Cubegeek

News of the Geek

I didn't realize that there was an app for Google Voice on the iPhone. Alas, it's too late for the Mafia powers that be have whacked it from the iTunes Music Store, which now no longer has the privilege of being known as simply iTunes because it's now all iPolitical and starting to smell like iCrap. But my abusive relationship continues and I'm still buying more iCrap. Is this how you humanize a corporation, make it into a love-hate relationship with their products and services?

It's clear that I love the latest vapor from iCorp, which everybody has pretty much decided is an iTouch on steroids. Considering how slim the normal iTouch is as compare to the iPhone, a really slim iTablet would rock on so many different levels. But more about them later.

I did load up on a couple new apps, including Dopplr, which I think only marginally better than Yelp. So little in fact that I don't use it. Nevertheless, Google Locator is even more worthless to me at the moment, so maybe Dopplr gets the shruggish nod. As to saying where I am, when I want to reveal that, Tweetdeck is the current winner. Still, if I haven't said it already, I'd like a Seesmic for the iPhone.

NY Nick has come through once again. This time he hipped me to a new program called TeraCopy. It is a non-schizophrenic copy program that actually does good estimates of how long it's going to take to copy large amounts of data from one drive to another, unlike the facility native to XP. The drag & drop nature of it is a little un-intuitive but you get used to it.

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I'm preparing myself for some Planning immersion coming this fall. It's going to be interesting and fun, I think. Planning is about all that's left of poor old Essbase. I've been reminiscing about the good old days at Hyperion eCRM in Foster City and the twisted path of that thing that became Siebel Analytics over the dead bodies of the wonderful products we built there. Now it's OBIEE which is killing off my other old buddy Wired for OLAP, which emerged triumphant through the thick and thin client implementations back in the days when nobody could decide which was better.

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.

Slingin' Topology

So I got the Sling Box installed.

It didn't take very long to get that done, and Playa helped me out. My problem was that I had forgotten how I'd wired the whole center. Which I probably should explain even for my own benefit.

I've got a Wii, an XBox 360, Verizon FIOS, a Samsung big screen, a Setton integrated amp, two Sony and two Yamaha speakers, a Soundcraftsman Preamp and an NAD amp plus the Motorola DVR all hooked up.  It just might be that the NAD+Soundcraftsmen are completely out of the loop, but I don't know. It was to this madness that I added the Slingbox.

The way I've accomplished it was to route everything through the Samsung, which now has a component source from the XBox, an HDMI from the DVR, an RCA from the Wii, and a VGA for my laptop should I desire. There's a two channel stereo out to my Setton line in which controls all four speakers. The Setton also has a stereo mini plug in so I can hookup an iPod or laptop audio and route that to the speakers. It also has a stereo microphone jack with a mixer so I can speak over anything.

So as soon as I hit the source button on the Samsung, whatever shows on the screen, goes through the speakers, if I have the Setton on, which I can turn off.

Now the Slingbox is hooked to the DVR via S-Video and it uses one of those infrared deals to control the DVR. It's also hooked into the ethernet hub that I have right there. Which brings me to the network.

The big coax comes out of the FIOS box and then hits a splitter. One leg goes right to the DVR and the other goes to the cable modem in my office. The cable modem then drives the Wifi-G right out of the box and then to two wired hubs. One of the wired hubs is in my office and the other goes back to the where the FIOS box is. That drives the XBox, two computers and the Slingbox. One of those computers has Orb. That computer is called Medea, she's the media server, get it?

Orb talks to the XBox. So now all of my Picasa and iTunes libraries are accessible to the XBox, although it's too big a menu for the XBox to handle. It obviously rebuilds the library every time and holds it in memory - it's even too slow to build a decent playlist. Better integration is needed. Both the music and photos are on an external USB drive that is backed up to JungleDisk. It took a month, but it's done.

I've got another Orb server associated with another of my office computers. The XBox sees both of them, but I rarely pipe music through, and although I have the big XBox drive, I haven't ripped any CDs lately. Maybe this weekend. Then again, I haven't purchased any CDs in a long time either. That's all Amazon MP3 by the way.

The next thing I need to do is figure out exactly how to rip all of my DVDs to MP4. Then I can justify buying a terabyte disk and perhaps I could stream them via Orb to the Samsung.

The Soundcraftsmen + NAD is driving no speakers - it used to drive my Infinitis but I gave them away two months ago. Maybe I should give that away too. Nah. I've got a psychological attraction to them, and no other rack mountables to put in the space. So they stay.

A Week as a Geek

This week's geekery involves a small select few things, almost not worth mentioning, but I'm committed to the shift from politics, so...

I'm about ready to start playing with VM images of all sorts. I like the idea of a VM jukebox. VM plus VPN can get me all sorts of elementary cloudishness.

NoSQL is an interesting and peculiar movement. I think they've got a lot of cheek, and I like that. But criticizing the NoSQL crowd is forcing me to think about the nature of the particular sort of computing I do. I think one way to think about it is to understand, as John C. Dvorak says, LAMP is over. Which means that the business model of certain providers like Dreamhost, as much as I love them and am a loyal customer, is threatened. Rackspace has evolved. There is an IT revolution afoot but before we get ahead of ourselves...

Way back when everybody was coming up with e-Business plans, I thunk up some mildly interesting product ideas. My obsession then, and growing again now, is what kind of things could be done with multiple database technologies. The plan was called 3DB and intended to build best of breed (enterprise) applications using object, relational and multidimensional databases in tandem. Why? Because each kind of job that interoperates across an enterprise requires a different kind of workflow with different sorts of transactions, and you simply couldn't assume that one database technology would support that best. I didn't end up specing out that business, but the idea remained in the back of my head. Now I'm thinking about it again, in the narrower sense of a tri-level hub and spoke architecture for data warehousing.

But the point is to think about workflows that databases support. I'll repost the idea from a comment thread at DBMS2.

NY Nick hipped me to the Verizon Mifi. A very cool device with a somewhat limited battery life that enables a personal mesh. Now that I swore off Palm and am on iPhone that allows no tethering, I have a marginal need for that. It's a really good idea, but I think I'm going to hold off. Another 40 bucks below the radar subscription is not what I need right now.

I'm about to get my first Slingbox today, from a buddy of mine. I can certainly use that now that I'm on the road. Why? Because my kids fill up my DVR with junk when I'm not around, and I don't need that. But there's an implication that I could VPN back to Vault107 remotely, which is weird because i don't think that my FIOS gives me a fixed IP. It has been years since I tinkered with DynDNS and it never really worked out for me. Hmm. We might see that again.

Video Professor has been charging me for stuff I didn't order. Be very careful if you order from that guy.

I'm trying out the Seesmic Desktop as I navigate my way sensibly through the Twitterverse. I originally had Twinkle on the iTouch, then on the iPhone. I then tried Tweetie and liked it. On the desktop I went from Twhirl to Tweetdeck and back to Twhirl, primarily because I like Adobe Air and Twhirl is cross platform. But I like Tweetdeck on the iPhone now. So today it's like this:

Ubuntu: Twhirl
iPhone: Tweetdeck
Windows: Seesmic + Twhirl

I added a bunch of DW heads to follow and I'm a little annoyed that they haven't decided to compartmentalize their life into waffle-hole sized blocks like I have. So now I know that one of the great database heads of our time has a cousin who wrestled with TSA over the weekend to fly his special homemade charcoal. OK.

I'm about ready to make the leap over to an EC2 box. I'm thinking VM host and/or Ubuntu playground. I'm displeased with the throughput I'm getting from JungleDisk and Nirvanix (not that I've tried much recently), but it just doesn't make me feel good about standalone cloud storage. Meanwhile the appeal of Dropbox is increasing. I think it obliviates thumbdrives.

I got a peek at Windows 7, and I must say that I'm intrigued. What I saw was MSFT finally approaching the multiple desktop paradigm that's been in Linux since the invention of KDE. It also looks like you can Alt-Tab by application. So instead of cycling through all your apps, you can cycle through just your open browsers or just your open spreadsheets. Nice.

I also found Isohunt, an alternative to the Pirate Bay.

Science is Political

There is some controversy, especially if you listen to some conservative pudits, over the future of China and whether or not we (stupid, lazy, spendthrift, immoral) Americans ought to be watching our asses lest we be overrun. In general I tend towards the belief that China will stumble before she and America rumble. Aside from all that, there's India. We like India and India likes us.

We in America tend to think of science as Big Science, which is something akin to Mad Science because it has, more often than not, military implications. But mad science could also have medical implications and there's a chance that China might decide that's the direction of their big science. So suddenly all the millions of Chinese scientists don't sound so scary.

And while it might difficult for us to get our heads around the notion that Chinese scientists might decide it's a good idea to clone people or genetically modify themselves, I would suggest to you that you probably have no idea how popular cosmetic surgery is in China.

And for all the drama surrounding Al Gore and his quest, you'd think that all those supposedly brilliant Chinese scientists would come up with a cleaner way to burn coal. But that's not in the cards as far as real smart people can predict, despite the fact that clean coal is already real technology.

All this goes to show that science is political and that brains are still a cheap commodity.

So what's up with the picture of the bug?  This happens to be a Cassidyfly, a bug I've never heard of before today. I happened to run across it as I was attempting to discover the size of Tubifex Tubifex which is the mysterious 'alien' creature YouTube says lives in the sewers of North Carolina. We (stupid, lazy, spendthrift, immoral) Americans took our own sweet time dispelling the myth, didn't we? So I found another video of Tubifex and it certainly looks grotesque, but there's still no sign of scale until I see this one. Apparently these things are fishbait. Tetras eat 'em up.

All wonderous mysteries of the natural world. Yeah but who actually cares about bugs and worms? Well, scientists do. Now I don't have any good idea of how much of our American Big Science makes use for the sorts of brainy disciplined people who would illustrate a taxonomy of insects like Gina Mikel whose Cassidyfly adorns my blog this afternoon. But surely the Chinese care about their bugs and worms, and surely they have a buttload of them in their hinterlands still undiscovered. And if the Chinese are going to advance in science and technology, they must include in their millions of cheap commodity brains, some patience for the natural world as well as we have. Surely there will be some Chen or Wang to add to the line of names Linnaeus, Darwin and Audubon.

On the other hand, maybe the Chinese scientists are dead set on thinking about technology the exact same we do. In which case I can't wait until I can sign up for their version of AT&T for my iPhone.

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