teh blog of Jim

The Metal in the Penny is worth 5 cents. Start hoarding those pennies

jimX — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:11:32 +0000

jimX — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:08:58 +0000

We have just gotten an anonymous tip from a source that indicates that Apple is planning a special event on February 20 to introduce Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07 as well as updated Mac Pros.

Hmm… maybe some updated Mac Minis and new displays too?

Updated: 20 things apple should implement

jimX — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:05:28 +0000

Well, it’s after MacWorld…

I’m underwhelmed by the iPhone. No 3G? eh… I was hoping for 3G… I can deal with it… No 3rd party apps? Locked to Cingular with no way to unlock it? Fsck no!!1!

Here’s an update of my last post, 20 things apple should implement

Sell DVORAK Keyboards - I still want one for the Mac.
Update to 802.11n - Does this need explination?
Upgrade the iSight - 1280×1024 for video… is it realy that expensive or hard?
Move the Mac Mini to the Core 2 Duo, work on Leopard - 64 bit is awesome, I’d like to be able to afford it.
three buttoned mouse - not five…. three.
Update the Mac Mini - 64 bit, better grpahics, silent, Sold state drives.
Make the startup chime optional - It just annoys me.
Work closer with nVidia and ATI - I want to buy a graphics card at WalMart, put it into my mac and have it work. This means EFI and BIOS support on all cards. EFI won’t get industry support until everything works with everything.
ZFS - Make it bootable!

Happy new year and all that rot.

Dear Google

jimX — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 06:42:14 +0000

STOP.
INDEXING.
WIKIPEDIA!

Dear Google,
For several days now, Wikipedia has been excruciatingly slow, to the point of it being unusable. I have heard that this happens when you index it, and I’ve noticed that the latest caches of Wikipedia pages are within the last few days. Knowing this, I have been able to determine that you are currently in the process of re-indexing the free encyclopedia. By doing this you are depriving the world of a valuable resource. Please stop. Instead, I suggest that you buy an xServe RAID and ask the wikimedia foundation to copy their articles onto it once a week. Then, the array can be shipped back to a Google office for indexing. This would be cheaper for the Wikimedia foundation, and it would allow for the free flow of information that the Internet and Wikipedia were designed to facilitate.

-jX

Merry Christmas!

jimX — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 01:01:08 +0000

I love christmas.

I hate out of tune cellos, small children, and hymnals that don’t keep consistant lyrics between printings.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

EDIT: PS. Cellphones and bluetooth are awesome. They let me update my blog from pretty much anywhere.

Why open source isn’t working

jimX — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 04:28:12 +0000

I’ve been reading a lot lately about why ZFS, the filesystem developed by Sun Microsystems, is so important to users of Mac OSX. It all sounds great! I want ZFS! oh wait… Windows doesn’t support it? Linux uses a userland hack? Linux can’t boot from it?

Why?!?! I thought Linux and ZFS were both open source?

Oh… Licensing. :-\

Well… isn’t the point of open source software to innovate without legal formalities? Since ZFS is so revolutionary, and Linux so widespread, why can’t Sun tweak their license to allow for ZFS inclusion in the Linux Kernel? Or, can Sun… just once… fork the code and hand it over to Linus Torvalds under the WTF Public License?

ZFS, with all it’s fancy features and redundancy would easily become the filesystem of choice for Server Admins, business users, and the small yet dedicated home userbase.

So what needs to be done?

Modify the GPL and/or CDDL so that code can be shared between the two licenses
Code ZFS into the Linux Kernel
Code ZFS support into GRUB and LILO
Code fsck and similar utilities for ZFS support

DO IT!

oh… have I mentioned how much I love Firefox’s spellcheck feature?

Merry Christmas!

The Day The Internet Shut Down

jimX — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 20:09:28 +0000

At approximately 2:00AM Eastern Daylights Savings time on October 21st 2005, The Internet effectively shut down. This was caused when Level3 Communications’s Teir-1 network went dark as a result of “severe routing problems” in a Chicago facility. Next, went Verio (a subsidiary of NTT Communications), as it was forced to compensate with the extra traffic that usually went through Level3’s network, causing a DDoS style effect. All of this while Level3 had pretty much cut the wire to Cogent (another Teir-1 ISP) over anti-competitive practices, or a scheduled router upgrade had been botched, the actual cause is not known.

With the Internet Sliced into 4 very equally-sized pieces, email to and from someone on your own ISP was almost impossible and trying to send email to someone with a different ISP left IT guys either laughing or crying.

This is how Hierarchal design of the internet is a bad thing.

-jX

More Ideas!!

jimX — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 23:40:39 +0000

AMD,

Please do the following:

Starting with the K8L series, include on-chip randomness generator based off of atomic decay.
Jack up the number of FPUs and make them wider or put them on a separate, user-upgradeable chip.
I don’t want this “4×4″ crap you’re pushing. I want a native Quad-core design by the next FX release.
Up the bus speeds! There’s no work for the shiny processor if the data can’t get to it.
Copy Intel. Copy their Instruction sets and implement them in all your processors. Also, make some of your own that will help with gaming, video editing, protein folding, and cryptography.
Have chips clock themselves based off of their temperature and workload unless (trusted) software requests to modify it.
Up the caches. Can’t go wrong with that.

20 Things Apple Should Implement

jimX — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 03:06:44 +0000

Sell the iPhone
The iPhone would be an excellent investment for Apple, as many people (including Your Humble Narrator) would want to buy one.
Make the 16:9 iPod
People want it, let them have it!
Sell DVORAK-Layout Keyboards
As Apple’s primary market is of the pro-sumer (read “nerdy and proud”) type, DVORAK keyboards would aid in serving this niche market by staving off carpal tunnel syndrome.
Update to 802.11n
Although the specification is not complete, Apple should roll out draft 802.11n hardware so that consumers can get a taste of the speed and range it offers. Once the final specification has been published, firmware updates could bring the hardware to that specification.
Upgrade the iSight
iSights (or as I refer to them, Whore-cams, for their obvious potential use) are currently able to capture 640×480 images at 30 frames per second. Upgrading these to at least two megapixels would allow for better picture when video chatting and better pictures when using photobooth.
Move Completely to 64-bit and Don’t Look Back
64-bit processors like Intel’s Core 2 Solo, Core 2 Duo, and upcoming Core 2 Quadro all support the standard x86 implementation of 64-bit processing, known to the Unix community as AMD64 (as opposed to Intel’s failed IA64), which can give a speed boost to some number-intensive applications like Video editing, protein folding, and cryptography.
Use 3-Buttoned Mice
Left-click, right-click, wheel-click. It’s everything you need. Nothing more, nothing less.
Cellular Modem Options
For the MacBook Pro (read “Professional”, as in business) it only makes sense that a cellular modem be offered. Imagine if a business user simply had to insert their SIM Card into their shiny system and have a 6Mbit connection at their fingertips?

Of course, it would support the standard Cellular and PCS protocols, such as GPRS, EDGE, 3G, and HSDPA. However, if the device were software-based and had hardware support for 850, 900, 1800, 1900, and 2100MHz bands, software updates could be used to provide for changes in cellular technology. In this case, a hardware upgrade would only be needed if a different set of frequencies comes into use.
Cool Batteries
No, I’m not talking about Badass rapper Nickel-cadmiums who are tight with “fiddy”, I’m talking about Lithium Ion batteries that don’t explode, catch fire, or think they’re C4 or thermite. Knowing that you’re going to have a groin and/or home 20 minutes from now is very comforting to customers.
Build Mac Mini That Can Drive the 30″ Display at Full Resolution
Is it really that hard? Update the graphics hardware just a wee bit… tiny computer + big display = teh awesome. The feeling would be almost James Bond-like. Imagine having a huge-ass display mounted on your wall and sitting on your desk is the smallest yet usable computer known to man. You lazily roll away from the desk on your spinny chair and send a few terminal commands to the system via the bluetooth keyboard. You’re so 1337.
Make the Mac Mini Silent
This means no fans. The Mac Mini, paired with a 30″ Display (see above), could be the ultimate Home entertainment system. Also, a comparison between a budget-level *coughDellcough* PC and a silent Mac Mini could land a few sales to the Audiophile and easily-annoyed market.
Offer Solid State Storage
A solid state storage device could speed up boot times, program launches, remove the noisy hard drive, save battery life, prevent lost data from sudden drops, and make systems smaller and lighter. The latter three are characteristics perfect for the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.
Linux Support in BootCamp
Although OSX is an excellent Unix-based operating system, some things can only be done in Linux. For example, Stanford University’s Folding@Home software was compiled for OSX on PPC. This leaves the user with four options: Use the Rosetta translator software (which means that the folding application takes a performance hit), use Microsoft Windows (eww), use WINE to emulate windows (and take a perfomance hit), or use Linux.

Although teams of clever Linux Gurus have made MacIntel hardware boot Linux, it is not elegant by far, as driver support in Linux for the Mac hardware is rough around the edges at best.
Ability to silence the startup chime
The chime just annoys me. I don’t know why, but I’m sure I’m not alone. A quick google search comes up with several unofficial ways to disable the sound, but I’d prefer an official solution.
Open Up Xgrid
In a perfect world, everyone would have enough money to provide themselves and their families with food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and a server rack full of Xserves. However this world is not perfect and few of us have that kind of money. In order to bring simple grid computing to the technically inclined, I suggest that Apple open up the protocols or produce and release a free (gratis/as in beer) boot image for PPC, PPC64, x86 and AMD64 machines that allows their resources to be allocated to an Xgrid. Since this obviously breaks their business model concerning clusters, I would also suggest a numerical limit to the number of non-Mac machines that can be run in one grid, perhaps 20.
Youth Outreach Program
Over the years, my public school district in western Pennsylvania has bought hundreds, if not, thousands of Macintosh computers (hell, the elementary schools still have Apple ][s!) . Sadly, they’re poorly maintained. For example, my C++ class is taught on iMac G3s from 1999. These systems overheat regularly, thus crashing, and obtaining the name “Crapples” from the student body. Newer eMacs are used in the Library environment, and are in excellent shape — because they’re rarely used. The authentication server used for the Library system is poorly equipped to handle the number of machines assigned to it, often taking 30-40 minutes to accept a student’s credentials, if at all. It doesn’t help that the library infrastructure is made exclusively out of Ethernet hubs, either.
Pseudo-BIOS and SLI
Although I admit that EFI is an excellent idea, and this problem will solve itself in a few months (in the form of EFI-compatible cards from nVidia and ATI), backward compatibility is needed. The Mac Pro is a very powerful system, perfect for gaming… except for one thing… the graphics card options. In my opinion, nVidia is the king of graphics. As such, I would like to see a dual-7950GTX solution for the Mac Pro. This isn’t currently possible because the firmware on the graphics board is expecting to see a PC-style BIOS on the other end of the PCI-Express lane, as opposed to the EFI. I expect that nVidia’s next generation of graphics cards (the 8xxx series) will support both EFI and BIOS, forcing ATI to do the same with their rebuttal technology.
Lower Prices
Every consumer’s dream is to see the item they’ve been lusting after fall into their price range. I’d like to suggest (read as “request”) that Apple lower their profit margins on their computer systems in order to sell more. It’s not a complicated concept. If lowering your price 2% gets you 5% more sales, you’ve just made 3% more than what you would have without lowering your prices.
Back Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD
This is a big one… having a system that can play the disk that your clueless aunt bought you for Christmas would be a major comfort when the holiday’s come around.
Ok… this isn’t all that important…
Include a ParaPara game with every iSight and iSight-equipped MacBook:

Can’t you just smell the Japanese flowing out of your screen?

-jX

Huh… it appears that I’ve been Dugg.

I hate school.

jimX — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 01:37:43 +0000

From http://smartpei.typepad.com/

-Passive acceptance is a more desirable response to ideas than active criticism.
-Discovering knowledge is beyond the power of students and is, in any case, none of their business.
-Recall is the highest form of intellectual achievement, & the collection of unrelated ‘facts’ is the goal of education.
-The voice of authority is to be trusted & valued more than independent judgment.
-One’s own ideas & those of one’s classmates are inconsequential.
-Feelings are irrelevant in education.
-There is always a single, unambiguous Right Answer to a question.
-English is not history & history is not science & science is not art & art is not music, & art & music are minor subjects & English, history & science are major subjects, & a subject is something you ‘take’ &, when you have taken it, you have ‘had’ it, & if you have ‘had’ it, you are immune & need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of education?)

… and the fact that…

I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, and I usually don’t catch the bus. This leaves me late to school and tired from my 4-5 hours sleep.

The school building is filthy and disease ridden. We have rodents, birds, mold, overflowing toilets, and allergy-provoking plants.

I hate most of the people in the school. Yes, I have friends. But we are what the “popular kids” refer to as “freaks” when they’re talking amongst themselves.

The cafteria food is nasty, and a ripoff.

The school administration is clueless. They have required that when a student writes a paragraph, it must be in “SEXXI” Format. This is a statement, followed by an explanation, two examples, and then an implication. This form is nothing but aggravating to independent thinkers such as myself.

The school IT administration is clueless. They’ve used hubs throughout the network, so data collisions prevent the network from being used. The filtering software is set to the “Nazi” setting, disallowing cold remedies (”Drug paraphernalia”), Technical sites (”Hacking/Proxy bypass”), Informative articles on Communism (”Hate speech”), and Myspace (”Porn”). Also, the student file storage server is unable to fill the requests required for the proper function of the technology-involved classes (like C++, VB.NET, and Multimedia Production.)

Most of the teachers are clueless. These teachers are those individuals who flunked out of real life. (Banking, Chemical Research, etc.)

Everything is the student’s fault. It’s not the teacher’s ability to teach, its that there are 35+ students who happen to be in the same class that become retarded during that class period and then return to their normal intelligence level during the next class-change.