After thinking about my productivity over the last few weeks my Google Reader habits have won the prize of getting neutered.
You’ll see by the chart below I tend to read a lot in between sessions, I thought it was a good way to spend a break but I’m finding out it often leads to 15-20 minute sucks.
My plan is to check it no more than once a day. Probably in the afternoon because I rather get to my desk and start hacking away at work.
Hoping this trend chart changes in a few weeks.
I’ve been steadily moving towards this already but here are my blog goals:
“Actual Friends”
Pownce
General
I guess my overall goal is to post more and figure out something for my VTA family and friends because I know dancameron.org is boring my wife.
iWork 08
Yesterday I posted about Numbers and I shyed away from posting about the other two apps in iWork ‘08; Pages and Keynote because the only thing out of those two apps that’s worth mentioning is “action builds” for Keynote.
Action builds is a very cool feature and to have it in a presentation software makes me say “finally”. Keynote has had animations in previous versions but not like this. Instead of building the motion in another application like Flash or Final Cut you can just create simple paths for our objects and build it within Keynote. The video reminds me of the few hours I’ve spent in Flash.
iLife ‘08
I don’t have any first hand use because I’m going to wait a few months for Leopard (since it’s bundled for free). But from the demos and the Apple press conference the new features are needed and the overhaul of iMovie was necessary. iMovie (Pre-08 ) although very simple and clean was abandoned after I purchased Final Cut Pro even though I don’t like editing in Final Cut Pro for home movies or short clips iMovie was just not cutting it.
Until I get the new version I’m not going to decide whether it’s as phenomenal as the Apple’s presentation makes it out to be or the demos on their site provide. Especially since people are already revolting from the new app and going back to the old iMovie. From what I’ve seen it’s a drastic improvement. I love the exporting options including direct to YouTube.
What I’m really looking forward to in the new iMovie is how it’s an actual video library now. Before importing clips into the project prevented me from wanting to make videos at all and almost every movie production application works that way. Now I can just import all of my DV into the application, easily scan through all of that video and simply create what I’ve promised Sara for so long.
Another notable feature coming is event sorting. Found in iPhoto it’s going to make it so much easier for our family to sort through the thousands of photos and make it easier to organize. It’s an outstanding way to organization and it’s a shame we don’t see it in any other application including flickr.
This has got to be the best review/article on the age old debate of Linux vs. Mac. The article is extensive but the conclusions on the topic mimic my sentiments exactly.
In the following pages, they lead a guided tour of the two OSes, paying particular attention to eight important areas: Installation & Migration; Hardware Support & Power Management; Networking, Web & Wireless; Productivity; Entertainment; Security; Working With Windows (because we couldn’t completely ignore Microsoft); and Stability, Backup & Disaster Recovery.
Which is the better OS? Only you can decide –but you’ll make a more informed decision after you’ve taken this tour, and you’ll discover you have some companions on your journey.
I will admit I have not completed the entire article, I have skimmed and read the beginning and end but it is something I want to go back and finish. I also don’t think anyone can conclude that either writer is biased because from what I’ve read the entire article plainly exposes the downsides of each platform in almost every major factor of any OS. It’s really apparent within the conclusions which they make the reader decide what’s best for them.
The conclusion of the review that mimics my take exactly (spoiler alert):
Conclusions: Linux
Linux gives you freedom on many levels: the freedom to tinker, the freedom to work without arbitrary constraints on your system setup, and the freedom to make decisions about nearly every aspect of your system.That freedom does come at a cost, though — the cost of a certain degree of effort. I haven’t yet dealt with a single Linux install that didn’t require me to edit some configuration file somewhere. That said, the amount of effort required to get the Linux system you want (or need) has gone down enormously with time.
If the freedom to use your PC in as unhindered a way as possible is important to you, that’s what Linux delivers — although keep in mind it comes with a learning curve, one that is still flattening out rather slowly.
– Serdar Yegulalp
Conclusions: Mac
If you believe that open source is a moral choice — and many people do — then buying Apple is making a deal with the devil. Apple is arguably the most proprietary hardware / software company in the industry, despite Mac OS X’s origins in BSD Unix, and the products’ compliance with many industry standards.You think Microsoft locks users in? At least with Microsoft you can buy a PC from a huge number of big and small vendors, or build your own from components. With the Mac, you buy your PC from Apple, you buy your operating system from Apple, and you’re also encouraged to buy your mouse, keyboard, display, audio device, and smartphone from Apple, all at an Apple Store where you can get Apple service.
But if you’re willing to live with lock-in, Apple is a great choice for computing. Installation isn’t a problem — Apple does it for you. Networking is easy. Productivity is a dream. The Mac offers a broad variety of entertainment options. It’s a secure platform. It interoperates well with Windows. It’s highly stable, and offers solid backup choices for the data losses that are inevitable on any computing platform.
Right now, Apple is smokin’, and its customers are happy. But if the Apple gets rotten and starts coming out with inferior products — as it did in the ’90s — its customers will have the choice of suffering, or making the painful switch to another platform.
Until then, I’m sticking with the Mac. It’s a great computer.
– Mitch Wagner
Well said…most of you know where I stand but no platform is perfect and it’s up to the user to decide what they value the most.
Well the wait is over for me. I talked myself into buying an iPod last night after toying around with it for just a few minutes and my experience with it for 20 minutes today at the mall solidified my decision.
 Yes, the iPhone does do what many other phones do already. That’s clear but it’s the how that counts. The simplicity may be a drawback for some (or at least one I know) but like the BlackBerry OS it’s almost perfect. Just look at how the BB and the iPhone handle the filesystem: the Blackberry does let the user notice that a structure is there when digging through images (which is a must for finding images or files with the expansion card) and the iPhone doesn’t let you worry about such things, making you think it’s not there. The Treo is similar but the Windows mobile OS is heavily constructed around the computer OS mentality to find and finally display files or run programs through a tree hierarchical system. Maybe this has changed since the Pocket PC OS but from what I’ve noticed it hasn’t. Some say this is a drawback to the simplicity of iPhone, I disagree; the Treo made it clear you didn’t need to worry about anything but launching apps and the BlackBerry proved it. iPhone is just banking on it.
And no, Apple does not tell people what to do. They know what people want and they let you do it. Basically, it just works how you want it. If it doesn’t, so be it, because in my experience Apple doesn’t tend to make Swiss Army devices that have a great spec sheets without anything more to back it.
Personally, that’a why I like iPhone (and the Apple TV). I just want a device that works. If I can’t get some clumsy 3rd party app that makes my phone (Treo, PPC, WMD) freeze or hard reset I don’t want the phone. That’s why I believe they’re completely closing the phone to widgets (javascript and CSS) and the web, giving the OS a chance not to deconstruct and fail by bad programming.
iPhone doesn’t make you struggle, similar to the blackberry it’s a phone and an application device. It doesn’t try to be anything more through sacrificing usability.
Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of missing pieces to this puzzle. Many of which can and will be updated through software updates. And the pieces that need hardware updates will come along on the mystery train that Apple loves to use for product releases.
Those hardware functions that lack on revision one are the reasons that I’m giving up my plot to buy an iPhone. What are they? Well, Edge although very responsive to my tests this morning could be replaced with 3g but that’s not why I’m not getting one. And, the storage size limitation of 8 gigs isn’t practical for me but that’s not the reason either, since I would need to sync the iPhone every night to charge anyways. Is it the lack of stereo bluetooth on the first bluetooth iPod? No. Is it the price of that hardware? No, it’s actually worth it as a computing device. The simple small little detail that noone is mentioning is…
No video output.
And since I use my iPod Video daily to watch video at our lunch hour it’s not an iPod to me. And it can’t be to many others who use it to display all the iTunes purchased or other video on their TV. My guess, “why add it while we have the AppleTV?” which is just another shitty marketing cross-sell idea because they think it’s not that big of an issue.
It is a big deal to me. But who am I when millions of iPhones have been sold to very happy consumers.
So for now I’ll still be running with my BlackBerry curve that I still adore. It hasn’t failed me yet and although it may be “limiting” it does what I need it to do, except run full websites (Opera doesn’t count) like Google Reader or Google Talk or have the most highly resolution screen I’ve ever seen in a small device or have hand gestures or motion sensing or come smaller or have WIFI.
I’ve used a couple managed voicemail providers in the last few months. My first provider was callwave which sent me my voicemails as MP3 through email and just like any voicemail added the ability to call in and hear the voicemail from your phone in a queue. A month or two ago I started using Spinvox after a hearing it briefly on a forgotten tech podcast. It provides voicemail like any other service with a call in queue but where callwave sends you an audio file through email it converts the voicemail to text and emails me. The result is something really cool.
As a BlackBerry user Spinvox provides my voicemail to my phone immediately as text, allowing me to actually respond to any message much faster in a medium I prefer. Even though I love mobile phones I don’t love them to talk or call my voicemail I love them for the the other connections they provide, ie e-mail, text and internet.
Personally I hate voicemail, it’s awfully time consuming. It’s slow, you have to find the time to call in, listen to the voicemail and then you have to call the person for a reply. The message that I receive now is a very good conversion of the audio left in the queue sent through email that I can read whenever I want, in a setting that I want and I could forward it to the caller with a reply.
No matter who it is I just may not be in the setting where it’s appropriate to pick the phone up; I’d say 95% all my voicemails are the result of me not being able to pick the phone up or I simply don’t want to. Now I wait 2-3 minutes for the email to be sent, I read it either on my computer or the phone and I can call them back when I can without calling my voicemail first. The majority of the time it’s just to get an answer to a question so I just text or email them back with a response. It’s extremely productive for me and it helps me not do something I don’t like, being on the phone.
If anyone want’s a Spinvox account contact me. I’m going to e-mail the contact I know over at Spinvox later this week to sign-up a few friends and he’s told me that I can pass along a full list of people to get free 1-year accounts.
If there are any drawbacks to Spinvox it would be:
I just noticed that Google setup a new nav.
What’s crazy is that they have some of their labs products thrown in there, eg Reader. Overall I like it because I use a lot of these products I’m just not too fond of having them in alpha order. Can’t they be sorted by relevance or use? This is Google.
I’m also surprised that users that aren’t signed into Google see the same thing. Not saying it’s unjust, it’s just not the same old Google anymore.
UPDATE:
I can’t believe they did this to EVERY Google Page. I just printed a Map and it’s on that printed page.
One of my tasks this week was to setup a web server for some sites currently hosted on the tragedy of the grid. I don’t want to talk about the (mt) grid since I’ve said so much about it before but to answer “why?” I’m still on the grid for production sites is, I’ve been too busy to migrate them and at one point I was going to put them on a spry VPS but my DB was too large for their contrants, very weird indeed and I could made it work but I pushed it aside.
This week I couldn’t wait any longer I was getting so many CS calls about it “being down” or “Sooo Slow” that it became a big priority. I was planning to install Ubuntu server and setup the system in a few hours but I had so many issues with Ubuntu Server. I rather not go into details because I can’t remember them all but one major problem was webmin and gnome. I hate to rely on a UI to manage a server but it makes my tasks so much easier. Gnome installed fine after an apt-get command but there are so many dependencies that it took hours for it to download and install. At that point I was already frustrated with the install that the problems with webmin, configuration and installing some other server packages I had givin up and started the fedora core 6 downloads.
Today I had the time to finish the system but the installation was as easy as Ubuntu except for the 5 CDs it took to install everything. That was the only 
downside for fedora over Ubuntu. But at least it’s a complete web server after install. Without phpMyadmin and webmin installed I was able to serve up whatever I needed with just a few service starts. The management tool provided as well are perfectly suited and easy to use. I can’t remember the particulars but it seemed Ubuntu wanted me to configure way to much after install without any management tools, fedora can serve a test page from apache after install and if not the tools provided make it a few clicks away.
After a few yum installs and eventually remembering to edit my host file in order to get webmin to show (from the host machine) I had a production server ready.
fedora has some great advatages over Ubuntu IMO: First SELinux (security) and server management tools. Another feature over Ubuntu right now would be the Xen support and management tools built into core 6. The Xen management will definitely help me get a couple webservers (maybe one for myself) installed with the little time I already have instead of wasting time figuring out how to install and configure it for Ubuntu.
This post is not saying fedora is a better web server then Ubuntu but for ease of use it’s clearly better out of the box.
Amazon’s Amapedia is a wiki for products. Pretty cool but I wonder if it’ll take off since like all wikis it’s highly dependent on user input. … Read More »
January 26
The controversial Google “Tipsâ€, where Google promoted certain of their own products over organic search results, have been quietly pulled down.
Until recently, Google searches for Calendar, Blogging, Photo Sharing and others returned “tips†above normal search results suggesting users try Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa, respectively. Firefox co-founder Blake Ross criticized the change in a widely … Read More »
January 04
