Cubegeek

HTTP Event Watcher

I've been thinking about 45 seconds about a tool I sure would like to have as an add-in to my browser. You could probably use it too. On the off chance that somebody is Googling, here's the idea for what it's worth. 

If you're an apps programmer like me, you probably sit around and watch a lot of slow queries return through a series of thin clients on an intranet. And since most corporations who pay for guys like us know very little in IT about handling web scale applications, more often than not that sitting around is generally more than a minute. Wouldn't it be nice to have a little button that says, watch the request to this process until it finishes then give me an alarm? 

Who doesn't get sick of this kind of stuff? So what I is to click the button, which minimizes the offending window and then prepares to return control, optionally with a timer and a choice of alerts. Yeah. That would be really cool. 

Consider this little scrap from Fiddler. 

While the http is waiting to finish, and deliver a nice 200 return code, we get a 304. And then the big dump of 618kb for the report when it's done. So the observables are observable to various code that's out there. It can be done. 

The Quadrotor

The quadrotor is one of those ideas that  just sounds obvious now that we've seen it. I've always been a fan of the V22 Osprey and I cannot imagine why helicopter design is still basically stuck in the same configuration as it was 60 years ago, especially given the number of fatal accidents military transports have. 

The Music Setup at Vault 330

I had a decent week with brainpower and willpower left over after work to actually get geeky again. It's nice to be able to have spare thinking cycles. A couple notes:

Clementine
If you're going to DJ a party, Clementine is the best free music organizer/player. It is singularly brilliant in that it's fast, handles huge libraries and allows you to work from multiple playlists at once. It's the multiple playlist thing that makes it perfect for gauging moods and then switching songs in real time. The other brilliant thing about it is that once you've aggregated a playlist, dragging and dropping them into a destination is easy, no matter what the source of the original song.  The only downside I've found is that it doesn't recognize playlists exported by iTunes. Weird.

XBox to NAS
So my music management setup is something like this. I've got a big media library on my NAS which is sourced from my own semi-deduped archives and partially replicated on a standalone USB external. Input comes from iTunes buys on the macbook and Amazon buys on the WinTel.  I keep a couple powered speakers on the either side of the Wintel monitor (Samson Resolv 50As). I've got Winamp Remote (powered by Orb) on the same box and that's a source for the XBox's Window Media Server client downstairs. That goes to the Samsung widescreen which kicks out preamp level stuff (simple RCA plugs). I've got a Soundcraftsmen preamp that's about 18 years old and still works nicely taking that signal and sends it to Samson 2.1 (Resolv 65s). So basically I use the Samsung source switch to determine what goes into the preamp and that handles the volume on the 2.1.

Now here's the weird part. The XBox WMS client recognizes two sources. One is the Winamp Remote / Orb thing and the other is the NAS itself. The NAS is the 2TB Iomega ix4-200d.  I still haven't quite figured out where and how the XBox picks out where the playlists reside, but I get the feeling that it does a dumb search across the entire machine's declared media folder, searches for file extensions and caches nothing. Oddly, Winamp's CD rips are automatically added as playlists in the Orb source even though they don't generate playlists I recognize. Then again I haven't looked that closely. It's a ton of music to organized (and dedup), and since I only use two or three playlists from the Orb server, I don't bother with the Iomega server. 

Boxee
I had Boxee running on the throwaway netbook that Verizon gave me with FIOS last August. It crawls, it crashes. It makes me want Apple TV.  I have yet to be fully satisfied with Boxee running on any of my boxes. I want to be, but I'm not. Well, actually I only just got my Mac dongle so that I can route video out to VGA from the macbook, so maybe Boxee on OSX might be cool. I'll try that out today and let you know.  I do love the nicety of using the iPhone as a remote, but as I said, Boxee needs horsepower.

MediaMonkey iTunes Winamp
I still have MediaMonkey but I don't use it much. It's not worth the trouble to try to sync my iphone onto different machines. So now that I have Clementine, it's not worth having yet another media player - BTW I never use anything other than VLC for video, unless it's direct from Netflix. So much for MM. Winamp is inter-combobulated with Orb in some strange way. Like a lot of folks, I had the missing dll problem. But since I paid for the Pro subscription back when I was completely fed up with iTunes, I may as well keep it.  The new iTunes 10 is serviceable and although I registered for Ping, it hasn't helped me at all yet. We'll see. iTunes is slightly better than a necessary evil and gets 3 out of 5 stars. 

Hardware
I have an old (old!) Setton integrated amp. It's a thing of beauty, but it is beginning to fail. I wonder if I can find an old crank who can fix it.  

Big Dog: The Aha Moment

Looking at this robot, it's clear that the guys at Boston Dynamics are onto something big. There are several segments of this video where I almost instantly recognize animal styles of mobility. The first is most obviously a dog. Then when I see the robot carrying a heavy load, I see moving men on opposite sides of a table, one walking forwards and the other backwards. At the end is clearly a horse.

This is the beginning.

The Little PC That Could

I had a dream that the wee Compaq PC that we're going to get for 300 bucks came in about the size of a Day Runner. In fact, it was embedded in a Day Runner and had an orange plastic cover with a velcro strap that kept it closed. The whole thing made perfect sense, because it was not a PC that was downsized, it was a Day Runner that was upgraded.

The first thing I noticed was that it was soft. Its softness made me like it. I held it in my hand and I squeezed it. Then I opened it up, and instead of the cheezy solar powered calculator you usually get in these things, it had a color screen, and it had pages. They were thick plastic pages...

iTablet Once Again

It turns out that there have been rumors about the 'iTablet' for years now. There have been a recent spate I caught this week from the Cranky Geeks. They report the rumor and then dis the product idea. I think they are being paid to shutup and say stupid things, like they did about the video iPod. The dimensions of the product?  A $800 machine with a 9.7 inch screen coming in October.

A DS style deal with two screens that turns into a two-page reader is a spectacular idea. An oversized iTouch is a stupid idea. But note how the rumor has the screen at 9.7 inches. That's the exact same size as the Kindle DX. My speculation has been that Apple wants a Kindle killer and I expect that Jobs will want to do with books and texts of all sorts what he has done with music, which is boldly forge alignments that change the industry forever.

Everything that Google has done, somewhat, and failed to do in convincing various publishers to go digital can be done with an Apple/Amazon alliance. Or Apple could do it alone. All you have to do is imagine is Jobs saying with major book publishers what he said with the major music industry players when the iTunes store was first announced. It can be that big.

An iReader with multitouch is reasonably priced at 800 for gearhead first adopters like me, and can come down to Kindle prices next Christmas.

I don't know how anyone can not imagine Apple building a sexier device with multitouch and text to speech that blows the doors off of a Kindle DX. That's all this product needs to do. The problem will be, of course, the liklihood that Apple will overload the iTunes Store. It needs to be a different kind of store, if you ask me, and it needs to be a touch more open so that booksellers can get on board.

If anybody at Apple is as visionary as I am, then they will see a market for 'book developers' which is at least as large as the blogosphere, and they will find a way to monetize writing and lower barriers to self-publication in the same way they have generated a new class of software developers.If they added a bit more brains to that vision, then they would do speech recognition in a devkit that would provide for transcribed podcasts.

Toolkit: Versioning

Download Versioner

The Version Tool is this simple perl script that works in conjunction with a version file to put a timestamp on zipped up versions of all of the Essbase objects in an app subdirectory. In this version of version.pl which is simpler than I thought - I'll have to dig for the more expansive one - it handles single database BSO cubes. 

Note that you need to modify the following snippet of code first off to assign the proper notifications and data paths.

$errdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\logs\\";
$logdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\logs\\";
$expdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\export\\";
$tmpdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\export\\temp\\";
$appdir="d:\\hyperion\\analyticservices\\app\\";
$scrdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\batch\\";
$inpdir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\batch\\input\\";
$bindir="d:\\hyperion\\essbase\\bin\\";

$recipients='mbowen@cubegeek.com';
$logfile="$logdir"."version_activity.log";

Then you'll have to change the parameters that you will allow for the named applications & cubes that you wish to version:

switch ($appid) {
case "back"  {$type=1; }
case "hr"  {$xapp="HR"; $db="HR"; $type = 2; }
case "gl" {$xapp="GL"; $db="GL"; $type = 2; }
else {$type = 0; }
}

In this case you have two single BSO cubes named HR:HR and GL:GL respectively. 'Back' is for versioning your backend itself. As I said, I'll lookup and find the code for ASO and multicube BSO shortly. That means I may have to start learning how to use Sourceforge. We'll see. 

Also note that you need to have 7zip on the path. 

Print Key

Many thanks to Doug Burke who offers a pointer to PrintKey2000, as a free alternative to Snagit. I've got Snagit and every time I open it, it wants to go home to it's mommy and get updated with more niceties that I don't really want or need. That's why I'm stuck on Snagit7. But I'm going to try something simple and give PrintKey a shot. You may like it too. 

MD5: 3033b0d05c7e37999b4b9644f53785af

Palm Pre - Uh Oh.

Just when I was about to throw my hands in the air. Palm has done it again. 

Several weeks ago my Treo lunched. It lost all of my contacts and really pissed me off. So I started looking for a new phone, but mostly new excuses to buy an iPhone. Except iPhones don't tether and I'd be stuck with AT&T. I'd much rather get on Verizon, but merely for one reason which is that I'd get better coverage. But that mostly means better coverage at my house which is a Sprint dead zone. I love Sprint's plan - unlimited digital for a simple flat rate, but their coverage leaves me wanting.

The reason my Treo lunched has to do with my PDANet application which stresses it out. Before using PDANet my Treo never ever gave me any problems. It rebooted maybe 6 times a year. But 6 times a day is not unusual when I've got it tethered to my laptop. 

The last phone I looked at, having decided that all of the Verizon phones bite, is the E71 by Nokia. I gotta have a keypad for my texting, period. So I get over to Best Buy just last weekend to put the Nokia in my hands. Yuk. It feels like an eye makeup kit. I mean it looks great but you pick it up and it's too light and too square and too thin. Don't these Nokia guys know anything about ergonomics?  HP figured this out 30 years ago with the 12C. What's wrong with you people? Same thing with the HTC Google Phone. Man those HTC phones look awesome in the glossy print ads and the big billboards at OHare, but when you touch them, the feel like they were made by Hasbro. Hasbro Vietnam that is.

So I have waited several months and have been giving my Treo a second chance and now I'm in luck because this Pre looks pretty awesome, so do the hands-on demos that I've seen. I get the feeling that this might be the phone for me. Now I can just be patient.  

Mobile Me Chapter Three

As I promised, I went to the local Apple store to see if any of the Genius Bar geniuses could figure out why my cloud is out of sync. The short answer is that I now have a fully enabled and free version of MobileMe that doesn't work.

The poor guy behind the counter freely admitted that he wished that he knew more about Exchange and Outlook and all that stuff. I'm thinking that the lot of the folks should stop wearing the cute badges that say 'Ask me about MobileMe'.

On the whole there were a few interesting gyrations that we went through that I hadn't figured out on my own, but to no avail. I erased my sync history in iTunes. I redirected and reset my Advanced sync options. I added MobileMe mail to my iTouch mail client. I got upgraded to the full version of MobileMe. I disabled my Outlook Add-Ins. So now there are another half-dozen things we know mean nothing when MM decides not to work. I will continue my dogged pursuit of the promise of MobileMe's cross-platform nirvana with another group of geniuses this weekend.

Fingers crossed.

UPDATE: Om Malik feels my pain.