Monday, November 30, 2009

Links for 11-30-09

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Links for 11-19-2009

  • Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization « Clay Shirky - "The local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether its hosting community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings, or putting benches out in front of the store. Local writers, harried parents, couples on dates, all get value from a store’s existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books... Online bookselling improves on many of the core functions of a bookstore, not just price and breadth of available books, but ways of searching for books, and of getting recommendations and context. On the other hand, the functions least readily replicated on the internet — providing real space in a physical location occupied by living, breathing people — have always been treated as side effects, value created by the stores and captured by the community, but not priced directly into the transactions."
  • The Economics of Pinball « Cheap Talk - Fascinating look at the end of pinball.
  • Beowulf Page 1 - Fascinating piece on Beowulf translations.
  • Why Wine Ratings Are Badly Flawed - WSJ.com - Wine ratings are apparently repeatable only within a range of about +/- 4 points.
  • psu_sharp.pdf (application/pdf Object) - Good overview of sharpening in Lightroom.
  • 5 things missing in VMware's new virtual desktop app, View 4

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

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.

Friday, November 13, 2009

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.

no-country-for-old-men-poster

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.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Links for 11-11-2009

Monday, November 09, 2009

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

Thursday, November 05, 2009

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

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

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.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Links for 11-03-2009