Archive for the 'Geek' Category

Motorola Droid and Google’s Android OS

Published on February 28, 2010 in Android and Geek. 0 Comments

So last November, I finally got a smartphone (through work no less).  Gotta love not having to pay that monthly phone+data bill.  The iPhone always had a lot of appeal to me, but the thought of having to switch to AT&T wasn’t especially attractive to me.  I’m not big on the restrictions Verizon usually places on their phones (let’s disable all the features of your phone out so we can force you to use an expensive VZW service instead and nickle-and-dime you to death).  But it’s hard to beat their coverage.  Long story short (too late), I ended up with a Motorola Droid running Google’s Android OS.

So far I’ve been pretty pleased with it.  In general, integration with Google services is pretty solid (gmail, calendar, contacts).  There’s the Google Market for installing new apps, and there are lots of pretty good free apps.  At some point I’ll probably do some followup posts highlighting some of the apps I find clever/useful.  The SDK is readily available and more importantly you don’t have to hack the phone to install non-Market apps (such as those you wrote yourself).  So Google isn’t maintaining a chokehold on app distribution as Apple is.  There are some really neat features of the Android SDK/API (e.g., a barcode scanner app can easily export it’s scanning routines so that other apps may rely on them).  And of course there’s the added flexibility you get with multitasking support.  But there are tradeoffs that come with this freedom.

I’ve never owned an iPhone/iPod Touch, but I suspect Apple has easily done a better job when it comes to general polish and usability.  While a vanilla Android install seems pretty snappy (at least on the Droid), you can definitely bump into issues with responsiveness especially as you install more apps.  You can definitely see the appeal of Apple’s approach to a restricted hardware platform since you know how it will perform, what features it will have, etc.  Since Android runs on a variety of platforms, there’s no guarantee how fast a CPU, how much memory, how much storage, etc are available.  And since it relies on every manufacturer to manage OS ports for their devices, there’s no guarantee that new OS releases will make it to all phones (or in a timely manner).

As far as the Motorola Droid in particular, it’s been a pretty solid phone.  It’s got some heft to it, but feels more solid than heavy to me.  The screen is pretty fantastic, and call quality is good.  It’s nice having a standard headphone jack and microUSB connector instead of any vendor-specific nonsense.  Most of the time, I find myself using the on-screen keyboard (especially after downloading the 3rd party Better Keyboard app), but occasionally having a physical keyboard is nice (such as when typing up long emails, or funky passwords).  They’ve certainly made some sacrifices with the keyboard to keep the size/weight down (keys aren’t offset and they’re pretty flat without as much of the usual tactile feedback you’d like).

What I find most odd is their choice of the Dpad.  It’s pretty big and forces you to a smaller keyboard.  But it’s on the right side instead of standard left as you’d find on a video game controller.  Makes it a little awkward since there are some pretty decent game emulators out there (I’ve got NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators installed at the moment so I can play Zelda, Mario, Sonic, etc).  Not bad for a phone.

 

Rackable acquires SGI?

Published on April 1, 2009 in Geek and Work. Closed

Well this is certainly not something I expected. SGI is one of the few HPC vendors out there that I’m aware of who are still doing neat things with hardware. We’ve got some of their large SMP Itanium boxes on the floor where I work, and I think they’re pretty slick machines. Pricy, but slick. And so far their support is about the best I’ve dealt with. That’s not saying their perfect (try getting a CXFS guru on the phone when you need one without sitting on a major outage for several hours), but they generally seem better than most of the other HPC vendors I’ve worked with (IBM, Cray). But SGI’s certainly had its share of financial woes and I think there was a recent warning from NASDAC that they’d be delisted. So I’m not necessarily surprised that someone’s buying them out, but that it’s Rackable specifically.

I’ve never had real day-to-day experience with a Rackable system, but they seemed to work at the other extreme of value commodity systems. I’ve chatted with some of their sales/technical folks and they push their cluster in a cargo container idea pretty hard. Their distinguishing features seem to be power distribution (aiming at higher efficiency by doing a single AC -> DC conversion and distributing DC to all the servers in a rack), and cooling efficiency (half depth servers loaded from both sides of a rack and blasting hot air into the gab between them in the middle of the rack). These are certainly aimed at addressing some of the big issues in datacenters everyone’s facing (power & cooling), but a lot of the big vendors are attacking those same problems, so I couldn’t guess whether Rackable really stands out in the commodity cluster space. But I suppose if they’ve got VC cash lying around, buying up the engineering assets at SGI may go a long ways toward giving them some more unusual products to set them apart.

I have to admit there’s a small part of me that thinks today was not the best day for them to announce the acquisition given the history of April 1st online shenanigans everyone’s expecting.

[Press release]

An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

Published on April 15, 2008 in Geek. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Space & Rocket Center

Published on March 23, 2008 in Geek, General and Photography. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.

The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…

Web migration complete… well mostly

Published on February 29, 2008 in Geek. Closed

So my hosting provider (was textdrive, now Joyent) is working on retiring all their old FreeBSD servers they were leasing. Yeah, it hadn’t occurred to me that you could lease a server like that. Anyway, they’re buying up fancy “Shared Accelerators” (8-core Opteron boxes with 4GB RAM/core from Sun running OpenSolaris) backed by SunFire x4500 Thumpers running ZFS.

I’d started off with this provider a couple years ago as part of a VC campaign (give us a large wad of cash, and we’ll give you an account for as long as we’re in business), and I’d upgraded at some point when they had a similar campaign that bumped up the specs on my hosting account and added their Connector service (group email, calendar, etc services with their own chunk of attached storage) and Strongspace service (large reliable online backup storage accessible via sftp/rsync over ssh/web over ssl). Anyway, all of this translates into my having the equivalent of a “Premier” service (see here). Long story short, I’ve got a lifetime account with the following specs:

  • Connector: 100 users/100 GB
  • Strongspace: 100GB
  • Hosting: 50 websites, 20GB Disk, 60GB Bandwidth, 100 databases

Considering what I paid for my initial VC lifetime account, and later the upgrade that added Connector and Strongspace, and the fact this level of account now runs $100/month, I think I got off like a bandit. I wouldn’t even get close to a year of service with what I’ve paid, and that’s for “lifetime” service at the above levels.

And the Premier level account means there’s 14 other accounts/virtual servers on my Shared Accelerator, so it should remain nice and snappy for me. So far it’s been much zippier for my sites as they were getting kinda bogged down on the old box. I’m not sure what all was going on there, if they’d simply oversubscribed the box or were starting to have issues with their storage backend for the old servers since they were pushing hard to move away from them, etc.

Now I just need to take some time to finish some of the manual migration for changes from FreeBSD to OpenSolaris, and fix up some stuff that was broken a while back due to a Wordpress upgrade. I’m also taking this opportunity to start picking up Ruby on Rails, and am vaguely contemplating ditching Wordpress in favor of something of my own creation built on RoR.

It’s still early (i.e., I’ve got a lot to learn about Rails), but so far it looks like a really sexy web framework and I threw together something resembling a blog after watching a 15-minute screencast that runs through the process to getting a basic app up and running. It’s still very basic but functional: add posts, edit them, list all posts, add comments to a post, and some of the unit testing framework in Rails. I’ve started thinking about what all else is really needed, and there’s a fair bit: authentication (so only I can post to the blog or edit stuff), more advanced comment handling (akismet for spam, etc), categorization/tagging, searching through posts, and of course actually putting some style into the whole thing with CSS. But what I’ve got’s a start and now that I’ve got my performance issues sorted out following the migration, I’m not in as big a rush to dump Wordpress.

Gmail and IMAP

Published on October 27, 2007 in Geek. Closed

Looks like Google has finally decided to support IMAP in Gmail. Now I just have to wait for them to roll it out to my account…

Movie Buff meme

Published on July 25, 2007 in Film, Geek and meme. Closed


Your Movie Buff Quotient: 88%


You are a movie buff of the most obsessive variety. If a movie exists, chances are that you’ve seen it.
You’re an expert on movie facts and trivia. It’s hard to stump you with a question about film.

Response from anyone who knows me:

well, duh. of course you’re a movie geek.

Social micro-blogging?

Published on July 11, 2007 in Geek. 1 Comment

There’s been a fair bit of hubbub about the social network/micro-blog services twitter and most recently pownce.

twitter is a bit of an interesting concept as it boils down to very short (less than 140 characters), text-only posts about what you’re up to. You can post updates in a variety of ways (web, email, im, sms message via cell, desktop client) and receive updates from your circle of twittery friends in a similar way (web, email, im, sms, desktop client, or rss feed).

pownce is a new contender to the field (so new it’s still in private beta). As far as I can tell, a fair chunk of the excitement about this platform is the involvement of Kevin Rose (of digg fame, all things revision3, and formerly of TechTV back when it had some actual tech). It also appears to be one of the first apps to be built using Adobe AIR (platform for developing net-based desktop apps). They don’t appear to have as many ways to send/receive updates (just web and desktop client at this point?), but they provide a number of other features that aren’t present in twitter. Notably: ability to send updates to subsets of your friends list (not just “everyone”), and the option of sending more media-rich updates (music, photos, videos, etc).

Since there’s been a fair bit of commotion on the web about these two services, I thought I might give them a spin and see what I think. You can check out my feeds at twitter and pownce. Don’t think I actually know anyone who’s currently using either service, which may make this experiment somewhat pointless, but I thought it might at least be worth a look-see.

Since pownce is currently in private beta, let me know if you need an invite to check it out yourself, as I have a handful to give out at this point. twitter is publicly available, so you can easily register for your own account if you’d like to check it out.

Joost coolness

Published on July 9, 2007 in Film, Geek and General. 2 Comments

I’m not sure how to describe Joost aside from on-demand, internet tv clips from the crew that put together Skype and Kazaa. A while back I managed to land an invite from Joost for their private beta test, and have enjoyed running it on my Macbook Pro (they support Windows and Intel Macs at this point). Very little lag when you first fire up a program, and haven’t had any issues once a show starts. They seem to be landing more and more content every time I check in with it. They’ve got all sorts of channels:

  • news – CNN and Routers
  • sports – soccer, indy cars, hockey…
  • music – more than I care to shake a stick at
  • movies – an assortment of indie stuff, some less than popular stuff from Paramount, “The Really Terrible Film Channel”, and a channel full of Godzilla movies :)
  • tv – a variety of stuff past and present – sci-fi stuff like Babylon 5, crap like Charlie’s Angels and Starsky & Hutch, stuff off Spike/Comedy Central/MTV/VH1/National Geographic
  • misc. animation – adult swim, old school transformers/gi joe, rocky & bullwinkle, anime, and assorted stuff from production companies like aardman animations (makers of Wallace & Grommet)

Anyway, it’s turning into a pretty cool source for free tv goodies as long as you’ve got a decent net connection. Some stuff relies on advertising, but it hasn’t been as obnoxious as what you’d find on regular tv so far (e.g. 10 minutes for ads in a 30 minute show on real tv).

Since it’s still in beta, you need an invite to get in. They’ve apparently scaled to the point where they can handle faster growth of their user base as they’ve given everyone “unlimited” invites at this point. So if anyone wants and invite, let me know.

Geektastic Yoda backpack

Published on June 8, 2006 in Geek. Closed

Just ran across this totally silly Yoda plush backpack that’s available from ThinkGeek:

yodabackpack.jpg

Now Star Wars geeks can live out their fantasies of training to be a Jedi under the watchful eye of Yoda while running around in their backyard!