September 2005 Archives

AOpen has announced its new "Pandora" mini PC.  This ultra-small-form-factor PC should look very familiar to anyone who recognizes Apple's Mac Mini:

 
   
Separated at Birth? AOpen's Pandora (left) and Apple's Mac Mini (right)

I've been a fan of Gwen Stefani's and No Doubt's for some time.  I have a weakness for women whose voices sound sort of sweet and innocent but who are willing to sing strong lyrics with a bit of an edge to them.  Juliana Hatfield (of solo and Blake Babies fame) is another such artist.  Thus, when I saw that "Love.Angel.Music.Baby." had come out, I was immediately interested in it.  After listening to it a few times, I've come to a couple of conclusions about it.

As I suspected when I reported it yesterday, Apple's iPod Nano indeed has a quality problem.  Earlier today, Apple admitted that a "vendor quality issue" caused the cracked screens that many iPod Nano customers are seeing.  As a result, they've agreed to replace broken units.  What I wonder is whether they'd have done this without the bad press they've gotten over it.

Undaunted by my lack of success in getting a free iPod (so far), I've decided to pursue getting a free Sony PlayStation Portable from the http://www.internetopiniongroup.com/ site. I'll keep a running log here of what transpires along the the way in this article.  If you're not interested in a free PSP, the same site also offers the Motorola i833 phone, Nintendo DS, Apple iBook, Motorola Razr V3 phone, and Philips 20" LCD TV.  (No, I don't get any referral bonuses if you sign up.)

 

 

I recently watched and reviewed Kung-Fu Hustle from Steven Chow.  A friend informed me that Chow had also directed and starred in "Shaolin Soccer".  Since Kung Fu Hustle was such an incredible movie, I had Netflix ship Shaolin Soccer right away.  I've watched it 3-4 times now.

Shaolin Soccer focuses on "Mighty Steel Leg Sing", a Kung Fu master who is trying hard to increase the popularity of Kung Fu by applying it to everyday tasks that have nothing to do with fighting or martial arts.  He explains that it could improve a soccer player's kick, prevent someone from falling when slipping on a banana peel, make trimming shrubs faster, etc.  He's not having any luck selling anyone on the idea, or selling them his Kung Fu lessons, so he's basically broke.




Sing meets "Golden Leg Fung", a former soccer star who threw a critical game in 1983 and was brutalized by fans.  Their attack left him unable to play and barely able to walk.  Sing tries unsuccessfully to convince Fung to take Kung Fu lessons from him.  Drunk and offended by one of Sing's comments, Fung throws his beer can at Sing.  Sing kicks the can what appears to be several blocks away.  Fung is at first impressed by this, then brushes it off as a cheap trick.

This review has to start with a couple of admissions.  First, I happen to think Cyndi Lauper (especially in her later albums) is an underrated songwriter and performer.  Most people think of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and dismiss her as an 80's pop culture icon (which she was, but she's a lot more than that).  Some of her later ballads are sung with great emotion and are among the best-written songs I've ever heard.  On the other hand, I really HATE remixes, especially when they're done solely to try to make "danceable" a song that was never intended to be dance music.  So I approached this album with a mix of excitement and fear... excitement that the "rarities" would be more of Cyndi's great songwriting and fear that the remixes would suck, as remixes tend to do.

If you're not familiar with them, the Bloodhound Gang is known for some rather raunchy lyrics, delivered with a healthy dose of humor.  The CD single "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" is no exception.  The single features three variations of the same song.  The first is the "straight" version they presumably recorded in the studio.  Second comes a remix by Jason Nevis (which to my ears is barely different from the original).  Third is a very different remix that gives the song a kind of "outer space disco" sound.

My musical taste would probably be described by most people as "very eclectic" or "unfocused" or simply "weird".  My music collection includes the likes of Morrissey, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Annie Lennox, The Beatles, Willie Nelson, Conway Twitty, Beethoven, Bach, AC/DC, and others you wouldn't expect to see on the same shelf.  But the further toward the musical fringes you get, the less likely you'll find me listening to it.  For example, metal that gets much heavier than AC/DC is not something I care much for.  I pretty much hate jazz altogether, and I wouldn't listen to Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, or James Taylor if you begged me.

When I first encountered the name of the band "Death Cab for Cutie", I pretty much dismissed it offhand.  With a name like that, I figured, they're probably some kind of goth-metal-punk band that sounds like a room full of industrial equipment going at full tilt.  I'm big enough to admit I was wrong.  They sound nothing like that.  In fact, they remind me a lot of the alternative bands I listened to on college radio in the 80's and 90's.  I felt very much at home and comfortable with them, almost as if I'd been listening to them for years.  Their latest album is "Plans" and was the first Death Cab for Cutie album I'd ever heard.

As discussed in another article on this web site, the OS X World Clock Dashboard widget can become a severe drain on system resources if it's left active on the screen for long periods of time since the last reboot.  Even when it has just been started up on a freshly rebooted system, it uses quite a bit of CPU.

For example, here's what Activity Monitor showed me when I launched the World Clock Widget on a 933 MHz G4 running MacOS X 10.4.2:



As you can see, CPU usage is in the 7-10% range.  If left on screen long enough, it will grow to as much as 80-85% of the CPU while it's active (0% when not shown on screen).  It will also consume quite a bit of RAM, potentially all the RAM on the system.

If you make the changes I'm going to suggest below, you can reduce that CPU usage considerably (though the Widget will still gradually increase its CPU and RAM usage over time for reasons I haven't figured out).  The Activity Monitor image below is what resource consumption looks like on the modified World Clock:



The first "World Clock DashboardClient" process above is mine (the one that's using 1.30% of the CPU).  The second "World Clock DashboardClient" process is an unchanged OS X 10.4 World Clock widget that has been left running on-screen for the better part of 4 days.  As you can see, it's grabbed about 80% of the CPU, 200MB of RAM, and 350MB of virtual memory.  My modified client (which hasn't been running very long) is using a lot less CPU and RAM (though it shares whatever is wrong in the unmodified widget that increases CPU and RAM usage over time - but it seems not to consume them as quickly).

My changes reduce CPU consumption from 7-8% down to about 1.2%.  You still have a second-hand, but you are eliminating the "sweep" (or "wiggle") the second-hand does as it revolves around the clock.  Apparently that sweeping action increases the widget's CPU usage by around 600%.  (Making it a good example of why I hate little utilities that do cutesy graphical changes to the system or OS features that waste lots of CPU just to animate things.)

(There are updates for 9/21 and 9/22/05 that appear after the graphs and charts on this page. Don't miss them, because they help wrap this little project up...)

Last Thursday I was running a compile of an open source package on a 933 MHz Macintosh G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.2 with all of Apple's latest patches and updates.  The compilation seemed to be going more slowly than I expected, so I wondered if it was really using all of the available CPU.  I brought up the Activity Monitor and saw THIS:



World Clock was consuming over 46% of my CPU?! That seemed very wrong to me, since World Clock does nothing more than display the current time somewhere on Earth.  Why would it need 46% of my CPU to do that?  I figured maybe the process had been corrupted by a power outage or some other problem.  I used Activity Monitor to stop the process, which restarted itself automatically.

These days, "content protection" is all the rage in the music and movie industries.  It's understandable that they want to prevent consumers from illegally duplicating products that they've spent millions of dollars to produce.  I respect their reasons for doing it, but I don't like Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies in general.  Most have significant limitations that make the content far less desirable than it would be without the DRM protection on it.

Case in point, music CDs.  Most days I walk around with a Creative Labs Nomad Zen Xtra MP3 player attached to my belt.  I use it to listen to audiobooks, the Bob and Tom radio show, a gaming podcast from the Columbus Dispatch, and various other audio content.  That player doesn't play CDs.  So if I buy a music CD, I'm more likely to be playing it on the MP3 player or the PC than anywhere else.  For those uses, an MP3 file is the perfect format for my music to be in.  My car has an MP3 player in it, I carry the Nomad around with me to play music outside the car, and MP3 is an efficient format for storing audio on the computer (yes, I know there are others and some are better than MP3).  If I can't "rip" my music CDs to MP3s, they're next-to-useless for me because I can't put them on the MP3 player and I often have other uses for the optical drive on my computer (e.g., game CDs).

The band Switchfoot recently released an album through Sony.  Sony, by default, uses a DRM product to prevent casual copying of its music CDs.  This DRM system prevents the disc from being ripped into MP3 files.  The band didn't like that, and their fans had a real problem with it, too.  So, unlike much of the media industry, they actually gave their fans some solutions for ripping the DRM-protected discs to MP3s.  (See http://forums1.sonymusic.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/716102313/m/5201067064 for Switchfoot's write-up.)

Chances are if you're reading this soon after its publication (September 17, 2005) there is a good chance you'll be able to catch Bruce Campbell's "Man with the Screaming Brain" on the Sci-Fi Channel.  They've been running it pretty regularly.  If you're familiar with Bruce Campbell's other work, in movies like Army of Darkness, Bubba Ho-Tep, Terminal Invasion, Alien Apocalypse, and the like, you pretty much know what to expect from this movie. 

If you're not familiar with Bruce Campbell (shame on you!), I'll try to give you an idea.  Bruce is known for being the star of "B-movies".  His characters are usually blowhards whose egos are bigger than their abilities can support.  As a result, you should rarely take his characters, his movies, or even some occasional over-acting as anything other than humorous.  Bruce knows he's doing some very silly, very campy, very funny stuff.  That's kind of the point.  So it is with "Man with the Screaming Brain".

Warning:  From this point on I'm going to be spoiling virtually the entire plot of this movie, though I'm intentionally leaving out a few of the funnier and interesting bits so that you'll have a reason to watch the movie when you get the chance.

As part of the research I've been doing into how easy it could be for a Mac OS X user to switch to Linux, I decided to load one of the more popular UNIX distributions and familiarize myself with it.  I didn't want to dedicate an entire PC to Linux, so setting up a virtual machine in which to test Linux seemed the right approach. 

What is virtual machine software?  That's hard to explain, but I'll give it a shot.  Virtual machine software "pretends" to be a complete computer, only it's software rather than hardware.  A good virtual machine program will allow an entire operating system to run inside it, with that operating system completely unaware that it isn't running inside its own PC.  There are many uses for virtual machine software, including testing and debugging operating systems, performing security testing ("honeypots" to attract viruses/worms, for example), and testing software with multiple operating systems without having to devote an entire PC to one OS.  In this case, having virtual machine software will allow me to run Linux on a Windows XP Pro system without disturbing my Windows installation.  Linux will be there when I want it or need it.  All I have to do is launch the virtual machine.

If you're not familiar with ReactOS and you are involved in the use or support of Microsoft Windows, you should take a moment to learn about it.  ReactOS is a serious competitor to Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as a desktop OS.  Or rather, it will be someday.

As part of my ongoing research into how easy it would be for an artist to move from the Mac OS X platform to Linux, I decided to take a look at the open source Inkscape application and compare it to a popular Macintosh drawing program, Macromedia FreeHand.  In a prior job, and as a side business some years ago, I used FreeHand pretty regularly to create graphics.  With FreeHand as my standard (I had tried Adobe Illustrator back in those days and found it very non-intuitive to use), I determined to find out if I could find any serious deficiencies in Inkscape that would make it unsuitable for a former FreeHand user to work with.

As part of the research I've been doing into whether a Mac OS X user could find life on Linux acceptable, I took a look at the free Scribus open source desktop publishing application.  In the past, I've done graphic design and page layout as a part of my job, and am intimately familiar with PageMaker 6.0 on the Macintosh platform (pre OS X).  In appropriate places during this review, I'll compare Scribus to my memories of PageMaker.

In the last article in this series, we took a closer look at search engines. We saw how they find sites to spider, saw how our web site looks to a search engine spider, and talked about how search engines classify pages using keywords and keyphrases. This installment will talk about how search engines decide which pages should be listed first in their results, why others get listed later, and why some get banned or blocked altogether.

In the first article in this series, we saw how search engines work. They have 'spiders? which crawl the web looking for pages to store in a database, a 'search page? that people use to find web pages of interest, and a 'search engine? that helps translate what people ask for into a list of pages that seem to be most relevant. The process looks like this:

This article is intended to be the first in a series of articles on this web site about search engines, optimizing your site for search engines, improving your site ranking, etc.  It explains at a high level what a search engine is, what it does, and how it does it.  This provides the basis for future discussions.

The World Wide Web contains many millions of web sites. Those web sites contain tens or hundreds of individual pages of content (information). If there was no such thing as a search engine, finding the page or pages you want out of the millions available would be at best a difficult and problematic exercise, and at worst, frustrating and impossible. This is the void that search engines fill in the Internet. You can tell a search engine that you?re interested in ?Ancient burial masks? and it will try to find pages from the millions available that talk about that subject. It will then give you a list of what it found and let you decide which ones might be helpful to you.

When I look in a ClamWin scan report, I often see the following errors (or something very similar):


Does this indicate a problem or virus on my computer?  Why can't ClamWin open these files?

As many of you know, the UPN series "Star Trek: Enterprise" was taken off the air earlier this year, never to return.  Paramount tells us that they don't plan to introduce a new Star Trek series for at least a couple of years.  Reasons I've seen given by the Paramount executives for the series' failure include:

• Competition with four previous series running in syndication (1)
• There's some "erosion" of interest in the franchise (1)
• Low ratings (2)
• There's no longer an audience for science-fiction (3)
  
  

Though I am not convinced that anything other than the "low ratings" have anything to do with the real reason the show was canceled, the reasons themselves show some surprising lack of touch with the Star Trek fan base.  If people really are watching re-runs of the four older series instead of the new one, that should tell you that the new series isn't "reaching" the hearts and minds of your audience.  If there is an erosion of interest in the franchise, then you must be doing something wrong.  Consider Doctor Who on the BBC, which has managed to deliver what its audience has wanted for decades without any such "erosion".  And if there was no longer an audience for science-fiction, why has the Sci-Fi Channel found such success with Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica?  Why are audiences still watching Star Trek: The Original Series, etc.?  No, it wasn't competition with other Star Trek series, erosion of interest, or the lack of an audience for science-fiction that caused the low ratings for Enterprise and its subsequent demise.  It was the lack of a vision.