scott.hodson.blog

I was down at Irvine Spectrum last night and my wife was spending quite a bit of time looking at skirts and sweaters at some stores…needless to say I needed to find something else to do. So I walked around and came across their new Apple Store, which I didn’t know was there. Anyways, I played around with the new MacBooks, deciding if a 13.3″ or 15.4″ model would suffice, but decided the 17″ MacBook Pro would have to be the way to go, mainly due to the lack of pixel resolution the smaller models support. Then I admired the design of their iPods, lamented at the paltry selection of available shelf/shrink-wrap software Mac OS X supports, looked at what other people in the store were doing on their macs, mostly teenagers playing with the built-in iSight or looking at photos of friends online, etc. This is the prototypical Apple store run-through for me.

So I camped out at a G5 with a 30″ monitor (”Cinema Display”) running at an astounding 2560×1600 resolution! I played with Photoshop, used Microsoft Remote Desktop to login to some servers to check on how things are going at the co-lo, tweaked some blogs, etc. After a while in front of a 30″ screen it was hard to leave. When my wife came back to find me she said “As much time as you spend in front of a computer you’d be pretty justified in getting one of those.” Ah, what a wife!

To make it even better, I was standing the whole time!

I played with the YouOS recently. Conceived at MIT, the YouOS emulates an operating system desktop environment within the confines on a web browser. Apps for the YouOS are written in HTML/Javascript/CSS/AJAX and offers some interesting possibilities. All of your session state is stored on a YouOS server so the next time you login you continue where you left off. It’s pretty slow, and the screen UI responsiveness is average at best, but I like the fact that someone is working on something like this.

While I’m not sure a browser-based operating system is really the best way to go, pushing more state, storage, and applications onto a network is becoming more viable as network speed and reliabilities increase. I think Sun Micro has made some great strides in this area, but most apps today are still built as 80-90% desktop with some HTTP/Web service “phone home” calls, or are heavily web browser based with some Javascript or Flash/Java running in the browser. I think we need more convergence between desktop and network application services.

Click on the screenshot above to see a larger version of what some of the running apps look like.

You can trade in your old CDs for an iPod over at MilleniumMusic.com. This rewards all of those people who’ve actually been paying for CDs. However, they don’t accept all CDs, and make sure you have ripped backups of the CDs you really care about before you send them in.

Here’s a story about some people that have used the service.

Here’s details on how it works.

In case you haven’t heard, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, articulately desribes the reasons against Net Neutrality. He refers to the Internet as a set of “tubes” and that the whole Internet was sent to him, among other things. Maybe he was getting the Internet and the Alaska Pipeline confused.

Remmeber, this is the same guy that got over $453M of federal funds for bridges in Alaska including the famous “bridge to nowhere“.

Here is the full audio

Here are some excerpts:

• “I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.”
• “They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that? Do you know why? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.”
• “Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.”

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Notepad.
2. Type .LOG on the first line, and then press ENTER to move to the next line.
3. On the File menu, click Save As, type a descriptive name for your file in the File name box, and then click OK. When you next open the file, note that the date and time have been appended to the end of the log, immediately preceding the place where new text can be added. You can use this functionality to automatically add the current date and time to each log entry.

Click here for full info

Read this:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/07/why-windows-takes-so-long-to-shut-down.html

Learn to leverage the power of DirectX in C# with the help of these videos. I started programming when I was 10 years old because I couldn’t afford to pay for video games so I learned how to create my own. I haven’t written any games since I was a teenager, though I recently created some educational games to help my kids learn to read the numbers 1-30. That was fun. Now I can finally build that MMPORG version of PONG I’ve been wanting to create!

Link to videos here.

It’s good to see the continued progress and support for better desktop integration and performance as well as tighter integration for web services support without having to depend on Java EE.

Read the top 10 here

So Dell has some new models to show off. OK. The desktop is an interesting mod case. The XPS M1210 12.1″ notebook is a nice MacBook competitor. The real doozy is the XPS M2010, a huge portable desktop with a 20.1″ screen and weighing in at 20lbs! It has an interesting way of folding together for portability with a detached keyboard and all. I’m just not sure what the suite spot for this is. Uber LAN partier? Laptop for bodybuilders? Users reminiscing about the good ole Osborne days? It’ll be interesting to see how this model is adapted in the marketplace. CNet has more pictures and a review here.

I rated myself a 3.8. Heading most of my newer stuff to Level 4 and heavier use of CSS for layout. Rate yourself here.