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From an email I wrote today, names changed to protect the innocent:

So today two important computer related things happened.

First, I think I may have mentioned that a Windows desktop that exists for the sole purpose of being able to let [my flatmate] and I access the corporate VPN and let us telework had died randomly after trying to update some weeks ago. Not sure what happened – it asked to reboot after installing updates … and never came back up. So I booted it up and discovered that there was a built in system recovery feature and allowed it to wipe the drive and start over. It took its sweet while, but it came back up – and the first thing that happened was that the setup wizard crashed. If I had no knowledge of computers, I wouldn’t have known what to do – there was a giant white screen with a frozen “HP” logo. As it happened, I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, terminated the process and went on my merry way. Which brings me to item the second: crapware. It took eleven reboots, two hung Symantec uninstaller, a hung HP uninstaller, a failed Microsoft “Works” removal tool and 4 hours of my time to get the machine to a state I would consider usable. I’m currently (6 hours into my adventure) trying to install service packs. It turns out that unlike any other operating system in the world, which would allow you to skip installing intermediate service packs and go to the latest release, Windows requires you to download, in order, SP1 (434MB) and SP2 (380MB). I’m waiting for those downloads to complete. If this is anything like the last time I installed SP1, that will mean an hour of my time and two reboots; if this is anything like the last time I installed SP2, that will mean 45 minutes and a reboot (possibly two). After that, I will need to install software to make the computer usable (Office, Office updates, Virus Scanner, Virus Scanner updates, iTunes, Picasa…) All told, I’m looking at maybe another 3 hours or work.

Second, today [my flatmate] bought a MacBook – one of those $800 Microcenter ones. She asked me to set it up. I started at 10.11pm to do so: setup (worked perfectly, by the way) – about 5 minutes; no crapware to remove, and it finished downloading the latest version of Mac OS X, and all the updates in a single go, installed them, rebooted once – about 17 minutes. Office installation took the longest time, because again, to get from Office 12.0.0 (which is what shipped) to Office 12.2.3 (the latest version), it downloaded 12.1.0, 12.2.0, 12.2.1, 12.2.3; time wasted to install Office: about 50 minutes. So it took twice the time to install Office than setting up and updating the computer. And, of course, the whole Mac installation took less than 1.5 hours – versus, six hours and counting on the PC.

In short, if you’re still using Windows, it’s because you value your time at $0. There’s no other explanation for why on EARTH it should take so long to get a computer to a working state. Truly, unbelievable.

Ugh.

The short take away: avoid Windows. Unless your time is worthless.

So two thoughts about iPad:

1. I hate Flash. With a tremendous passion. It is a bug-ridden, resource-hungry abomination that has encouraged bad design to proliferate around the web. That said, if you have a “wicked fast” processor, especially one that isn’t “wasting” cycles on things like managing the overhead of multitasking, there’s no excuse not to have Flash. By all means, leave it off by default – I know, I would – but the choice to not have Flash should be up to the user, not Apple.
2. The more I look at iPhone OS X, the more convinced I am that Apple’s perfect OS in Steve Jobs’ – or whomever is running the OS side of things – mind was System 7. If you’ve never had the … pleasure of running an OS that was not multitasking or multithreaded, you’ve not enjoyed the fun that we System 7 users had; a “favourite” memory that comes to mind is of waiting for minutes or hours for Word or Clarisworks to spool a print job. It was enough to push me to Windows and leave me firmly there until OS X 10.3 “Panther” came out.

In short, let’s say I have a budget of about $1000. I can get for $829 an iPad, with 1GHz ARM processor, 64GB of storage, a 9.7″ screen, a lot of nifty sensors, a 3G radio and the ability to run one task at a time. Or, for $999 – or $799, if you’re shopping at Microcenter these days – I could get a MacBook, with a 2.0GHz dual core x86 processor (remember here the law of x86 inevitability), a 13.3″ screen, 160GB of storage, a beautiful multi-touch trackpad, and the ability to run an absolutely arbitrary number of apps. Oh, and, let’s not forget, I could use Flash on sites where I didn’t have Flashblock running. To me this is a no-brainer: go for the MacBook. You’re trading off a 3G radio*, a bunch of sensors, some amount of portability and some 3 hours of runtime, for a lot more computing power, more storage and the ability to multitask. I’m sure there are people for whom the iPad makes sense. I’m not one of them.

*: Given that WAN is powered by AT&T, it’s highly debatable you actually have a 3G radio. The last conversation I had with an AT&T rep had this choice line from me: “I’ve lived in countries where the annual income is less than what you take home in a week, and they had better networks than you can dream of.”

I found that there are a whole bunch of articles shared by various people on Twitter that I wanted to comment on, but with more than 140 characters. Plus, I come across some pretty interesting posts on Google Reader every so often, and I often find I want to write a response. So this is going to be a semi-occasional roundup of various such articles.

1. Via @atmasphere comes Marketers salivating over smartphone potential: Actually I suspect the apparent willingness to see mobile has less to do with what they’ve identified and more to do with: (a) there’s no irritating, resource-intensive Flash ads on most phones, so people’s desire to tune them out hasn’t kicked in as strongly yet; and, (b) there’s no Adblock for most of these phones yet. Once these ads start slowing phones down and eating through the capped data plans causing overage and grief for users, this will change quickly.
2. Saw what is probably the definitive guide to available-in-the-US e-readers over at dealnews.com. While there are a ton more readers out there if you’re willing to look at importers, this is a pretty exhaustive comparison of the various options out there. The thing that I find most interesting about this is how all the screens are 6″ or larger (basically). I, for one, would welcome an e-book reader roughly the shape and size of a traditional mass-market paperback book.
3. Engadget is reporting on the Symbian app store, joining such stores as the Android, Apple, Blackberry and Nokia stores. And in the last of that list lies the nub: given that just about the only people who use Symbian extensively is Nokia, why is there such a duplication of effort? Let Symbian licence the Nokia store for use on any Symbian-powered devices, if the legalities are a problem. This is just a tremendous waste of resources.
4. Via @bperry comes Mobile first: I agree with the the author’s first two points. Mobile use is skyrocketing, and mobile screen real estate is limited and websites designed for mobile devices are often clearer and more function-oriented than their desktop-bound counterparts. But I disagree with the observation that mobile platforms are more functional; in fact, that’s the biggest challenge in designing for mobile devices has always been the huge disparities in device capabilities. Even if you look at the two platforms currently hogging mindshare – iPhone OS and Android – device capabilities are hugely different. The original iPhone doesn’t have a GPS at all; the 3G has a GPS, but no compass. The Android devices offer multiple resolutions. More to the point, these two platforms occupy a very small market share and if you expand your audience to the entire mobile spectrum – feature phones and smart phones – then good luck getting anything beyond the most minimal of pages up.

A lot of people have asked about my Tweet earlier that I had to call the police on an on-duty Metro employee, so I figure it’s just easier to post here.

About two years ago, I found a phone on the Metro, a $400 Treo Pro. I called the number marked “Home” on it, told the very grateful person that I had found it and that I was leaving it with the station manager.

When I tried to turn it in, I made the mistake of mentioning that I had called the person, at which point of time, she told me it was my problem, since I had broken Metro protocol by telling the person I had found the phone. I assume, given my experience before and since with Metro, that makes it harder for some Metro employee to “keep” the phone. Mind you, this was in the first two weeks of the “‘Scuse me, is thaaat your baaag?” announcements.

So I asked her what would be the protocol if I hadn’t mentioned that I had called the person. She accused of us of lying, etc. I had had enough of this BS, so I started to leave the phone on her desk. She picked it up and HURLED at me, striking me on chest. I had had enough. I called the Fairfax County Police, who told me to call Metro Police, the latter being useless scumbags.

Long story short, the woman ran off before the police came – at 6pm for “lunch” – and then when she got back, basically lied through her teeth with the help of her subordinate, making up a bullshit story about my lying to her about calling the person and then claiming that I hadn’t. (Remember, I said, “What would you’ve done had I not said I had called the owner?” – a hypothetical question). Eventually John Catoe showed up along with the line manager for the Orange Line, took the phone, and Metro Police essentially forced me to leave mid-conversation by shoving me out of the station. I took the station manager’s name, filed a complaint in writing, nothing ever came of it, of course. I’ve seen her since at “work” so I assume fully that she was either commended for her “honesty” or she got a free phone out of my efforts.

And of course, they continue to announce that if I see someone leave something behind, I should tell a Metro employee. I don’t any longer. If one day one of those phones is hooked up to a bomb, I hope that they name it after the station manager that taught me never to help Metro make itself safer. Also, that weekend, I got my US driver’s licence. So that I never again have to go on the Metro if I don’t want to.

I was visiting an office colleague today while our highly competent IT team was trying to ascertain just what was wrong with my computer. For the first time, said office colleague’s office mate was there and since work had come to a stand still thanks to my dead computer, I sat down to talk for a while. One comment led to another and I stopped for a second to consider the math of one of the statements. (I believe it was about the carbon capacity of the ocean and I thought about what was the fastest way to measure the liters of water in the ocean).

I remarked that I had to stop to think about this. The office mate said something to the effect of “Wow what a nerd you are” to which I happily told her the story of my college’s unofficial motto: “Where fun comes to die”. Upon which I was asked in disbelief, “Why are you admitting this?”

Why indeed. Consider: I read sci-fi, I play video games, I listen to opera and techno, I can out pun all but one person that I know, I devour knowledge, but most of all, I understand technology in a way few people do. Most people think an internal combustion engine or a computer or why the sky is blue are magic; I know enough to explain the mechanism to someone else. I’m decently good at math and I grok a fair amount of physics, economics and a few other fields to not be so that I am not confused when people far ahead of me try to teach me a thing or two. And I am not afraid to ask questions.

I pride myself for knowing more than most people. And I enjoy verbal swordplay and banter. And I enjoy intellectual discourse. And challenging mental problems. And reading. The pursuit of more knowledge is the single greatest joy of being alive.

So you know what? I am a nerd/dork/geek and proud of it.

If you are too, take the word back. It’s about our quest for information. Not their label for something they don’t understand. Not their label for those of us who revel in the quest for more.

Edit 1: And one more thing – I list the stuff above not because it makes me a genius, but because it tells you a little bit about my quest for knowledge. More information about a lot of things is infinitely preferable to more information about a few things. These are just some of the “nerdy”/”dorky”/”geeky” fields I look for information about – and from there, learn to tell others about. If that makes me a nerd/dork/geek, I am proud to be one.

How far into the future have you thought or dreamt about? A decade? Fifty years? One hundred years? A thousand years? I think that’s about my limit of how far out I’ve thought about the future – wondering what the world might look like in 2999 in 1999, I had a heady feeling that we would all be either immortal – or there wouldn’t be an earth left. So, when Alastair Reynolds begins House of Suns with a deliberately ambiguous timeframe, I was sure that the story wasn’t set more than a thousand years or so in the future. And it’s true – parts of the story are in fact set in the beginning of the fourth millennium CE, taking place on a vast torus of asteroids and bodies circling the sun at a distance of about a half a light hour. But the majority of the story takes place 32 circuits in the future. And how long, you ask now, is a circuit? Well, let’s put it to you this way.

Sometime about a thousand years in to the future, humanity splits into two major factions: those that choose to remain gravity well-bound, choosing to establish civilizations on planets and planetary systems, and those who choose not to re-enter the gravity well – and spend years touring the galaxies in guilds known as lines – the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, is one such line from which we are introduced to two characters: Campion and Purslane, the characters around which the story of House of Suns revolves. The business of all the Lines, organized into cartel known as the Commonality, is to care for the planet-bound civilizations as they rise and fall, and the business of the Gentian Line, in particular, is to ensure that stars close to inhabited systems do not destroy these worlds when the stars explode, or supernova. The galaxy is mostly empty – organic life has all evolved from humans, which have adapted themselves in infinite ways to suit their local planets, or systems, or ships, and machines are all descended from the development of current-day human computers and artificial intellect. There is, however, one rather weird thing: the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbouring galaxy, is missing. For all practical purposes, the galaxy is there – but it can’t be seen from anywhere inside the Milky Way. Since the discovery of this Absence, a project called the Vigilance has been organized to watch over the Absence and try to understand why the Andromeda is missing, and by whom or what agency, the galaxy disappeared. Reynolds excels at Lovecraftian horror. With Revelation Space, there’s the frightening disappearing of worlds. With House of Suns, it’s the frightening disappearance of an entire galaxy. Civilizations rise and fall, lives are begun and ended, as the Vigilance continues to watch what has happened with Andromeda and try to make sense of it. It’s fascinating, and utterly frightening.

So, circuits. Well, Lines are households composed of about a thousand individuals each; each individual is called a shatterling. You’ll find out why they’re called that pretty soon into the book, and it makes excellent sense. Each Lines’ shatterlings takes their ship, usually alone, and proceeds to do charitable work for the Line, acting in accordance with Commonality’s belief that it is their duty to help planet-bound civilizations. The nigh immortal shatterling takes a round of the galaxy, helping where possible – called a circuit – and then returning every so many years for a reunion of the Line – an event called the Thousand Nights. On average, a circuit is about 200,000 years long, and a reunion lasts just three. And the story, to save you the math, is thus taking place about 6.4 million years into the future, at the event of one of the reunions. Or at least, that’s where it starts – it goes on from there.

Reading this book, I had the feeling I occasionally have when I’ve very very sick – this feeling that I’m falling head first off a cliff – but for entirely different reasons. For one thing, One Million CE is a mind-boggling distance away into the future. For another, 6.4 Million CE is the equivalent of the entirety of human evolution. I’ve always known the universe is a big place, and traveling around the universe takes time, but it doesn’t strike me how mind bogglingly large the universe is, until I read stories like this where the distance and time scales boggle my mind. The only other book I’ve read where I’ve had this feeling is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama Revealed, as various members of the des Jardins-Wakefield family are being split up and told to say their goodbyes as the distances between them are about to grow immense. While Reynolds does a fantastic job tying up the loose ends of this novel in a way that he doesn’t in Revelation Space, I almost enjoyed some of the mysteries in that series more because they went unexplained. It also left a lot of room to grow the universe, while this novel is pretty much done and going to stand alone: he had a story to tell and he’s told it, though you may not realize he’s done when you read the last sentence.

I’m not going to tell you much of the plot of the story, because it really is that good. It will tie up nicely at the end, if you’re looking for that, with almost all of the explanations forthcoming. Those mysteries without explanations are minor at best, so if you do not like loose ends in your novels, this is for you, my friend. You do get dumped into the novel in the middle of all the action, so you might be frustrated until you understand how all the parts are connected and how the terms all match up, but it’s not like a Neal Stephenson novel where every third word is new and people like it for that obtuseness. All I can say is, don’t be surprised if after reading it, you’re not in the mood for some space travel, immediately.

I was thinking about this on the way back from work today: what’s the end-user cost of (worthless) DRM? And I realized, well, it’s whatever it takes to get around it. So I decided to illustrate this with an example, using our monopoly cable provider and its BS DRM as the inspiration, since I’ve been trying to work this out. Let’s use a simple example. Cox, one of the worst companies on earth, is required by law to carry all local broadcast channels unencrypted over its cable network. They don’t, of course, and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a lot of FCC regulations and at least a couple of laws, but that’s a story for another day. So I want to take a copy of an HD program (House, for example) with me on my iPhone to watch on the train to work. Top Gear is also on at the same time, so I want to record both shows and take them both with me when I go. And for the examples, I’m assuming you’re doing this for a year. Okay. Here’s how it would work in an ideal world.

I plug my iPhone into my DVR, and get a copy of the show automagically transferred over in a beautiful, iPhone-compatible H.264 format. Cost: cable ($50/month) + DVR ($25/month) + BS Cox Charges ($25/month) = $100/month = $1,200 for the year. Of course, that’s not reality. For one thing, Apple locks down transfers to the iPhone more securely than the Treasury does its gold (and I do have a bone to pick with Apple for that). For another, this solution comes free of charge with eternal life, unicorns and world peace. So, the reality is, you’re going to need something to talk to both the DVR and the iPhone. Enter a computer.

Okay, not that much more complicated, because by law, Cox is supposed to provide an unencrypted stream of local broadcast channels out of the DVR to any device that wants it over IEEE1394 (aka “FireWire”). Except, of course, they don’t. They encrypt everything, except the SD versions of Fox, NBC, ABC, PBS and CBS (and possibly Univision). So even though the cost of this is about $1,200 (for the cable + DVR) and $600 (for the computer) = $1,800 for the year, you can’t actually do this.

In fact, to do that simple scenario of recording Top Gear and House at the same time, here’s what I need to do:

I need to get two set top boxes (one per channel), two Hauppauge HD-PVRs (one per channel) to record the unencrypted component data, a beefy encoding machine, a network and my iTunes machine. Total cost? Cable: $1,600. HD-PVRs: $500. Encoding machine: $500. Network: (let’s assume I have this, otherwise) $100. Mac: $600. That tots up to a staggering $3,200, or $3,300 if I don’t have a network for one year. This is beyond my willingness to pay, and beyond most people’s technical skills. Can you imagine if your parents or aunts and uncles asked for a copy of the latest Top Gear and you told them this is what you had to do?

So what do most people do? Well, for a cost of $(amount spent on computer), they do this, because it’s simpler, easier and it just works, thus only causing DRM to harm those legitimate consumers:

And that, in a nutshell, is why DRM sucks.

I posted this call for help on SmallNetBuilder.com, since that’s one of the smartest, most knowledgeable communities on the Internet for finding out what to do with small, home networks. But I figure I ought to cross-post it here too, in the hopes that someone else might end up here instead. Your help is appreciated!

I came over here looking to just mention my experience with FreeNAS the last few weeks, and lo – Tim’s asking about RAID recovery. Slightly freaky.

I had my FreeNAS box go south on me over the last couple of days and I thought I’d just share two things I’ve learnt from the experience. A little background first: for over a year, I’ve been running FreeNAS 0.6x on a home-built Celeron 430-based machine, four SATA drives for storage via software RAID, a throwaway IDE drive for the OS. The basic setup was two RAID1 arrays joined together as a JBOD, a decision I have come to regret, but thus it was, thus it is. So what have I learnt?

1. RAID recovery does not work. There is inevitably something that will go wrong. In my case, two things went horribly wrong. First, even though I could read FreeNAS’ native UFS formatted file system, I couldn’t recover any of the disks because FreeNAS partitions using the GPT partition structure, and NOT the more common MBR partition structure. Second, because of my decision to JBOD the arrays, the file system was partially on the first array, and partially on the second. No recovery software I found could handle this setup.

2. RAID is not a backup, so backup, backup, backup, or don’t give a damn. Because of my inherent paranoia, I’ve been copying stuff from other computers on to the NAS, in the hopes that everything doesn’t go south all at the same time. The net result of the NAS crash is that we’ve lost: my current resume (and I’m pretty sure I have it in my email somewhere), the current network map (not that difficult to recreate, as I have older ones around), and two bits of software (which I can re-download and re-request keys for). I’m sure we’ll discover a few other things that have gone missing over a few weeks, but it’s not bad. So data loss is not the issue here – but time and convenience is. It was very simple for me to go to my software share and reinstall some piece of software, or to go to the music share and stream some music. That’s all on hold. Moreover, I’m currently missing a safety net, in case something else should go sour.

I’m going to give some thought as to what to do next – and your comments are welcome and appreciated. One option that I am going to rule out before someone suggests it is reinstall FreeNAS. This is the third time in as many years that I’ve had something go abruptly wrong, with no explanation, even though it’s apparently a known issue in the current nightly releases, and must exist earlier as I was running an earlier build. My time is not worth another FreeNAS install, though I’ve loved using it when things are going well. The fact is, there is no reason an orderly shut-down should result in chaos when brought back up again.

Options that I’ve come up with so far:
1. OpenFiler. I’m told this is a painful OS to administer, but a pleasure to use. I’m not sure I want to necessarily learn yet another OS to just have my files available everywhere. On the other hand, my previous experience indicates that it supports a significantly larger set of features than FreeNAS, including one thing that FreeNAS fails at – the ability to use (slightly) different size disks.

2. Windows Home Server. Testing here and elsewhere indicates that WHS is faster than its alternatives, and very user-friendly. However, the lack of a web-based administration front-end means that I’m stuck to using a PC running Windows to administer it, which is not an option. Microsoft also rubs me the wrong way philosophically, though I’m willing to put aside monetary and philosophical concerns if the damn thing just works and allows me to upgrade as larger hard drives become available.

3. Buy a BYOD NAS like the QNAP or Synology devices. Yes, that’s nice. It’s also several hundred dollars, and locking into a storage vendor’s options. What I mean by this last thing: codec support missing for video files, or some proprietary file system, or, worst of all, a feature that’s locked out because you’ve not paid for some annual subscription. Yes, there are relatively standard x86 computers inside some of them and no, I’m still not convinced. Unless someone has had a successful experience recovering a device, the trade-off is not worth it.

4. Forget it. No network-based storage. Expand local storage with a local RAID (or RAID-like) array, and use my Mac OS X based machine as a server to share out the files. I’m most tempted by this option – where this means buying a Drobo. I’ve heard both good things and bad things about it – no one I know has ever had an issue with their Drobo, but there are enough horror stories on the internet about Drobos going south that I don’t know whether I’m living in a statistical fluke.

5. Something else. This is where you all come in. Surely this can’t be the entirety of the options. You’ll notice that all of the options are those that keep the device (and data!) under my control; that’s a (strong) preference, but not an absolute requirement – provided strong encryption and incremental backup are both possible.

Thanks for listening. And remember to do your backups.

The New York Times is carrying an article basically summarizing what most of us have known for a while – technology is slowly creeping into every waking moment of life. More importantly, as the pipes and tubes of the internet have become available to every single device out there, networks are creeping into every single waking moment of life, which is a far more powerful thing than just technology:

Courtesy XKCD.

For what it’s worth, Jan Chipchase said something to me a few years ago when we were talking about Nokia’s design philosophy that still sticks out in my mind; sadly, though, I think Nokia’s lost this philosophy sometime between when we talked and now. To wit:

We’ve reached the age where your phone is both the first thing you look at when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you look at when you go to sleep. And there’s a lot of use-cases in between. We have to design for each of those cases, and still keep the phone simple enough for the average human to use.

It definitely got me thinking about when I first got a phone the better part of a decade ago. Without needing to be told, I put the phone on the bedside table when I went to sleep, setting an alarm on it for the next day. It seemed like the correct thing to do – and now it’s reflex for me to set the alarm at night, tap the snooze button once in the morning and then get up to go get ready. I’m not alone either.

Since you (you know who you are) asked, this is what it looks like, with apologies for the slight misalignment; different resolutions on the monitors:

And as long as you’re brutal about keeping your folder structure, it’s not that hard to not have any desktop clutter!