Picks and Pans

I bought a used iphone 2G model for work. I didn't intend to use it as an actual phone. But, as time wore on, I started playing with it, and (mostly) prying it out of the hands of my 10 and 12 year olds and I've grown to like it.

Oddly, I've yet to activate it. I suppose I will soon, but the idea of spending $75/month is a little painful right now. I guess I'm paying $50/month for my current phone, so maybe it's not that much of an increase.

The most fun part for me has been the mp3 player. I have a lot of music on our home file server, all legally paid for and ripped from CD's. Except for the mp3's I downloaded directly from Amazon (THANK YOU Amazon for selling MP3's!). Anyway, all of the music is legit. And now I can load it onto the phone and listen to it as I walk to and from work. Heh - I've become one of those "young people" who wear headphones. But I swear it's great to listen to music on the way to work.

I may have to upgrade to the 3G version, however, if only for the EDGE and GPS. I think the GPS might come in pretty handy.

I'm a little sad because my sleek little MP3 playing Sony Ericson slide phone is still pretty cool. I didn't intend to cheat. It just happened.

One thing I will mention - using iTunes can be a real pain. It's a very pretty interface but for the first time user it can be pretty confusing. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get music into it from a file on my hard disk. It should not be that hard.

I should also mention that the apps you can buy (or download for free) from the Apple "app store" are pretty cool. There's a lot of things to browese through. A few too many, to be honest. I would be nice to find some place the reviews the apps and recommends the best ones. Naturally my son (he's 10) immediately downloaded the Star Wars "light saber" app. Even I find it fun after a few coctails.

Even without activation the 802.11 connectivity make it a very useful device. I can browese, get weather, stock info, you tube, send email, etc...

All in all, I like it. And I didn't think I would.

Posted by Brad at 9:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Two interesting things happened this week

- the "R" programming language was talked about in the mainstream press.

- I discovered that the openbsd folks are working on using a non-gcc C
compiler (pcc). Turns out in the non-linux unix world there is not so
much love for gcc.

This makes some sense. gcc is huge and hard to work with. When it
compiles it uses every available resource and eats the machine. It's
not that easy to port or maintain. And it keeps getting bigger.

"pcc" on the other hand is 5-10 times faster, generates reasonable code
and is easy to port and work on. Someone is actually maintaining it.
This is the same pcc some will remember from Bell Labs in the '70s, back
when all the world was a pdp-11 (just before all the world became a
vax).

And, as eco systems go, it's good to have more than one option. Linux
is competely dependant on gcc. Netbsd on the other hand, is not.

(I've been working on getting netbsd to run on a my vax 11/730 again,
so I've fallen back in love with netbsd. Well, I think we're more like
friends with benefits, but please don't tell linux I've been cheating.)

anyway, I thought that was interesting. Apparently the pcc maintainer is
planning to add PIC support to pcc this winter which is one of the
missing features needed.

Posted by Brad at 2:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have a couple of machines running Ubuntu. More and more lately.

One machine at home was running Ubuntu 7.04 and mythtv. I was loath to change it
because it was working and I hate having to type "ssh" when I'm watching tv.

But, I finally did it over the holidays. First I upgraded to 7.10, which was a pain.
7.04 is not longer supported and I have to hack the apt config file to point to the
archives. But this broke the upgrade. So I ended up starting with a archive pointing apt
config and then switching it in the middle of the upgrade to point to the normal repository.
A bit hair raising but it worked.

Once at 7.10 I could cleanly upgrade to 8.04 and then to 8.10. I did it all via ssh and
and it worked with very few problems. My hat is off to the Ununtu guys.

Getting X to work consistantly with my Nvidia display card was no so easy. With some
releases there is support from Ubuntu. But not 8.10. For that I had to go back to using
the linux install script from NVidia, which does all sorts of fun things under the covers.

But now I have mythtv back, and I'm running 8.10 and all is well with the world.

That went so well I upgrade a machine at work and it too did the right thing. Very nice.

Sadly I'm about to wave goodbye to RedHat. I with I didn't have to,but they don't seem
to be providing the same level of coolness that Ubuntu us. The "apt-get" system is
just too nice. I never want to see another rpm again.

Virtually everything I wanted was available from apt-get. Amazing. And easy!

Posted by Brad at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)