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I got a new 100 GB hard drive for my file server last week. This week I tried to install it. After opening up the box I found massive amounts of dust inside. Not just a lot of dust but truly horrendous amounts. I could not let this go so I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up dust inside the computer.

Then I went about the process of installing the new drive and setting the jumpers on the existing drive so it could coexist with the new drive. I also decided to disconnect a couple of small fans that weren’t all that effective.

After everything was settled I hit the power button. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I checked my connections. Everything was plugged in and secured tight. Still no power. I reconnected the two lousy fans I had previously disconnected. Still nothing.

Somehow I managed to toast my box by simply by cleaning some dust out and installing a new hard drive. Either that, or there’s a simple problem I’m just not aware of. I’m guessing it’s the later since it makes no sense for a machine to simply not power on after it’s been running perfectly fine for the past three years.

Last week for my birthday Emily got me a new PDA. It’s a Sony Clie PEG-NX 60/U. Did I mention Emily is the best wife in the whole wide world? Well, she is.

My PDA has actually become a pretty integral part of my life. I really don’t know how I ever stayed organized without it. The standard Address Book, Date Book, and Memo applications are the ones I use the most by far. No longer do I have things written down in notebooks or scraps of paper scattered all over the house. Anything important at all gets written down in my PDA where I will always know where it is and can call it up in a matter of seconds.

My old Visor Deluxe has served me well over the last two years. However, with the amount of information I had added to the DateBk4 application it was a little sluggish. Also, the monochrome display was getting a little old.

The first thing that struck me about my new Clie is how amazingly fast it is. The UI has that “snappy” feel that we usually only associate with old DOS programs now. Of course it is running a 200MHz processor which is a lot better than the old 33MHz processor on my old Visor Deluxe. It’s kind of changed my perception of how fast a graphical user interface should be. Any action I take has an immediate response. There is absolutely zero delay when scrolling through days in DateBk5 with the jog dial. I only wish my 1.7GHz Windows XP machine responded that fast.

The screen is a huge improvement over the old low-resolution monochromatic screens on old Plam devices. The Graffiti area is software based now so you can minimize it if you want to so you can use the whole screen for your application. This comes in handy if you have a lot of To Do items and want to be able to see more them on screen. It also means you can have bigger pictures for your PhotoStand albums.

Another nice thing about the NX60 is that it comes with a mini-keyboard if you don’t want to use Graffiti for input. I’ve tried the keyboard a few times and while I’m glad it’s there it may take me some getting used to. I do tend to be fairly proficient with Graffiti so it seems a little easier to me to just write my notes in that way. I know a lot of people swear by the keyboard though so I do intend to use it more in the future. I’m sure it’s just a case of getting used to the feel of it.

No, there’s not a camera on my model. That comes with the model one higher up than mine. But since we have a real digital camera I don’t need no gimmick camera added on to my PDA. It does have a nifty little voice recorder feature though. I’ve actually used this a couple of times when driving in my car. Sometimes, I think of something I need to do while I’m commuting but will have forgotten about it by the time I get home. Now all I have to do is record myself a little voice message that will pop up at me the next time I open my Clie.

Then there’s the picture album application which provides a convenient way to carry around pictures and show them to people. I know that once our baby is born my memory stick is going to be filled to brim with nothing but baby pictures and videos. Ya, it plays videos too. This is an application I’m still experimenting with. I put those Terry Tate commercials on my Clie but for some reason there’s no sound. I’m going to have to learn more about this.

I think I’ve rambled on enough here. Executive Summary: I really like my new gadget. It’s one of those tech toys that actually is quite useful and improves your life in more than a few ways.

MacWorld San Francisco is going on today. This morning Steve Jobs made his keynote address and unveiled several new interesting products. There’s new laptops to be had including one with a 17″ screen! What got my attention though is their new web browser, Safari.

I’ve been using Mac OS X off and on at work for several months now. As I said before it is a true marvel of engineering. We finally have a desktop UNIX system that anyone can use without ever really knowing it’s UNIX. That’s all good and well but it’s really the applications that real users are concerned with.

Between Apple, Microsoft and Adobe OS X has a great portfolio of applications. Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office work and look great on Mac OS X. Adobe has nearly every kind of graphic editing application you could ever want. Apple supplies applications for music, digital photos, movie editing, CD/DVD burning, scheduling, email, etc. Limewire has a version for OS X that emulates the native OS X look-n-feel. Fetch is an adequate FTP program. Even though I haven’t used it much most people swear by BB Edit as their code editor.

There has been one area where I’ve never been quite satisfied and that’s the web browser. Yes, Microsoft makes Internet Explorer for the Mac but I refuse to deal with pop-up windows. Since IE doesn’t have any pop-up blocking feature I have to rule it out. I’ve used both Netscape 7 and Mozilla for OS X but they’re both slow and look kind of weird in OS X. Because of the theme feature, which looks great in Windows and Linux, it doesn’t really feel like it belongs to the OS X environment. That would be fine if Mozilla and Netscape performed well but they are quite slow on my old 300Mhz G4 at work. Scrolling down a long page can be particularly painful.

I downloaded Chimera which is a native OS X browser using Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. The problem with this is that the Chimera browser built around the rending engine is immature and not nearly as functional as I need. Opera recently released a version of their browser which runs natively in OS X. This is a step better than any of the others but it’s a little too “sponsored” for my taste. Also, I could never quite get used to the user interface for Opera. For some reason it has just never felt natural to me.

So when I saw that Apple is beta testing their own web browser, Safari, I was hopeful this might actually be the browser to use in OS X. It’s a native OS X application with the brushed metal look of the iApps. It has pop-up blocking. In fact, it’s super easy to access the pop-up blocking feature. It has very intuitive bookmark management. And for some reason I cannot explain it is very very fast. Everything on my crusty old Mac runs sluggishly but Safari is actually runs very quickly. It starts fast, loads pages fast, and scrolls down long page extremely smoothly. I can only imagine what using this on a faster machine would be like.

Folks, I think we finally have a web browser for OS X that’s quite good. In you’re using a Mac a highly recommend going to apple.com and downloading the beta.

I was listening to CNet Radio last week as I often do when driving in my car on my way to work in the morning. (How’s that for a sentence full of prepositions?) On this particular morning they had a couple of clueless pundits making grand predictions about what computing will be like five years from now. Sometimes I think people make silly predictions just to get a reaction from people. I guess it worked because here’s my reaction.

The first guy talked about how we will manage our files in the future. Basically, he thinks that the idea of putting files in folders will become obsolete as searching and cataloging technology gets better and better. Utter and complete crap. First of all, the more organized people are always going to want to have a nice hierarchical filing system for all of their files. It is and always will be an absolute necessity to coders. For the non technical user who is too unorganized to put files in folders to begin with having better searching and cataloging technology isn’t going to help them out much since they probably won’t tag their documents with enough information for those tools to work effectively anyway. It doesn’t matter if your filing system is on a computer or not. You get out of it what you put into it. You are either organized or you’re not.

The second guy’s prediction is slightly more believable but still pretty far off base. He thinks the computer will become people’s primary communication device replacing the telephone. Given enough time it is certainly possible that the computer will be able to handle all of you communication needs. But is it really going to replace the telephone? Not anytime soon and here’s why. Telephones are cheap, durable, small and idiot proof. Computers are expensive, delicate, large and difficult to use. Let’s look at each of these qualities.

You can get a decent cordless phone for about fifty dollars. Computer prices have dropped dramatically over the past few years but it’s bound to hit bottom soon. You’re still going to pay $500 or more for a basic system and at least $1000 for a cheap laptop. Granted, the computer can do a heck of a lot more than a phone but for people living in poverty or even on a tight budget a computer may not be an option. However, practically everyone, poor or rich, has a telephone.

The phone is durable. How many times have you dropped your phone? Chances are you’ve dropped it at least a few times and it still works. How many times do you think you could drop your laptop on the kitchen floor and have it still work?

The phone is small enough to hold with one hand and carry around the house as you speak. With a computer you will either have to have a wireless headset or sit at the computer the whole time you wanted to talk to someone. Sure, I can walk with my laptop from room to room but I can’t use it as I’m walking.

Then there’s the clincher. Anyone can operate a phone. The interface is fool proof and it doesn’t crash. In contrast the computer is an amazingly complicated device. To get everything set up properly for communications purposes would require someone with a fairly deep knowledge of computers to make sure all of the hardware is configured properly and all the right software is installed and working correctly. Then you have to know how to use all that software. You might need wireless connectivity which is a whole other can of worms. With a phone you take it out of the box and plug it in. It’s no more complicated than that. Until computers become that simple to use the telephone will always have a place in the world.

So you’ve got Netscape 7.x and life is good but you still get those annoying pop-up ads. All of those Mozilla users are always talking about how they have pop-up blocking built into their browser. Netscape 7.x is largely derived from Mozilla code so why can’t Netscape 7.x have pop-up blocking? For some reason the folks at Netscape decided to leave this useful feature out of their browser. I’m guessing it has something to do with the fact that they’re owned by AOL.

But if you know where to look you can have pop-up blocking in Netscape 7.x. According to The Unofficial Netscape FAQ all you have to do is download a little .xpi file. Close the browser and restart Netscape. From the main menu go to Edit | Preferences | Advanced | Scripts & Windows and make sure “Open Unrequested Windows” is unchecked. That’s it.

Last week at work I got a USB KVM switch. This is a piece of equipment that allows me to use more than one computer from a single keyboard, mouse and monitor. In fact, the letters KVM stand for keyboard, video, mouse. What’s special about a USB version of a KVM switch is that it can be used to with computers that only take USB keyboard and mice like Macs. So now I can easily switch between my Windows laptop and Mac G4 where before I had to unplug everything from my laptop and plug it into the G4. Therefore, I’ve actually been using my Mac a lot more recently.

After a few days of switching back and forth between WindowsXP and OS X I can say that OS X looks a heck of a lot more professional and polished than WindowsXP. I’ve never really liked the new Luna interface of WindowsXP. The big bright blue bars look childish and draw too much attention to themselves. Most menus and controls seems to have gotten “flatter” since Windows 98. The alternate color schemes — Olive and Silver — aren’t much better. In contrast, the Aqua interface for OS X is very pleasant to look at. It’s easy on the eyes and has a clean professional look. The 3D and transparency effects are nicely done but not overdone. The fonts seem a bit weird to my Windows-trained eyes but I’m sure I get used to it as time goes on. I much prefer running OS X in 1280×1024 rather than 1024×768. I don’t know how to explain it but it just feels better at that resolution. On a 17″ monitor it actually looks pretty good and most things are easy enough to read.

So OS X looks good but what does it have under the hood? This is where the system really shines. OS X has almost nothing in common with previous versions. It’s a modified version of BSD UNIX that goes by the name Darwin. Fire up the Terminal application and you have command line access to Darwin that looks and behaves just like any version of UNIX/Linux/BSD you’ve ever used.

Apple has managed to do what Sun and open source programmers have been unable to do for decades: they’ve created a version of UNIX that anyone can use. Most Mac users will be completely unaware they’re even using a UNIX system. How long has Sun Microsystems been in business and why haven’t they been able to do anything like this? Apple deserves major kudos for developing the world’s first user-friendly UNIX system and marketing it to the masses.

Now if we can just get some faster CPUs for Macs. All Apple machines use Motorola CPUs which are falling further and further behind Intel and AMD in the speed race. The current high end laptop from Apple tops out at 800Mhz! The Windows laptop I bought six months ago is nearly twice that speed. I have heard rumors of Apple looking at other chip vendors and I certainly hope those rumors are true.

After using OpenOffice for a week I’m in a better position to report on some of its weaknesses. The biggest one: it starts slow. It seems to take forever to start up on my 600MHz XP machine. But then again, pretty much everything is slow on that machine. MS Office applications start up much faster than OpenOffice applications. Using OpenOffice’s quickstart at system start up doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference either. Maybe we can look forward to speed optimizations in future versions. On my 1.7GHz laptop at home the start up times aren’t that bad but I still want to see it faster. With machines being as fast as they are today there’s no reason why a simple word processor shouldn’t instantly pop up on screen.

I also noticed that sometime during last week MS Office took over it’s file type associations for .doc and .xls files even though I never asked it to do anything of the sort. The only way to give those file types back to OpenOffice is to “repair” the installation of OpenOffice which basically means reinstalling it. It would be nice if OpenOffice could reclaim the file types that were stolen from it.

Those are two minor gripes but neither one is enough to make me abandon the product. I intend to stick with OpenOffice for quite a while longer. However, I will be eagerly anticipating any updates the promise faster start up times.

I recently downloaded and installed OpenOffice 1.0.1. I have used Star Office in the past and have even used some of the beta versions of OpenOffice. This office suite has come a long way in the past few years. I plan to use it both at work and at home as my primary office application for a month and see if this will be the version that can replace Microsoft Office as my fulltime word processor and spreadsheet application. Those are really the only two parts of the office suite I use on a regular basis. The Access database application means nothing to me and the last time I used PowerPoint was about eight years ago in college.

The look-n-feel of OpenOffice is much improved over it’s Star Office 5.x predessor. Gone is the psuedo-desktop that annoyed the heck out of me and a lot of other users too. Now each application is it’s own distinct entity. The interface seems similar enough to MS Office that new users should be comfortable with it. However, there are welcome differences. The style pallette makes it easy to apply different styles to various parts of your document and change what those styles look like. In contrast, changing the “normal” style is MS Word involves a certain amount of menu-hunting and dialog digging.

Another helpful feature is that OpenOffice deals with MS file formats transparently. I need to share documents with everyone else in the world who uses MS Office and OpenOffice makes this really easy in two ways. First, it can associate itself with MS file formats so whenever I double-click on a .doc or .xls file it will open in OpenOffice instead of Word or Excel. I can also set the default file format for saving files to be MS formats as well. Being able to work with MS Office file transparently is a huge plus in my book and will make it so much easier to make the transistion complete.

That’s all I can really say about it for now since I haven’t used it all that much. But based on my initial impressions this one looks like a winner. Download it at OpenOffice.org and try it out for yourself.

Here’s an interesting story I found on Yahoo! today. Read the story first.

Yahoo! News – Sony PlayStation 3 Seen Out of the Box by 2005

Are you completely confused? I know I am. What exactly is the PlayStation 3 going to be? A network of various devices? If it’s not a little black box but is instead a chip that’s embedded in various consumer electronics connected by a high speed network then what are we supposed to buy?

Granted, these guys are talking about something a few years off in the future and a lot can change during that time. What I think Sony needs to understand is that people like having solid tangible objects. A PlayStation 2 is very easy to understand and acquire. You go to the store and pay $200 for a slim black box that you hook up to your television. It’s so easy even our parents can understand it.

The way the article is written it sounds like we won’t buy a PlayStation 3 but instead will buy a television with PlayStation capabilities. You’ll buy a DVD player with PlayStation 3 capabilities. You’ll buy a network router with PlayStation 3 capabilities. If they actually do decide to go this route it is doomed to failure. First, there’s no one single device to buy. Second, it would be much more expensive to procure all the parts you need than simply paying $200 for a box. Third, we love our boxes. We can point to our PS2 and say “That’s the best game machine on the planet”. We can pick it up and take it to a friend’s house.

In all fairness I don’t think Sony themselves really know how their “cell” project will mature and be rolled out to the masses. They have conceptual thinkers who want to be revolutionary in their ideas but I think ultimately the more practically minded managers will win out. People simply aren’t ready to buy into a game system based on a distributed architecture. The “cell” project will continue and maybe 10 or 15 years from now distributed computing will be more widespread and then we can conceivably have a PlayStation 6 or 7 based on that idea. But for 2005 I really think Sony’s going to get the fastest chip they have at the time and stick it in a box — along with built-in network adapter and hard drive. Heck maybe even select models will have a TV tuner and include Tivo-like functionality.

It all started back with the release of Windows95. Upon starting up my brand new Windows95 machine back in 1996 the first icon I saw in the upper left corner of the screen was labeled “My Computer”. Beneath that was “My Network Neighborhood”. Great. Windows95 was a welcome upgrade from Windows 3.1 but now Microsoft seemed intent on turning my desktop into something out of Sesame Street. Is there any reason these items couldn’t simply be called “Computer”, “Network Neighborhood”, and “Document”? Does it really make the system that much easier to use by saying it’s “My” computer? Plus, what if I’m happen to be sitting at someone else’s computer. Then it’s not really mine is it? It would be more correct to all of the potential users of a machine for the icon to be labeled something like “Bob’s Computer”.

It wasn’t too long before I figured out how to rename these little icons. Now it was possible to have a desktop that didn’t insult my intelligence. I could pick something more mature sounding like “System”, “Root”, or “Machine”. Better yet, I could try to be cute and name it something like “Not Your Computer”, “This Computer Belongs To Michael”, or “Horribly Slow Piece of Crap That My Company Won’t Upgrade Because They’re Cheap”.

Side Note: I actually tried to intentionally overheat my CPU once by disabling the fan on my horribly slow computer. I figured that would guarantee me getting a new machine but the uncooled CPU kept on working! I guess I should have overclocked it also. Oh well.

Do you know how hard it is to rename the “My Documents” folder and have that change be reflected in every area of the system? It’s impossible. No matter how hard you try some file open dialog somewhere will still show you a “My Documents” folder.

Things only got worse as time went on. Now we have “My Pictures” and “My Music”. I don’t use the Microsoft movie editing application but if I did I’m sure there would be a “My Movies” folder sitting in “My Documents”. And the operating system is very insistent that you have a “My Pictures” folder. Have you ever tried renaming or deleting this folder in Windows98? I tried but it kept coming back! I eventually gave up and resigned myself to the fact that I would always have a “My Pictures” directory that sits empty on my hard drive. Windows XP seems to take renaming these folders a little better. However, they still show up with the “My” prefix in certain circumstances.

Microsoft isn’t the only offender. Other companies are now joining the “My” bandwagon. I recently had to install Stuffit Expander for Windows and it automatically created a “My Archives” folder. I didn’t ask for this! I don’t want this folder and I certainly don’t need it. So I delete it. Yet, every single time I open a .sit file with Stuffit Expander this directory is recreated for me! Does that count as virus-like behavior or not? Does anyone know of any alternatives to Stuffit Expander?

Adobe is another culprit. Upon installing Acrobat 5.x I noticed a “My Portable Documents” folder. What?! Who in the world would use this? I’ll bet that even the employees at Adobe don’t put all of their PDF files under one folder. I have many PDF files on my system but all of my document files are organized based on their subject matter, not file type. This is absolutely ridiculous! At least this folder stayed gone when I deleted it.

I remember the days when an application would ask you if it was okay to create directories like this. Now, in the effort to be more user-friendly, software makers just assume that you’ll want a directory just to store files of their file type. Slowly but surely, the control we used to have over our own computers is being taken away by software companies who will do anything for market share.

Maybe next time I’ll rant about competing applications stealing file associations from each other. Or utility applications that assume they are so central to your everyday computing life that they install a system tray icon for you.

Until next time…