Rick's World

A few weeks ago, I bought a nice new Apple Macbook. It is the first laptop that I've owned in probably 5 years or more. My last laptop was an HP laptop with a 1Ghz CPU, and a 20GB hard drive. My new laptop has dual 2.2 Ghz CPUs and a 120GB hard drive. Essentially, I've got 4 times the CPU power and 6 times the storage space in a device that is smaller, lighter, faster and cheaper than that last laptop. You gotta love technology.

Why did I go out and spend all the money on a laptop when I've already got a screaming Mac Pro at home that blows even this laptop away? I'd like to say that I bought it for work or to take notes at conferences (which is true!) but the simple fact is, I bought it because it was a nice toy. The Mac Pro is great for pure power, but for portability it sucks. The Mac Pro is still my primary computer, but this laptop will certainly have it's uses as well. There's something truly cool about parking yourself in the recliner, with a laptop on your lap. You can sit there programming, surfing the web, reading email, etc. while you are watching TV on your big, thumping surround sound system! You don't even feel like your working.

What was the event that finally made me decide to go out and buy this laptop? A few weeks ago, I attended a Microsoft .NET all day show where they discussed various new .NET programming technologies. At the time the only thing I had to take notes with was my little iPod Touch. While the iPod Touch is certainly capable of taking notes and visiting the programming web sites they mention, it is just too slow to type on it. You need a real keyboard and computer for that. I didn't have one. So, the next weekend I took a trip down to the local Apple Store and bought myself one. I bought the midrange Macbook with (at the time) a 2.2Ghz dual core CPU, a 120GB hard drive and 1GB RAM. Of course a few days ago Apple upgraded the equivalent Macbook that I just bought to a 2.4Ghz dual core CPU, a 160 GB hard drive and 2GB RAM. It figures! Oh well. The new Macbook is only slightly faster than this one. Plus I was already planning on upgrading the RAM to 4GB (which I did) so the 2GB doesn't really matter. Plus, I was going to upgrade the hard drive to a 7200 RPM, 200GB hard drive, so the slightly bigger hard drive doesn't make much difference either. I think I'm going to stick with this Macbook. I could just return it and get the newer one, but I doubt I will. It's not worth the effort. I've already upgraded it to 4GB of RAM (more memory than my Mac Pro!) and I'll likely upgrade the hard drive to the 200GB 7200 RPM drive soon.

I've been very impressed with how OS X handles laptops and wireless networking in general, since I bought this laptop. Whenever you do a system upgrade on the laptop, it warns you if you don't have the laptop plugged in. This is a great thing to do because if you run out of battery power while upgrading, you can screw up the operating system to the point that it won't work without reinstalling the operating system.

It also works very well in a networked environment. While I've been using Macs for a couple years now, I've never really done much related to networking them. Yes, I have an old Power PC Mac Mini sitting on my network, but I never really used it for much. It was still very much a single computer network since I used the Mac Pro 99% of the time. Now that I have two Macs that I actually use regularly, it's been a real education. OS X Leopard has a nice feature that shows an icon showing what the actual computer looks like when you browse the network for other computers. In other words, my Macbook looks like a Macbook on the network, my Mini looks like a Mini on the network, and my Mac Pro looks like a Mac Pro on the network! Yes, it's a little thing, but it's yet another one of those nice little OS X touches that I love. Also, I was easily able to set up my Macbook to print to my networked laser printer in the home office. It's really cool to print something and hear the printer in the other room start up! All this with no cables! This Macbook is the first laptop I've ever owned that was truly practical to run completely wireless. My old laptop required a network cable running across the floor of the house, connected to the network, plus a power cable plugged into the wall. Not exactly a portable setup there!

Now that I have this laptop, I can take it to those conferences to take notes, as well as other uses. Right now I'm sitting in the cafe at Whole Foods Market, writing this entire blog wirelessly. Gotta love that! The reason I'm sitting here in Whole Foods writing this, rather than at home is because I just dropped my car off at the Sound Advice store a couple of doors down to get some work done on the stereo. I'm getting some upgrades to the iPod player in my car, which are going to take an hour and a half or so, so I figured I'd walk over here and take advantage of their free WiFi to kill some time. I can easily kill and hour and a half on my Mac if I have access to the Internet! I also brought along my Cocoa programming book in case I want to do some studying of that while I'm here.

I'll be sure to post more blogs about my experiences with this laptop in the future...

Link: http://www.digg.com

I've been reading the Digg.com web site for a long time. It's a web site that allows readers to submit news stories. The news stories get voted up or down. The most popular stories end up the front page. Since the news stories are user submitted, it tends to have a fairly chaotic and oddball selection of stories. But despite that, I could always find something interesting to read on the site.

The problem is that lately, the site had devolved into nothing but a bunch of foul mouthed, ignorant morons who seems to like nothing more than to vote up preposterous news stories full of obscenities in the titles. These were all stories that were clearly biased and heavily so. News reporting is supposed to be impartial. Just give me the facts. Keep your personal opinion out of it. I got so annoyed with these foul mouthed, childish posts, that I stopped reading the site.

Earlier this week, the developers who run Digg, reorganized how it ranks news stories. One fantastic benefit if this change is that the endless venom is gone! Yes, it still has it's fair share of oddball stories, but those are fine. I enjoy reading those. I don't enjoy reading articles full of obscenities and totally unfounded accusations.

Thank you Digg for restoring sanity to the site!

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine and I had a falling out. We got into an argument over certain political issues, that I won't discuss here, and he ended up angrily telling me that he never wanted to speak to me again. Now, I wasn't angry at him and I did not want to lose him as a friend. I tried to discuss his disagreement with me several times, but he refused. So, I figured he wasn't going to budge on it. I hoped that at some point he would relent, but in the meantime I stopped speaking to him. Several years have passed since that day. The other day, I got an email from him apologizing. I responded that there were no hard feelings. Now we are friends again. Simple as that.

My friend and I have been friends for a good 10 years or so. It hasn't been an easy friendship. We are two very different people. He smokes. I don't. He's a Democrat. I tend toward the Republican side of the fence. He's gay. I'm straight. He suffers from bipolar disorder. I don't.

He is the first real gay friend I've ever had. Before I met him and became friends with him, I admit I was quite homophobic, but being friends with him has taught me a lot. I've learned to become a lot more tolerant and understanding of homosexuality. Does the concept of homosexuality still 'creep me out' at times? Yes, and it likely always will. That's just the way I am. We think differently on this subject, as we do in many subjects. I've learned to accept him and others like him for what he is. It's just another detail of who they are. Something to notice, but not be concerned about.

As for his bipolar disorder, that has been an education as well. Bipolar disorder used to be called Manic Depression. In other words, some days you are depressed and some days you are really manic (cheerful and full of energy). It was certainly an adventure to find out which side of him was out that day. This was yet another new experience for me. I'd never been friends with someone with a mental disorder before. Again, this was an education for me and I think it helped me develop a better tolerance for people like this. One day a number of years ago, he had not been taking his medications. This caused him to get seriously messed up, mentally. He ended up wandering several miles away from his house. He had ended up walking because his father had taken away his car keys because he knew he wasn't in any condition to be driving a car. After wandering for a while, I think he realized he was in trouble, so he called me and asked me to come pick him up. I did. We went back to my house and chatted for a while. It was obvious that he was in very bad shape mentally. He talked on and on about nonsensical things all evening. I'd never dealt with this before. I didn't know what to do. Eventually, he suggested we go get something to eat. I ended up driving him to the hospital, without telling him I was going to do that. I didn't know what else to do. When we got to the hospital, he realized why I was there and he got mad. He refused to go in and told me to take him home. I turned around and took him home. When I brought him home, his father was very relieved that I had brought him back. He had wandered off hours earlier and not told anyone, including his father where he was. His father was very worried about him. I was very flattered that even in his current state, that he trusted me enough to call me for help.

I've valued his friendship. I've learned a lot about dealing with people who are different from being friends with him. I'm glad we were friends and I'm very glad that we seem to be heading back to being friends.

Good to have you back, bud!

Link: http://jailbreakme.com/1.1.2

Last night I 'jailbroke' my iPod Touch. What is jailbreaking? That's the term for when you take the iPod Touch (or iPhone), which is normally locked down tight to prevent any third party applications from being installed on it and you break into it and modify it to allow third party applications. In a sense you break it out of being locked up 'in jail' (hence the name).

Jailbreaking is certainly not authorized by Apple. In fact, they've put a lot of effort into stopping people from doing this. They have locked down the OS on these devices very tightly, and provided no documentation on how to access the OS or write applications for it. However, despite this, hackers have been able to not only break into the OS, but to figure out how to write applications for it. I am truly impressed by what they have been able to accomplish.

Now you may ask, why did I bother to jailbreak my iPod Touch when they are announcing an official SDK for it next month. The reason is, that I know that this little device is a VERY powerful computer, and I know you can do A LOT more with it, than what Apple provides. I wanted to see what will be possible starting next month, and I have to say that the possibilities of what can be done with this device are staggering. If they can accomplish all I've seen with NO documentation and no SDK, imagine what they can do with full documentation and an official SDK! I can't wait to see what happens.

Yep, I'm back after a long period of not blogging. Why? I don't know. Just never got around to it. Other stuff to do. Anyway, yesterday was Christmas, so here's my summary of the day.

The day started at about 8am with my furry alarm clocks (Tiger & Jewel) waking me up. I got up, had breakfast etc. I was out the door around 9am or so. I arrived at the parents house around 930am. After greeting everyone and bringing in my pile of gifts, we proceeded to take some family pictures. For the next 20 minutes or so, it was a game of rearranging the family to every possible combination of two people, three people, and even a few of all four of us (taken using the timer function of the cameras. After everyone had their own family picture, we proceeded to the gifts.

As usual, its the war between the parents insisting the kids open their gifts first and the kids insisting the parents open their gifts first. Of course the kids won and we had the parents open their gifts first. Mom got a CD of games for the computer and a copy of Planet Earth from me. For dad, I got a copy of Windows XP Professional (We don't need no steenking Vista!). Yes, that's right. After all these years, my parents are finally 'legit' with Windows! My brother gave my dad a new jacket to wear, and a large new Ikea cutting board that he liked. He gave my mom a new light fixture for her ceiling fan and a gift certificate to JoAnn Fabrics (Mom's a quilter!). From both of the 'kids' we give dad a wireless keyboard and mouse for the computer. Mom also got a new ring to wear from Dad and Mom gave Dad a nice new Sealy Posturpedic computer chair. Man that's a comfy chair! I want one! :)

Once the parents were done unwrapping their gifts, the 'kids' got to open their gifts. I got a nice battery powered screwdriver, an Ikea Poang chair and footstool. I also got a copy of Animusic 1 and Animusic 2, but one of the DVDs was loose in the case and got badly scratched. The DVD was unplayable and so I had to mail it back to Amazon.com today for exchange. It'll likely be a few weeks before I get the replacements. What a bummer! Those are some really neat movies. My brother received several seasons of TV shows on DVD, another copy of Windows XP Professional, a remote control helicopter, and a Nintendo Wii. Yes, that's right. My bro managed to receive one of the most sought after gadgets of the year. I gotta thank my friend Dave for finding that Wii for me. I spent weeks looking but was unable to locate one.

By now, it was past noon and the presents were finally all opened. I went off to help the parents change the CD Key on their copy of Windows XP to use their new legit CD Key. I was able to get this changed and their computer completely updated. However, once I set the new CD Key, AVG Antivirus suddenly started complaining that it's serial number was invalid! This is weird, because I was using the free version of their antivirus and it never asked for a serial number. It just generated one. Apparently, it must generate that serial number based on the Windows XP CD key. I had to uninstall and reinstall AVG Antivirus to get that to work again. Grr. I also had a ton of trouble with their network printer. It refused to print from Windows, though it oddly printed perfectly from my brother's Mac Mini. I was never able to figure out how to fix that yesterday. My father and brother did manage to fix it today though by reinstalling the printer drivers.

Later, around 6pm we ate dinner. Dinner consisted of a Honey Baked Ham, mashed potatoes (made by me!), veggies and rolls. A very good dinner. I left later in the evening and took all my new stuff home. I was really tired. I went home and went straight to bed.

I also found out that a cousin of mine discovered my blog and hopefully is a regular reader now. Hi Miki!

As for that photo up at the top, that's the Ekle family. I'm the guy on the left. My brother, Bob is standing to my right, followed by my dad and my mom.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas!

*sigh* Even when I have legal copies of Windows XP, it still seems to enjoy aggravating the hell out of me.

I use a Mac Pro at home. I've written in the past about how great it was and how I could run Windows XP in a virtual machine so well that I never needed a separate PC anymore. I'd been running XP happily in the virtual machine for several months, using a legal, registered copy of Windows XP, that I bought just for this purpose. I never had a problem with this setup. A couple of days ago, I decided to take the next step. That's when the fun began.

The next step that I decided to take was to use Boot Camp to install Windows XP on a separate hard drive. This would allow me to reboot into full Windows XP whenever I need to, and have full access to all the computer's resources in XP. VMWare Fusion has the ability to take a BootCamp partition and run it as if it was a virtual machine from inside OS X. I figured this would give me the best of both worlds. I could run full blown Windows in Boot Camp if I needed more power, and I could run that same copy of windows in VMWare Fusion whenever I just needed to do something quickly.

I ran the BootCamp Assistant and was able to easily install Windows XP to the spare hard drive. Leopard's install DVD even contains a program that autoinstalls Windows drivers for all the hardware on the Mac Pro. Windows XP is up and running perfectly. I then spent the rest of the evening reactivating that copy of XP (to replace the one I had activated in the virtual machine), installing updates, installing software etc. I spent hours setting this thing up. It was running perfectly.

Last night I decided to try running the BootCamp partition in VMWare Fusion. Here is where XP ruined my day. XP's activation system is based on doing an inventory of the hardware on your machine. If a lot of hardware changes, it decided you must have changed computers or perhaps installed a second copy on another computer. If it detects too many changes, it deactivates your copy of Windows and gives you three days to reactivate. This is exactly what happened to me when I ran it in BootCamp for the first time. XP's activation system noticed I was running in 'different hardware' now (i.e. VMWare) so it deactivated itself and told me I have to reactivate. This reactivation is a slow, annoying process you need to do over the phone.

So assuming I reactivate XP in VMWare, then it will work. The problem is, as soon as I go back to running it in Boot Camp, it will detect hardware changes again and deactivate itself again! In other words, everytime I switch between running it in Boot Camp and running it in VMWare, I'll have to reactivate it again!

Screw this crap! I'm going back to my VMWare virtual machine I had before and wiping that hard drive! ARGH!

For the last several years I've had an ongoing problem with my garage door opener. Several years ago, the garage door opener that came with my house stopped working right, so I got a new one. My dad came over to help me install it (I'm not exactly Mr. Handyman). We proceeded to replace the motor only and left everything else alone. There was no need to change anything else, because the motor was the only thing that was bad.

For the last several years I've had a problem where the garage door opener refuses to close properly. It would close part way, stop, and then reverse itself and open up all the way again. At the end, the light would blink repeatedly, as if there was some kind of error. For a long time, I just forced it to go down by holding the button until it closed all the way. This really annoyed me, though because I could never close the garage door unless I was inside the garage. It makes it kind of useless.

This past weekend, I asked Dad to come by so we could swap out the old electric eyes that were left over from the previous garage door opener, with the new ones that came with it. I figured that the old electric eye wasn't working right. This would cause the eye to think something was blocking it, so it would refuse to close the door.

Dad came over and after some experimentation with the old and new electric eyes, we finally figured out what the problem was. There was nothing wrong with the old electric eye. The problem was we had connected it wrong to the motor! This was no doubt screwing up the signal causing it to not work right. It took some trial and error and reading the installation instructions (which weren't very clear), before we figured out the wiring was wrong. Finally, after fixing the wiring, the old eye worked perfectly with the newer motor. It's worked flawlessly ever since.

The moral of the story - Read the instructions! Don't assume you know how it works! :)

In short: It SUCKED!

I just got back from seeing Beowulf, or should I say, I just got back from seeing part of Beowulf. I walked out about 20 minutes into the movie and demanded my money back.

The movie starts and I'm sitting there watching it. Right from the beginning, I'm thinking that something is not right about this movie. It doesn't look right. I can't quite put my finger on it at first. After a few minutes, I realize the truth. The entire movie is CGI animation! Not just the occasional CGI monster, but everything! This would not be a bad thing in and of itself. The CGI animation was the most amazing, most realistic CGI animation I've ever seen. Unfortunately, that's the only good thing I can say about the movie.

Not more than a few minutes into the movie, Grendel the monster shows up. Now, I rather expected there to be some build up to this. Nope. We get a very good look at Grendel. He is the stupidest, most pathetic looking monster I have ever seen. Not scary at all. He looks like a giant, deformed man who seems to be missing his skin. He looks like a goofy skinless giant. Once Grendel finished his attack by killing everyone in sight, he leaves and returns to his lair. There he talks to an unseen character (Angelina Jolie's character?) and then he starts talking in Italian or something. Huh? It made no sense.

We are also treated to a very high quality CGI animation of an obese Anthony Hopkins staggering around as the drunk king, wearing nothing but a toga. At one point we come perilously close to seeing a CGI animated full-frontal nudity shot of an overweight fat guy. Um, no thanks.

The CGI animation was also very inconsistent. At some points, it was nearly flawless. Unless you looked closely you couldn't tell it wasn't a live action person. At other times, I thought I was watching a bad rip off of Shrek.

This movie was supposed to be your typical, intense, serious action movie. Lots of cool sword fights, big scary monsters, etc. I kind of expected another '300' style movie - stylized violence. Instead we find a movie where the entire audience was laughing at everything! It's a very bad sign when the audience of a serious action movie is laughing at the utter ridiculous stuff they are watching. At least I can have faith in the fact that the rest of the audience clearly was thinking the same thing I was - This movie is pathetic and stupid.

This movie deserves to bomb.

I grieve for the obscene amount of CPU cycles that went into rendering this movie. From a CGI point of view, this movie is ground-breaking. It's just suck a pathetic movie, that this fact will likely be forgotten.

This past weekend, I went to the Miami International Auto Show. Below is a picture taken of me sitting in the car I wanna buy!

Last week, on October 26th, I met with my friend Dave to buy our copies of Leopard. Not long after we finished installing we started trying out the various features of Leopard to see what was new.

At one point, we got to trying out Apple Mail. This is Apple's email reading program that comes with OS X. I had been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years and was curious about how Apple Mail worked. One feature that I used all the time was Thunderbirds 'View only Unread Mail' setting. This was a setting on the menu that changed it so it only showed the unread mail in your inbox. I liked this setting because I like to keep my old mail around, but after a while, all that old mail starts to 'clutter up' the list and it's hard to find the new email to read.

We loaded Apple Mail, and searched everywhere in the menus for this 'View Unread Only' setting. It was nowhere to be found. This of course made me mad. How could Apple leave out such a common feature that exists in all other email programs? This sucks! Back to Thunderbird for me. But then Dave came up with a solution. Just create a smart folder that displays all the unread mail in your inbox! Suddenly I understood why Apple left off this obvious feature. It wasn't needed and it was a poor approach to the problem. Why waste menu space creating a feature that not everyone is going to use? Why not simply add it as a feature of smart folders. This way, people like me can add the feature, and the rest who don't care about it, never have to see some confusing menu item. Everyone wins.

Nice job Apple. Once again Apple is forcing me to 'think different', but in a good way.