Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Today I got home from work, open my email and a couple inbound virus warning popped up. One of the virus laden emails was strange.

Yes, that looks like Michele sent me a virus. But it didn’t come from her. It came from someone that has both my email address and Michele’s in their address book.
That narrows down the list of possibilities quite a bit to close friends and family. So, friends and family, if you read this and you aren’t running anti-virus software, I think you should.
Everyone should be running anti-virus software, this means YOU!

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
– H.L. Mencken

I stumbled across this quote today and felt it applied to many things.
Personally, I refuse to fear hobgoblins.

Last night I went out to see Touching the Void with Brad. The film is the story of two climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who took on a mountain in the Andes. During the descent, Joe breaks his leg and the two are faced with getting down the mountain.
I won’t go into the details, but the harrowing tale of survival is truly amazing. This isn’t a good novel or interesting screenplay, this is real. This really happened to two men.
You should go see this movie. I won’t spoil anything, but since the two climbers are interviewed in the film, you know they both survive. But the story of how they survive is astounding.

Last night I was about to head off to bed but decided to check the Tivo to see if the latest Daily Show was there. I flipped around the channel guide and saw the Tavis Smiley Show. I was a bit suprised since I only know Tavis from his NPR radio program that I listen to in the evenings on occasion. Tavis is insightful, direct, and fun with his guests. And man does he get the guests. Everyone from athletes, to presidential candidates, to musicians.
On the TV show I saw that he was interviewing Prince. Now, I love me some Prince. His music was core to my younger years and holds special place in my heart. More recently his strangeness with that symbol and religion had made me think he’d gone off the deep end.

I eager watched the show. Amazingly, Prince is now a 40-something, articulate and interesting musician. The discussion between Tavis & Prince was great and showed that Prince isn’t such a nutcase that many may seem to think. Tavis even showed a clip from Barbershop where they mocked him and Prince laughed at it. I was impressed that he came across as a mature, intelligent artist rather than a Hollywood nutcase.
He did an acoustic version of a song with Wendy, and then Tavis premiered Prince’s new video, Musicology. His music isn’t the same as the old, but the new video was pretty good.
When the new album comes out, I’m buying.

A couple days a ago I moved the media server into the living room. I took out the stereo and CD player and replaced it with this:

Michele wanted this setup. From here, she can play any of the music on the speakers and even rip new CDs as we buy them. We can also get to the music from any of the other computers. I should be getting a smaller and more aesthetically pleasing keyboard and mouse. Eventually the server will move inside the cabinet and we might get an LCD monitor. Hopefully the sub-woofer will find a place on the floor.
Next I want the Dlink Wireless Media Player to stream video to the TV off of any computer in the house.
In other news, check out the 1000 Fighting Styles of Donald Rumsfeld.

I’ve been playing with my camera phone and a textamerica moblog. Check it out.

A friend asked about buying a computer. He wrote

Time for a new home computer. Went to the Apple store with the wife, and she’s in love with the iMac, and I have to admit, it comes across as a pretty slick product. Personally, I like the fact that OS X is Unix based, as I’ve got a pretty good handle on the Unix command line and overall architecture – PC’s are black-magic to me(not to mention I hate Gate’s guts) even though I use one daily and know the usual apps.
Primary applications for home will be the usual browsing, kid’s educational sw, kids games, and photo and home-movie editing/production. The iMac in question, 1.25Ghz PowerPC, 80Gb drive, 256M RAM looks really meek compared to lower-priced PC hardware sporting 2.5GHz Intel hw. So what gives? I know that processor speed doesn’t necessarily translate linearly to computing power, but can anyone clue me in on relative performance of the two CPUs? Does it come down to a RISC/CISC thing? Multi-threading?
In short, I’m looking for some pro/con analysis on the Mac vs. PC. If I were to buy today, I’d lean toward the Mac, but have the reservations alluded to above.

Here’s how I replied:

My advice -> If you like the Mac, buy the Mac, don’t worry about CPU comparisons.

Do max out the RAM after you get the thing home with 3rd party RAM. A gig would be good.

Functionally, Windows and Macintosh both get the job done for users. Either way you can surf the web, email, make DVDs, etc. Both OSs are stable, highly useable, and powerful.

Things the Mac excels at:
Integration of software – The apps work cohesively and in a similar fashion.
Aesthetic design – No doubt Macs look nicer, and this is important to some people.
Security – Since OSX is a tiny fraction of the deployed OSs in the world, it is rarely targeted for exploits.
Innovation – Apple pioneered use of USB, firewire, and Bluetooth, while Microsoft is slow to adopt newer technologies. Sony is comparable to Apple in hardware design and innovation, but is hampered by the needed changes to the Windows OS.

Things the Mac sucks at:
Closed hardware – Unless Steve wants you to have it, it ain’t available. If it is available, it costs more. Long term upgrading is near impossible.
Living within Apple design – The apps are great as long as you will do things the Apple way. If you don’t like the way iTunes manages music, too bad, you’re stuck. Same for email, file system, calendar, etc.
Cost – Macs are more expensive. OS upgrades are costly. Four $99+ OS upgrades in the last three years alone.

Things Windows excels at:
Open hardware – You can run Windows on nearly everything, PCs are virtually unlimited on what kind of hardware you want to add, upgrade, or change.
Cost – PCs are far, far cheaper than Macs, but you get varying levels of quality.
Software – If there’s software to do something out there, chances are it runs on Windows. No other platform can say that.

Things Windows sucks at:
Security – A Windows computer is under constant assault. You need firewalls, auto-updating OS, anti-virus, and anti-spyware software running at all times.
Integration of software – Windows apps ‘look and feel’ different from application to application. To some this is a drawback.

The only crystal clear choice to choose a PC over a Mac is for gaming. If you want to play computer games, there is no comparison. PCs are orders of magnitude above Macs in CPU & video card power and selection of games.

In all other aspects, the computers/operating systems are comparable for home users.

Myself, I use Windows because I like to build the computers from scratch and am constantly upgrading them. Also, gaming is hobby of mine and I want a great platform to play on.

What do you think?

In my slow, but steady pace to catchup with blogging, I finally made a gallery and put up my photos from the Emerging Technology Conference.

Other good photos at the etech.textamerica moblog, Splatt’s moblog, and Joi’s ETech photos.

I finally have some time to write about the presentation I helped give at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this week. I spoke about Disney’s use of RSS, weblogs, and wikis in the workplace.
To be honest, I was a little concerned before I spoke that the crowd would think what we had done was simple and not ’emerging’. I mean RSS and weblogs are nothing new to the people that attend the ETech conference.
Happily, everyone seemed duly impressed and we felt that our talk was worthwhile and of some benefit to others. Many people wrote about the talk. As asmall sampling, take a look at Ross Mayfield’s notes (with a TON of trackbacks), Cory Doctorow’s notes, group notes taken in the session via Hydra, a person at edweblogs.org that gets my message, good insight from Tim Bishop, and more if you want to google or technorati them up.
Before the talk, we discussed if anything was going to raise eyebrows, and we agreed that the RSS vs. Atom thing would probably do so. While many see the choices as between RSS and Atom, we tend to see it as a single choice for the use of syndication. Syndication of information is the real change we are seeing, not the specific flavor. RSS works and has a wide variety of uses. Atom promises to make ingest & reuse of content even simpler. Both will probably have place within Disney.
I am a bit interested in the stats behind the number of RSS aggregators shipped. With Disney’s revealing that the our Motion product is really a RSS aggregator in over two million computers, it’s got to be one of the most widely shipped ones out there.
The talk was fun and I enjoyed it. I guess I better figure out something else cool to work on if I ever want to speak again.

I’m back home from ETech and there’s enough calm for me to blog a bit. I’ll make several entries as I can on various topics.
I’ve known for a while that I was going to ETech, since I was giving a presentation. A few weeks ago, one of the local LA bloggers I know, Sean Bonner, posted a note saying he was thinking of going down for the show. Besides running a successful art gallery, SixSpace, he also is part of the teams running blogging.la and weblogsinc.com. He’s probably got a dozen more weblogs, but then again, he has no children to distract him.
I digress. We chatted in email and agreed to drive down together. It’s be nice to have a extra friendly face at the big scary conference. I had met Sean once before in meatspace at a wireless meeting and exchanged a bit of email ever since.
So Sunday arrives and he gets dropped off at my house for the drive. At the last minute I learned that he was a vegan. Currently I’m on the Atkins diet, meaning I eat a LOT of meat. He’s an artist, I’m an engineer. I was wondering how we were going to get along.
Well, we got along great. We chatted the whole way down and it was good to have a partner during the conference to check in with. We talked aobut everything under the sun and compared notes on events that we were both at, but saw in different ways.
The social dynamics of the blogosphere at the conference were of constant amusement to us. We kept watching how people would orbit the A-list bloggers is some attempt to grab a little meatspace google juice from these people. You could do a whole paper on the hierarchy of the blogosphere at conferences. The worlds colliding of the various blogging cliques was funny.
Sean is great guy and his laidback, easy going exterior hides his mischevious interior. It’s a great combo. Sitting quietly in the lounge, Sean would systematically bluejack every bluetooth device in the room. His IRC comments were hilarious and he often had me laughing out loud in sessions, when I was supposed to be paying attention.
So, in lieu of a viable online reputation system, Sean gets the Cruft Seal of Approval.