The ArcterJournal

Please Allow Me To Fanboy A Bit

2008-07-23T03:20:48Z

Normally I'm not a huge fanboy, and I try (no, really, I do) not to turn into an Apple Fanboy (or a Linux Fanboy), at least to too extreme an extreme.

However, one thing I noticed a bit ago that I thought I should mention, at least in the "this is where Apple wins" department.... I opened up the iWork '08 spreadsheet program, Numbers and was asked to choose a template. For shits and giggles I selected "Budget" and was presented with this default document:

(Clicky Clicky for a bigger image)

So first of all it's beautifully setup, second of all it's functional, and third, it's well thought out. The sections and definitions make sense, it deals with the standard cases for a normal household budget. Also it allows you to relatively easily figure it out, giving very low barrier to entry by allowing the user to just plug numbers in to match your own particular circumstance. Oh, and this is probably the least colorful and "fun" of the templates that you're presented with.

Does excel have anything like this? I really don't like railing on Microsoft but when you start up excel you get an empty spreadsheet at worst, and a list of boring stock templates (if I remember right, no copy of Excel around here right now).

It's this sort of thing that creates the Apple fanboys, and keeps them. The non-fanboys discount this sort of thing with "blah blah not industry standard software, blah blah too expensive blah blah pay Steve Jobs $200 every year for updates blah blah", but someone (like me) who is not a fanboy and who has the opportunity to experience "the cult of mac"... it blew me away.

Apple somehow was able to make spreadsheets fun. Fun! Spreadsheets!! Me and Firefly sat down and started plugging in our own numbers and watching the graphs go up and down and it was fun! WTF!? It's easy to talk about these things and discount them, but it's really weird when it actually happens.

Fanboy mode off.

Apple

On The Frustration of Exercise

2008-07-16T13:29:18Z

So since I started my new job I've been running three times a week and going to the gym twice a week. This morning this started as normal waking up at 5:40am and finding the clothes I'd left out for the morning had been peed on by one of the kittens who got over the barriers we put up to prevent them from peeing all over the bed and clothes. I then found out that since June 3rd my weight has dropped exactly 0. The run didn't feel any easier than normal, and my time is down barely a minute for the 2 mile route to 22 and a half minutes. I'm really being frustrated with this whole thing, as it really doesn't seem to be doing anything.

Don't get me wrong, I know I'm doing it wrong, but as a rational person I had the idea that running 6 miles a week and going to the gym twice (though I rarely make it past 45 minutes in there) would do something all other things being equal.

And of course proper diet and everything, and the 2 hours of sitting on a train and 8 hours of sitting in a desk certainly doesn't help either. I'm wondering if just stopping the exercise would affect anything.

Bah.

Personal

Dear Apple Fanboys....

2008-07-12T04:55:49Z

It's things like this that make you sound like idiots instead of just passionate about your software or hardware dealer of choice (post from online forum regarding the (just) released iPod Touch 2.0 firmware):

OK, it's downloading!!!!! I swear, if there is one bug with 2.0, I'll be on the phone bitching out some customer service representative! I've been up for almost 60 hours without even laying down waiting for Mobile Me and this, it had better be perfect Apple!

Now, I have a feeling this guy is joking, but there were a bunch of similar posts that seemed less exaggerated and just as pissed off...

The 24 Hours of The iPhone, Leo and TWIT Live

2008-07-11T13:53:57Z

So I got somehow sucked into the TWiT TV 24 hour iPhone live netcast..... 24 hours of Leo Laporte sitting and talking about the iPhone and talking to people around the world as the different iPhone stores open from New Zealand all the way around the world to California. Yup, a video stream of a guy sitting in his basement doing nothing but talking. Yet as stupid as it sounds, and regardless of how you feel about Leo and the TWiT network (I not everyone is a fan) it's somehow strangely fascinating. Even if you call me a weirdo, there are over six thousand people doing the same thing. There's an IRC channel and a video chat channel, both full up, talking at such a rate that it's hard to keep up with anything. I was watching it when I went to bed at 11pm last night and when I got up this morning to go for a run (and couldn't, but that's another story) at 5:40 it was still going strong. I expected Leo to still be going, but I didn't expect both chatrooms to still be full.

It's definitely an interesting phenomenon if you think about it in terms of technology reporting. People are getting up to the second information about the world of the new iPhone (and the iPod Touch, and the new iTunes app store). Imagine the marketing potential of something like that, with that much rapt attention.... They're also crashing websites (few sites are able to handle 6000 people accessing them at exactly the same time it seems :) This last part has been pretty amusing, basically any site Leo mentions everyone goes to all at once, and it's unavailable.... (and when I got up it looked like there was a drinking game going on where if a site is crashed everyone takes a drink.... 6:30 is a bit early for me though :)

I suppose some of the other reason to watch is that there are (were) 10 new iPhones being given away to random people, so that's a good reason to be sitting in the chat or calling in to stream video to him to talk and give a sob story and hope to get a freebie :)

So I'm still undecided about the iPhone, and getting one. Yes, it's expensive, I could get it for a plan price around what I have now (only a few $ more a month, plus the phone of course), but I have a iPod Touch already (no internet not around wifi of course), the "Rogers is evil/confusing" thing, and that it sounds like the 3G internet access kills battery life, so if you're turning that off why not just keep the iPod Touch anyway... I think I'll wait for a few days at least to wait to hear what other people have to say, and lets be honest, I'll probably break down and end up getting one next week sometime :)

Anyway, congrats Leo on a unique new way of doing media and good luck on the last 1.5 hours of your 24 hour marathon!

Some iPhone Details From Rogers

2008-07-10T03:04:11Z

Update: Thanks Boone for the digg!

So I finally got off the phone with Rogers and have a bit of information that might help my fellow Canadians with navigating the tricky waters that is figuring out WTF Rogers is doing with their plans. I have a feeling that they might not be so much evil as just too big and complex to appear anything but that.

First of all huge thanks to Pat in the customer service office for dealing with me and my stupid questions.

What I learned about the plans

You don't have to put a iPhone plan on an iPhone, you can put any voice and/or data package onto the iPhone when you purchase it. The only stipulation is that the plan is current, so if you're grandfathered in with a plan that's no longer around, sucks to be you.
While your voice plan may not be current and therefor not transferable to an iPhone, your addons (ie: the $11 bundle for voicemail/callerID/etc) may be. So if you have a bundle for addons now you may not need to get a new one.
If you don't get one of the iPhone plans and want voicemail, you can get either normal voicemail or the visual voicemail, you don't need both. If you go for the visual voice mail as an a la carte item it's $8.
The extras on a voice / data / extras a la carte plan are:
- $6.95 "access fee" (*cough* money grab)
- $0.50 911 fee
If you're looking for other discounts, you can pull the "I've been a loyal Rogers customer since the '90s, what can you do for me, look, I'm committing to a 3 year plan with you!" card, they do have flexibility in the plan costs, but not the phone costs (unsurprising as Apple traditionally has given no flexibility in pricing of their hardware). It sounded like it was up to the discretion of the person you were dealing with, and your own payment history, etc. My thanks to Pat who was able to do something for me here without me committing to anything or having anything being contingent on getting a phone.
Your eligibility for getting an iphone at the $199 or $299 price is if you haven't bought a new phone in the last year.
The 60GB Data plan can be added on to any "vision" phone, ie: any iPhone or smartphone, but not some random POS normal phone.

Here are some "gotchas"

If your voice plan is $30 or less they charge an extra $50 for the phone. So if you're going for the 250 minute voice plan for $30 you pay $249 for the 8G iPhone instead of $199. This I call horse-shit.
If your voice plan is $30 or less they charge an extra $50 for the phone. So if you're going for the 250 minute voice plan for $30 you pay $249 for the 8G iPhone instead of $199. This I call horse-shit also.
Visual voice mail is something that is a double edged sword, and not the kind where one edge is good and one is bad, in this case both are bad....
- It's a separate charge from the data ($8)
- It uses data transfer
- It uses minutes
- ... so a triple edged sword if you think about it!
If you go with a higher plan than you need for voice or data you can change it after the fact (and still within your contract), but if you downgrade you may (she wasn't sure of this) pay a $50 downgrade fee. So if you get the 6G data package and find out after a few months you're only using 100mb a month, you can move to a lower data plan, but you pay. Oh, and if you drop a data plan altogether you pay as well. This is unsurprising of course.

What I learned to keep an eye on for the in store activations

Make sure your new iPhone is working before you leave the store
Make sure your new iPhone is working before you leave the store
Pat reiterated several times (to make sure I got it through my thick skull) that if you buy your phone (at a rogers store of course) and the salesguy screws up somehow while activating it and bricks it, and you leave the store, it's now your responsibility and you get to take it to apple to send it away to fix it, or whatever. However it's bricked and you're still in the store and find this out, they can just put it aside and get a new one for you. If you leave the store and find out after that it's not working, "sucks to be you".

What I forgot to ask about was things like

Is there a cap in data overages?
How is the 3G coverage in the Valley?
How can I tell how much data you're using as the month goes on?
Does the plan I was looking at have texting in it as well (d'oh! talked about this but forgot to find out about it on the last plan we talked about!)

Even with all my conversation I still couldn't find on the website where they had the details of some of the plans that I was looking at, so if you are really wanting something specific, it's probably best to call in. Oh, and when you do, be nice, they are finding out about this stuff after we are it seems (though they know the inner details of the non-iPhone plans way better). iPhone in Canada has some info too.

Hopefully this'll help someone out there figure this stuff out, it at least got some of my questions answered. Now at least if/when I get one I can go to the guy and say I want plan X, with options Y, Z and Q, here's the SKU for it, and hopefully speed things up.

Apple

Smooshed Car :(

2008-07-09T03:19:21Z

So my car got a bit smooshed last week, coming home from the gym. *sigh*. Coming home, turning into my driveway and either I didn't look hard enough, or the guy behind me was going way too fast, but I turned and I suddenly hear this screen and a thump as he hits me on the front ~~right~~ left quarterpanel. Basically caved in the body and gave a good scrape on the door (crappy cell phone picture included). Everyone was ok thankfully, mostly it's just going to be my pride and my pocketbook that's hurt, as app

arently ICBC has "special" rules for turning into a driveway which essentially says that if you're the one turning into the driveway, you're at fault. The guy on the phone told me that the best I could hope for was 75% at fault, the other guys' skid 20' of skid marks aside. Luckily of course this is what insurance is for, but sadly the 11 years of safe driving means nothing, or next to nothing (so much for the "one free accident" thing I heard about). So I lose some discount on my insurance (the suck when a "sports" car like mine has such high premiums to begin with), pay some money over 3 years (not sure what's up with that), and of course it goes on my insurance record. Or at least it'll be something like that, I have yet to hear from them with any official word. Course, when you have a monopoly in the province, it seems there's not a lot you can do but some bitching and whining :(

Dear Lazyweb / VMWare - How Can I Mount a VMWare ESX VMDK File?

2008-06-30T23:55:18Z

My google-fu seems to be broken right now, so I'll ask the interweb in general, with the hopes that some kind soul from VMWare will be able to help me out. I'm looking for a way to mount a VMWare ESX (VI 3.5 in particular) VMDK disk file on a local system. This used to be available with the vmware-mount.pl script, but it seems this is no longer (search for vmware-mount).

Currently the round-trip time to correct simple bugs in the ESX virtual machines I'm in charge of setting up and sending to a QA cycle is in the magnitude of hours due to having to upload an image to the ESX server (which has a somehow stupendously slow VMFS filesystem for storage, but that's another issue), fixing the bug, re-cleaning up the image (removing bash_history, etc), re-downloading the image back to my workstation, zipping it up, and sending it to QA.

Being able to mount the vmdk on my local system, edit it, and then upload that to QA would make my life (and my bosses) far easier than it is now.

Does anyone have any idea how to do this, or what the channel to get a bug into the VMware guys' ears are?

TIA

Update: Looks like my question to the forums got some answers.... look good, will have to try those tomorrow.

Why Do People Like Summer?

2008-06-30T16:07:29Z

In this week's heat wave I am really wondering what all the hype about this "summer" thing is? I can't sleep at night because it's boiling hot, when I do wake up my allergies almost immediately start bugging me, and heaven help me if I go outside at all.... if I take my crappy and ineffective allergy meds and do make it outside I'm immediately alit upon by about 30 blood sucking mosquitoes, meaning that when I go back inside to hide with the air conditioning and fans (which only do so much against the 32+ heat) I'm itchy and my arms and legs look like I have some sort of horrible rash.

If I hide from the mosquitoes and heat by going for a drive in the car with the windows down, then it's just like having someone blow hot air on my face instead of the non-moving hot air in the house.

Bah, humbug.

Kittens at Four Weeks

2008-06-26T06:06:11Z

Just a quickie before bed... sorry haven't written, not much going on, work goes, life goes, etc. Kittens keep getting cuter!

More after the jump....

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For lack of time I'm not going to title each image, there's not a whole lot of a mystery here... kittens in various states of cuteness, licking noses, in an upside-down-inside-out kitten pile, investigating, looking cute, and looking cuter!

Kitten Pictures

2008-06-11T05:27:38Z

So the babies hit the 2 week old mark, here's the latest batch of pictures:

As always, hit the images for the flickr page.

Weekend Project: MythTV Case Upgrade

2008-06-10T04:19:35Z

This weekend my (short) travels led me to the local NCIX computer store, where I picked up, among some other toys, a new case for the MythTV PVR system I have. Seems that the wife didn't appreciate the old computer case with whining fans and cables strewn about sitting in the middle of the living room, so we agreed that a case upgrade wouldn't suck.

I picked the Silvertone LC17 case, not out of any great length of research, but it was big but not too big, and available in store. The case itself isn't very small, which turned out to be a good thing I think, and is basically a slimmed down normal case size oriented to sit on it's side, just like any other piece of your stereo or AV system.

My PVR isn't the slimmest beast in the world either, 2 hard drives, a CDROM, a video card, and a capture card, along with a standard size ATX motherboard means that when you jam it all in together there's lots of wires and components to jam around. I eliminated the CDROM as it's never used, and that helped a bit, but it was still a tight fit at the end (I'm not an expert cable-hider though :)

In the end other than the video card config bitching because the PCI address of the video card had changed, it all went together fine. The case ended up a bit bigger than my receiver, which meant I had to move the shelf in the TV stand around, and juggle the DVD player to fit it all in, not to mention having to cram a bunch of cables behind the case to get the case as far back on the shelf as possible (it's still hanging half off it's front feet).

In the end it's not a lot quieter (probably due to the two case fans in there, plus a more-uber CPU fan than is maybe needed), but it is a heck of a lot more tidy and better looking in the TV stand than my old desktop case sitting on the floor!

Headache Day, Apple's New Toys, and Misc

2008-06-10T04:07:31Z

While today's utter hell had nothing to do directly with the 6 hours of training in a small stuffy room with a guy talking really loud so one other guy at the other end of a conference call could hear, it certainly didn't help. The painful migraine that started early noon-ish and continued until about the time I got home at 7 was the main hell, though the short snooze on the train (helped along by a handful of super strength Tylenol I'm sure) helped. I've still got a bit of it hiding in the back of my head still.

Holy rain batman! when I got home I had to practically swim home from the train station! I'm glad it was decent this morning when I went on my run (yay me). I'm going to go for the mon/wed/fri run and just waking up the same time tues/wed and shifting my hours back. That's the current idea anyway.

I was excited about the Apple WWDC keynote today, where they announced (finally) the 3G iPhone, available (early July) in a bunch of countries, including here (through Rogers, another plus for me) and you no longer have to pay $700 for it, but it's a far more reasonable $199 (8Gig version) or $299 (16Gig version). I'm not 100% sure if I'll get one yet, that will be decided by the data plans that Rogers comes up with. Their current offering of 25mb for $97/month (and no doubt crazy expensive overage fees) just isn't going to cut it. I have a 16Gig iPod Touch already and I'm fairly happy with it, but if I can get rid of my phone, combine it with my iPod and get always on internet through it.... suddenly that looks really attractive (again, with decent data rates).

The online description of the keynote sounded fairly boring though, I have to agree with Paul Thurrotte's assessment, at least based on what I read. And reading through a live keynote blog and going "this sounds kinda boring" is saying a lot, especially for an Apple keynote.

A lot of the things they highlight are pretty lame too..... contact search is worth a mention at a keynote?!? Ditto with the now non-completely-stupid-and-sucky fix of the headphone jack now not needing special headphones to work?!? Demoing medical imaging software?!? I'm sure that now iPhone is "business friendly" this applies a bit, but the attendees are no doubt not caring much about this. Lifehacker has another set of thoughts that fairly mirror mine.

Course, it all means nothing until things actually show up here on (I presume) July 11 or so.

Looking forward to an early night and lots of sleep tonight. Kitten pics posted soon!

Newest Kitten Pics

2008-06-04T05:40:26Z

Once again with the gobs of kitten pics. Posting from Flock this time, maybe it'l. make it easier to do the image stuff compared to the standard HTML editing....

New Phase in the ArcterLife - A New Job

2008-06-03T04:40:09Z

So after working for 1-3 years (depending on if you count mergers and acquisitions) and my previous job, I put in my notice and resigned, starting the next segment of the ArcterLife. I'm now an employee of Layer 7 as a "OS Developer". L7 does interesting things with XML firewalls and gateways, and it is definitely something different and definitely something interesting.

The saddest part is leaving the guys at my last job. The best thing about working there (and I'm not alone in saying this) is the people. B and L were awesome and kept me sane (and I hope I did a bit of the same for them), the girls from marketing and finance were great, not only for not filing multiple complaints against me and the guys for.... well, being ourselves, but being fun to hang out with and bring an aspect outside the geek lives of boys. Everyone else as well, H and boss-J, were great to work with. I also appreciate those that I talked about this. It was a very hard decision, especially the prospect of leaving people you spend 8+ hours a day with!

In the end though, I decided to move on. Today was the first day of work, and it definitely came out in the "not-awful" category. At my previous job I was stuffed at a desk in between two other people, had no phone, and no computer my first day there. This was totally different.... well, kinda. No phone still, no desk (only an empty area with a large collection of desk chairs in it), but I did have a nice desktop computer to work with. I actually had to carry a spare desk through the office with the new boss to get a place to work until the nice cubical desk setup is brought in and setup by the building people. Not bad considering.

As with most new jobs, the first day (actually probably the first few at least) will be spent setting up, getting used to things, finding the URLs for the company mail/wiki/bugtracker/etc, getting mail and IM setup, configuring my workstation just so, and so on. This isn't to say I haven't been thrown into the fray a bit already of course! The new boss man keeps on mentioning things and following up with something like

"... and that'll be yours now." or
"... you'll own that part of the system." and
"... that part I'm getting to hand off to you."

I'm only mildly petrified of course ;)

The new format of work means that (for now anyway) my hours are shifted a bit. Instead of getting on the 6am train in and the 4pm train out, it'll be the 7:30 in and the 5:30 out, meaning I get back home at around 7pm, but on the other hand get to wake up a glorious 1.5 hours later than normal. In a fit of "go-getter-ness" I am even going to be going out running in the mornings to take advantage of a body that's used to getting up at 5:15am!

That's the theory anyway.

So, that's what's new. In the giant timeline of Alan this will be marked with a small note that says something like "June 2008, resigns from job for only the second time ever and starts working at Layer 7". Sadly the historical and archaeological value of this will probably go mostly unnoticed by everyone but me.

Quotes

2008-06-02T04:37:58Z

"Its windows so you have to use the stupid clicky thing."
-- Jim regarding software maintenance

"You smell like blood, sweat, and mom's tears"
-- J of her Dad (kidding of course)