The other day I was reflecting on the multitude of technological tools and services I use in the course of my day to day life. Some that seem vital to me today (e.g. Gmail) didn’t even exist a few years ago, while others that were so important to my life in the past (e.g. Usenet) I haven’t with bothered with for ages.

I thought it might be interesting to record what tools I currently use and how I use them. Ideally I could update it every year or so and thereby create a personal technological timeline.

And my first thought on looking at it? “Gosh that’s a long list.”
Continue Reading “My Technology : Point in Time” »

Currently I’m prepared to spend (all NZ dollars):

• about $5-15 for an ‘album’ worth of music. But only if it’s high-quality and unencumbered digital files. I don’t want your bits of plastic or your DRM.
• up to $25 on a physical book. But I use the library more.
• up to $10 on an electronic book, even if it’s encumbered and locked to my reading device. I’d consider paying more for an unencumbered one.
• up to about $40/year for access to a good website or online service (e.g. salon.com or fitday.com).
• up to $10 for an iPhone app, or up to $5 if it’s pretty trivial.
• $15 to see a movie or $17.50 if it’s in 3D. (Although I normally go on cheap Tuesday.)
• $10 to rent a movie on DVD or online.
• $1-2 for a downloaded TV episode.

Naturally it’s all subject to change. I used to pay $30 for a music CD!

My first computer was a 1990 i386 with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive, scrounged from the offices of a local shipping company. Complete with serial mouse, IBM Model M keyboard, and 15″ color VGA monitor, it was my parents’ hope for making me into a competent writer, but it better succeeded in making me a PC gamer. This ancient machine, 17 years old, is incredibly outdated in the physical basis of every technological detail, except one: its hard disk.

This is the introductory paragraph for a rather lightweight article about hard drives. It’s also a great example of a writer saying something obviously stupid purely because it suited the rhetorical framework that they had chosen to use.

Yes, the hard drive does still take the basic form that it did 17 years ago. But when kept to the same level of required similarity, so does the memory, the CPU, the motherboard, the case, the power supply, and the keyboard. Indeed, the only two major physical design changes I can think of when it comes to the common PC is the replacement of ball mice with optical mice, and the rise of the flat-screen LCD monitor.

Don’t you just hate it when reality gets in the way of a good line?

Ah, IT commentators, some of them are so young. About Microsoft:

They’ve got this new “consumer” bug where they think they’ve got to be a player in every consumer market. I think they would be better served sticking to their enterprise roots and not chase every consumer trend.

Enterprise roots? Microsoft may be the company that ended up changing how enterprises (I don’t like the term and it hurts me to use it but it’ll have to do) implemented IT but it took a long time to happen and they definitely didn’t start there. Indeed, the enterprise fought against Microsoft and their silly PCs for quite a while, and even when they let PCs in to the front office they still weren’t prepared to let Microsoft into the datacentre.

If you had to pick a term, “hobbyist roots” would probably be more accurate.

In an earlier post I complained about Vodafone’s rapacious pricing of casual data rates ($11000 per GB).

Now in the comments at this post from Rob Drury we get the Vodafone PR guy Paul Brislen boasting that “The front page of Stuff alone would cost a fortune to open…”

So, he’s using his company’s unconscionable pricing model to justify providing their own limited walled garden (Vodafone Live) that they just happen to make lots of money with.

They really do have no shame.

Microsoft have included the IDT High Definition Audio CODEC as an optional update within Windows Update. Installing it killed my audio as it has done for a number of other users.

I’d recommend not installing it for now.

(I ended up fixing it by uninstalling it and reinstalling the Dell audio drivers from scratch. Other options would be using System Restore to go back to before you installed it.)

I’m kind of disappointed because Windows Update has always been so amazingly solid for me in the past.

Some time ago I subscribed to eMusic.com for a number of reasons. Firstly, no matter how much I like my old favourites I crave the novelty of listening to music I haven’t heard before.

Secondly, I have completely and utterly lost the habit of buying CDs and I’d hardly know what to do with one once I got it. Thirdly, I can’t really be bothered with the hassle of finding and downloading music illegally. (RIP Oink, I miss you and your universal catalogue of well-ripped and properly tagged music.)

Fourthly, and in some ways most importantly to me when it came to actually signing up and paying money, eMusic did it right. The music you download from them is unencumbered moderately high-quality MP3s. No silly Apple or Microsoft enabled controls on what you could do with it or where you could listen to it.

I enjoyed using the service and got some good music to listen to (we’ll ignore the album of death-metal I downloaded by accident). But last year it didn’t seem worth it to me any more as I had no income and no decent internet connection, so I let my subscription lapse.

But eMusic is cunning and every so often they’d send me a little reminder email, “Come back! We has musics! Join us!” And then they got even more enticing and offered me 75 bonus downloads if I signed up again – so I did.

But there’s a new twist on the old service. eMusic’s catalogue was always a bit patchy and it was often a case of finding something good to download rather than going there with a particular artist or album in mind. But now it’s got even harder as:

We’re sorry. This album is unavailable for download in your country (New Zealand) at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Even worse, eMusic is sending me titillating emails that are promoting the very albums that I’m not allowed to download!

Yes, the music industry is back to its old tricks of trying to impose their will on their customers, saying that they’d rather not take our money so that their “product/marketing geniuses” can continue to play their consumer segmentation games.

I thought they’d learnt, that the invisible hand of the marketplace had given them a good slapping around and that they had resolved to not be so stupid any more. Apparently I was wrong and we’re going to have to go through another round of watching the music industry indulge in self-destructive behaviour. Maybe one day they’ll finally get it and they’ll actually make it easy for me to give them money in exchange for music.

I can still remember the event that made me really want wireless networking. I was sitting in a very boring developer meeting that had nothing of any interest or relevance for me. I day-dreamed about important things like lunch.

Then things went from bad to worse as the meeting started one of those silly go-nowhere arguments. It was at this point that I realised that the developer next to me wasn’t earnestly taking notes on his shiny TiBook (they were new and cool at the time) but was reading some website about digital cameras. This looked far more interesting than a pointless debate about code check-in comment style and I had to resist the urge to read over his shoulder. I then knew that I wanted the flexibility of that be-anywhere portable connection.

I’ve had wireless at home since soon after that meeting, starting with 802.11b at 11Mbps, then upgrading to the faster 54Mbps 802.11g when that was released. This upgrade was partly spurred by buying a new digital camera – loading 400kB photos over the old conenction wasn’t too bad, but the new camera’s 2000kB files just took too long.

We’ve been waiting for the next standard (802.11n at ~300Mbps) for some time now and it’s still not finished. That hasn’t stopped a number of manufacturers releasing equipment based on the draft standard, including Dlink and the DIR-655 that retails for just under $300. Of course you also need your computer to support 802.11n (many modern laptops do).

There has been some scepticism about the real performance advantages of using 802.11n, with some people reporting disappointing results that are hardly faster than 802.11g. Here’s the results from my simple test of copying a 1GB file (distance of a few metres from the access point, 802.11n network using mixed g/n).

That’s roughly 2.5 times faster. I’m happy with that.

Are there any IT sites with more than a few servers that don’t have at least one named after a Simpsons character? I’m writing up the servers at my current job and the names are a wonderfully typical cross-section of geek culture. Here’s a list of some of the names along with what I believe the reference is to (corrections welcome):

AGENTSMITH – The Matrix
BASIL – Fawlty Towers
BLUESTEEL – Zoolander
BORAT – Ali G/Borat
CORLEONE – The Godfather
CYBERTRON – Transformers
DRGONZO – Hunter S Thompson
MAGGIE – The Simpsons
PEDRO – Napoleon Dynamite
RAOUL – The Addams Family
RATCHET – Transformers rather than the Ratchet & Clank video game
REN – Ren & Stimpy
RIVENDELL – Lord of the Rings
SHELOB – Lord of the Rings
SHOCKWAVE – Transformers rather than The Shockwave Rider
STARSCREAM – Transformers
STIMPY – Ren & Stimpy
VERBAL – The Usual Suspects

Notable omissions:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Buffy/Angel/etc

(I did consider whether there were any confidentiality or security implications of posting this and I couldn’t think of any.)