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...

I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview today and just spent the last several hours playing around with it. It's ....interesting. Now, granted, Microsoft has taken pains to emphasize this is a Beta release (they have a cute lil' "Beta" fish on the start up screen to remind us), and also is careful to point out much could change between now and whenever they end up releasing this thing.  And having messed about with it, I'd bet money they will, since its current iteration will not win it many fans. It's ....interesting. And "interesting" is not the same as good. If you don't believe me, next time your significant other makes dinner and asks how you like it, say, "It's ....interesting." You'll find it scores you no points. For whatever reason, Microsoft has decided to drag out it's clunky, horsey-looking Windows Mobile interface (now apparently re-name "Metro") and attempt yet again to sell it to the ...

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...

Since I worked from home yesterday I ended up deciding it would be a good idea to upgrade my iDevices to iOS 5 the very first day it was available . Remind me to never do that again. Not surprisingly, everybody on this side of the space-time continuum made the same foolish choice. My first attempt to download the upgrade started by helpfully informing me it would take around 23 minute to download...then 29...then 38...  Which was bad enough except when it finished, iTunes gave me a terse little error message that said, "there was a problem downloading" blah, blah. Son of a bitch ! After several failed attempts (each longer than the last) I Googled the error message and speculated my anti-virus software was not playing nice with iTunes. Thank you Kaspersky. After disabling it I started the download process again, (it took about 90 minutes) and finally got my iPad updated. The whole process, with backing up, restoring, etc, took roughly 2 and a half to 3 hours. Note ...

So Apple finally announced the iPhone du jour yesterday. Am I the only one out there who feels slightly underwhelmed? Okay - these are the features most prominently displayed on the Apple website: Faster processer - nice, but I never felt my 3GS was cripplingly slow. Meh. Better camera - nice, but it's still a camera in a phone, with all the limitations that come with that. Slightly more compelling but still - meh. Siri - voice commands. I tried Siri before Apple bought it and never found it all that useful. A gimmick. Note to Apple: I'm saying "meh," now - is there a command for that? iOS5 - this is actually the most interesting thing being trumpeted as part of the new phone. Oh wait - I can get it as a free upgrade to my current phone in a few days. More on that below. iCloud - sounds like this is an iOS5 thing. See above comment. So I'm not seeing any reason to rush right out and replace my old 3GS. The biggest complaint I have with it is that battery...

It's a sad thing to see stuff you remember as cutting edge now relegated to nostalgia. But better there than forgotten altogether. PCMag.com posted an amusing slideshow / feature entitled 12 Forgotten Online Games a couple of days ago. The kicker was these were all pre-internet "What?" you say. "There was online before the internet?" Indeed. Dial up services and games abounded, not to mention the grandfather of all community access, the BBS. I had, at various times, an AOL account (using the pre-Windows client), Delphi and CompuServe. And tons of BBS accounts. I was never a huge gamer but I recalled several of the games mentioned in the PCMag story, primarily the BBS "door" games; I had an ongoing friendly rivalry with the SYSOP of the Cat's Eye BBS on his Tradewar 2000 game. I also wasted time on LORD (Lord of Red Dragon) and Planets. My eldest son had a demo account (several, really) on The Realm, which he and one of his friends used t...

I'd sort of been wanting a netbook for a while. These dinky little toys will leave some disappointed who are looking for a cheap general purpose laptop. Understanding the design focus is on portability and battery life is key. After shopping around, I finally took the plunge and got an Acer Aspire. It had a new-ish processor (the Atom N450), a 6-cell battery, 1 GB RAM (expandable to 2 GB by swapping the chip) and a 160 GB hard drive. As with many netbooks, it came equipped with Windows 7 Starter Edition , a stripped down version for the modestly powered machines. 1 GB occasionally leaves it gasping for air. I'd made up my mind to dual boot to Linux before I'd even decided on a machine. Enter Wubi . Wubi (Windows UBuntu Installer) lets you install Ubuntu Linux using a Windows-based installer. No repartitioning, no finding an external CD/DVD drive, no blowing away Windows. Download the installer in Windows, run it, choose the edition you want to install and sit back...

The whole Apple vs. Adobe soap opera continues. When will somebody cancel this show? The latest installment comes from Adobe, who's now running full pages ads in the Wall Street Journal and posting open letters. The latest is entitled, " Our thoughts on open markets ." As the founders of Adobe, we believe open markets are in the best interest of developers, content owners, and consumers. Freedom of choice on the web has unleashed an explosion of content and transformed how we work, learn, communicate, and, ultimately, express ourselves. Yeah right. This is because (sniff) Apple won't support Flash on the iPod/iPad/iPhone. Oh boo hoo. Guess what: when I use the Lynx browser on the console of my Linux box I get no Flash support either. More significantly, the Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. It is a closed, proprietary platform. Closed: not open. As far as open markets, A...

 Ever hear how Amazon managed to patent the idea of " One-Click Shopping? "  That's right -- they were granted a patent for the idea of pre-entering your credit card info so when you clicked on the "Buy Now" button, you didn't have to re-enter all your financial data.  When Barnes and Noble later offered a similar service, Amazon sued for (get this) patent infringement. Years later, large chunks of the original broad patent were thrown out, but not without a lot of money being flushed down the toilet that is occasionally our legal system. The European Patent Office refused to grant a patent. This sort of nonsense abounds. A couple of weeks ago, a new short documentary was released on-line entitled, " Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system. " In it, independent filmmaker Luca Lucarini looks at how our current patent system has managed to screw by issuing patents on the flimsiest of premises and the history of how this sorry st...

Imagine you were a guitar player. You're no Leo Kottke, but you can hold your own on open mike night at the local bar. How would feel if you discovered, buried in the fine print in the owner's manual that came with your Martin D-15, something that said you could only perform with said guitar for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes? Or suppose you were an artist - a painter - and discovered the brushes you used to paint your last masterpiece came with the same restriction: for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes only? Or a writer, with the same restrictions on anything that came out of your word-processor? Freaking ridiculous, eh? Guess what, all you photographers shooting digital video, your camera may have the same restriction. It's about the technology used to encode the video (the "codec"). OS News (one of my favorite technology sites) has a long article about the licensing restrictions placed on one of the more commo...

Omigod! Against all that I thought possible, Apple has approved the Opera Mini browser for iPhone (presumably an iPad version can't be far behind). Omigod! I'm downloading it now !

It's funny how we can be responsible for something much large than ourselves. Case in point: the late H. Edward Roberts . He's well-known in a somewhat narrow context and yet I'd be willing to bet the next 10 people you see have no idea who he is. That being said, he's directly had an impact on you if you are reading this. Ed Roberts developed and sold what was arguably the first commercially successful personal computer, the Altair 8800 , way back in 1975. Just as significantly, he hired a couple of bright, ambitious college dropouts to write a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800: Bill Gates and Paul Allen . Gates and Allen went on found a little software startup called Microsoft. Perhaps you've heard of it? Roberts came out of the hobbyist electronics world. MITS, the company he started, initially designed and sold telemetry devices for model rocketeers, the moved to selling kits for programmable calculators (back when these were enormously expensive). The Janu...

Slashdot reminds us that this week would have been the 15th birthday of Microsoft Bob . For a look back, see the Bob Chronicles on Technologizer.com -- worth a visit! Enjoy!

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.

Because not everyone needs or can afford Photoshop, here's a quick round up of some of the better free web-based image editors. All will allow you to upload an image and do basic photo-editing: resize, rotate, crop, correct exposure, color-correct and sharpen. Some do one thing well, others may do another. Most are Flash based. Your mileage (as they say) may vary. In no particular order: Picnik - no registration needed but free registration gives you additional features; premium ($) version available. Just acquired by Google, so keep your eye on it. PHIXR - unregistered logins good for 3 hours; free registration lets you save, etc. Same basic corrections as above, plus some holiday effects (goofy) and text tools. It has a quasi-Photoshop-like interface. Pixer.us - no login or registration required. Some interesting effects. No text tools. You can play with some of their default images if you don't want to upload your own. FotoFlexer - no registration required. Good r...

WebDesignerDepot.com has a great story entitled 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop . It is a mark of the ubiquitousness of this amazing piece of software that it has become a verb: " photoshopping " (as in digitally manipulating an image -- usually with the intent to decieve). The Knolls brothers originally called their program Image Pro when they released in it 1988. After unsuccessfully pedaling it to both SuperMac and Aldus, they finally hit paydirt with Adobe Systems, a little company founded to market the page description language known as PostScript. Version 1 was available only for the Mac. The first Windows version was 2.5. The first version I owned was version 3, which I got bundled with a scanner; it introduced layers. The rest, as they say, is history. The WebDesignerDepot.com story has lots of screenshots of early versions as well as video clips of interviews with the creators. Thanks to Slashdot for mentioning the story. Enjoy.

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...

Youngest son (and fellow Colbert Report junkie) clued me into the launch of a new app from the Colbert Nation which features clips of all of Stephen Colbert's " The Word ." Now you'll never be more than a screen tap away from Stephen's truthiness. This may be the single best reason ever to get an iPhone. You can view the featured (most recent) Word, or choose by date--all the way back to 2005. You can go by the title and by most popular. Or select Random and pull up some long-forgotten Wisdom from any of the past five seasons. Best 99 cents you'll ever spend! Screenshot shamelessly nicked from TheNoFactZone -- best source of information on All Things Colbert. Follow the link for more information and additional screenshots.

I have seen the future of eBooks. It's the Foxit eSlick Reader . Unlike the Kindle, Sony and other eBook readers which use document formats that lock you down to a single source, this one reads PDFs. While Adobe originally created PDF as a proprietary format, they released it as an open standard on July 1, 2008. While Kindle and its kin are well made devices, the reliance on a single entity is problematic: should the company decide to discontinue the device and end support for the document format, you're screwed. With the eSlick Reader, even if Foxit stops making the unit, you'll be able to continue to get new books, as well as read the books on any other device (including your computer) that reads PDFs. Quoting from the overview page, The eSlick Reader has an internal memory of 512MB and comes with a 2 GB SD card (supports up to 4 GB). Resolution is 600 x 800 pixel. As with almost every other device out there, it also plays MP3s (great for audio books). It also ...

Actually this happened a couple of weeks ago, right before I took the young scholar off to George Mason University. Looking back, most of my cellphone decisions have been driven by the whim of my offspring. We got cellphones in the first place at the urging of our oldest, who foolishly thought it would make his mother easier to get hold of. Now we've switched to AT&T because the youngest wanted an iPhone. Since we regularly found ourselves standing on the sidewalk to make calls due to T-Mobile's crappy coverage, I was game for a change. And I get a modest discount from AT&T's mobile price thanks to my employer. Not to drag this out, but in the end we all ended up with iPhones -- youngest and me with 32GB 3Gs models, mom with the 8GB 3G. Mom (who shows slight Luddite tendencies) was the straggler. But after a weekend session of showing her what mine would do, she decided she liked the idea of having a cool phone. Thank you, Steven Jobs. Overall I'm fin...