A really quick post today to recommend an interview with Rick Timmis of Adaptive Linux Solutions, a UK based open source IT deployment company. The interview is part of the March 15, 2006 episode of The Linux Link Tech Show; skip to around 33 minutes into the show for the start of the interview.
Last week was my experimental week of commuting from my home in Alameda to the new Devicescape office in San Bruno. The morning route consists of taking the Alameda-Oakland ferry from Alameda to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. From there, I cross the road and drop down into Embarcadero BART station and catch a Millbrae/SFO train to San Bruno (the station in the Tanforan shopping mall). Finally, I catch the shuttle bus up to Cherry Avenue, or I can walk it in about 20 minutes. The evening is basically the reverse of that route.
Opinions? Well, the ferry service is great. The only things missing from it are free Wi-Fi access (which is available on the other Alameda ferry service) and espresso coffee drinks (they do have regular coffee though, and a full range of other drinks including cocktails for those return trips after a long day!).
The BART segment is less impressive though. BART is noisy (making it difficult to listen to my growing podcast collection), and unpleasant, even for a subway train service. The no food/drink policy might save them some cleaning, but it is losing them an important revenue source and making the journey less pleasant for commuters. Other subway train services around the world not only allow food and drink, but sell it at the stations. Vendors pay for space in the stations, even on the platforms. Vending machines, selling food and drinks, are also common sights on other subway systems. Imagine even 1% of all those latte drinks that get consumed each day; it might even allow them to invest more in the service.
Finally, when the bay area finally gets its act together and has the TransLink system running, these cards could be used pay for newspapers, drinks and snacks from the station vendors, providing another source of revenue for the operators (the service fee for handling the transaction). London’s Oyster and Tokyo’s Suica cards already provide these services and more. When will the supposed heart of the high-tech world catch up?
And we won’t even talk about how badly they handled the bomb scare incident on Wednesday, suffice to say that I sat at Embarcadero for almost an hour because they had closed a station that was not even part of my route. Seems that in addition to handling the station evacuation badly, it appears that they have no plans in place for operating service over a partial system. When a key station like West Oakland is shut down, they should still be able to run services over the two disconnected portions of the system.
BoingBoing posted an article yesterday describing how EMI has released a CD in Brazil that contains DRM malware which installs regardless of whether you agree to it, and has no uninstaller option.
Confusingly, the posting also states the DRM “blocks you from playing the CD on Linux and MacOS, and from loading it onto an iPod.” I don’t see how a Windoze DRM application would prevent me using the CD on Linux or MacOS (I’d love to hear from somebody who has tried this). I can see how it would block a Windoze user though, and that is another demonstration of just how out of touch with the reality of the way people listen to music the music companies have become. People don’t want to carry larger devices and stacks of CDs around to listen to their music. They want to transfer the content from their CDs to the small device of their choice, and listen that way. Also, given the Sony DRM incident, I wouldn’t trust any DRM software from a music company, and especially not one that installs itself even if you ask it not to.
Thanks to the Daily Irrelevant for the pointer to this article.
All around the Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco this morning were oranges with stickers on them pointing at a web site: Godfather321.com. This appears to be a marketing campaign for a new EA game based on the Godfather movie.
Clicking on the right-most orange on the main page of the Godfather321.com site reveals movie clips of the oranges in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. (You might need to reduce your window size for that to play smoothly, and it seems a little distorted in Google’s player, but you get the idea.)
I’ve added a bluedonkey.org tag to all the photos in my Flickr account that have appeared on the blog (and I will tag any that appear in future the same way). Then, using the Mosaic Maker from fd’s Flickr Toys I created the square mosaic with the latest 36 photos with that tag on them.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog reports that Nirlog.com has a step-by-step guide to booting Windows XP on Apple’s latest MacBook Pro laptop. Earlier in the week they also reported that Windows XP was booting on the new iMac machines too. Problem with this in my mind, is why would you bother?
Dual booting is annoying. I live on machines that I never shut down (my laptops sleep, but rarely shutdown). I have lots of windows, mostly command line shells, open that I wouldn’t want to close just to switch to another operating system, and then have to switch back. If you want to do this, get something like VMware that lets you run multiple operating systems at the same time. So, here’s a real challenge to the folks working on XP: get VMware, or something similar, running on a MacBook Pro with Windoze running inside it. That would be something that might be useful to those stuck with running a Windoze app.
Running Windoze in place of the far superior Mac OS X seems odd too. Why open your machine up to all the problems that Windoze brings? I would have thought it would have been a more interesting hack to see if they could get Mac OS X running on another Intel based computer. There are a number of non-Apple Core Duo laptops out there now, like the 12″ Thinkpad X60; how about getting one of those to boot Mac OS X? That would be a worthwhile upgrade.
Devicescape has moved its headquarters to a new office building in San Bruno. Opposite our new home is a small strip mall area called the Bayhill Shopping Center, in which there is a Mollie Stone’s supermarket. In the Mollie Stone’s supermarket, there is a small area that sells British foods, as well as some other international foods. And, in there I found Marmite; something that I had been able to get at Albertsons until fairly recently when they dropped it. (For any Australian ex-pats in the SF Bay Area, they also stock Vegemite.)
They had a lot more things from home too, including Quorn which I had previously only found in Whole Foods Market stores.
Seems that even underwear is going wireless these days, at least in Victoria’s Secret. This new form of wireless is even patent protected (US patent 6,986,696).
Not clear from any of the information available whether this is employing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or an entirely new form of wireless technology called IPEX; nor is it clear what the purpose is.
Inside the grounds of Dover Castle, high up atop the famous white cliffs, there is a picnic area. Alongside one of the tables is an old mobile gun, designed to be towed around behind a jeep or similar vehicle. This is the hub of one of its wheels, close up.
So, I have been playing with IM a little this weekend, trying to reconcile the many IM accounts I seem to have acquired recently (mostly with something else). I now have a Google Talk IM for work use, my Yahoo! account that I’ve been using for a long time, my GizmoProject account and a test account I setup at Jabber.org (though I don’t use that for much). I also wanted to play with iChat‘s video conferencing.
But how to deal with all these different IM systems without running them all (if that was even an option, which it is not since Google haven’t learnt to support Linux and Mac OS X yet).
So, on my Linux box I am using Gaim. It works, though it is not exactly the most advanced client out there. On the Mac though I found Adium X. Now this is cool, and yet more evidence of how far Linux desktops have to go before they come close to Mac OS. It looks good and it works well. Gaim works OK, but does not have the looks of Adium X.
Finally, I used the iChat video conferencing system for a trans-Atlantic video conference and it worked pretty well. Was a little fussy getting connected once or twice (gave a very strange error message saying I didn’t respond when I was the person initiating the call), but when it worked the video looked good and the sound worked using the builtin mic & speakers (no headset needed).
