple to place the order for the 1100 G5s had never bought a Mac before in his life.
Arrived too late to catch the replay of the original 1984 commercial for the 20th anniversary of the Mac, but did see a variety of original Macs scattered around at historical booths. It blows the mind to see how far we’ve come… and to think that even those primitive little boxes with tiny screens and no hard drives were leading the industry in their own time.
The introduction of GarageBand to the iLife suite was pretty impressive, especially with John Mayer in person on keys and guitar. Anyone who’s played with Soundtrack can see that Apple has basically repackaged its guts — removed the video soundtrack-specific elements and wrapped it in hipper packaging. Nothing wrong with that. It’s the most intuitive multitrack editing, looping, etc. i’ve experimented with. Can’t wait to play with it more. As Mayer said, “If I had had this when I was 13, I never would have left my room.” Ahem.
The downside: More incentive for people not to learn to make real music. GarageBand and similar apps make it too damned easy to sound good.
On the flipside, plug a real instrument into GarageBand and you can do some pretty awesome stuff. The MIDI guitar sounds Mayer was generating via keyboard were incredible – realistic attack, pitch bending, fingertips touching string spirals. Amazing. Mayer claimed it was the first time he had heard software-based guitar sounds he’d actually want to record with. Not sure what he was paid to say that, but it sounded convincing.
There are revolutionary MacWorlds and there incremental MacWorlds. In all, I’d say this one was incremental. But there was one really revolutionary thing I saw – a guy in a wheelchair at the same height as standing men and women. He was a crippled Vietnam Vet in an iBot 3000 — a chair designed by Dean Kamen, who also invented the Segway. The iBot uses gyroscopes to balance, just like the Segway, and lets handicapped drivers climb stairs, traverse rough terrain, reach tall shelves, and stand at the same height as everyone else. Said he was riding one of 12 existing prototypes in the world. A thing of beauty to see in action.
Off to MacWorld for Jobs’ keynote. Rumors are floating about $200 iPods, but price reductions and performance enhancements are de rigeur and therefore not all that interesting. I’m going to predict that Apple finally nudges into the living room with some kind of home entertainment device — a stationary iPod sort of thing networked to MP3 collections throughout the home via Rendezvous (iTunes already automatically and seamlessly finds shared collections and playlists elsewhere on the local subnet). In other words they could end up taking the sliMP3 / SqueezeBox model and making it super-elegant, super-easy, and DRM-integrated. Of course it would be tied into ITMS. The kicker is that such a device would double as a DVR and compete with TiVO et al. So it would be a full audio/video centerpiece ready to tie into modern home entertainment systems.
Basis for prediction: Apple has been positioning the Mac to be the hub of the digital life for a few years now. They’d be crazy not to push all this stuff out of the den and into the living room. It’s a tough category to get right, so Apple has been taking their time to make sure it’s another category definer.
Oh, and it’s got to be as attractive to PC users as Mac, right out of the gate.
I’ll be standing by ready to wipe egg from face.
Old-school post office boxes at the El Cerrito P.O. These remind me of childhood trips to visit grandpa, how he went to visit his p.o. box every day, the limitless rows of windows and dials, the lock’s combination made of letters rather than numbers (though this one is not), the thrill of pulling out envelopes and looking through to the innards of the post office, the detail and filigree of the eagle and the surrounding design, that 1930s-style drop-shadow on the box number…
But mostly I’m digging the fact that NetPBM installed properly when ImageMagick would not. :)
Trying to get the Image::Magick libraries and accompanying perl modules* installed via RPM, I am reminded of the kinds of reasons I happily ditched Linux in favor of Mac OS X Server — RPM Hell is… hell. In my previous Linux explorations, as in this current venture, it seems that the majority of my RPM experiences have gone badly, or require way too much effort to resolve. Install of package A depends on presence of Package B. But B requires C, although A has no awareness of its need for C. Each RPM must be specifically built for your specific distro and version, or chaos follows. Some install says you don’t have but need some other install, but when you go to install it you’re told you already have it. Try to uninstall it and are told you don’t have it. And so on.
Building from source is easy in principle, but failure is an all-too-frequent possibility. Building Image::Magick on RH9 has been an abysmal failure, even with direct assistance from the developers. There are too many distributions with too many differences for Linux devs to guarantee any particular experience on any particular machine for any particular package. Support forums may or may not yield useful help.
Biodiversity may be that which has allowed Linux to live through hard times, but it remains a thorn in the side for ease of use — and ease of use applies to sysadmins as well as users.
* ImageMagick does a zillion things — MovableType uses it to build thumbnails of uploaded images on the fly, among other things.