For those of you computer geeks out there, in particular UNIX aficionados, you might get a chuckle out of this. My cousin saw this photo op in Barcelona and sent me the pic. For those of you who know both of us, you’ll be able to guess exactly who sent me this. We’re both UNIX geeks; he more so than me, yet ironically, I’m just the one who decided to turn it into a half-baked career of sorts. Click the pic for a larger image. BTW, I didn’t even come up with the title to this blog post; that honor goes to the photographer.
As you know if you read my little corner of the Web, we recently switched Gizmos for Geeks over to a new platform. That was quite a task, and of course, there were errors that cropped up. For example, we had to reroute a bunch of old URLs from the old platform to conform to the new ones, and we got some of them wrong. The problem is that when visitors or search engine crawlers try to access those ‘new’ URLs, they get 404 or Not Found errors. That’s bad.
Luckily, we’re using Google’s Webmaster Tools and it generates a report that gives us all of the URLs that it can’t find. Since Google first started crawling the new site, we’ve fixed a bunch of those links, but not all, and Google continues to crawl the site as there are thousands of URLs and it’s not done yet. So I don’t really want to go through the entire list by hand to figure out which ones end up in 404s.
June 26, 2007 at 10:20 AM · Filed under Gadgets, Tech
This is hardly the first article on the subject, but Reuters has a piece vaguely saying that some consumers are waiting on improvements or even a new version altogether before buying an iPhone. It would have been nice if they actually included some hard stats, instead of the opinions of just 3 people! Yes, yes, this is always true - there are always interested consumers who wait to see how others fare with a product before diving in themselves. But… based on my own (unscientific) experience, I actually believe the technology-buying public is becoming smarter - they’re not buying into new hype the second it comes out, because they’re learning that companies are more interested in getting the product out there quickly and fixing the smaller issues later on down the line. Read the rest of this entry »
Doug and I have just launched our latest venture, MvixCommunity.com. At CES, we hooked up with a small but promising company called MvixUSA that sells a number of very cool products. The most notable line of products they sell are Media Players, which as a product class have been growing over the past few years. In fact, Apple just released their own such product, the Apple TV.
So what’s a Media Player? [There are other names, like Streaming Media device and Media Center. At any rate, Media Player is what Mvix chose to go with.] Let’s phrase the answer in a problem-and-solution format. Problem: you have media (music, video, photos) all over the place (computer, DVR, etc.), and want to get it all in one place so that you can watch it on your TV. Solution: an Mvix media player! With a hard drive at its heart, an Mvix media player stores all of this media and plays it back using a on-screen control menu.
Anyway, we agreed to start a forum site that caters exclusively to Mvix products. So if you’re at all interested in these types of products, or better yet, if you own one, please jump on, sign up and participate. Tell all of your friends too!
On Monday, I was one of the privileged few to get to attend a special viewing of the brand new Airbus A380 airplane. I have a friend who is a fantastic photographer and a huge airplane buff, and thanks to his connection with a rep over at Qantas, we were invited to this special screening. [BTW, while I’m not sure whether or not I should mention their name, I can say this much – they were extremely friendly and I’m glad my buddy knew them.] Qantas is one of the larger airlines to have already ordered A380s, and worked with LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and Airbus to run this compatibility trial, as it was called. While JFK airport in New York received a plane with 500 guests serviced by a Lufthansa cabin crew on the same day (Mar 19), LAX got MSN1 – the very first A380 made.
Since the A380 that landed at LAX didn’t have the interior finished for passengers, we weren’t given a tour of the cabin, but we did get to go out on the tarmac and get quite close to the airplane. The perimeter that they created was a bit amusing (it matched the footprint of the plane), but we didn’t complain too much. After all, we were standing pretty much almost under the plane.
That morning we stood outside the airport very near to the leading edge of the runway that the A380 was scheduled to land on and watched it land. Later that day, we met a blogger who took a video of the landing [Other YouTube videos]. Not the best video, but it certainly conveyed the excitement of the crowd gathered to watch.
So what’s so special about the A380 [specs] apart from it now being the largest airliner in the world? In my opinion, the feature that stands out most is the double-decker passenger configuration. The wingspan is pretty impressive, but as far as overall size goes, it’s not as if it’s twice as large as the next largest plane in the world. As an LA Times reporter noted, “it doesn’t represent change on the scale its older cousin [Boeing 747] did.†In fact, it’s approximately the same length and width as a 747 give or take a few meters. One of the funny optical illusions is how short the A380 looks due to the height and fatness of the fuselage.
March 14, 2007 at 10:22 PM · Filed under Computers, Tech
This is a fantastic 6 minute video that just hits you with stat after stat about how quickly the technological world is advancing and gives you a clue as to how it may affect you. I wonder if people living in the early 20th century looked at the introduction of cars, airplanes and telephones and marvelled at how quickly technology was progressing and then wondered whether it was moving too quickly.
Some of my favoriate stats: a week’s worth of the NY Times is estimated to contain more information than an 18th century person was likely to come across in their lifetime. It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 1018) of information of unique information will be generated this year (an exabyte is 1000 million times a Gigabyte (GB)). That 1.5 exabytes is estimated to be more than in the past 5000 years.
Windowing and Graphical User Interfaces are taking some more big steps. You may think that I may be talking about Windows Vista with Aero, but while it has some neat features, I’m not. Instead, let me first tell you about the coolest thing in X Windowswindow managers: Beryl. I’m totally going to date myself in this article by reminiscing about when I used twm, mwm, and fvwm. The X-Windows/*nix marriage was definitely something that I love - you have the power of a *nix kernel, a totally customizable command-line based shell, slap X-Windows on top of it and run any window manager you want. Your computing environment, your way.
Where was I? Oh yes, Beryl. Having been stuck in a predominantly MS Windows environment for years now, I’ve lost touch with the latest in the windowing advances. Luckily, I know folks who do keep in touch, and I was recently shown an extremely cool demo video of Beryl (and there are probably dozens of videos now). If you’ve seen demos of Aero and been wowed, prepared to be floored. Features in Beryl include warping windows, zooming in and out, using a cube as an abstration for a virtual desktop environment, transparency, wrapping windows around edges, and so much more. Just watch the video here:
This is hardly the first article on the subject, but Reuters has a piece vaguely saying that 
On Monday, I was one of the privileged few to get to attend a special viewing of the brand new Airbus A380 airplane. I have a friend who is 
