on tech and life
Computers
Sour Apple
0Sour Apple? No, not a Blow Pops commercial from the 80′s, this is about Apple Computer Inc., er… Apple Inc.. Yeah it’s been a long time since I’ve posted something. I’ve considered posting here for a while and for some reason an article I saw on Boing Boing compelled me to do so.
The article is about Apple adding a cryptographic block to their new iPods to prevent them from syncing with anything but iTunes. While I understand that they probably want to make it harder for competing online music services to get their music onto the iPod. They’re trying to look out for the iPod/iTunes brand but they somehow completely missed the point. Part of the iPod’s continued success is that it is now so ubiquitous, everything is compatible with it. By doing this, they not only made it so fringe users like me are less likely to buy it because we run a flavor of Linux or BSD or Solaris or whatever and use programs like Amarok or GtkPod to transfer our songs, but it makes a large portion of people who use OS X and Windows less likely to buy it too. There are currently many many alternative solutions for syncing music on Windows like Anapod Explorer and Media Monkey. I’m confident that there’s numerous solutions on OS X too. iTunes really isn’t that good of a program. Those alternative solutions make an iPod a viable choice even for those people who don’t like iTunes, of which there are many. Once Apple makes it absolutely necessary that you use iTunes with their device, a lot of people won’t be happy.
Personally, I switched back to Creative players with my last mp3 player purchase this April and bought a Zen Vision: M 60GB, after owning an iPod Color that finally died after a good 2-3 years of heavy usage and even surviving my car accident. That said, an iPod was always a viable option that I considered. After seeing the new iPod Touch, I even had been thinking that my next mp3 player may be a 3rd generation iPod Touch 2-3 years from now, once the capacity of a flash memory based drive gets up to where hard drive based players are today (60GB+). If Apple continues to cripple their products like they are, an iPod won’t even be something I consider. Sure, there will be hacks to make it work, especially for Linux, but sometimes it’s not worth the hassle and I certainly wouldn’t want to support these types of practices by buying such a product.
With this issue and recently reading about the cable fiasco surrounding the new generation of iPods, maybe PC World is right in suggesting the Apple is becoming the new Microsoft.
Seamless Virtualization (or, the new “Coherence Mode”)
5For a while now, despite the fact that I’m not a fan of Mac OS X, there’s been one thing I’ve been envious of. Parallels Desktop… or more specifically, its Coherence Mode. Parallels is a virtualization server that allows you to run one OS in another. That alone isn’t very special. There’s tons of programs that can do that in linux, like VMWare, VirtualBox, KVM and of course QEMU. The special thing that the Mac OS X version of Parallels has is coherence mode. This mode allows you to not show the entire Windows desktop. You can view individual windows as just windows, so it is as if they are running natively under Mac OS X. This is an excellent feature that makes virtualization even easier and quicker (less processing of unused desktop space and windows). Parallels has said for a while that they’ll update their linux version to add coherence mode, but it doesn’t seem like they will do so anytime soon.
Fortunately, that no longer matters. With a little trickery of QEMU, the kvm paravirtualization drivers in the latest linux kernel (2.6.20 as of this writing), and a little program called rdesktop, linux can do the same. The Ubuntu Wiki details setting up Windows XP in QEMU (for the creation of the virtual machine) and then setting up rdesktop (for the creation of our very own “coherence mode”). It must be noted that these walkthroughs on the Ubuntu Wiki are designed for Ubuntu 7.04 only, because it is the first version to include kernel 2.6.20 and its paravirtualization support.
I can’t say yet how well it works, but I plan to set this up once my projects are over next week and I’m “studying” for exams. I’ll report back on how it went.
Firefox Search Keywords
0I was talking with Jonathan about search keywords in Firefox today and said I’d send him my search keyword bookmarks file because he hadn’t used them before. This is one of those things that is too valuable to not share, so I’m posting the info here. The Firefox search keyword is an excellent feature that unfortunately few people know about. It’s basically an extension of the bookmark. Here’s how it works: You can assign bookmarks a keyword. You can then type this keyword into the address bar and the browser brings you directly to the bookmarked URL. In addition to that, there is a special identifier, %s, that you can insert into the address of the bookmark. Then if you put text after the keyword in the address bar, the text will be inserted into the URL where the %s was.
Here’s an example: If you have a bookmark of “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” and give it a keyword “g”, then typing “g linux” into the address bar will bring you to “http://www.google.com/search?q=linux”, which is a Google search for linux. That’s it.
Here’s a bookmark file that includes the search keywords I use: Kevin’s Search Keywords
Just import that into Firefox to use them. After the cut is a description of each included search keyword.
Bad Design
0After discussing with Jonathan about how little so many people in our major (Computer Engineering) actually understand programming, I was reminded of the great website Worse Than Failure. It features examples of bad design in computing. Like really bad hacks or unintuitive ways of doing things. One good example is about a guy who got around his lack of knowledge about string concatenation in an interesting way. Check it out, there’s lots of laughs all around the site.
Of Old Software
2This post is mainly for myself, but I think others could benefit as well. For my music listening needs (on Windows), I always use Winamp. But not just any Winamp. I’ve found that Winamp has become quite bloated with feature creep over the last few years. Winamp 2 was the peak of Winamp-y goodness. Winamp 3 and now Winamp 5 just add too much extra junk I don’t need. So this post is just a way for me to keep a little archive of the bare essentials I need from Winamp. This includes the installer for Winamp 2.81 and the skin Receiver by Fli7e. Both these files are now hard to find. Places like Winamp Heaven and Old Version have the installer and I found this website with the skin, but I don’t know how much longer they will be around, so I’ve decided to make an archive of my own. Plus it’s easier for me to find than googling! Enjoy the old school Winamp goodness!
Direct Downloads:
Linux MCE is the hotness
3Once I’m working full time and have some extra cash (hopefully fall 2007), I will definitely be building a Linux MCE box. Linux media Center Edition is so hot. I can’t wait! Watch the video and be impressed.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4422887272477313460Source: DownloadSquad
Maybe Dell’s not so bad
0I know a recent post echoed some bashing of Dell’s customer service, and rightly so. But I have to applaud them when they do something right, very right, for once. Dell recently created an Ideastorm website, where users make suggestions to Dell and then vote on the suggestions of others. Overwhelmingly, selling computers preinstalled with Linux was the suggestion(s) with the highest votes. One of the many suggestions regarding preinstalled Linux already has over 110,000 votes. In a surpising, but good move from Dell, they’ve decided to investigate further. They’re doing this through the Linux Learnings Survey. In it they’re asking users about exactly what they want out of a preinstalled Linux system. Make sure to participate and hopefully Dell will start selling Linux systems, which would make the adoption of Linux much easier for everyone. A big hurdle for Linux is people getting it installed and working on their hardware. This would eliminate that problem. So good going Dell!
Dell: Absolutely free Vista upgrade 70% off
0Sounds like Dell’s support is no better than Gateway’s. Read this article about a guy who was promised a free upgrade to Vista when he bought his PC, but had the hardest time getting them to uphold their promise. But this shows that Dell is better than Gateway, they eventually fix their mistakes when you take it up to corporate, instead of continuing to ignore you. I’ll have to port over the Gateway article to WordPress soon…
