Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

It's heresy, I  know. I've used Windows for a while, usually grudgingly, and I'll admit: I've been a hater. I won't bore you with a laundry list of  objections I've had over the years.  "The triumph of marketing over technology," sums up my feelings. After sticking with Windows XP's bubble gum look and feel (it puts a whole new spin on "gooey interface") I finally made the jump to Windows 7, after skipping the over-hyped and under-performing Vista, and thought it was....not bad. Being an IT geek I of course had to try out the new Windows 8 prereleases, featuring the new Metro Interface. I thought: this sucks. But a funny thing happened. I picked up a copy of Windows 8 on the cheap (for a while you could snag a legit copy from Microsoft for $15 if you knew how to game the system) and installed it on a new Zotac ZBOX microcomputer that doubles as a video server. There are several add-ons one can install that bring back the St...

Okay, not long after my rant about Amazon dropping support for Linux in their MP3 market place, I cooled down and did a second look. I'd rather fix my problem than bitch - here's what I figured out. In case you missed it, here's what prompted my outrage: to download albums from Amazon, you download an AMZ file, which is essentially an encoded list of URLs to the MP3s in the album. After supporting this functionality for Linux for a number of years, they suddenly dropped it. If you are a Linux user, they now inform you that you will need to download your MP3s from their Cloud Player, one file at a time . Click, download, click, download (repeat ad nauseum). If you purchase much music, this is a completely unacceptable solution. First rule of computer troubleshooting: no matter how outlandish or obscure the problem, somebody has experienced it before you. I did what any self-respecting geek did: I Googled. Breaking this down, there are actually 2 problems to solve. O...

Dennis Ritchie passed away on October 8, at age 70. Most people will say "huh," upon hearing his name. I'd argue he had a much greater influence on modern computing than the late Steve Jobs. He developed C , the most widely used programming language in the world, while working at Bell Laboratories in the late 60's. He still has a home page at Bell Labs . While originally written to be used to create the Unix operating system (which Ritchie also developed, along with Ken Thompson), C is now used for writing software for computers, embedded devices, smart appliances, cellphones, consumer goods - everything from operating systems to applications to device drivers to...well, you name it. The beauty of C is that it can be compiled for any number of different platforms. C gave rise to an number of variations and spin offs - C+, C++ (I'm not making this up) as well as directly and indirectly influencing the structure and syntax of a host of other modern programm...

My good friend, guitar-playing buddy and occasional debating partner The Whited Sepulchre posted the NPR Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Book list with annotations (I guess there is a lot of this going around) and challenged folks to do their version of the list. Despite his occasionally loathsome political opinions, the WS is extremely well-read (and now a published author !) so I found his list fascinating.  I used to read a lot of sci-fi when I was younger; not so much now. A lot of authors I enjoyed when younger I find tiresome now. Anyway, here's my list. 1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien I'm sorry - I've tried to read this probably 2 dozen times and never got any further than the first 30 pages. My first attempt was when I was 13, my last was when I was in my late 40's. Hugo Dyson, one of Tolkien's contemporaries is reported to have exclaimed : " Oh god! Not another fucking elf! "during a reading by Tolkien. I feel his...

Not to yet again brand myself as an ancient, but when I got my first computer (a Tandy Color Computer) the connected world was a much simpler place. I had a 300 baud modem and a CompuServe account which cost me an arm and a leg. This was around 1981. I soon discovered BBS's and saved a bunch of money. This thing called the internet ran on leased 56K phone lines and one had to be at a research or defense facility or employed by the government or military to gain access to it. The "world wide web" wouldn't appear for another 10 years. If you knew someone, you might have access to something a bit more connected than just a BBS. Around the time my oldest was born I had a sibling who worked at a local university and he gave me the dial in number for the library computer. With a little judicious poking around all sorts of interesting things could be found. Telehack.com has put together a blast from the past - a javascript based emulator for that yesteryear of comput...

We are defined by our habits and god knows I'm a creature of habit. There are certain websites I go to almost daily, for information and entertainment. In no particular order, here's my daily reading list. This will go a long way to explaining why I hold the peculiar opinions that I do. Slashdot.org   "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," is their tagline. Where else can you read about programming, intellectual property law, the latest video game or the politics of anti-terrorism?  The stories are good, but the reader comments are where the real fun is. Geek cred at Slashdot can in part be determined by how low your user ID is (indicating how long you've had an account): mine is in the low 70,000's; account numbers are now in the millions range. Comics Curmudgeon Every few days Josh Fruhlinger waxes eloquently about ... oh hell, he waxes snarkily , about the daily funny pages. He spares no one. His favorites are the "soap opera" strips like Mar...

The US Courts have declared that "jailbreaking" your iPhone is a perfectly legal activity. Apple has been waving its corporate arms and screaming that jailbreaking is illegal -- citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- and making apocalyptic predictions of "potentially catastrophic" cyberattacks by hordes of iPhone-wielding cyber terrorists. The courts said, "Uh, no." While Apple is free to declare that jailbreaking voids warranties, it's not against the law. I guess all those Android-toting desperados are now free to switch carriers once their contracts run out, since the iPhone is obviously a much better platform for their nefarious deeds. You can thank the Electronic Frontier Foundation for this latest bit of sanity in the world of corporate nonsense.

Slashdot had a link this morning to an article entitled " The Secret Origin of Windows ," written by Tandy Trower, who was the Microsoft Product Manager responsible for Windows 1.0. A fascinating, if not geeky read. Thanks, Slashdot ! Enjoy! Update : after posting the above, I remembered The GUI Gallery - which has a vast collection of screenshots of operating systems you've never heard of.

Okay -- Apple has finally announced what the fan-boys have all been waiting for: their new tablet. gdgt.com live blogged the event and my comments are based largely on theirs, so I could turn out to be completely full of crap. However, that's never stopped me before. They call it the iPad. Cute. It looks a lot like an oversized iPod touch or iPhone. Apple claims up to 10 hours of battery live. We'll see about that. My iPhone does well to make it through the day with a full charge unless I do nothing but use it as a phone, and what's the point of that? It's got a 9.7 inch display, is 1/2 an inch thick and weighs a pound and a half. Since it strongly resembles an oversized iPod/Phone, my first question would be: will we see the same sad cracked touch screens that about every 4th iPod/Phone seems to be cursed with?  Maybe it's time Apple rethought the notion of Real Glass (which Really Breaks) and go with an alternative. Other specs: comes with WiFi/Bluetooth...

And now for a short break from ponderous holiday thoughts. Here's my latest geeky thing. I confess, I love my tunes, which is one of the reasons I finally opted for an iPhone -- it's a great portable music device. And not just when using it as an MP3 player. Lots of devices do that. It also has great streaming audio functionality. Apps like Pandora , Slacker and Shoutcast (to mention but a few) were what sold me. But when I'm home I don't always feel like listening to streams on my iPhone. I've got other stream players, such as my Roku Soundbridge and Linksys WMLS11B . Here's a brief discussion about one way (out of many) to manage tunes for these two devices. Both of these have remotes that let you browse for music servers on your network or  select preselected streams. While useful, both devices have only low-res displays which means a lot of drilling down using the remote -- not a very fast or intuitive method of looking for stuff. Since I can...

I've never been a huge Mac fan, although I have a representative sampling of old machines in my collection o' historic computer junk. Still, I find them interesting. Most of them were either bargains from Goodwill or cast-offs from a local university, running versions of the Mac OS from 6.x to 8.5. I played with them mostly as curiosities. Once finished I'd go back to my Windows or (later) my Linux machines. Being the sometimes artist, I have lots of friends firmly in the Mac world, so I'm familiar with the basics of the cult of the Mac. Because of his interest in the arts, when oldest son got ready to leave for college he chose an iBook laptop (at my suggestion) rather than a PC. He loves it, and later upgraded to a MacBook. His laptop was my first exposure to OS X. A little history The road to OS X from previous Mac operating systems was, to coin a phrase, a maze of twisty little passages, all different (if you're interested in this sort of thing there...

Okay -- this is a bit of an experiment, and it may not be a long lived one. I've set up a Twitter account: PostRalphaelite . To see posts, go to http://www.twitter.com/PostRalphaelite or subscribe. You can see my last 6 tweets on the right sidebar, below my profile. Now, in addition to the embarrassingly small number of people who read this blog, I can add even fewer who follow my tweets. Twitter, as you may know, is a "micro-blogger," allowing you 160 characters per post. Think of it as blogger lite. Twitter, thy name is self-importance .

The latest Linux Ubuntu release from Canonical, 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) , is now loosed on the internets. I'm running Kubuntu (KDE) 8.04 (Hardy Heron) right now on my main desktop computer and love it. I'm trying to decide: upgrade? The Jackalope promises faster boot times, a new package management system, an updated kernel, and KDE 4. The upgrade will probably take an hour and be relatively painless, unlike the agony soon to be experienced by all those poor chumps out there waiting to upgrade Windows 7 beta to the Release Candidate. Decisions, decisions. If none of this makes a lick of sense, don't worry: tomorrow I'll be writing about my garden.