I Have A Problem Only Jo Rowling Can Solve

I name everything after Harry Potter characters, places, events.  Any proper name is game for my obsession and I plan, here, to record a history of all monickers I have identified my gadgets with through the years.  We’ll start with my first laptop and move on to my newest video game system.

Compaq Presario V2000 – “Albus”

PSP-2000 God of War Edition – “Albus”, “Aberforth”

iPod Touch 1G – “Expecto”

iPod Touch 2G – “Fawkes”

160 GB Maxtor Removable HDD – “HORCRUX”

320 GB SimpleTech Portable HDD – “Privet Drive”

BlackBerry Curve 8330 – “Sirius BlackBerry” (Clever eh?!)

15″ Early 2008 MacBook Pro (Penryn) – “Chamber of Secrets”  (R.I.P.)

13″ Aluminum MacBook Pro – “Lovegood” (Awwwww)

Xbox 360 (which I got 3 months after release and until recently have had 0 problems with but has recently started to act up.  I seem to be the only one capable of dealing with its problems and making it fun, thus the name.) – “Crookshanks”

Sprint HTC Hero – “Moony”

Sony PS3 Slim (120 GB) – “Godric”

The only thing I’ve named that hasn’t been named after a Harry Potter thing is my 2001 Ford Explorer Sport Trac, which my college friends decided to name based on it’s color.  We named it “Teal’c” after the well-loved Jaffa from Stargate SG-1.  I have since reconciled this discontinuity with myself and will take no further questions on the matter.

State of Play

Just saw State of Play, and I must say, I never thought I’d see a great reporter suspense movie.  Russell Crowe was great, and this was the first movie that made me forget about Rachel McAdams in The Notebook (i’m going to be sick now).  The only thing I could not stand about this movie was their view on the modern newspaper.

Crowe plays a reporter following a lead for the Washington Globe, a newspaper recently acquire by MediaCorp (supposedly some large media conglomerate).  He and Rachel McAdams (the Globe’s new blog girl) take on a case about a reporter’s dead mistress.  Crowe can’t stand McAdam’s newbie trendy blogger approach to news, and the movie plays out such that online media is seen as inferior.  The Globe is running out of money, and this fully researched, true story is causing them trouble but they could run trash online.

What irks me about this is that the opinion among most people now is that the blog will never serve as a profit-bearing replacement to the traditional newspaper.  However, when people learn to monetize their content in a way that doesn’t alienate their readers/viewers/listeners/users, they’ll find that their worries of the death of news was immature.

Despite this, State of Play was fantastic, and you should all check it out.

The Philosophy of Coding — Thoughts on My First Year as an EE Student

Abstract classes.  Data structures.  ADT’s.  Encapsulation.  Data hiding.  Spend anytime in a mid-level CS course at any US university and you’ll hear some, if not all, of these terms.  You’ll hear them more than once.  You’ll hear them everyday if you listen closely.  I definitely work with them more than I’d like to admit, but everytime I hear someone say “data hiding,” I cringe.

As a high school Sophomore, I was fortunate to pick up a Linux Format magazine in Barnes & Noble one afternoon.  That afternoon kicked off my love for Open Source, Linux, the OSI, and transparency in general.  Now, I’m a Mac user, so I appreciate what can come from an incredibly closed-off production team, but I hold  place in my heart and a sector of my brain open for Open Source Software.  It is the philosophies that Open Source is based on that have me thinking that as programmer’s we have the wrong idea.

Our languages are built around protecting personal property and copyrighted material.  They are made to hide the actual goings on of our code from coders who would expand on our programs.  Are we really so deperate to have control over our code?

Now, things like ADT’s and Data Structures provide new “features” that can be practical.  However, their initial conception was for the purposes of “abstraction” and “hiding.”  It almost makes computer programmers seem like overzealous conspiracy theorists.

I know I’m not the first person with these ideas, as there would be no OSI without such ideas have been spawned long before my time.  Maybe someday we’ll be able to trade protection and abstraction for community and synergy.  In a day without software patents, that could happen.  Hell, in a day without the RIAA the same thing could happen for musicians.  Who said our controlling tendencies only showed themselves in software engineering?

OnLive-HOLY LOW LATENCY BATMAN

Before you do anything, check out Engadget’s OnLive article.

Next, I must say, I have never been so excited for not actually being able to hold the things I own.  The video on that page demonstrates a video streaming technology that I cannot believe has been kept secret for so long.  When the system runs Prince of Persia, there is nigh zero-latency between the demonstrator’s button presses and the video on-screen.  They have so much server power running this thing, they have cycles to waste on showing you random gameplay from live users.  From the moment you turn on the system, you are being streamed video.

Honestly, this is definitely going to change things.  I wasn’t convinced until I watched the video.  The OnLive model eliminates piracy, incompatibility, exclusivity deals, and expensive hardware.  For most gamers, these things are exactly what we have been complaining about for years.  I don’t want to by a supercomputer to play Crysis (Honestly?  I don’t want to play Crysis.), and I don’t want to have to own every game console.  I want to play the game I was playing at home on my Xbox on my Mac (preferrably while I’m in class).  I want game prices to quit skyrocketing because of piracy, and I want to avoid BlockBuster at all costs (Netflix user here).  OnLive brings all of this to reality.

So check out the video, and let me know what you think.  As always, @reply MrMattux on Twitter.

Swagger Like Us

So the 51st Annual Grammy Awards graced the televisions of thousands tonight, and I’m very happy to say that my screen was tuned in.  I watched every performance of the first hour and every award and monitored TweetDeck all night.  Here are some of my favorite tweets of the evening:

levarburton Am at the Granmys! One I the best party nights in the LA calendar year. Am on a mission to get 45 seconds with Beyonce. Wish me luck.

film_girl Yup, I’m out. Kid rock and a jonas/miley reference = I’m done with the Grammys

film_girl Whitney doesn’t look totally cracked out. Good to J Hudson, deserves it after her year.

MikeTRose Someone should have told Adele to SPIT OUT HER DAMN GUM.

MrMattux @MikeTRose she’s amazing. I don’t care if she smacks her gum into the microphone. As long as she takes it out to sing.

MikeTRose @MrMattux I’ll check out her albums, but frankly her speaking voice sounds like a Kristen Wiig caricature of a British teenager.

And something else very interesting that has nothing to do with the Grammy’s:

Ihnatko Yup, it’s official: Woz is on this season’s “Dancing With The Stars” (just announced on ABC)

Yep.  Yep…

Finally Getting in Gear

Making our lives easier

Shortly into my listening into Buzz Out Loud episode 899, I heard something that at first did not interest me.  Google was releasing an offline version of Google through their Google Gears program.  I had yet to even look up what Google Gears actually does, so it meant nothing to me.  I am one of few people who use Microsoft Entourage and enjoy it.  As much as I severely, and in a completely unfounded manner hate Microsoft and their various failures, I enjoy Entourage.  This is ironic, because most people hate Entourage more than they hate Windows Vista.  Anyway, point being, I’m a client guy.  If it’s online, I’ll make it offline.  I hate being in a browser.

That being said, Google Gears finally got me, and I went an looked it up. Now, if you’re one of the few who does not know what Gears does, I’ll summarize.  Gears saves offline versions of select websites on your hard drive and allows you to run them in your browser, despite being cut off from the cloud.  The cogs started turning (I know, I know.  I’m sorry.), and I went searching for websites that use gears.  Gmail, obviously uses gears, but so do Google Docs, Google Reader, Remember the Milk, and a variety of other services around the web.  Needless to say, I installed Gears quickly and am loving it.

I live on a college campus with free wifi everywhere, but there are times when I either cannot connect to a network for one reason or another or I just need to stay off of Facebook for a while but need something out of Gmail.  Of course, I could use Entourage, but Gears puts all of my applications (word processor, email client, rss reader) in one place.  This way I have my offline capabilities and don’t have to use many system resources.

There is always a Catch-22, however, and this catch is a big one.  Google has not implemented Google Gears features for Google Calendar.  I am a big calendar guy, and sync my Google Calendar up to everything: my Blackberry Curve 8330, iCal, and iPod Touch 2G.  Google needs this now, and I’m not the first to say it.  As far as my internet search skills can tell, they used to have an implementation of this feature.  Please bring it back, Google.  The organized are dying out here.

See Google’s official blog post on offline Gmail here.

Jailbreak! Everybody run….

The SpringBoard of my iPod Touch 2G. Theme is "Icarus" by ispazio.

First of all, I’d like to say that I opened this blog for the sole purpose of posting this entry.  The iPod Touch 2G jailbreak is upon us.  For the past year, the iPhone Dev Team has been a major fixation of my interests.  On Saturday, I woke up, checked their blog, and found that they had made their newest move.  The iPod Touch 2G jailbreak was finally released after months of waiting with no news.

The news was bittersweet, though, because this round you have to have your iPod plugged in and a few command-line processes running to even reboot your device.  The Dev Team has gotten a lot of crap for this, but it’s something they are trying to fix.  It’s not the flamers on ipodtouchfans that grind my gears, and it isn’t the bad attitude of the Dev Team in recent months that piss me off.  There is another group of people that make me even angrier.

This morning I took a look at TUAW, where Christina Warren had given her input on the developments of late.  Christina said what I expected she would say.  This release was a bit too difficult for her, and she planned on waiting for a non-tethered release.  She says that she is “not convinced that anything available via jailbreak is worth risking [her] $400 investment.”  I get that.  I’m kind of tech enthusiast/nerd, so DFU mode and terminal commands do not scare me.  I spent the time and effort and had many terrifying moments, and I get that most people don’t want to do that.  What I do not understand is the response of the commenters on her article.

“Why?! Is there ANY advantage to taking your touch off the grid? This counterculture BS makes no sense!” said David.  “All this jailbreak stuff is non-news. It’s like taking a new car and removing everything that you need to pass inspection – what is the point?” he said in a later comment.  After reading a few more comments and inspecting the Digg entry on the release, I was throughly angered by commenters and forum users who think that jailbreaking is either related to cracking and illegal activities or completely useless an not newsworthy.  Many commenters believe that Apple blogs shouldn’t write about the jailbreak because it is not Apple news.  My comment, in reply to David and his ilk read as such:

Just because some people don’t understand tinkering, doesn’t mean that those of us that like it should be flamed. Just like some people sit in their garage for hours on end tuning their car to no end, there are those of us that like to do fun things with our technology. We are the kind of people that like to run Linux on anything we obtain, theme every piece of technology we own, and swoon over a new package manager release. This is an Apple blog, and when important news about Apple technology (whether official or not) comes around, someone is bound to write about it.

Sans my bad grammar, that is exactly how I feel.  I don’t get the anger people feel towards jailbreakers.  If they don’t like what a blog reports on, then they should not be reading it. What doesn’t help, either, is Christina’s next article.  One of the worst moves you can make after causing an uproar with an article about a jailbreak is write an article about a jailbreak app that lets you pirate legitimate iPhone software.  It’s news, but at least pass it off to another writer.  It was interesting article, if I am going to be honest, but it was not the right time and place to write it.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love TUAW, and Chrstina Warren is my favorite TUAW blogger.  I just have to notice the blatantly inappropriate placement of two very well-written articles.  We tinkerers already get enough trouble from Apple proper.  The last thing we need is the Apple cult crying “Crucify!”