January, 2007


8
Jan 07

life without IM

huh. i’ve accidentally been forgetting to turn on my IM client (adium) for the past few days, and have noticed that my productivity has been a lot higher (if not quite as social). i think i’m going to experiment with that some.


8
Jan 07

CES & MacWorld

I think I’ll write some more about how I feel about Apple lately tonight if I can find some time, but as I watch the newsfeeds all come in from CES, I can’t help but feel like it’s sort of irrelevant. I mean, there’s a bunch of cool stuff there, but it just feels like a whole mess of it will be irrelevant after MacWorld tomorrow. That’s how large Jobs is towering over the industry. It just feels like everyone is guessing about what might be neat, in preparation for hearing it from Steve. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Vista Media Edition will be huge. Maybe.


8
Jan 07

Parallels vs VMWare Fusion vs Crossover vs BootCamp

I’ve really enjoyed having my Intel-based MacBook Pro this last year or so — while it’s a bit of a quirky machine and runs hotter than the sun, it’s probably my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. One of the great things about it is virtualization — the ability to run other operating systems as guest processes while still working in OSX.

Why do I care? Well, maybe 4 reasons:

1) Quicken — Quicken for Windows is significantly more feature-rich and less crashy than Quicken for OS X. I’ve gone back and forth on this one, have used Quicken in both environments a bunch, and just can’t get happy with the OS X version. It’s made a bigger problem lately by the lack of a Universal Binary, which means that it’s running emulated (sloooooowwwww), and I find my machine running extra-strangely when Rosetta (the emulation layer) is running. (Apple, if you can release even a marginal spreadsheet tomorrow as part of iWork 07, my life will be a lot better. I know I’ll still need Excel & Word from time to time, but not nearly as much. Hmm. Maybe I’ll post about that in another note.)

2) Firefox — As Firefox is pretty much my bread and butter, and we run on (more than) Windows, Linux, and OS X, it’s great to be able to flip over to Windows or Ubuntu or whatever to see how it works, test out issues that get reported by partners, that sort of thing.

3) Other new stuff — Less frequent than previously, but every once in a while, something comes out that only runs on Windows. The Venice Project is a good example (that I’m going to experiment with and hopefully blog about later this week).

4) Remembering what Windows is like, and playing around with Vista — as much as I like my current OS X operating environment (and I do, a lot — it works the best of any system that I’ve ever used, really), it’s important to remember that most of the world doesn’t have the same experience (for lots of reasons, not just OS X). So I like periodically living in Windows XP or Vista for a bit of time so that I don’t lose my muscle memory. Also interesting to play around with Ubuntu and notice what great strides they’re making in terms of getting Linux to “just work” in lots of different cases.

I’ve been using Parallels for about 6 months now, and it works incredibly well. The team has built a program which gets better by the month, it seems. It’s my virtualization of choice at the moment. I think the coherence feature is pretty bogus, even though the blogosphere is all excited about it. I find that in practice, it just doesn’t work all that well. I will say that as good as Parallels is, and it’s great, my machine always acts a little strangely when it’s running.

VMWare Fusion, which is only a debug build at this point, is what I expect to start using eventually. It’s very slow now — because of the debug status — but is a lot better behaved, lives better next to other applications, stays where you expect it. I’m pretty sure this will be the winner.

Crossver is, basically, unusable. Slooooooooowwww. And not really right. Neat that they can make it work. But when applications run, they make a lot of assumptions about the OS & shell environment that they’re in — and if you don’t have the whole package there to support it, there will always be weird gaps, no matter how much you implement.

And boot camp is good, too, but I just don’t reboot my machine frequently enough for it to be practical.

Anyway, for the moment, it’s Parallels, but I’m betting on VMWare before the summer.


7
Jan 07

Augustus, by Anthony Everitt

Fantastic, fantastic book. I read Everitt’s Cicero a while back and really enjoyed it. I’ve also read a few different accounts of the war between Caesar and Pompey that I’ve enjoyed. But I haven’t read much about the period after Caesar’s assassination as Octavian ruled with, then fought against Marc Antony to become Rome’s first emperor. And even less about his actual reign. With HBO’s Rome starting up again next week, I was especially interested to read this book. Completely delivers — loved the book. The bits about Octavian’s early life aren’t so great, but that’s not much of the book. Things really start getting interesting when Caesar adopts Octavian, then even more interesting when Caesar is killed, and his former advisors clearly helped Octavian elevate into a triumvir position with Antony & Lepidus. Hopefully the new HBO season will cover a bunch of this to reinforce it for me — completely fascinating period in history — a deeply republican society transforming into an imperial one, all the while using the poetry of the Republic. While Augustus was fairly cynical in his use of Republican rhetoric to develop his control of the empire, it turned out to be an incredibly good thing for the society — providing a stability that hadn’t been there in a hundred years. The parallels are too obvious not to notice, but I’m unsure what to learn from them.

Anyway, great great book.


7
Jan 07

The Camera Eye

Kathy & I have each been using the Nike+ipod system for our runs lately — 2 gizmos: one that attaches to your running shoe, another that attaches to your nano. It adds some functionality to your ipod during runs — a voice will interject when you’ve run 1K, 2K, 3K — when you’re halfway to your goal distance/time/etc. That by itself is really terrific, although it’s not *as* important for me since I often run inside on treadmills. What’s really cool is that my ipod stores information about my runs and automatically syncs it to the Nike web site:

Picture 8



Keeps track of all sorts of information — the particular view above shows my run totals week-by-week since the end of October, when we started. (One beef I have with the site is that it’s all in Flash — not web native.) You can see that some weeks I did better than others — like the week before Christmas, when things were pretty quiet around the office, as opposed to the week of Christmas, when Mom was here and Sam was a little under the weather.

What I find particularly useful, though, is goal setting. Here’s a goal that I set a couple of weeks ago, to run 75 miles in 4 weeks:

Picture 9

I’m behind a bit — because of the aforementioned Christmas week. I’ll catch up a bunch today, but with my trip to China coming up, I’m betting I’m not quite going to get this one done. It’s okay, though, as I find that the nike+ipod makes me want to run more, to run faster, to perform better. And my runs are getting longer & faster as a result, in measurable ways. (There is a funny counter-effect — the times when I forget to bring your ipod, I’m much less motivated to run hard or far, as I don’t get “credit” — Kathy’s noticed the same thing for her. A related effect, I think, is that I’ve been doing more running compared to lifting weights than previously — again, I think it’s the psychological issue of getting credit.) I also find myself, once I’ve set a goal (of, say 8 miles or a 10K), that even if I’m tired, I generally power through and finish. The other day I mis-entered a run of 2 miles longer than I wanted to run — but instead of stopping when I had intended, I took it as a challenge to run a little bit further.

Anyway, this is turning out to be an extremely useful & fulfilling thing for both Kathy & me. Makes me start thinking about what other parts of our lives will start/continue to be metered. (Kathy & I used something like this called a SportBrain a few years ago, but this is a lot lot better.)