Installing DOS in a Virtual Machine

One of my recent home projects has been to decommission some old systems that didn’t really need dedicated boxes any longer. Aiding in this effort is virtualization. Thus, I moved what used to be a dedicated Linux installation to a Virtual Box VM; it’s mostly for development use so it’s fine just sitting on my main Windows desktop.

Installing DOS in a VM proved a bit more problematic.

(Why DOS?!? You cry. Mostly just for fooling around with for old times sake—running some old games and such. Not something I particularly wanted to have an ancient PC taking up space for as I did previously.)

The first step was to find DOS. I had diskettes of various versions hanging around including DR-DOS but no easy way to use them to create a VM as my desktop doesn’t have a floppy drive. As it turns out, the best solution appears to be FreeDOS. I downloaded an ISO image, mounted it as a CD, and fired up Virtual Box.

Things went pretty smoothly except for one thing: I couldn’t get sound to work. Recent versions of Virtual Box do let you set audio to Sound Blaster 16, the de facto standard for sound output in the DOS world for many years. I also put what appeared to be the required incantations in the DOS startup files—a messy mix of DMA and IRQ settings and related arcana with which I was far too familiar from past years. But no sound—not even native PC speaker sounds (which are what I really cared about). And no sound meant not much use for games.

VMware Workstation to the rescue. I downloaded a trial copy, created a FreeDOS VM, and sound worked fine out of the box.

One caveat: After FreeDOS sets up your partitions, the system needs to reboot. However, now that there’s a primary partition, the system will try to boot from hard disk (rather than the CD) and fail. At this point, you need to go to the Boot menu in BIOS and change the boot order so that the CD boots before the hard drive. This is a bit tricky because, when the VM boots, it moves past the point where you can press F2 to enter BIOS very quickly. So you have to be fast. (Alternatively, you can edit the .VMX file to increase the delay.) After the installation completes, you then will need to switch things back.

VMware Workstation is for-charge software. However, I assume that once you have the VM set-up, you can run it using the free VMware Player. You may also be able to use VMware Server, the free version of VMware’s former GSX Server, although I have not tried either.

Finally, to move software on to the VM, I found the easiest thing to do was to create an ISO image of any files I wanted. I can then mount the ISO and copy its contents to the "C:\" drive (i.e. the VM's primary partition). FreeDOS provides packet drivers and various other networking pieces but I didn't feel especially motivated to spend the time to try to get this stuff working.

My 100ish Best American Films - Updated

In 1998, the American Film Institute put on a 100 Best American Movies show. I’ve long been interested in movies—I was publicity director for my university’s film group--so I put together my own list at the time. It wasn’t markedly different from the AFI’s list but did generally incorporate more comedies and removed some films that were arguably more important than objectively excellent.

In the years since I’ve occasionally discussed the list with friends. New deserving films have come onto the scene. I’ve also taken a fresh look at some films I included on my list or excluded from it and tweaked my opinion in a couple of cases.

This new list is based on all that. It also cheats. Although I did prune a few movies that were probably near the bottom of my best-of rankings, I came to the conclusion that sticking to a strict 100 movies list would result in two things happening: Eliminating some older films that, while still enjoyable, require a certain historical perspective to fully appreciate and eliminating some newer films that I very much like today but may or may not stand the test of time.

I didn’t go nuts but there are maybe ten or so extra films. Much of the commentary from my earlier list still applies; I didn’t go hog-wild adding a lot of separate films on a similar theme or in a similar style (think Woody Allen or Pixar). In addition, while I haven’t included anything just because it’s supposed to be “great film-making,” I haven’t necessarily included movies that I like but would have trouble justifying as “best” or “ground-breaking” in some respect. (Thus, a number of favorite science fiction films are excluded.) This isn’t a films-for-a-desert-island list although the two would have a fair bit of overlap.

At some point perhaps I’ll add some commentary to these choices but, for now, here’s the list.

• 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
• ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, THE (1938)
• AFRICAN QUEEN, THE (1951)
• ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)
• ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930)
• ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)
• AMADEUS (1984)
• AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)
• ANNIE HALL (1977)
• ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944)
• APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)
• AVIATOR, THE (2004)
• BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
• BIG CHILL, THE (1983)
• BLADE RUNNER (1982)
• BONNIE & CLYDE (1967)
• BRAZIL (1985)
• BREAKER MORANT (1980)
• BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S (1961)
• BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE (1935)
• BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE (1957)
• BRINGING UP BABY (1938)
• BULL DURHAM (1988)
• BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)
• CASABLANCA (1942)
• CHINATOWN (1974)
• CITIZEN KANE (1941)
• CLOCKWORK ORANGE, A (1971)
• CABARET (1972)
• CHARIOTS OF FIRE (1981)
• DAY OF THE JACKAL, THE (1973)
• DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)
• DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965)
• DUCK SOUP (1933) [but it could just as easily be NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)]
• ED WOOD (1994)
• ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)
• FANTASIA (1940)
• FARGO (1996)
• FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
• FRENCH CONNECTION, THE (1971)
• FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)
• GIANT (1956)
• GODFATHER, THE (1972) and GODFATHER PART II, THE (1974)
• GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)
• GOODFELLAS (1990)
• GRADUATE, THE (1967)
• GRAPES OF WRATH, THE (1940)
• GUNGA DIN (1939)
• HAROLD AND MAUDE (1972)
• HIGH NOON (1952)
• HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)
• INHERIT THE WIND (1960)
• IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946)
• KING KONG (1933)
• LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)
• LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995)
• LIFE OF BRIAN (1979)
• LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy (2001/2/3)
• LOST IN TRANSLATION
• MALTESE FALCON, THE (1941)
• MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, THE (1975)
• MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE (1962)
• MARY POPPINS (1964)
• M*A*S*H (1970)
• MATRIX, THE (1999)
• MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)
• MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935)
• MY FAIR LADY (1964)
• NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE (1978)
• NETWORK (1976)
• NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
• ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)
• PAPER CHASE, THE (1973)
• PATTON (1970)
• PHILADELPHIA STORY, THE (1940)
• PINOCCHIO (1940)
• PLAYER, THE (1992)
• PRODUCERS, THE (1968)
• PSYCHO (1960)
• PULP FICTION (1994)
• RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
• REBECCA (1940)
• REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)
• SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993)
• SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)
• SIDEWAYS (2004)
• SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, THE (1991)
• SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)
• SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)
• SOUND OF MUSIC, THE (1965)
• STAR WARS (1977) and EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE (1980)
• STING, THE (1973)
• STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, A (1951)
• SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)
• TAXI DRIVER (1976)
• THIN MAN, THE (1934)
• THIRD MAN, THE (1949)
• TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
• WALL-E (2008) – or just about any other Pixar film of your choice
• WHEN HARRY MET SALLY (1989)
• WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988)
• WIZARD OF OZ, THE (1939)
• WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939)
• YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, THE (1983)

Silents: GENERAL, THE (1927) GOLD RUSH, THE (1925) INTOLERANCE (1916) MODERN TIMES (1936) SAFETY LAST (1923) THIEF OF BAGDAD, THE (1924)

Recipe: Garlic-Almond Dip for Crudities

I served this at happy hour on a recent hiking weekend and it was a big hit. It’s also a staple of my summer barbecues. I tend to just serve this easy-to-prepare dip with strips of red pepper (or a mix of red, yellow, and orange for more of a multi-color effect) but you can use a wide variety of fresh vegetables.

Ingredients:

2 cups of Mayonnaise (If store-bought, a 15 fluid oz. jar is just right)

3 cloves garlic, peeled

5 TBS trimmed white bread or bread crumbs, lightly toasted

1/2 tsp black pepper, freshly ground

1/2 cup Almonds

2 TBS fresh Parsley

Crudities (i.e. sliced pinkie-sized carrot pieces, cauliflower flowerettes, 1/4 in. strips of peppers, small red and white radishes, young scallions, and any other fresh vegetable which seems appropriate)

Clean and slice assorted crudities.

Add garlic, bread crumbs, pepper, almonds, and parsley to a blender or food processor. Pulse until finely chopped.

Scoop mayonnaise into a bowl and stir in the chopped ingredients until well-blended.

How I Backup my Digital Photos

In “Backup Your Photos Online & Preserve Memories Forever,” Amit Agarwal succinctly lays out the options for backing up your photos with a focus on online services. He concludes that “For most users, the best option for preserving digital photographs is often "online backup" because it doesn’t require you to burn DVDs (which are unreliable anyway), you don’t have to invest in any new hardware and your photos are likely to last forever as long as you pay the yearly bills.”

I agree in part and disagree in part.

I agree about the value of online services in general. I view backup services and photo sharing sites to be complementary rather than alternatives.

I use Mozy—Carbonite is another good alternative—to backup all my data files, including my digital photos. Both have a fixed annual fee of about $60 with no bandwidth charges.

I also have a Flickr Pro membership. I don’t really consider Flickr a backup mechanism though. I can only upload processed JPEG images. And, although I could theoretically upload every frame I shoot, in practice that would get in the way of using Flickr as a photo sharing site. (SmugMug has a service called SmugVault that you can use for RAW images and other types of files but then you’re getting into Amazon S3 bandwidth and storage charges which can get pricey for large volumes.)

Yes, at the end of the day Flickr provides me with a totally independent backup of reasonable fidelity copies of the majority of my most valued photos. But this is a side effect that I certainly hope I will never have to depend on as opposed to a systematic backup.

I don't consider an online backup to be sufficient though. I also recommend keeping a local backup. I like to keep an uncompressed file-by-file backup. In my case, a program called SyncBack synchronizes a network drive to my user directory every night. A USB drive will also work as would image backups. I do things the way I do for a couple of reasons: 1.) Data files in the backup are readily available to other computers on my network and 2.) In the event of a problem with my main computer, I don’t need to restore backups and so forth; the data files are right there ready to be accessed by another system.

In general, my philosophy is that I want to make backups using two different mechanisms and I want one of those mechanisms to give me an offsite backup. Backing up to both a local drive and an online service--using different software--is a good way to accomplish this objective.

One final suggestion for the less technically savvy who shoot a more modest quantity of photos than I do. (This is what I have my dad doing.) If you’re not going to have a good backup process, consider just leaving the photos on the memory card given that a 2GB card costing maybe $10 can store 400 or so JPEGs. Note that even if you do have rigorous backup, you shouldn’t erase any important pictures until your processes have had a chance to actually make a backup.

Links for 11-11-2009

• Cool Tools: Recipe Aggregators - I use Epicurious (one wonders what will happen with this over time with the demise of Gourmet). Curious to take a look at the others.
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Communications, Journalism and Media in the Internet Age - "Such highly visual experiences are now commonplace in games and animated films, but these are mostly designed for entertainment, not to deliver and emotionally feel real-world news in non-traditional, innovative ways. The real breakthroughs here will be to marry these highly visual, interactive, immersive capabilities with serious journalism and a new, more experiential way of delivering the news."
• Edwin Diamond - Ed Diamond popped up in a conversation today. As with Paul, he was one of my favorite professors at MIT.
• VMware announces View 4 with software PC-over-IP and vSphere 4 support - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com - Overview of the announcement--including what isn't there yet.
• KS2009: How Google uses Linux [LWN.net] - Interesting behind the scenes.

The Specs on my Latest DIY PC

The sunroom I added earlier this year got a 42-inch plasma panel for the wall. Part of the panel’s purpose is to serve as a giant digital picture frame; the TV has a built-in SD card slot. My Wii and Xbox consoles are also connected.

But I wanted to add a PC—not so much to be a home theater PC in the usual meaning of the word but to display videos from a browser. In addition, in spite of options within the TV itself and in the attached Xbox to display photos, they all have some drawbacks for walking through a slideshow manually. I find Irfanview on a PC to be the best option.

My starting point was a micro-ATX MSI 785GM-E65 motherboard with an Athlon II X4 processor. The price on this combo was right given that AMD gave it to me after a recent analyst event. (Mobo+CPU is under $200 in any case.) However, it was also a good fit; the integrated graphics seem to be plenty fast for my purposes and it comes with an HDMI out. In fact, I was also given a discrete graphics board but chose not to install it and let the system run a bit cooler and quieter.

I added 2 GB of DDR3 DRAM; I can always bump that later if I want to but I don’t intend to do a lot of multi-tasking or run resource-intensive applications. The disk is a 10K RPM Raptor, another freebie from a friend of mine. It’s only 75GB but I’ll typically keep media content on a network drive.

There’s no internal optical drive. This wasn’t so much a design decision as a reflection of the fact that I have an external USB Blu-Ray drive that I got with my HP dv2 laptop—so I figured I’d start out just plugging that in as needed.

I’m running a beta of 32-bit Windows 7, again pretty much a no brainer. (Yes, I suppose I could have installed Linux and perhaps I will when the beta expires but it was simpler to get started with Windows and see how I end up using the system.)

In the end, I really only had two decisions to make.

The first was the control device--the Logitech DiNovo Mini that I described in an earlier post. It’s an unobtrusive handheld keyboard and trackpad combination. For tasks that are tiresome to tackle by thumb typing, I establish a remote connection using another PC. Logitech also makes a larger version if you’d rather have a full-sized keyboard.

Finally, I settled on an Antec NSK2480 case for micro-ATX boards. It’s stylish which may or may not matter to you depending upon where it’s housed. It also takes full-height PCI boards without adapters or other tricks. It seems well put together and fairly quiet. This case was a bit bigger than would have been my preference, given that I didn’t need space for either drives or PCI cards. But reviewers dinged a couple of smaller cases that I looked at for either noise or heat buildup so I stuck with the larger size.

Links for 11-09-2009

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Be everywhere now - "There are those who, in their desire to sell themselves and others an idealized version of progress, are quick to dismiss all fond personal memories as nostalgia. But some of those memories are not sentimental distortions of the past but accurate records of experience. Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our "endless present" is the loss of a certain "magical power" that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he's right." << This is related to although separate from the audience fragmentation that has at the least diluted "Must See TV."
• Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate CrowdSpring | Andrew Hyde - Startups. Start Here. - But see also this. Yes, it makes me feel a bit squeemish whenever I see dozens of designs submitted for one low-cost project. One the one hand, OK -- maybe useful experience for some kid starting out -- but, on the other, feels rather sweat-shoppish.
• Global marketplace for creative services: logo design, business card design, graphic design and website design | crowdSPRING
• 423 – Flow-Charting the Ring Trilogy « Strange Maps
• Bullet Trains for America? - A detailed look at high-speed rail challenges.
• FEED » Hello - Razorfish's FEED09 study charting how consumers engage with brands.
• Summering and Lobstering in Westport, Mass. - NYTimes.com - Pretty amusing account of lobstering by summer residents.

Quick Takes: Logitech DiNovo Mini

When I connected up a PC to a wall-mounted television in a sunroom that I had built earlier this year, I knew that I needed something to control it with.

Using a configuration that required a separate mouse wasn’t a good option as I didn’t have a hard surface near where I would normally view from. The Lenovo ThinkPad UltraNav keyboard would have been an interesting option but there isn’t a wireless version. Remote control from another computer was and is another possibility but I also wanted something that I could just directly control the computer with. (And I know there are some iPhone applications but I didn’t yet have an iPhone at the time.)

What I settled on was the Logitech diNovo Mini. This 6-inch by 3.5-inch handheld keyboard and pad isn't perfect but it’s a pretty good option for a home theatre PC so long as you don’t intend to do lots of typing. It’s a lot more functional as a keyboard than a typical remote control is but you’re not going to want to compose long emails and the like.

What I like:

• It’s small and stylish with a smoked plastic flip-down lid. It won’t look out of place sitting on a coffee table.
• It has a mode for directly controlling Windows Media Center
• The integrated pointer control works well
• The thumb pad works pretty well for entering URLs and other relatively short strings or blocks of text

What I don’t like:

• It’s relatively pricey with a list price of $150
• As I noted, it’s basically a thumb keyboard, albeit a relatively large one, so you’re not going to be banging away like on a regular keyboard
• Right click and dragging operations are more awkward than they would ideally be

Bottom line: If you can live without having a “real” keyboard and just want something unobtrusive to easily pull up YouTube and Hulu videos and the like, it’s a good, if premium, choice.

Here's another more detailed review of the DiNovo Mini. I concur with most of his comments, especially with respect to mouse operations.

Links for 11-05-2009

• Coding Horror: Preserving Our Digital Pre-History - In many respects, preserving digital history is more haphazard than it probably should be.
• Google: Android fragmentation not 'bad thing' • The Register - The keys to Android are 1. how different are targets wrt developer? 2. how many targets? how big targets?
• Chuck's Blog: The VCE Coalition: Redrawing The Landscape - EMC's Chuck Hollis on the integrated stack.
• Is Verizon Being Unfair to AT&T in 3G Map Comparisons? - Wi-Fi Networking News - Succinct backgrounder of the technical aspects of Verizon vs. AT&T 3G network coverage.
• AT&T sues Verizon over 'there's a map for that' ads - A lot of predictable fanboism on both sides of this issue. Without subscribing to the "People who don't know what 3G is shouldn't be allowed to own a phone extreme," it does seem to me that the commercials clearly emphasize connection performance and don't (to me anyway) suggest that they're talking about overall coverage. Of course, lots of ads include disclaimers and qualifiers of various sorts and perhaps some such is appropriate here.

Fixing Virtual Meetings?

Although the signal-to-noise ratio is regrettably poor, every now and then I get a random PR email that piques my interest. So it was with one titled “Workplace Story Idea-Study Shows Professionals Lack Virtual Meeting Skills / Avoiding 5 Common Pitfalls.”

It caught my eye because I’m seeing more and more attempts to run virtual events of various types. And, in my experience, even the best ones have problems.

In any case, the email in question was followed by a copy of the book The Hamster Revolution for Meetings by Mike Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Burress. It’s written in what for my taste is an overly cutesy style but it’s a thin book and a quick read that I got through in a short evening.

It gets into a number of common-sense recommendations for meetings: have an agenda, stay on course, schedule meetings for  less than a full hour, and so forth. However, a lot of the book deals specifically with virtual meetings. On the one hand, the authors make some good suggestions such as:

Technical glitches slow the flow.

Tip: If it's an important web conference, shut down and restart your computer before it starts. Arrive 20 minutes early and encourage participants to get there 10 minutes early. Do a sound, mute, and visual check with a colleague. Create a virtual meeting cheat sheet that lists all web and teleconference features such as "mute all" and customer service line. A free "tech glitch cheat sheet" can be downloaded at: http://infoexcellence.com/icfreelessons.htm.

(I believe this is called documenting around a bug.)

I also think they’re spot on about some of the problems associated with virtual meetings and events (even if some of  the suggestions related to this problem reflect the aforementioned cuteness).

Virtual distance makes relationships go cold.

Tip: Remote meetings make it harder to build warm productive relationships with colleagues. Adorn your presentation with photos of presenters and participants so people connect faces with names. Use the chat function to ask quick, fun questions of the team at the meeting's start to break the ice and get acquainted. For example: "Type the name of your favorite movie into the chat box."

However, much of the authors’ focus seems to be on making virtual meeting a more immersive experience. For example:

Participants email during your webinar.

Tip: Jazz up your visuals to distract them. Use web conferencing tools like Webex and Go to Meeting to turn graphics on instantly. Pepper your presentation with a parade of charts, slides, and competitor's websites to keep them engaged--and invite them to email comments at the end.

People tune out of web conference and chat on Facebook instead.

Tip: Transform your meeting into a social networking event by asking participants to use your web conferencing tool's chat function to comment in real time. You'll get great ideas, instant feedback, and lively, entertaining banter.

Web meeting fatigue is setting in.

Tip: Take a 5-minute surf break! Invite everyone to take visit a relevant, humorous, motivating, or topical business-appropriate website that you've bookmarked ahead of time. Examples include NASA's astronomy picture of the day site, motivational quote sites, or a site that features a fun quiz or survey.

Now, there may indeed be meetings in which it’s important to keep participants engaged as fully as possible. Perhaps it’s a brainstorming session for a new product launch. (Although, this is a case—as we recommend when we do consulting days with clients—where it really makes sense to do face-to-face if at all possible. There are also more advanced telepresence systems such as HP Halo that go way beyond web conferencing.

However, given that the book describes these as “common webinar pitfalls,” the insistence on maintaining single-tasking engagement seems misdirected. Sure, the occasional poll and the use of chat can help keep the session from being a pure one-way broadcast. But I have yet to see mechanisms to make web conferencing a truly interactive medium. And, given that even attendees at a real, live conference are multi-tasking more often than not, trying to force virtual interactions to be even more focused seems misguided.

Links for 11-03-2009

• Building a SaaS Application: One of the keys to success: Multi-Tenancy - Nice overview of multi-tenancy models for SaaS.
• Views From The Top - Forums - View Single Post - $25,000 fine assessed for teen hiker - This comment sums up my issues with what's going on with hiking rescue fines in NH pretty nicely.
• This tech news is not embargoed - InternetNews:The Blog - David Needle - I generally feel that embargoes are useful.
• BrokenBridge - Good detailed look at what happened with the Bay Bridge
• YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. - Videos from Google Atmosphere conference.
• James Governor's Monkchips » Towards a Permission-based Web. Wherefore Net Neutrality? Or: Maybe Open Source Wins After All - I am perhaps less convinced that Android is an elixer. Is it truly a cross-platform open environment or does it just splinter (while providing Google an entree into many different mobile phones)
• Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug - Worldwide electric plugs - Gizmodo - Fun rundown on the whys and wherefores of electrical plugs around the world.
• Who Says TV News Is Biased? TV News Viewers Do! - Tuned In - TIME.com - "One thing that annoys me about studies like this is that they force a choice among "liberal bias," "conservative bias" and "no bias." This ignores moderate bias, which absolutely exists and is arguably the most prevalent bias in traditional "mainstream" media: the general establishmentarian belief that the middle ground is probably the most rational, and that a belief that varies too far from it must necessarily be wrong, or at least require a counterbalance implying that "the truth lies somewhere in the middle.""
• Custom Camera Applications Development Using Iphone Sdk - The part of the SDK that needs to be used by third-party camera apps is pretty kludgy and limited.
• Virtual Appliances – More Risk than Reward? - Virtual machines can't be black boxes--except where they can.
• Computer History Museum | October 29, 1969 - Happy 40th Birthday to a Radical Idea! - And so Skynet was born.
• High Anxiety: Where We Won't Be Going for 2020 Olympics - The NBC reporter's question made me laugh. It is pretty inappropriate though.

Links for 10-29-2009

• Strobist: Brain Food: Three New Offerings - Lighting is something I've never really gotten into. Maybe I should one of these days.
• Technology Review: A Note on the Type - The geeky but important matter of web fonts.
• magCulture.com / editorial design - Obviously has an agenda behind it but interesting stuff here. Things like Conde Naste's troubles notwithstanding, magazines are generally in a much healthier place than newspapers.
• A New Financial Model For News, Straight From The Cable Industry | paidContent - This is really just a different billing mechanism for a paywall and has the same problems. And if you do something like essentially add a tax to ISPs that gets divvied up among content providers you're effectively mandating a subsidy.
• DRM by any other name: The latest from Hollywood | Freedom to Tinker - " If it's going to work on my iPhone while I'm sitting in an airplane, the entire video needs to be stored there in advance. Furthermore, if the video is supposed to be "high definition," that's a bare minimum of 5 megabits. (Broadcast HD is 20 megabits and Blu-ray is 48 megabits.) Most home DSL or cable modem connections either will never go that fast, or certainly cannot maintain those speeds without hiccups, particularly when sharing the line with other users. To do high quality video, you either have to have a real broadcast medium (cable, over-the-air, or satellite) or you have to download in advance and store on a hard drive. And, of course, once you've stored the video, it's just not that hard to extract it. And it always will be. The challenge for Hollywood is to change the incentives of the game."
• Charting US newspapers' decline | Media | guardian.co.uk - A striking chart of circulation changes.
• The Media Death Spiral - Megan McArdle - Depressing opine. But I think that Megan is probably right on multiple counts. "Maybe there will be jobs, online. But if so, more web outfits are going to have to get into the habit of paying salaries that will support an adult middle-class life. Right now, a lot of web outfits tend to churn through twenty-somethings who are also building their resumes . . . but I'm not sure how well this works in a world where a job churning out blog copy for pennies a word is the last stop in a journalistic career, rather than the first."
• William Vambenepe — Exploring “IT management in a changing IT world” - Interesting framework for looking at IT. Ops/apps is a useful division.
• The need for clear data licenses :: High Earth Orbit - I have more issues with Creative Commons than Andrew does but a good look at the issues around licenses for data.
• Speed versus accuracy in journalism: towards a new debate | Regret the Error - Thoughtful piece. The opinions pretty much mirror mine.
• ASCII by Jason Scott / GeoStupid - The erosion of the Web's memory.
• Can We Secure Cloud Computing? Can We Afford Not To? | Rational Survivability - Good high-level take on security and cloud computing.
• Lighter Than Arrogance - TIME - "Modern media did not invent greed, eccentricity or lust for attention. What they did was monetize them. There have long been odd families and obscure men pursuing bizarre theories and cobbling together flying machines in their backyards. But only in the reality-TV era has unstable behavior become a valid career choice."

Links for 10-22-2009

• SEOmoz | Explaining (Some of) Google's Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff - A lot of interesting detail related to Google ranking algorithms.
• Chart Shows How Few Missions To Mars Succeeded - Space - io9
• Against 'Moneyball' | The New Republic - A critique of Lweis' Moneyball.
• Shakespeare, Plagiarism Detection and Authorship | PlagiarismToday - I know that I tend to reuse phrases and so forth. I'd be curious to run a number of my pieces through this some day and see what I find.
• Information Retrieval Gupf » Music and Exploratory Search - I find myself increasingly letting services and software create my playlists for me.
• Emerging Internet Trends: An Analysis of Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit Presentation - RWW's analysis of Mary Meeker's presentation.
• Kirk's Rants: Monty, Stallman, MySQL, Oracle, and Sun: Open Letter Wars - As one of the comments puts it, well-articulated rant. I have no idea whether all the specific allegations therein are true or not.
• Adobe demos next-gen erase tool in Photoshop | Deep Tech - CNET News - "Every time Photoshop gets something like this, some folks--not without some reason in my opinion--get concerned that we can't trust the veracity of the images you see. But let's be clear: while the ease and sophistication of editing is increasing, photo manipulation has been going on for more than a century. And the way I see it, the profusion of digital cameras and ease of posting photos online probably reality is being documented in unretouched form more comprehensively than ever. "
• This Photo Is Lying to You | Outside Online - Good discussion of manipulation in nature photos.
• Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009 - Mobile will be the incremental driver of Internet growth.

A Few Thoughts on Photo Manipulation

CNET's Stephen Shankland writes:

Every time Photoshop gets something like this, some folks--not without some reason in my opinion--get concerned that we can't trust the veracity of the images we see. But let's be clear: although the ease and sophistication of editing is increasing, photo manipulation has been going on for more than a century. And the way I see it, the profusion of digital cameras and ease of posting photos online probably means reality is being documented in unretouched form more comprehensively than ever.

I guess I largely agree although I was a bit shocked at the amount of manipulation that apparently happens in nature photography according to a recent article in Outside Magazine.

It's fair to say that the amount of "casual" manipulation will probably continue to increase. By this I mean the post-processing of fine art photography and other pictures that primarily serve an aesthetic purpose. Or the routine elimination of telephone poles and other distractions in snapshots posted to twitter.

A lot of photographers will decry this trend and I sympathize up to a point. Especially because there's rarely a hard line between art and documentary. But it's probably inevitable--at least outside of organizations that have strict editorial policies.

To their credit, news organizations have generally maintained strict policies and aren't especially tolerant even of what some might dismiss as minor retouching. Which is as it should be. One day you're removing an awkwardly positioned fence post. The next you're making the subject of a news photograph look more handsome or more haggard.

Stephen's other point on the increased documentation of reality is doubtless true. Indeed, there's now a game based on the concept.

Furthermore, with photographs from a variety of sources so widely distributed, we've already seen a variety of cases where readers have spotted alterations as likely would not have happened in an earlier age.

The general conclusion I draw is that, while photography has always been a selective reality, the arbitrary photograph will increasingly be "optimized" to a degree that would have taken, at a minimum, considerable effort in the past. At the same time, many sources and many eyeballs will tend to both capture and confirm reality when it matters most.

Links for 10-21-2009

• What is Layering, and why does it matter? - Gabe Knuth - BrianMadden.com - Rundown on layering concept in client-side virtualization.
  
• A Visual Guide to Computer Cables and Connectors - Identify The Right Cable Easily - If you're familiar with A/V and computer hardware, there's nothing here you won't know but a nice rundown on common cabling for those who aren't.
  
• Kefir: Interesting Thing of the Day - I'm quite fond of Kefir.
  
• Schneier on Security: Ballmer Blames the Failure of Windows Vista on Security - "Security warnings are often a way for the developer to avoid making a decision."
  
• Mark Logic CEO Blog: Gartner Sued Over Magic Quadrant for Alleged Damages of $132M plus Punitives of $1.3B - Pretty nice summation.
  
• 10 Things You May Not Know About Memcached | Gear6 - A lot of these characteristics are why the idea of a memchached appliance could make sense.
  
• The Song Decoders at Pandora - NYTimes.com
  
• Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Small Bridges (to Proximate Spaces) - Some interesting stuff about the "web of data" in the context of photos and the Flickr API.
  
• Swissdisk suffers spectacular cloud snafu • The Register - Another online data loss. Don't think these problems negate the potential value of cloud-based storage but they do raise questions about trusting any single cloud provider for storage of primary data.
  

Links for 09-11-2009

• McGarr Solicitors - Dublin Solicitors Ireland | Cloud Computing: European Data Protection Dangers - "This ‘as-is’ approach clashes fundamentally with the responsibility of a Data Controller to ensure the security of the data they pass on to a data processor. There is the additional complication that, unlike Amazon, not all the cloud computing service providers will promise to keep the data uploaded from the EU in the EU. The result is the possibility of breaching the laws which prevent EU citizen’s personal data being exported to jurisdictions with less stringent protections."
  
• Coding Horror: 9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You - Or, put another way, 9 types of irrational behavior to recognize and either exploit or take advantage of.
  
• The Good of Creative Commons | PlagiarismToday - I generally agree with this. My primary objection to CC is the chinese menu approach that introduces a lot of complexity and avoids taking positions.
  

Links for 08-07-2009

• Five Great John Hughes Moments - Monkey See Blog : NPR - Of the Breakfast Club. Yeah: "See, that's the trick. I don't get it, but I know it. All of it. From many, many viewings stretching back to 1985. In many ways, I think it's the weakest of these movies creatively, because it was trying so hard and taking itself so seriously, but it might be the one I've seen the most. You see what I mean: He knew something."
• Seven alternative Flickr search engines | Webware - CNET
• Coding Horror: Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong? - Some interesting thoughts in both the post and the comments.
• Putting lipstick on Microsoft’s pigs - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech - The "Microsoft doesn't innovate" theme gets overplayed. However, it's unclear what problem exactly Microsoft thinks it is solving with these stores. It does seem derivative.
• No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users - WSJ.com - Backlash against notebooks in coffee shops?
• 25 Music APIs - After my latest organizational binge I'm looking to pull as much metadata as possible into my music collection.
• Why Teens Don’t Tweet - "Twitter offers something that adults crave more than teenagers: an audience. Facebook doesn’t fulfill this need as well as Twitter does, but the offset is that teenagers turn to Facebook to communicate with their friends."
• SF Signal: MIND MELD: The Hugo Awards - Success at Picking the Best, How Well it Represents the Genre, 2009 Predictions & Overlooked Titles - "In the past, the voters were a good cross-section of fandom and so the shortlists often included what was good and exciting in sf and fantasy. But - bar the odd exception - that's not been true since the late 1970s. This is hardly surprising. Books are nominated and voted on by a small group of fans who are growing older and increasingly conservative in their tastes. Whatever attracted them to the genre all those years ago, that's what they look for in books being published today. The genre may have progressed, but it often seems those fans haven't. So we get shortlists filled with old-fashioned and dull sf, picked by people who think that novels which "entertain" are successful... despite failing in all other areas, despite not trying anything interesting."
• Why consumers won't buy tablets | Rafe's Radar - CNET News - Sensible points. I do think we'll see a tablet tweener device someday but the big question is when.
• Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Five Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH - Interfaces are an important frontier of computing.

Links for 08-04-2009

• How Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so fast -- chicagotribune.com - Interesting piece about a visit to a Netflix warehouse.
• Gawker vs. The Washington Post: Is Linking Stealing? - Tuned In - TIME.com - "The rules of how to do this kind of post are not set in stone, but in general, it's better to summarize an interesting article and refer readers to the original, or add some value to it with analysis or opinion or more information, and give explicit, clear credit."
• Worst Part of a Trip May Be Booking It on the Web - NYTimes.com - Not me. I really like being able to sit down and make my own tradeoffs rather than having someone else do it for me. I much prefer booking my own flightds than doing the back and forth with a corporate travel department as I sometimes have to.
• Op-Ed Guest Columnist - Twittergraphy - NYTimes.com - Maybe we need a codebook.
• Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com - Cooking shows up, actual cooking down.
• Photojournalism’s Coming Crisis | Newspaper Death Watch - I agree with a lot of this--up to a point. I don't think pubs can crowdsource everything but a microstock for editorial could indeed drive pricing down.
• The Media Equation - A Talk Magazine Party That Presaged the Decline - NYTimes.com - "There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk." In retrospect, is easy to criticize blindness to Web's impact as myopic, but it's not so much that people didn't see the Web but they didn't appreciate the full economic impact that it would have on print. (Or they assumed could just over time move print to Web and keep everything else the same.)

Links for 08-03-2009

• Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009 - Ars Technica - Jeremy's history with Word closely parallels mine. (I could never stand WordPerfect for DOS and I too used Ami Pro for a time.)
• Op-Ed Columnist - Swan Songs? - NYTimes.com - Interesting graphic that shows sales by music format over time.
• Amazon, Rackspace Are Top Cloud Hosts « Data Center Knowledge - Rackspace doing well against Amazin. Google AppEngine hasn't gotten much traction.
• The National Parks: America's Best Idea | PBS - is could be good.
• A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]
• Cogs: A Steampunk Puzzle Game from Lazy 8 Studios - Looks cool somewhat in the World of Goo vein.

Links for 07-29-2009

• World of Goo - Drew Davidson | ETC-Press (Beta) - Nice overview of World of Goo.
• The Volokh Conspiracy - 100 Best Movie Lines in 200 Seconds:
• Amazing Lunar Lander Game Using Google Earth | Google Earth Blog
• Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker - Although a lot of the criticisms are valid to various degrees, this seems to go out of its way to find the negative IMO. (And has lots of subtle snark like only a New Yorker writer could do it.)
• HP plans electronic whiteboarding tool | Beyond Binary - CNET News - Potentially interesting. The ability to do "napkin sketches" and the like easily is one of the things that seems really missing when you're working remotely.

Links for 07-23-2009

• 'Waterproof' Camera Group Test (Q2 2009) Review: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - Nice set of reviews. Is it too much to ask that someone put an optical viewfinder on a waterproof camera?
• Open Source to Go!: The Real FLOSS Community and the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists" - "I've come to think of these people over the past several days as the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists"." A lot of truth in this although there are certainly community people who are very ideological as well.
• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule - Some good thinking here. As an analyst I have to be somewhat interrupt-driven and take a lot of 30 min-1 hr briefings. Sometimes it's OK, especially as I've shifted to a heavier concentration of shorter pieces that I can crank out in between 30 mins and 2 hrs. However, more in-depth research and writing takes focus. It's hard for me to totally isolate myself but I do try to reduce the interrupt frequency, especially of lower-priority interrupts (e.g. twitter).
• How The Times' Home Page Gets Made | The New York Observer - Interesting piece. Note especially the discussion about the use (or non-use) of Web stats.
• Lobster in the rough - The Boston Globe - I'd add Young's in Belfast, ME and I find Harraseeket in S. Freeport, while in a great location, a bit inconsistent on non-lobster items but overall seems a good list.
• Nina Munk on Hard Times at Harvard | vanityfair.com - Hugely damning. I don't really have a feel for how fair it is overall.

Links for 07-22-2009

• PUNKADIDDLE: Hugos 2009 - A rant about the Hugos shortlist. I don't read nearly as much SF as I used to. I think there's truth to the assertion that fandom as a whole tends to favor the predictable--just look at the endless padded series out there. OTOH, I confess to often being lukewarm on more "literary" works favored by many professional critics and writers.
• Amazon is not Big Brother - Telegraph - Amazon did a dumb thing (which they've acknowledged) but this piece has the outrage about right.

Hands-on with an HP dv2 Notebook

A few weeks ago, AMD sent me an HP dv2 notebook, the first system to use their “Yukon” mobile processor. The dv2’s basic concept can be summed up as ultraportable experience at a value price point—it starts at $700. Put another way, it aims to avoid some of the compromises associated with netbooks while getting within at least sight of netbook price points.

So how does it do? Read on. This won’t be a full review but after playing around with the system for a few weeks, I think I have a pretty good feel for its capabilities.

Let me start by saying that my overall experience is quite positive. It’s small. It’s light. The touchpad doesn’t drive me crazy like many do. (My pointer tastes are a bit idiosyncratic. I favor trackpoints on notebooks and trackballs on desktops.) And the processor has been fast enough for what I’ve thrown at it.

This last point is worth digging into a bit deeper given that it’s pretty central to the dv2’s concept. I didn’t do formal benchmark comparisons, but I did open up a CPU meter on Vista’s sidebar and cranked up multimedia applications to see if things would stutter or otherwise go unresponsive on me.

I started music playing using AMD’s Fusion Media Explorer. Then I opened Firefox to Hulu and started some video playing. To round out the experience, I fired up another browser Window and went off Web surfing sites with the usual mix of Flash and other multimedia.

All this drove the CPU pretty hard as indicated by the CPU meter but both the music and the video continued to play smoothly and the system always felt responsive. I’ve no doubt that heavy-duty image or video processing would bog down the system but it seems to have plenty of performance for the sort of Web usage and general productivity work that I tend to use an ultraportable for while out of the office.

The 12-inch screen and almost full-sized keyboard were easy enough to view and type on although my personal preference is something just slightly larger. (My other notebook is a 13-inch Lenovo ThinkPad x200; the x200 is also on the order of 50 percent more expensive than the dv2.)

One thing that may bother some people is that the dv2 doesn’t have an internal optical drive. The external USB Blu-ray drive that I received with the notebook works well, but it’s one more thing to carry and and is a bit awkward if you’re balancing everything on your lap. Personally I’m largely indifferent to whether an ultraportable has an internal optical drive or not—I generally don’t travel with one—but I know it’s a sticking point for some.

As for aesthetics, it’s black and silver and shiny. To be honest, my tastes lean more towards the muted finishes of my ThinkPad that, among other things, doesn’t attract fingerprints to nearly the same degree. But it’s hard to criticize such sleekness too much.

Bottom line? If you want a budget ultraportable that’s closer to the look, feel, and experience of full-featured notebooks than it is to even a 10-inch netbook then the dv2 looks to be a pretty good choice.

Links for 07-21-2009

• Internet Evolution - Andrew Keen - It's Time to Bust the Beta Cult - "But I’m worried about the increasing centrality of the beta product and the beta ideal in the digital economy. Beta is a creditable practice -- as long it exists in parallel with the more adult world of finished products. But when it becomes the thing-in-itself, when there are no finished products, when everything is in perpetual flux, then the Internet economy has a serious problem."
• Tech Tips - The Digital Journalist - "In the realm of compact digital cameras, there is no question that the high end of the market is looking for better image quality than current cameras provide, especially at high ISOs. But I'll bet that the eventual solution to that request is going to be larger image sensors with high resolution rather than small sensors with reduced resolution. Time will tell!"
• tweetbook.in - Get all your tweets in PDF form.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Where’s Twitter’s past, and what’s it’s future? - "Blogs privilege the “now.” New stuff always goes on top. But they also create a durable record of “then” — as I have learned in spending the last couple of years digging through the back catalog of blogging. One of the great contributions of blogging software is to organize the past for anyone who writes frequently online. Before blogs, with each new addition to a website we had to think, where does this go, and how will I find it later? Blog tools, as personal content management systems, ended that era."

Links for 07-20-2009

• The Technium: Was Moore's Law Inevitable?
• Web fonts. Where are we? Will web fonts ever be a reality? | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog - A good overview of where things stand with fonts for the Web.
• Too Many Words « Slice of MIT by the Alumni Association - "When I use a blackboard, the material flows out at about the speed at which it can be absorbed. Students not only see it, they think about it. Speaking as an MIT-educated Electrical Engineer, there is a good impedance match."
• Lessons from Amazon's 1984 Moment | Freedom to Tinker - Lack of transparency, yes, but this also seems closely related to cloud computing in that you only control certain aspects of the environment.