Sean’s Mental Walkabout

After reading cote’s blog post on the chumby, I got intrigued.  The chumby is a small linux device, specifically designed to run flash based widgets, served up from the chumby servers.  It looks like and interesting device, priced at a reasonable price point, and eminently hackable.

The only dig seems to be the Developers Agreement, especially section 3.1:

…

Your Modified Device and/or Licensee Applications must comply with the following: (i) your Modified Device and Licensee Applications must not enable you or anyone else to access the Chumby Service and/or servers without an active network ID issued by Chumby; (ii) your Modified Device and Licensee Applications must not block or interfere with any advertisement that is served by or distributed through the Chumby Service and/or servers; and (iii) any Modified Device or Licensee Application that connects to a Consumer Content Network must also enable the end user to connect the Modified Device and Licensee Application to the Chumby Service in substantially the same manner as the Modified Device or Licensee Application connects to the Consumer Content Network.

Which pretty much counts me out.  The license which is “you can only write software for our device that registers with our service, and that serves our ads” seems to completely miss the mark of having a fun, openly hackable device.  It’s frustrating when a consumer electronics company comes so close to making an open piece of hardware, but then freaks out at the last minute with their licensing and substantially shuts down their community growth in the process.  Hopefully they’ll realize that and adjust their license in the future to be actually open.

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@strips = @user.comics.collect {|c|    
    c.strips.find(:all, :conditions => ["date > ?", 7.days.ago])}.
    flatten.   
    delete_if {|c| c == nil}.   
    sort_by {|c| c.date}

The previous shows ruby in much of it’s glory, and is code that I needed this weekend for one of my side hacking projects.  I’ve colored it to match what xemacs shows me, just to make it a little more clear.

First off, it shows off the power of mixins. 7.days.ago does exactly what you would expect, providing you with a date object.

Ruby is such a fun language to program in.

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As a professor you get sent new sample textbooks all the time, or so I learned from Dr Nick last night. The “hot” area for these textbooks is the CS1 (or Intro to Computer Science) classes. Computer Science programs have the unique challenge of getting beat up by Industry because they aren’t producing enough new graduates. At the same time Mass Media keeps saying “all your tech job are belong to India”, scaring potentially interested students to the much more secure careers of History and English.

The thing that is exciting about software development is the ability to be creative with a nearly infinitely malleable canvas. The tools for creating software are better than they’ve ever been, and the massive prevalence of Open Source Software makes finding example code really easy. In a weekend you can create a completely reasonable web application with Rails, or a nice client application using Glade. In each case they solve a problem you have, and make you’re life a little easier.

The bad old ways of teaching CS definitely miss this whole point. I’m a firm believer in students needing to understand interesting data structures and what is going on in the memory of the computer, but that doesn’t have to be the CS1 focus. That’s like teaching shop in high school, but instead of letting people build boxes or bridges, having them spend the entire first semester pounding nails into boards until they get it right. As with any industry that has a stigma for boring, you need to show students the creative aspects early in their education.

Back to text books. One of the new textbooks that Nick got was teaching CS1 in Javascript, in a browser. It did all the standard CS1 things about loops and datastructures, but in an environment that students might actually intrinsically care for. Relevancy is key to interest, and what can be more relevant in this day and age than the web browser. I’m sure the purists will loose their lunch over the idea of Javascript as the first language people learn, fortunately lunch is cheap and easy to find.

I for one, am excited about anything that brings more creative and talented people to the field. The current approach of making 18 year olds decide they don’t like software because they didn’t understand inane java syntax in the first 4 weeks that they were in college isn’t working out so well.

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Over the past couple of months I’ve started looking more at various new “web 2.0″ sites, putting aside past prejudices, and seeing where the value in these applications might be.

Delicious is social book marking. I’ve found it is a great way to put interesting stuff on my blog that I didn’t have more than a sentence to say about anyway. It also cuts down on my IM spam to people with interesting links I’ve found, because if they want them, they are here.

Twitter is microbloging, which I’m still experimenting with. It’s more like free form presence vs. content of any nature. I think there is something valuable there, but my few weeks of experimenting are too little to really sort that out. You can see my status at twitter now.

If you read this, and have a Delicious or Twitter account, let me know (post a comment, or find me in other ways). I’d love to network in with more people here and get a better sense of the network effects.

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About 6 months ago I bought an Olevia 542i 42″ HDTV. It isn’t the best 42″ TV that you can get, but it is one of the best deals, and it is a very respectable set. Nice features of the set include a VGA input port, upgradeable firmware via USB, and an RS232 interface to remote control it (in addition to IR). Olevia publishes the full set of protocol codes for the RS232 in a 4 page pdf file.

Not so nice features, there are 10 TV inputs, but the factory remote only has an input next button to flip between them. That means going from HDMI to Component2 is 9 button presses. Not very fun. When programming a logitech harmony to automatically change between those states you need to leave enough time gap to not miss codes, so it takes a long time to get from HDMI -> Component2.

Logitech Harmony remotes are little embedded computers with a state machine. You use a windows app to program the thing over USB (works fine via VMWare). They also get regular updates from logitech when new IR code databases are published. Apparently, some time ago someone figured out that there were IR codes for direct input setting (there were rs232 codes for it, so it made sense that you should be able to get to them from IR). 3 weeks ago they made it into the Logitech Harmony database. Last night I updated the remote, and now I don’t have cycle time.

It’s really nice to live in an era where a product isn’t dead once it’s shipped, but that it continues to improve while you own it. Especially something like a TV.

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Two weeks ago my venerable iRiver H340 decided that this whole battery powered thing was so passe, and refused to run for more than 5 minutes at a go before declaring that it was done, and should be plugged back in. This is an incredibly unuseful state for a portable digital audio player. My attempts at open heart surgery to replace the battery appeared to go well, but the H340 no longer thinks it has any battery now.

During this digital outage, I posted off to the MHVLUG lists asking for possible opinions on new players. My requirements were:

• Must support UMS (USB Mass Storage). Rsync is the way the universe intended us to move data around, and I’m not interested in using someone else’s DRM laced protocols (which may or may not work in Linux) to get access to my player. Hence no iPods or “Plays for Sure” players.
• Relatively large storage. The H340 is a 40 GB HD. I just rsynced everything over to it, and didn’t need to decide in advance what I wanted on my player. Small flash drives are nice, but they don’t support the way I use a player.
• FM Radio. My H340 had an FM radio in it, which I thought was an odd feature at first. Then I had power issues at the house, and I used it to listen to NPR while I worked from home waiting for the power company to arrive. In the last year I’ve started to use my player while mowing the lawn (under some really nice ear protectors). If it’s Saturday or Sunday morning, I like listening to Morning Edition while I do it. I might be able to live with a player without FM, but I really wanted it there.
• Ogg support. While this is less of a requirement than those above, I have some content ogg only, and I really didn’t want to deal with converting or reripping that content. Plus, I haven’t sent Thomson my 3 quarters yet.

This very quickly narrowed the field. The winner of my search turned out to be the Cowon A2, which is a 30 GB player that also does movies.

There are so many good things about this player, including the fact that it ships with a GPL notice in the box, and that it does USB host support (so you can transfer data to it from other USB devices). However, a single feature that I didn’t even know it had in advance has sold me on this device forever.

One of the items in the top menu is Recent Files. In recent files is the last 10 files that you have stopped viewing/listening to. These files can be of any type the player supports, and the reason for stopping can be anything (power shut off, pause, jump to something else). It stores the files, as well as your position in them, so they can be resumed directly where you were previously. This is bloody brilliant. No more needing to wait to get to the end of a CD in an audio book before I jump to the latest podcast I pulled down, to avoid having to seek for 5 minutes to figure out where I was in the audio book. For this single feature, I would recommend this player.

So here’s to at least another week in geek nirvana with my new toy, and now I finally get to see the cover art that is embedded in the drunk and retired podcast episodes.

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For the past six months, Verizon has been spending a lot of time in our neighborhood. I was as likely to spot little tented trucks with big spools of cable spilling out, as deer on my way to work. Every day this last week there were Verizon trucks working on poles. And, as I suspected, it was because they were bringing in fiber.

Yesterday morning the Fios Internet flier went up on every mailbox in the neighborhood. The offer for our area is the enhanced deal, so 10 Mbs down / 2 Mbs up for the lowest level of service, and 20 Mbs down / 5 Mbs up for the next level. Given how often the cable modem falls over, and how while they increased the downstream recently, they decreased the upstream, which is annoying for things like NX sessions to work, photo uploads, and a host of other bits.

I’m still trying to figure out what the phone quality is like, before I make the plunge, but I’ll probably look at switching some time this summer.

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From sogrady’s daily links post (which I tend to find one new gem in every other day), I found that Google has a set of online repositories for just about every Linux distro out there. What a great way to make sure you’ve got the latest google earth, or any of their other apps you like. (Update: Apparently the repo only contains 2 packages, picassa, and google-desktop-linux. Boo google for not putting google earth in there, which is the only app I really care about at the moment.)

Through sogrady’s links I also came to the drunk and retired podcast, in which cote (another Redmonker) discusses current trends in technology, as well as dives into some technical topics in depth. The discussion of parsers, and Domain Specific Languages recently was surprisingly coherent for trying to explain something like that with audio only. While this isn’t MIT lectures by any stretch of the imagination, it’s a pretty good place to get exposed to technology trends that might be outside of your normal day to day environment.

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Last night my MediaGate MG-35 arrived. This is a small front end device for playing back video, audio, or picture content off of a central server. I’ve got an xbox solution for this in the main living room, but with Susan and I using the exercise bike a lot more of late, I wanted the same thing going on in the family room. It was reasonably cheap (I got the one without a local hard drive for ~$120), so was worth the risk.

Once plugged in an running, the device was pretty easy to use. The remote is a little small (it’s actually powered by a watch battery), so it is hard to know if you’ve always hit the buttons. The interface isn’t as intuitive as XBMC, and the Samba server scan takes a little time when you first start to drill down into your media folders, but it isn’t very awkward. The interface looks a lot prettier than most of the filesystem browsing DVD players I’ve seen out there, which is a nice change.

Video playback worked fine, though one set of encoded videos I’ve got were a little jumpy. They are 704×400 in size, and I’m doing a test on some other media to figure out if it is a specific encode, or if the device just doesn’t have enough juice to scale at that size (which would actually be a scale down for the 4:3 tv it is on right now). I’m slightly curious if the MG-350HD has a better video processor to handle that (as it is “designed for HD”), but the price jump on that unit makes it a little beyond what I’d be looking at. I’m also curious if I’d get the same jitter if the media was local, vs. coming over a smb share.

For how we are going to use this, and the price, it works fine. It isn’t stellar by any means, but you can only expect so much from a device this cheap.

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I got an email today from Meetup.com about more people interested in a local Linux Meetup. There are now 30 people listed on the meetup interest site for Linux in Poughkeepsie NY. Only 2 of which (including myself) are MHVLUG members.

Hey, I thought to myself, I should just fill out the rest of the meetup site to let these folks know we’ve got a very active Linux users group already, and they should come join. That seemed to be the most constructive thing to do, as 28 people who are interested in Learning more about Linux, and all within drivable distance from the LUG, would be a nice addition, and some new blood to the group.

Thus I started to fill out the rest of the meetup.com require information to actually start the group, and send an email to everyone to this effect. After I filled out all the details of times and information, it takes me to the “pay for this” screen, where meetup.com requires $20 / month (some bulk discounts for long term contracts) to have the group created. Wtf?

Meetup.com was some unheard of website offering a free service 4 years ago. Then the Howard Dean team used them to help organize their campaign, and gave the site a huge amount of visibility. Now they appear to be in the business of shaking down book clubs for the privilege of letting people in the same neighborhood talk to each other.

Anyway, in the end I just updated my entry on the user list to include: “We’re already doing this, check out http://mhvlug.org”. With any luck people will see that and come to a meeting or two in the future.

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