Author Archives: adrianlprice

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2006-11-10

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"Learn to say ‘I don’t know.’ If used when appropriate, it will be often."

Appropriately, About.com is running a toplist of Rummy quotes. There are some real gems in there, too:

“I don’t know what the facts are but somebody’s certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know.”

“I’m not into this detail stuff. I’m more concepty.”

“Needless to say, the President is correct. Whatever it was he said.”

“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”

Oh, just go read them all.

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2006-11-09

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US is a broadband laggard, according to FCC commissioner

Ars Technica just posted an article regarding broadband availability in the US. To quote the article:

It seems like everybody agrees on an essential point: access to “quality,” reasonably priced broadband is crucial in this day and age. Unfortunately, we’re not even close in the US. Yes, the nation’s two largest telecoms are at this moment rolling out new fiber optic networks. Better yet, consumers in areas served by Verizon’s new FiOS network are seeing the benefits of increased competition: some cable providers in those areas are bumping speeds up to 15Mbps/1.5Mbps. However, fiber deployments are slow and selective, leaving most Americans out in the cold.

We may be looking at a radically different landscape in five years, with WiMAX, BPL, cable, DSL, and municipal WiFi networks offering consumers a host of equally-good choices. That rosy outcome is by no means guaranteed—there’s much that has to be done in the interim to make it a reality.

I couldn’t agree more. Look at Japan: basic broadband is 24 – 40Mbps, and runs the equivalent of around $20 per month. Alternately, where FttC is available, customers can get 50 – 100Mbps, for $30 – $45 per month. Right now, I pay $65 per month for 6Mbps service through Comcast, including the 15 channels I’m required to sign up for. Technically, I don’t have to sign up for those 15 channels; however, the price for service to those without any TV services goes up such that it ends up being about a dollar cheaper to add the TV stations – and besides, my girlfriend watches TV, so I suppose that’s fine. Also, that 6M service can burst over 12M when I’ve got the network to myself; it can also go down for hours at a time when it rains, or slow down to sub-200k speeds during peak times. And it’s $65 a month.

DSL in my area isn’t exactly better; they just rolled out 6M service, and are moving toward 12M and eventually 24M (via two lines). However, that 6M service is not available without phone service; for 6M service and a phone line (which I won’t use other than for DSL), the price comes to $65, before taxes, surcharges, fees, installation, equipment, and so on.

Basically, Americans sit around thinking we’re the kings of the Interweb, but, lo and behold, we’re barely even on the list. We’re no higher than 15th place in terms of broadband penetration, and 21st place when you factor in cost, speed and availability. And to think, we pioneered this thing.

What’s the big holdup? Well, Japan managed what they’ve accomplished through government sponsorship of their telco, NTT DoCoMo. NTT serves every Japanese person with telephone service; it is a regulated monopoly. NTT offers phone, broadband, wireless, and TV. They also have the advantage of shorter distances; DSL offers better speeds the closer you are to your CO, allowing the more densely-packed Japan to offer higher speeds to more people. It also means a fiber rollout requires fewer miles of fiber to be laid down.

America could accomplish the same thing, but it won’t – it’s just too socialist for us. We’d rather foster competition: some local municipalities are offering broadband wireless, and some power companies are starting to talk about maybe eventually rolling out broadband over power lines (BPL). Both of these are great options; however, the wireless technology just isn’t there yet, and there are still spectrum hurdles to be overcome. BPL is a great prospect, with the capability of huge speeds at low cost; however, it’s a long way off, and the cost to the consumer is entirely decided by the provider. If the broadband market hasn’t changed much by the time these offerings arrive, the providers may see little incentive to end the price gouging – it’s more profitable to join in.

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2006-11-02

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Review: Eventum

Eventum is an open-source web-based issue management and tracking system from MySQL AB. It runs on PHP with a MySQL backend (of course), and offers a rich featureset and easy installation – in theory.

Installation
Eventum is a little bit picky about it’s installation environment. Attempting to install Eventum on a default installation of Apache (with MySQL libraries installed) results in some bad luck. When you load the installer, you’ll get a long list of files that Apache doesn’t have the permission to write to. Then, it’ll tell you you’re missing the GD2 library, and that you need to turn on the deprecated allow_call_time_pass_reference in php.ini.

Under Windows, installing GD2 means uncommenting one line in php.ini. Under Linux, it means gathering libjpeg, libpng, and libttf, and gd2, compiling all of them, then reconfiguring and recompiling PHP itself. Easy for some, but hey, I’m not a comand-line ninja. That stuff takes me a while.

Once you’ve done your bowing and scraping, the installation is rather straightforward – fill in the fields, click the button, it installs itself, but doesn’t log you in or tell you the default account – you have to go back to the INSTALL file to get the default admin account, and use this to create your own account and other accounts. Then you’re ready to get started.

Initial Setup
Once you’ve got it installed, you have to create your project. This seems simple enough until you try to create a ticket, only to discover that new projects have no default priority codes or issue types – an odd choice.

Interface
The interface leaves much to be desired, even for a developer’s tool. In terms of usability, it isn’t very intuitive in general, and navigation can be complex and confusing. The entire interface could sorely use a severe overhaul – something I may take on if I decide to continue using it.

Featureset
Eventum is very feature-rich, which is a bad thing in my situation. I chose it for its quick install, not for the features; I just need issue management, not timekeeping, which seems to play a large part in Eventum. I also don’t need all the pie charts and graphs that made GD2 necessary in the first place.

As far as it’s core featureset is concerned, it is an effective issue manager, though some features are clunky. For example, the notes on issues are difficult to get to; as a developer, I want to be able to open an issue and immediately see the note history so I can see where progress is being made and what the current status is, beyond the “implementation” status code.

It should really also open to the My Assignments page if you have assignments, rather than the Stats page. It also sorely needs a preference to let you change the default rows per page on the issue lists to something other than 5 (yes, the default is 5, and each row actually only takes up one line on the page. I’m not sure what they were thinking.)

Overall
I’m stuck with Eventum for the time being as I don’t have time to find, install and migrate to an alternative. I chose Eventum as a quick-fix. Once I have time to apply to the issue of issue management, I may switch to another solution, or try to fix Eventum. I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it – who knows, maybe it’ll have grown on my by then. Or maybe I’ll finally make that issue management system I keep putting off…

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2006-11-01

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Review: FireFox 2.0

After the Great Chronos Crash of ’06, I was forced to reinstall, well, everything. That’s mostly a bad thing, but it did encourage me to upgrade everything I use to the latest and greatest, including Mozilla’s FireFox browser (my browser of choice.) So, behold the silver lining to my grey cloud: my review of FireFox 2.0.

Interface
The first thing anyone notices about a new version of a program is , of course, the interface. FireFox 2.0 sports a somewhat updated interface, particularly in the toolbar and tab bar.

The new toolbar I’m really not happy with. I like the search suggestions that have been added to the search box; other than that, I hate what they’ve done with the toolbar. The addition of a Go button is fine for computer novices – which I am not, yet there is no option to remove the button to free up screen real estate. Likewise, there is an equivalent Search button added to the search box – again, fine for users who don’t know about hitting enter, but I want an option to remove the thing, because I don’t need, use, or want it. The updated icons are ugly, particularly the home icon. Using FireFox 1.5 I left the default skin in place; now I’ve switched to one of the freely-available custom skins (GrayModern2, if you’re wondering). I’m sorry, brown is just a really unappealing colour for a toolbar button.

The new tab bar I do like; it integrates many of the features that I previously had to add myself using extensions, like the close box now available on every tab, and the use of fixed-width tabs. I would have liked to see a close box remain fixed at one side of the tab bar; I often find myself closing a series of tabs one after the other, so the ability to just click several times in one spot to close several tabs in a row is a big plus. It’s now more obvious which tab is the active tab, which is nice. They’ve also added a tab menu button to the far-right side of the tab bar, which gives you a list of the currently open tabs; this feature is almost useful, but deeply hampered by the fact that you can’t right-click items in this menu to get the context menu you’d get by right-clicking the tab (e.g., close tab, close other tabs, etc.). They have added Undo Close Tab to the context menu, thank god – a feature I use regularly, being one who often makes mistakes.

The preferences have been updated slightly; I noticed that they removed the option to change your screen resolution in DPI – a mixed bag, since it didn’t work before, but such a feature would be extremely handy if it worked, since I run at high resolution with DPI turned up for improved readability.

The extensions and theme managers have been integrated into a single “add-ons” manager – not a big deal, but a positive change nonetheless.

New Features
The new version isn’t particularly big on new features, but there are a few. The new search bar has support for search suggestions, such as those available on Google, which, I have to say, I didn’t really like at first. However, after leaving it on for a couple of days, it’s really started to grow on me as a handy time-saver. Plus, your search history shows up ahead of the suggestions, leaving that feature unencumbered by the new addition.

It also features a long-time wish of mine, inline spell check. That means you have a spell checker like that of a word processor when you’re using web form fields (such as the one I’m entering this post into.) Not much to explain, but incredibly handy. It underlines misspelled words as you type, and you can right-click to auto-correct, add to dictionary, etc.

There’s a new feed reader as well, but I’m not a big RSS user. I may just have to give RSS another try with the newer clients available (including FireFox’s built-in options) and post a followup here.

Overall
They say it’s more stable and performs better, but it’s really hard to say, as it’s always been really stable and performed really well. I will say that this version seems to be bogged down less by having multiple extensions installed than 1.5 did, but that may also be partly due to the fact that all the plugin developers had to release new versions for compatibility with 2.0, so they may have released some improvements of their own along with the update.

All in all, I’d say it’s certainly worth the upgrade (especially being free), but nothing ground-breaking here. I’m looking forward to FireFox 3.0 which seems to have passed the Acid2 test in development builds. Finally!

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2006-10-31

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Google – Make up your minds!

So, Google is on two separate and opposing rampages. On one hand, they’re talking about halting new releases to improve quality and integration, and (as mentioned in a previous post), even cutting their product count by a full 20%. On the other hand, they’re making acquisition after acquisition. It just doesn’t add up – do they want more products, or less? Are they bulking up or slimming down? I’m a rabid technophile, I read more tech news than most people read “real” news. So, which is it, Big G?

Anyone who’s read my blog knows I’m all for speculation, but this one has me stumped. I’d hate to see good in-house projects get dumped in favor of bringing in products from the outside – not so much because of the products themselves, but because of Google’s merger habits. You see, when they bring out a new in-house product, it’s, well, Googley. It’s got the familiar Google UI, and it typically has some level of integration with existing Google products – at the very least, it shares Google’s accounts system. But when they buy something up, well… how long have they had Blogger, and they’re just now integrating accounts into it? And that’s pretty much it. The UI is still the same dismal Blogger UI they’ve always had (and yes, I am using the “new” Blogger Beta), the Google logo is nowhere to be found, and integration is nearly non-existent. When they bought YouTube they stated they were keeping Google Video around, which indicates to me that they are planning on keeping the YouTube brand separate from Google for the foreseeable future.

With all their talk of wanting to scale down product count and focus on integration, they seem to be doing a lot of acquisition which works against both goals. It just doesn’t add up.

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2006-10-27

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Why I hate iTunes, but use it anyway

Let me preface this post by saying I’m not an Apple-hater. In fact, I was once an Apple-lover, a die-hard Mac-user. I had an Apple //c when I was 5, a Mac SE when I was 9, a Quadra 605 when I was 13, and a PowerMac G3 (blue & white) when I was 16. The first time I had used a Windows PC was when I got a job doing tech support for an ISP, so I had to learn Windows both for use as my workstation and for troubleshooting calls. My first Windows PC I built myself when I was 19.

Then MacOS X came out, and I sold my Macs and went straight-PC. I hate MacOS X. I know a lot of people love it, but, well, I disagree. It’s worse than Windows, by a significant margin. But, enough ragging on OSX. I’m here to rag on iTunes.

You see, when I got this nice new job here in ATL and started making decent money, I went out, and I bought me an iPod. Loved the thing. They’re just awesome. Small, lightweight, brilliant interface, good audio quality, good physical quality. Overpriced, but hey. I had a new job.

Some time later, a friend bought me a new iPod Video as a gift, and I gave the old iPod mini away to a friend. I love the new iPod even more than the old one. I even put an iPod adapter in my car so I can hook the iPod directly to the stereo – works great, I can control the iPod from the head unit, and it displays track info on the head unit’s display. Awesome. Love it.

Basically, iPods are the shit.

The problem, however, is in the software. You see, iTunes is godawful. Dreadful. Ghastly. Really, really bad.

It doesn’t work with multiple users. AT ALL. It gives each person a seperate library; purchases from ITMS don’t show up for both users, and neither do playlists; if one person has iTunes open, the other can’t open it or control the other instance, and if you switch to another user from the user that’s running iTunes while it’s playing, the audio goes all choppy until you force-quit the app. The application is a resource-hog. The interface is awful.

I like the iTunes Store – it’s usually cheaper than buying CD’s, and I can make purchases from the comfort of my livingroom and immediately put them on my iPod without having to rip CD’s. I do feel a little gipped on quality settings, and I feel thoroughly gipped by the DRM. You see, I’d happily buy tracks off of ITS all day long, if I could play the damned things in, oh, say, WinAmp. I would buy Apple’s hardware, I would buy Apple’s content – the only part I don’t want is the part they don’t make a penny off of, their free software. But can you remove that piece of the equation? Well, sort of.

You see, you can burn and re-rip your ITMS tracks to get plain MP3s, it’s just a pain to do so. After that, you can play them in any player you want – but you still need iTunes to update your iPod’s library. Of course, you could re-flash the iPod BIOS in order to use a different app to manage it, but then you lose all accessory functionality – e.g., my car-stereo hookup. So, it’s a no-win situation.

Why not switch to another MP3 player, and another online store? Well, all the online stores have DRM issues, and most of them use WMA, which I hate even more than AAC. On top of that, because Apple dominates the player market, they own the accessory market too – a good 90% of accessories are only available for the iPod, or if they work with other players, feature very limited support (i.e., audio only, no support for controlling the iPod via the device or gathering track info from the iPod for display on the device.)

So, I suppose at this point I’m suck with iTunes. But, Apple, you’ve got a choice: either get iTunes into shape, open up access to ITS and iPod to other software, or expect to lose a good hunk of market share as soon as decent alternatives become available. Because I’m already more than ready to jump ship as soon as a decent alternative appears.

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2006-10-27

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Google’s Internal Company Goals

As mentioned on Slashdot, Google Blogoscoped posted an article about Google’s internal goals, and it’s actually really interesting. It mentions some upcoming projects like a revamped Google News, Gmail 2.0, Google Archive Search, and “Another interesting feature foreshadowed in the Google papers was to grab relevant locations & dates from web pages allowing users to ‘view results on a timeline of map.'” I’m not entirely sure what the last one might look like, but it certainly sounds interesting.

What interested me the most about this post, however, was the note that Google intends to “Count total number of Google products and reduce by 20%.” When I first read this, I found it somewhat worrisome – I use a lot of Google products, and I’d hate to see a much-loved product hit the chopping block.

But I don’t think that’s going to happen – not that I don’t think they’ll reduce the product count by 20%, but that I don’t think that means many products will disappear. There are basically 3 ways they could remove a product from their product count:

  1. The obvious: dump the product entirely. I’m sure this will happen to some products.
  2. The unlikely: sell off products. I doubt if this will happen to any Google products; if they see fit to keep it online, they’ll keep it in-house as well.
  3. The sneaky: combine disparate products into a cohesive whole. E.g., Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools might become a single, combined entity.

Since they’ve already stated that they want to tighten up integration between their various products, I see #3 as being a highly viable option for them to use to reduce product count; it lets them kill two birds with one stone without actually having to “kill” a product.

At least, I hope they pick #3 if they’re looking at slimming down one of the many Google products I use on a daily basis.

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2006-10-27

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Chronos Update Updated

Okay. Chronos is back up and running stable and solid. I ran Prime95 for about 3 hours with no problems, CPU steady at 44 degrees. Ran BF2 for about an hour, again no problems. So I’m hopeful that it might actually be finally fixed. By this time tomorrow, well, I’ll be moderately certain that it’s fixed. At this point I’m just hedging my bets. I might call it fully fixed if it’s still stable this time next week.

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2006-10-26

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Chronos Update

It was all going so well. Quake 4, 1280×1024, maxed out, smooth as silk. Battlefield 2, 1600×1200, maxed out, smooth as silk. I played Q4 for about an hour with no stability problems. I played Battlefield 2 for about 15 mintues, and Chronos turned off. Again. Only this time, it wouldn’t turn back on.

So I pop the case, unplug everything but the CPU, HSF and mobo power connector. Still no boot. I haul the POS to CJ’s place. No boot. Swap PSU’s. Boots. Swap back to my PSU. Boots. Boggle. Swap back to CJ’s PSU, and CJ takes mine in his bawx. His bawx boots fine. Runs stably. I take his PSU. Still boots. Haul it back to my appartment. Tired, went straight to bed. Got up. Hooked up Chronos. Won’t boot. Unplug, replug. Boots. BIOS. I hear the screen res flipping as if it’s about to load up windows. I get hopeful. I’ve got a steady HDD light. Good… good… good… screen remains black, HDD light remains on. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. No sign of progress. Solid HDD, blank screen, but the screen isn’t in sleep mode – it’s just blank.

So, Chronos is back in critical condition, YET AGAIN. I feel more and more an idiot every day.

Also, I’ve cancelled our trip to Asheville this weekend. I’m just not up to it. My girlfriend is sick, my cat is sick, my PC is sick, my project (at work) is sick (buggy, and I’m not sure what’s wrong with it), my appartment is a wreck. I have no costume.

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2006-10-25

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Chronos Reborn

Chronos is back with the living, for the most part. I’m having some drive lettering problems, and I’ve yet to really reinstall everything, but it’s booting and I’m using it to post this right now. Photos to come later.

Update: turns out it requires an act of Congress to reletter your system drive, so I get to reinstall again. But I have an upgrade copy of Windows, and the Win98 disk with which to authorize it is at CJ’s house, and CJ is at work. So… Chronos is back in critical condition until such time as I can reinstall windows AGAIN. YAY!