SuBBrilliant Blog

In case you don’t have time to wade through the pages and pages being written about Google and Verizon’s net neutrality announcment, I’ve tried to sum it up here.

Google and Verizon have made a public policy proposal (no business arrangements) and have asked for it to be enforced by FCC with power for fines (up to 2 million dollars). The proposal requires wired broadband like cable and DSL to be strictly neutral but it allows for additional, differentiated online services. In other words things like services to hospitals, or Verizon’s FIOS service, neither of which would go out on the open Internet. It leaves wireless broadband largely unregulated.

A key point in the wired broadband part of the agreement is that there would be no selling of priority traffic slots over the public Internet. In other words no company can pay to get their videos sent more reliably or faster than others. But dedicated capacity could be sold to customers over a dedicated network. That means you can buy a VPN or a private service of some kind. But nothing that would be available openly on the Net.

Yesterday I spent the day trying to save my data from a dying hard drive and swap in a new one. It all turned out successfully. This is something I’ve done several times int he past, but this time I noticed one incredible difference from all my past experiences.

I wasn’t irrationally angry.

And I think I know the reason. In the past while cloning and swapping, all my data was essentially unavailable. The stress of fearing I might fail in the process and have to spend countless hours restoring from other backups or even lose some data made me wig.

I remember one evening when Windows 95 wouldn’t boot for me and I actually asked friends who were over at the time to leave until I got it fixed. I knew myself. I was not going to be pleasant to be around.

So what changed?

This time around I had my iPhone and iPad. I was able to access almost all the data I needed while my cloning churned away. I answered email, I edited documents, I read books and comics.

The few things not comfortably done on these devices could have easily been done on one of the other computers in our house too, just by using Mozilla Weave to get all my settings in my browser.

The cloud is what eased my mind. Having my data accessible in useful applications in ways I was familiar with meant I didn’t really sweat the swap. I know ‘terminal’ computing and other variants on the cloud have been predicted for years. I’m not saying we’ll all move to dumb terminals. But I think we really have ventured down a new road in how we interact and rely on our data. We’re going to think less about where it is in the future.

The other day I referred to one of my laptops as “Starbuck” and the topic of naming your gadgets came up. I do it in the grand tradition of naming servers or printers or such, just to make it easy to know which device I’m talking about. I generally use my default “stuffed animal” names for mobile devices, and name computers after SciFi characters.

Do you name your gadgets? Tell me the names int he comments? Here are some of mine.

MacBook Pro (Unibody) – Martha Jones
Old MacBook Pro (Silver keyboard) – Lois
Old ThinkPad T42 – Starbuck
Dell Windows XP machine – HAL
iPod – BobPod
iPhone – FredPhone
iPad – JeffPad
Apple TV – Teeves (like Jeeves)
Slingbox – Sam

I don’t name things like the TiVo, PS3, Wii Xbox, etc… because they’re so easy to refer to anyway.

I have a question, can anyone help?

You left out an important detail. Please provide it.

Oh sorry, here is half of what you asked for.

Yes, but that’s still not all of the important details I asked for.

Oh sorry. Here’s the rest, but with a serious misunderstanding.

Let me clarify. I need this exactly.

Oh OK. Here you go.

Hi I just discovered the thread and instead of being helpful I’m going to explain to you why you would never want to do what you’re asking.

Hi I just discovered this thread and would like to point out how you could Google this yourself but I also will not actually provide any help.

I just jumped in to call you a n00b and make an ironic joke.

Hi I’m the original responder and I have a solution you can try.

I tried your solution but it didn’t work.

Can you explain more why it didn’t work?

Well let me give you half an explanation leaving out several important details.

I guess I’ll need to ask for the rest of the details then.

Oh sorry, here are the rest of the details including a very important detail that I left out of the original problem that you could never have guessed.

Well I will have to take a slightly exasperated tone and say that you should have told me that in the beginning. So now let me propose a different solution.

I want to jump back in and point out that I can’t see any earthly reason why you’d want to do what you’re asking, but at the same time provide no real useful help to the thread.

I just want to make another ironic joke.

I the original poster must now ask a question that was actually answered in the latest proposed solution.

I will politely refrain from pointing out that if you read my last post more carefully you would see I answered that, but instead just repeat that part verbatim without further commentary.

Oh, got it, I will try that. I will then not respond for several weeks.

Hey, it worked. Thanks for all the help everyone!

Last week on CNET’s The Real Deal podcast, I realized that a lot of my favorite podcasts have no topic. In fact I do a podcast called East Meets West that intentionally has no stated topic. So I’ve decided, without their approval, to start a trade group for these podcasts called Podcasts without Portfolio. Here are the charter members, whether they like it or not.

You Look Nice Today
Had the idea for this trade group while listening to the latest episode. While ostensibly about emotional hygiene, it’s really about saying funny things.

No Agenda
Was this podcast with John Dvorak and the Podfather, Adam Curry cerated created as an homage to East Meets West? Only history can judge.

Tangential Convergence
Smart Canadians talk about smart things while usually drinking.

Jawbone Radio
I never knew that life living near Cleveland could uncover so many universal truths.

Honorary Membership: Extra Life Radio
It’s a gaming podcast, but really it’s much much more.

Someone, I think it might have been Starman, but I rightly don’t remember, so forgive me. That wasn’t a sentence. This next one will be. Someone recently asked me to blog my experience with VMWare Fusion and Parallels.

Sigh.

I’m so bad at blogging. You can see that as early as my first post. Go ahead, dig into the archives here and find it. I’ll be right here experiencing the effects of time diliation. F or you it’s been a period of ten minutes or so. For me it’s been the space of hitting the space bar. But do you see? I don’t know what it is, but I have a real block against this blogging thing.

However, time, thunderstorms, and airline policy have conspired to keep me delayed here at gate 23 at good old OAK, meaning I have sunk deep into my amusement of last resort; picking out nose hairs. Which got me in BIG trouble with the wife, so now I must sink to blogging.

I shot a video on virtualization for CNET TV this week. The editor just finished it up today, so I imagine it won’t be posted until Tuesday. That will cover the majority of my experience. Then on Tuesday, Rafe Needleman is out of town so I’m on my own for The Real Deal podcast. So I figure I’ll talk virtualization there while it’s fresh in my mind. So that will cover almost the rest of it. And frankly audio is the medium I’m most comfortable with.

But here I blog until the gods of airline delays release me from my purgatory of waiting. So wile I’ll hold off on real details and explanations for the video and podcast that pay the bills, perhaps I will give an impressionistic account of my trip through virtualization, as I remember it.

Boot Camp 2.1 Freeze. Anger. Annoyance. A feeling of an era of bliss ending. Oh Windows XP on a Mac. I loved your look. I loved your speedy performance. I loved your idiosyncrasy. But your occasional need to freeze for 20 seconds played havoc with the Sword and Laser podcast as well as Buzz Out Loud prep. So you drove me into virtualization.

Start with free Parallels download. All is smooth until —- ACTIVATION. See, I had played with VMWare once in January. And had used activations with Boot Camp. So I was looking mighty peg-legged and eye-patch wearing as far as Microsoft could tell. But a little extra effort overcame.
Parallels is great!

But wait. Slight sadness. No second monitor now for Windows apps. Grr. How about VMWare? No respite there.

Surpise! VMWare Fusion Beta. Multi-monitor support.

Install it. Crazy install hell. Must make calls and pretend to have rebuilt machine. But finally activated. No way to get Parallels and VMWare to both work. They seem to overwrite each other’s activations. OH well. Live in VMWare. The beta seems a bit slower than PArallels but I lvoe the multimon support.

So why not keep moving to OS X!

Move iTunes over. No problem! Well slight problem when shooting a video and I accidentally trash my whoel library. But I restored it. So no harm done!

BUT THEN! I tried to repartition. S ee when I set up Boot Camp I expected to live in Windows. So I gave Windows a healthy 150 GB and Mac about 80 or so. With iTunes moved that 80 was getting cramped. So I plunk down the money for iPartition. Doesn’t work. Can’t move the data. Must defrag. Go into Windows Boot Camp and defrag Windows partition. Go into iDefrag and defrag Mac partition. Now partitioning works! Cross fingers and pray as partitions are resized and moved. It works!

Until!!!!

Next morning’s VMWare boot can’t find the virtual machines file! Ack! Moving the partition munged the virtualization. Oh well. Bite nails, cry a small tear and trash the VMWare image file and rebuild. Whew! It works. Must reinstall VMWare tools but no reactivation! Crisis averted.

Now in search of the mail and calendaring replacement. Millions of programs will get my mail but almost nothign can read our exchange calendar. One program that promises to sync iCal with Exchange Calendar doesn’t work in Leopard!

Oh but Entourage you are so darn expensive. I mean, I just bought Popcorn Hour, Roku Netflix AND new headphones for my iPhone. I just can’t plunk down for Office for Mac. No way.

So I live in two worlds still. And the only real issue with that is when I click a link in an Outlook mail, it opens in Windows Firefox instead of Mac.

Also the Belkin Flip we use on CNET Live won’t recognise video from OS X for some reason. We need the flip so both me and Cooley’s laptops can be hooked up to the control room. The direct conenction without the flip works fine, which is how I was able to demonstrate VMWare on CNET Live last week. But as soon as we use th flip so both laptops can be connected, nothing.

So for CNET Live I must use Boot Camp. But good news! I figured out the Boot Camp freeze that led to all this. Apparently Input Remapper, that I use to reprogram the MacBook Pro keyboard doesn’t play nice with the keyboard manager in Boot Camp 2.1. So I disabled the keyboard manager in MSCONFIG and voila! No more freezes!

So I suppose I could go all the way back to Windows now, but I kinda like OS X. Plus I’d have to pay for MacDrive in order to see the files on my OS X partition in Windows. So I think virtualization will be the mode of choice for now. And hopefully the VMWare beta will be updated and not be so laggy as it goes along.

Scattered and incomplete as it is, there are my impressions of my experience with virtualization. Thanks for reading.

Give me enough time off and I’ll go off and do something silly. Like attempt to re-write A Christmas Carol in a modern-day setting.

But if there is enough time after that, I’ll circle back to doing something halfway more reasonable.

And so, I present to you the Buzz Town Wiki

This is our own Wiki for the people of Buzz Town. Here we can create bios for the various citizens of Buzz Town (without risk of violating notability standards), document organizations like TM Analysts, Buzz Air and Space Command, etc.

I’ve seeded it with a few articles, but I encourage you to jump in and add your own. Even add yourself. If we get more than 20 active editors we can graduate from a scratchpad mini wiki to real full-fledged Wikia Wiki just like Wookiepedia. And isn’t that what every Wiki dreams of?

So what do you say Shalin? Dave the psychologist? Tripp? (Are you alive Tripp?) Let’s get some articles on DRM, Perception of difficulty, the chance we’re a simulation, and anything else that strikes your fancy — and relates to Buzz Town.

Maybe even a map!

Russ Pitts, former Half Price Books Computer Section Manager, Head of Insomnia Productions, Producer of SuBBrilliant TV, writer for SuBBrilliant News, and one-time Line Producer of The Screen Savers, wrote a long, involved, insightful reminscence of his years at TechTV.

This paragraph sums it up:

I laugh now when I hear the phrase Web 2.0, not because I think it’s an inherently stupid concept (it isn’t), but because back when Web 1.0 was barely in its adolescence, The Screen Savers was already pushing the envelope, stretching that bitch at the seams and wanting more. So we created TV 2.0, in which you were part of the show, and even if you never called in, never logged in or sent in an email, watching other people do so, you knew that you could. You knew that we cared. Because we did. It was all for you. Yes, we were having the fucking time of our lives, but we were doing it for you, because we’d been there on the other end of that TV screen thinking nobody understood why these things were so important to us, and we knew how lonely it could be. And we wanted you to know you weren’t alone.

Thanks for that Russ. I mean it. It makes me even more proud to have worked there to have it expressed that way.

Read the whole thing at FalseGravity.com.

OK.  Everybody seems to be back on the Flock bandwagon, so I’m giving it a whirl. I wish they had a wizard for setting up all your accounts, though the setup is pretty easy.  Let’s see how this blog posting works.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: browser

I purchased a Deep Space Nine video a long time ago as part of the Google Video store. Today I got this email stating that Google was ending its program and I would no longer be able to watch my video after August 15. Google was nice enough to give me a credit of $2 towards other stuff, but still. This is going to bring another round of people around to the understanding of why DRM is crap, and we need a better way.

Here’s the email:

Hello,

As a valued Google user, we're contacting you with some important
information about the videos you've purchased or rented from Google Video.
In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the
ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video, ending the
DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective
August 15, 2007.

To fully account for the video purchases you made before July 18, 2007, we
are providing you with a Google Checkout bonus for $2.00. Your bonus
expires in 60 days, and you can use it at the stores listed here:
http://www.google.com/checkout/signupwelcome.html. The minimum purchase
amount must be equal to or greater than your bonus amount, before shipping
and tax.

After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased
or rented videos.

If you have further questions or requests, please do not hesitate to
contact us. Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

The Google Video Team