Snowflakes in Hell

So Apple announced the iPad. I was hoping for something more than just a big iPhone. I was also hoping for some advanced form of electronic paper display, maybe one that did color and had a reasonable refresh rate, but I guess no one really develops that kind of thing in secret anymore. It’s an IPS TFT display, but that’s not new. I have to admit to a bit of a yawn over the product. I have a MacBook, I have an iPhone, I don’t think I have a use for an iPad.

If Apple wanted to fill the niche between the iPhone and the Laptop, I think they should have picked a more capable user interface than that of the iPhone. At the least, I would expect this kind of device to handle concurrently running applications.

I was reminded of a topic I wanted to bring up by an e-mail from Jennifer, who’s husband is a custom holster maker. Most of us have gun holsters, and while I’ve gone through a few in my nearly decade of carrying, one thing I’ve noticed is that a good holster lasts a long time. I’ve banged it against door frames, crushed it sitting on it weird, and generally put them through a lot of stress and abuse, and they stand up to it.

My iPhone belt clips, on the other hand, all generally tend to be garbage. I go through one maybe every couple of months before something on it breaks. They are made of  cheap plastic, and are otherwise generally flimsy. Holster makers are good at making things that stand up to abuse. Why not make a really quality set of holsters for smart phones? There are a few challenges that I see. A gun is easy because you have a convenient handle to draw it from and can apply reasonable force to break retention. A phone still need to be retained, but you need some way to be able to remove it easily. It might take a more ingenious retention mechanism than a firearm. Second the phone screen needs protection. Gun finishes get worn from repeated holstering and reholstering. A screen on an smart phone can’t take that kind of abuse, so you’d have to at least felt line the side the screen is facing.

Still, I think there’s business opportunity for holster makers to get into the smart phone market with a product that can really take abuse, which is none of the crap I’ve seen on the market currently. Maybe the reason is people won’t pay a premium for a quality smart phone holster, but I would if it would last, and it was functional in its role.

So now that it’s finally official, I think Comcast can expect our cancellation shortly after this goes live. Or sooner. Mix it in with a bundle that Verizon is willing to offer so that we get discounts on the phone & basic tv service, and there’s absolutely no justification for Comcast’s high prices.

Since my last Netflix-related post was unexpectedly popular, here are more topics for discussion:

• The Warner Bros. Compromise: Good or Bad?
• Wii Streaming: Will you use it if you don’t already stream through another method?
• Lost: Ana Lucia’s Finally Dead to Me! Yay!

My own answers will start the comments.

Snowflakes in Hell just got an Internet upgrade. It’s been about four years since I signed up for FiOS Internet, and my connection was 15 megabits down and 2 megabits up. I noticed when I posted pics of my Webley Mark IV, it was getting pretty pokey when enough folks were downloading. I also noticed Verizon didn’t even sell my package anymore, so I quickly realized I might be able to get an upgrade without paying anything. Typically you have to ask, as Verizon will be happy to sell you slow service for yesterday’s price.

Calls to Verizon are aways rough, because I have an unusual account. When you call, they ask for a telephone number to cross reference account info. I have Verizon FiOS for Small Business, because I need a static IP so you all know where to find me. My phone number is a standard residential POTS line. Invariably they ask for your phone number to determine your account, which always sends me to residential service, who quickly realize they only have a phone account for me, and transfer me to business support, who then look at my phone number and say “Oh, this is residential service, let me transfer you back.”  A back and forth twice, finally being able to say “No, no.. it’s a residential phone line, but I do have a Small Business FiOS account!” Finally I get to talk to someone, but someone who ends up being very nice and helpful.

Turns out I can upgrade to 20 megabits down and 5 up for the same price, but for ten dollars more a month I can do a whopping 25 megabits down and 15 up. Hell yeah, I’ll take that. Apparently I can also save money bundling my phone and TV service with my Small Business Account, which I couldn’t do before. I’m going to look into doing that. To make a long story short, Snowflakes in Hell now has over 7 times the upload bandwidth it used to, and I’m hardly paying any extra for it.

Via Ride Fast, an account of some of the security measures Israel uses for air travel, which includes a much more intrusive search for explosives than the TSA uses. The good thing for her is that the hard drive on that MacBook Pro model is in the lower right corner, which as far as I can tell does not have any holes in it. It’s probably fine.

Bitter just got herself a Droid. Playing with it, I think it is in many ways inferior to the iPhone, but there are a few very key things about the Droid that have the potential to make it more useful:

• It’s on Verizon’s network instead of AT&T. It’s amazing how fast browsing was compared to my iPhone.
• It’s an open-source platform without the crazy control freakishness of the Apple platform.

I’m relatively happy to see Adobe is developing a flash plugin for the Droid browser. Although I really hate Flash, there’s a lot of stuff on the Internet that doesn’t work without it. In theory, I’ll be able to use Bitter’s Droid to watch Cam & Company on the road. I figure if I find myself having to keep borrowing Bitter’s Droid because it’s more functional, that’ll be my signal to ditch the iPhone and move to Verizon.

It came in the mail today, along with a review copy of Dave Kopel’s new book Aiming for Liberty, which I hope to read over the Thanksgiving Holiday. The Magic Mouse is the mouse I’ve been waiting for all my life. We’ve come a long way since the big one button wonder on the original Macintosh. The only mechanical part on the Magic Mouse is the click. Scrolling is done entirely by touch. Right click/left click works just as it does on the earlier Mighty Mouse. Apple’s Mighty Mouse was nice, but the scroll wheel had the odious habit of getting gummed up and not working. That combined with a lack of user serviceability made this a serious flaw. I find the Mighty Mouse’s function intuitive and smooth. My only real complaint is with the packaging, which uses a glue strip to hold the mouse in place, and which leaves a residue on the mouse that needs to be cleaned off before use. Annoying for sure, but that’s probably the only time I’ll ever have to clean the mighty mouse with anything other than a quick wipe down, and that alone makes it worth it.

Apple reveals its replacement for the Mighty Mouse. Optical mouse with no buttons, switches, wheels, or balls? It should last forever. I hate the Mighty Mouse. The scroll ball on the mouse will inevitably end up dirty, to the point where Apple’s recommended cleaning method will no longer work, and the mouse can’t be taken apart and disassembled without breaking it.  The Might Mouse I’m currently using looks like this, because it stopped scrolling, and I had to take it apart to clean the gunk off the gnat sized rollers. It still works, but it doesn’t glide as smoothly across the pad anymore.

The Mighty Mouse is dead. Long live the Magic Mouse!

Not normally visible, but it apparently emits infrared. White House has issued a press release saying the hithertofore undiscovered ring was never noticed because it has only appeared since his ascension, and is the celestial manifestation of the big guy’s unimpeachable awesomeness. The White House also noted that the next years Nobel for Physics wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for having created this phenomenon.

Countertop has an iPhone bleg.  I’ve been using PDA’s for a while now, the first being a Newton, then through the Graffiti years with Palm, onto the Treo, through the age of Windows Mobile and to the age of the Blackberry.  Most of them I’ve found crippled in one way or another, but I think Apple pretty much nailed what the smart phone ought to be with the iPhone.  But not all is rosy.  Here’s my impression about what the iPhone beats the Blackberry on:

• Interface.  The iPhone has a far more intuitive interface, and is much easier to navigate.  There’s no little nubby mouse like creature on the iPhone, which I find annoying on the Blackberry.
• Web browsing.  Except for the lack of flash, browsing on the iPhone is the same as on the desktop, pretty much.
• Integration with Calendar, Contacts, E-Mail, etc, on an Exchange Server works much better than on a Crackberry, and without expensive enterprise software needed on the server end.  I think mail in general works better.
• More apps.  There really is an app for everything.

But there are downsides to the iPhone:

• AT&T is the crappiest provider I’ve ever been with, and I’ve been with both Sprint and T-Mobile.  It is the main reason to avoid the iPhone.  Expect dropped calls, poor coverage, and slow data connections.  AT&T’s call coverage isn’t too bad, but 3G coverage is poor.
• It is a closed system.  Nothing gets installed on the iPhone without Apple and AT&T approval, unless you want to jailbreak your phone.
• Some people don’t like Apple’s on screen keyboard.  I like it, but some hate it.
• Battery life on a Crackberry is typically better than the iPhone.  Don’t forget your charger.
• iPhone silence switch is easy, too easy, to hit casually.  You will miss calls by flipping it to silent accidentally.
• Speakerphone on the iPhone is way too quiet.

I still prefer the iPhone, even with the downsides.  But it’ll be a much better platform if they make a CDMA version that can be used on other carriers.

I’m surprised by how much interest there was in the Mars post.  I guess one would expect that Mars colonization would appeal to gun nuts.  What better place to go to be left the hell alone by the powers that be?   But as much as the idea of sending people off to Mars to colonize it is appealing, I think the engineering challenges of keeping people on Mars would be just as daunting, if not more daunting, than bringing them back.

Mars is an incredibly hostile planet to human life.  It has an unbreathable atmosphere that is 100 times thinner than that of Earth.  This translates into very cold temperatures, and much higher radiation levels.  Mars is also only about a tenth of the mass of Earth, which translates into about a third of the gravity .  Mars’ average surface temperature is -63 degrees centigrade, and can hit lows of -140 degrees centigrade.   Mars also has no magnetic field, so solar storms can send unsafe levels of radiation to the Martian surface.

The only way humans are going to survive on Mars is to bring along an ample supply of food, a sustainable energy source, a way to manufacture breathable air, and enough construction equipment and materials to bury a habitat underground.  And all this will have to be done while in space suits, because Mars is too hostile and too cold to just walk around with a heavy coat and breathing apparatus on.  Humans on Mars would be totally dependent on supplies from Earth. and would probably require a steady stream of materials and equipment to be launched.

And after constructing a habitat on Mars, we don’t know whether we could get crops to grow, what effect the low gravity environment would have on humans or other animals we’d need to sustain a colony.  We don’t know how easy it will be to get liquid water on Mars.

I think humans will have a colony on Mars eventually, but I think sending scouting missions, where the astronauts come back, is going to be easier as a first step than jumping right to colonization.  With current technology and costs, I’m afraid any one way trip to Mars isn’t going to be much better than a suicide mission.

The New York Times ponders a one-way-trip to Mars:

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

Apparently there’s no shortage of people who would be willing to take a one way trip, knowing that would mean they die on Mars.  For me, a successful mission means bringing the astronauts home again.  It wouldn’t have mattered much if Christopher Columbus had sunk in the Caribbean, never returning home to tell everyone of the New World.  No, a successful mission has to bring the explorers home.  The problem is that space is full of radiation, and shielding is expensive and heavy.

I’ve pretty much lost all faith in government space initiatives.  I do think we’ll go to Mars.  But we’ll go to Mars because there’s money in it.  If someone is willing to take a one-way-trip, there’s someone else who will pay a lot of money to go and return.  All we need is for private industry to make it cheap and routine.

Ran out to the Apple Store in King of Prussia yesterday to pick up a copy of Snow Leopard.  Installation went off without a hitch, and the main reason I decided to upgrade quickly, which were the time machine speedups, seem to work OK.  The integration of Apple Mail with Exchange 2007 seems to work well.  My iCal synchronizes with my Exchange calendar just fine, and the e-mail part works fine too.   I’m happy about this because it gives me an opportunity to stop using Entourage, which works fine, but is a bit more slow and bloated compared to Mail.  I also switched to using Safari instead of Firefox, because it’s much faster, so I thought I’d give it another chance.  We’ll see how it goes.

If American immigration policy had any brains at all, which it does not, we’d find this guy and offer him a green card.  Anyone who builds a helicopter out of spare parts and flies it to 2600 feet based on a middle school physics education and what he managed to find on his cell phone browser is OK in my book.

Every range is going to need one of these.  Total geek factor.

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting link on “100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About.”  I’ve set IRQs before, but anyone who rembers NuBus knows this was the inferior way.  It was nice when PCs finally caught up.  What things am I too young to remember doing?  Not much.  Definitely remember using Mosaic for the first time.  I remember Gopher and Archie, and I’ve uudecoded more than a few things in my life.  I still have a lot of negatives on disk film somewhere.  This list had to have been made by guys in their mid 30s.  You know, at some point, I should probably look at getting all the video footage from when I was a kid, all on 8mm, transferred over to DVD.

UPDATE: How many have kid pictures on this medium?  How many kids today will know that the term “slides” in power point actually dervives from this, and also the term “Slideshow” in image programs.

This looks really neat, and would be a great training tool, but I suspect I’d get one nasty case of simulator sickness.

Kevin Baker was there, but has the TV broadcast from 40 years ago.  I would never see one.  The last Saturn V rocket was launched a year before I was born.  Most children grow up dreaming of visiting other worlds, but this guy actually grew up and built rockets that did it.  I think the era of public manned space programs is probably nearing an end.  This is the future of space travel.  I hope that in my lifetime, I will also get to see men walk on other worlds.

Due to the recent departure from my company of the only other Mac user, I have acquired a new MacBook Pro 15″, and begun to use it.  For two years I’ve used my own personal laptop for work matters, so I figured it was time to use a company computer once again.  I even have one of the new chicklet keyboards.

The only difference, other than being a bit faster, and various other things you’d expect from a more modern laptop, is that it has a glossy screen rather than a matte screen.  Every machine and LCD display I’ve had up until now has been matte.  I’m not sure how I feel about glossy.  On the one hand, the glossy display is pretty clearly more crisp and true, but I can also see myself in it, which I find annoying.  But I love the clarity and sharp contrast of the display.

One of my other pet peeves about monitors is fingerprints.  I hate them.  I have long loathed people coming into my office and putting their booger hooks all over my display.  With matte displays, I’ve found some measure of relief from my obsession with clean glass, but now the obsession is back with the glossy display.  I actually had to get a matte screen filter for my iPhone, because I couldn’t deal with the fingerprints.

The last leg of today’s virtual flying was from Ryan’s Creek Airport on Stuart Island, New Zealand, to Sydney International Airport in Sydney, Australia, following a course along the Tasman Sea.  I have to say, even in a virtual world, southern New Zealand is quite beautiful.  I continue to be impressed by how much flight simulators have improved since I was younger.  While I still would not get in a plane with myself, at least my landing in Sydney would be in the realm of respectable, I think.

X-Plane has a feature that allows you to record flight footage as if you had a camcorder in the pilot’s seat.  I’ve always enjoyed approaches over water, where as you dip closer and closer to the drink, you look to the guy next to you and think “I hope you like fish.”  Only at the last minute to have a runway roll out underneath you.  Sydney would seem to be one of those approaches.

The Cirrus Vision being simulated here likes to be in the air, and can land even at low speed under full flaps.  I find it to be very easy to fly compared to some of the other jets available within X-Plane.

I received my rudder pedals last night, in the hopes to learn to fly the helicopters in X-Plane.  I find that flying rotorcraft is far more difficult than flying fixed wing aircraft.  Here is why anyone would be insane to get into a helicopter with me.

This is actually me flying in the simulator.  My goal was to maintain a steady hover while rising above the runway, transition to forward movement, and land on the other side of the runway.  The first part didn’t work out so well.  Once I transition to forward flight, I can keep my crap together.  I still need to work on precise landings, but I’m beginning to be able to put down without crashing.

Hey, at least I did better than this guy, but I’ve done a few tries that had similar results.

Thanks to Instapundit for this great article by P.J. O’Rourke:

Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

It is an excellent story on American’s relationship with the automobile, which is now turning into the worst story of America’s relationship with its dysfunctional government.

… when you might be the one who didn’t have fish for dinner.   The two products I absolutely must have is this joystick, and these rudder pedals.

When I was a kid, I always enjoyed flight simulators, going back years.  I’d spend hours trying to perfect how to fly the various planes, but there’s only so much you can do with an 8086 with CGA (later a 386 with EGA) graphics.  Once I hit college I didn’t have time to keep up with my interest in aviation.  But last week I got myself a copy of X-Plane 9.

I have to say, home flight simulators have come a long way since I last messed around with Flight Simulator 4.0.  At cruise altitude, it almost looks like you’re looking down from a real plane.  I spent most of the weekend flying around to various places.  I can still line up with a runway and land without crashing, though I wouldn’t characterize my landings as always beautiful.  I did a flight from Newark Liberty International, following the VORs across Pennsylvania to land at Pittsburgh.  Then flew a Cirrus Vision from Roanoke, Virginia to Westfield Massachusetts.  Total flying time, a little more than two hours.  Then for no apparent reason, I loaded up a Piper Saratoga II, and flew it from Essex County Airport in New Jersey, to Martha’s Vineyard, at night, in low visibility.  Had to pass over the runway once, but managed to land the second time without putting the plane into the drink.

The great thing about flight simulators is, you can fly while drinking bourbon.  The FAA frowns on that in a real plane.  Truth be told, I think flying while drinking is probably less dangerous then driving, since you have a lot of time to figure things out, and once you get past takeoff and landing, the computer does most of the real flying anyway.  Your job, at that point, is just to navigate.

Another new thing in these newfangled modern flight sims is they have helicopters.  I found out I can’t fly a helicopter to save my life.  I can kind of take off, and get moving forward, but I can’t hover, and I crash.  The balance between cyclic control, collective control, yaw, and compensating for wind seems to elude me.

All this could possibly get me interested in real aviation, as I once wanted to get a pilot’s license, but I don’t know if I really need another expensive hobby.  And when it comes to expense, flying puts guns to shame.

A few folks were complaining this morning that they couldn’t get on the VPN at work.  I checked the phone lines, and they seemed to be out too.  I figured it was a telco issue.  Got Bitter up, because we were going to head to L.L. Bean because I am in great need of pants (I can’t be stealing Robb’s gig now can I?).  I figured I’d stop by work on the way there.

Once I got there, I realized we had a power issue.  Nothing in my data center was on.  Called up the facilities guy, and got him out there, along with the landlord.  We had to get the subzero freezers out to outlets with power.  All the lab plugs were dead, and the subzeros keep things at -40C for a reason.  Normally they were powered off the UPS.  What happened?

UPS is totally dead.  Nothing on the screen.  Circuit breakers all tripped.  These aren’t small breakers, like you have in a residence.  It’s 200 amp 480 volt three phase power.  Takes a good bit of force to close them.  I try to reset one, and I hear a loud arcing sound.  Uh oh.  Called up the UPS company.  Meanwhile, we went and flipped all the breakers over to bypass the UPS and get everything on PECO.  I brought up part of my systems until I could figure out what was up with the UPS.  Went to L.L. Bean in the mean time.

Get back to work, and the UPS guy says it blew a transformer.  It’ll take some skill and time to repair.  Figuring we’ll be on PECO for a while, I brought up the rest of the room.  I’m hoping all the lab equipment is OK.  Those freezers were off for a while.  We also have incubators for cell lines, but those are water jacketed incubators and hold their heat very well.  Hopefully everything will be fine on Monday.  At least all my systems were fine.