It was almost two years to the day that I purchased my 4GB iPod Nano and just a couple of days after post this. At the time it seemed like a lot of space, but I really filled it up pretty quickly. Apple advertises 1000 songs on that unit, but it really turned out to be more like 550 songs out of what I listen to.

So I have been longing for something bigger since around September, but having just bought the car I wanted to hold off on splurging on another pricey product. Last year the iPhone and iPod Touch caught everyone’s attention, and then a few months ago my dad picked up an iPhone. So now that I was recently in the market for a new mp3 player, I started looking at these two. The iPhone, while I consider it the perfect convergence tool, carries that recurring monthly phone plan and has 16GB of music space in the new version. I feel that the product still has some time to grow before it will actually be perfect, but it sure is close. I also thought that with the amount of music that I have on my drive, I would need more than 16Gb of space. So the new iPod Touch, with its similar interface and 32GB of space seemed just right. The battery life is really great, especially since it charges any time I use it in the Mini. And after adding tons of music to it, I’m only up to 9GB - but I’m still only part of the way through my collection and there is a lot more to add.

I now use it for an alarm since there is the occassional power outage that makes my alarms loose track of the time. The usefulness of the WiFi capability is astounding. As soon as I wake up and shut off the iPod alarm, I hit the email, weather icon, and then browser over to see my weather station on wunderground (KNJHILLS9) - without having to wait for a computer to boot up. That takes 1-5 minutes, and then I jump into the shower. It really is a wonderful bonus in the product. There is just so much more that they’re going to be able to do with this product.

So what’s missing? For one, I have a daap streaming server in my home that I can access through iTunes. It would be great if I could access that through the WiFi when I am in range. A good RSS reader would be really nice. I currently use Monkeychow, which works in Safari for Windows, but I’ve had the same problems with it that I’ve had with other mobile browsers on Treos and my Blackberry and just have not had time to get through the code and fix it. The buttons that look really nice in the MonkeyChow web interface on Firefox and IE are terribly small on the iPhone and I will have to think about how to redesign that and how to handle the hundreds of articles that a feed can have. The default 50 articles per page seems like a bit much on that screen.

I also have a samba server in my house from which I could be watching movies on this nice little screen when my other set is taken up by the kids. It could have better access to social networks. A camera. A quick blogging tool. Some of these are real “pie in the sky” desires and not real needs, but the sky is the limit now that wireless networking has been added to the product and everyone is going to want a lot more. A lot of this is covered in their online apps, and a lot of sites like the above i.wund.com have Touch/iPhone compatible displays to make the browsing experience easier.

I still feel that the iPhone is the perfect product, but the Touch will do in the meanwhile. And if anyone has a good podcast to recommend for the morning drive, please recommend in the comments. I have about an hour commute and like to listen to something interesting in the morning and music on the ride home.

We spent Saturday at the 2008 New York International Auto Show from the time the doors opened on the show until about 8pm when we were really tired from all the walking. There were a lot of great cars, both production and concept. Of course, we stopped off at the Mini showfloor and spent a lot of time checking out the Clubman and other 2008 models. I was really hoping they would show the Mini SAV concept, but it didn’t happen. Shortly after that the battery died in my camera and I had not thought to buy a spare, even though that is not the first time the camera battery has come up short on me. We missed taking pictures of the small part of the top floor we hadn’t gotten to yet, and the whole lower floor.

Here are some nice pictures we were able to get that day:
http://www.shokk.com/gallery2/v/20080329nyautoshow/

So I was in the datacenter one day, the week that the Macbook Air debuted, when a tech from EMC was working with us on DiskXtender for UNIX for our Centera cluster pair. He needed to get some PDFs for reference so he pulls out an older Macbook Pro called Wakko decked out with an Animaniacs background. I made the simple comment, “Mac, huh? So how do you like it?” His reply was like a lightswitch in my mind: “Oh I love it, especially since I’m a UNIX geek.” *Ding*

Ignoring the C128 GEOS that I used as a glorified word processor, the first GUI desktop system that I used at Penn State was a Mac Plus. The only PC systems around were in a few buildings like Hammond Engineering lab, which, being an Electrical Engineer, I spent surprisingly little time in. The university was replete with dumb terminals but later the PCs would grow more numerous on campus as something called The World Wide Web and Gopher began to gain popularity. My son, at the time about two years old, would play a coloring book program on the color mac on days when his mom would bring him by the lab I was working for PSU CACOPS.

When I took my first real job at Mentor Graphics, they were heavily into Macs, so I knew how to work with the systems, which were really simple at the time. About the time the powerpc versions began to come out, the company started to turn towards PCs, which carried more of the software necessary for the company. At one point I brought home some sort of Mac II with a ginormous black and white monitor that was being thrown out at work. Because it was so slow, no one wanted to use it and I soon took back into the office to be thrown out with the rest of the stuff. That was really my last contact with Apple products until the ipod Nano came along.

Flash forward to my day in the computer room. All along, Apple’s promotions had me thinking in terms versus the PC. Apple just doesn’t have the number of games available that my PC does. And that’s always been a big negative for me, with no real room for positive when the PC does everything else that the Mac does. I just don’t buy the lines that Apple tries to push in the Mac ads. The Mac, like Linux and Windows, has its share of security holes if you care to look at security bulletins every month like I do. I have no attraction to the Mac interface when they advertise it as virtually a “for dummies” product. But the idea that it’s UNIX underneath, at its very core, attracts me because at my core, I’m a UNIX/Linux professional. It is really the holy grail of computing that the UNIX world has been shooting for all these years and consistently failed to grasp with its long series of amateurish and unprofessonal looking interfaces. Large companies like Red Hat, HP, and Sun have been unable to produce an interface worth loving. Gnome and KDE/CDE are not my interface of choice. To this day I would use OpenWindows on the Sun and mwm on Red Hat because of their light weight and simplicity.

I have recently admired Apple’s slick and genius accessory products like Apple TV, Time Capsule, and the Airport Express. Flagship products like the iPhone, iPods touch and nano, and the Macbook Air are very shiny! The PC world is comparatively very fractured and does not offer such coordinated and aesthetically pleasing products. My dad recently got an iPhone and I’ll likely get a 32GB iPod touch as I pass my trusty 4gb iPod nano to my daughter. Now, someone has cracked Leopard and presented us with an “EFI fix” version that allows us to run it on virtually any PC. The laptops that we got on Black Friday happened to be the perfect candidate. Here is a video my son made detailing how he blew away Windows XP after having just tried this version of the OS on another spare hard drive for just a couple of days. Being into graphic arts, he seems to be preparing for the day when he will likely have to use a Mac in college or in the professional world. Having played with the Leopard interface for a bit, I’m convinced that I will likely get one for myself in the next couple of years, possibly even picking up another Compaq C717NR some day soon to get a cheap first version. With products like Bootcamp and VMWare Fusion, I can even still have my games! Here is a peek at how the “EFI fix” install goes.

Recently Google changed the login process for Adsense, which broke the previous version of the AdsenseAgg Pepper for Mint. I’ve been able to figure out the updated login process and correct the code so that it works for a number of people now. The new version can be downloaded from the Mint Peppermill.

Update 2008-03-02: If you have any trouble displaying AdsenseAgg stats, be sure to login to Google and accept the TOS update they have just thrown up.

At this page you will find a list of polls that were posted to northamericanmotoring.com and nemini.org:
http://www.shokk.com/blog/mini-polls/

Have at it!

Sad Face…

Update 2008-Feb-05: Got the mini back. Very disappointed that the Geico adjuster never wrote down that I had rear-fog lights, so they were not fixed. They had written down “rear reflectors” even though I had pointed them out as such while he was writing things. Luckily the guys at the garage figured out the bulb was out and happened to have one on hand to send me on my way. And the bumper was loose so I had to tighten up a few screws when I got home.

And then while making a turn this evening, after just having gotten the car back, I came too close to the curb and scratched the white rims.

=(

Can’t win.

A while back I adapted an old Adsense pepper for Mint to a newer version of Mint. Afew versions of Firefox and IE later (and somehow convincing Google to unban my Adsense account), and that no longer worked. There are still a number of people looking to tie Adsense into their Mint install. I have been using an Adsense to RSS script for a while now, so I thought that this might be interesting to some. There is a discussion going on here about it if you would like to voice your desire for this type of info or just let me know if it works at all for you.

This Christmas was filled with all sorts of delights. From good times with family and friends to new XBox 360s, bikes, TVs and laptops.

After dealing with the agonizingly inconsistent behavior of our Sony KP-51HW40 for over a year, we finally decided to replace it with a Samsung FP-T5084 plasma we ordered from Amazon. This flat panel display has an HD tuner built in, so as soon as we plugged it in, we were mesmerized by the few free HD channels that Patriot Media offers. Luckily one of them played the Pats-Giants game in beautiful colors and amazing detail. We switched back to the standard def channel every now and then and were appalled at what now seemed like a bland and blurry display. Our cable company offers a number of other HD channels for only a few dollars a month extra, so they may be worth pursuing. Our TiVo has been showing its age and now that I know our favorite shows such as Heroes and Battlestar Galactica may be running in HD on NBC, it may be time to look at the Series 3 TiVos for their HD recording capability. The old set has been relegated to the basement where it amazingly is no longer flashing colors or shutting itself off. We attribute that to the bumpy journey into the basement.

My son got another XBox 360, this one with the HDMI port which we can use with the new plasma system. The older one goes to the basement with the Sony rear projection system for simultaneous big-screen gaming. Of course, rewiring the whole entertainment center took about 4 hours of breathing dust and uncovering ancient artifacts such as an old composite cable labeled VCR. In all, we freed a number of unused cables from that jungle of wiring and took out our old faithful Pioneer DV-414 from 199, which hasn’t been used in some time since the XBox 360 was able to do progressive scan playback. A cheap HDMI cable and the XBox HD-DVD kit will let us get into some nice HD-DVD movies. I think that with the advent of the sub-$100 HD-DVD player, HD-DVD will come out the winner over Blu-Ray this season, the same way DVD won over Circuit City’s terrible short-lived DiVx disc rental system back in the holiday season of 1998. Only the final numbers will tell.

Our littlest one got a few video games and a new bike. My daughter finally got the extra Compaq C717NR I picked up on Black Friday. I haven’t seen any rebates from it yet, but I’m anxiously waiting for those to come in. She’s doing OK with Windows Vista and the home wireless is keeping up with both laptops. Nothing new on the music front this year, as everyone but the 4-year old has an iPod, although he keeps going to apple.com to look at the videos and hinting that his favorite color is green. In some of the pictures of our Christmas photos you’ll see a long string of cards. This is from a nice Mini snail mail mailing list on northamericanmotoring.com I signed up for where we traded addresses (50 total) and sent each other Christmas cards.

The break involved a lot of resting, and working to set up some computer projects I had on the back burner such as finishing the virtualization of the web server, a few network upgrades in the home, and setting up my dad’s Dell PowerEdge 2950 (2x 3GHz dual core, 16GB mem) with CentOS and VMWare Server. There was a lot of Halo 3 being played! We closed the holidays with a New Years Eve bash at the Stress Factory comedy club in New Brunswich NJ where Joey Kola and Patty Rosborough performed to a sold out crowd.

I’ve been using Wordpress for some time now, but with the number of plugins I use, it has always been a pretty hacked up affair for me, with functions thrown throughout the sidebar.php file. So I started investigating what it would take to move my site to using the stock default theme. Boring right? But also more secure since any third party themes are likely to lag behind when anything basic changes in the default theme. So in order to do so, I would need to have everything that I had hacked into the sidebar available in widget form.

Not everything was - first and foremost, the Mint Popular Posts plugin which links into my Mint database to show the most popular posts at the time. So I took a look at the Nike+ plugin I had worked on some time ago. It had a widget available, so I was able to learn how the widgets and the Options pages in Wordpress work. And then I spent a weekend a few weeks back adding some code to the Popular Posts plugin to add the widget. Since a number of people at the plugin developer’s site were asking for widget capability in the plugin, I submitted it for anyone else to use. A new version has just been released with the addition of my code at
http://ellisweb.net/2006/03/wp-mint-popular-posts/. As a side benefit, since all content is in the database now, I can easily move to another regularly updated theme at any time without affecting the sidebar contents.

If you haven’t gotten a copy of Mint for your web site, check out this review.

We celebrated Thanksgiving this year with the usual family feast, only to rush out at 7pm to our closest Circuit City to camp out overnight for a number of electronic goodies. Specifically, we were waiting for the Compaq C717NR for $299. It included Norton Internet Suite 2007, a free router, and an all-in-one printer, both of which were quickly thrown up on Ebay. Some pictures of our evening below.

This is the second year in a row we have done Black Friday. Last year we attended one at Best Buy but we were way back in a line that wrapped around the whole mall after arriving around 4:30am. This year we came prepared with a tent, which kept us out of the wind that everyone else complained about, and many layers of clothes.

We were 9th in line at the start of the evening, but somehow the group at the very front seemed to multiply as the evening went on, even though they were the ones keeping the list of people in line. A few confrontations over the list and the line jumpers came up and everything was smoothed out again. About 2am I made a run to Dunkin Donuts for a Box of Joe full of hot chocolate for a little warmth. We went to sleep about 2:30, but it was pretty restless sleep for all of us on the hard concrete. About 3am some more line jumpers showed and someone was complaining loudly so we all got up. At 3:30 we made the decision to pack the tent away in the van, after which an employee came out to announce that vouchers would be handed out and everything needed to be packed up.

Around 4am they began handing out vouchers for the limited items such as the laptop. I got voucher 14 of 24 for the laptop while my son got 10 of 24, and a friend got voucher 1 or 9 for an Acer desktop. Around that time more line jumpers showed up at the front, but by that time everyone in line was exhausted and no one wanted to argue any more. I had what I came for so I gave up that fight. A few of the guys waiting in line were just there to flip the vouchers for cash at the back of the line and walked away with $200 for their efforts that evening.

After getting inside at 5am, we got to the head of a longer line for the laptops, but were in the heat so that didn’t matter. Waiting in line for everyone else to finish up took 4 hours so we were finally out the door at 9am.

All around a fun event that we’ll prepare better for next year. I’m thinking inflatable mattresses and enough chemical handwarmers.