Dustin’s Blog

…why do most CFL bulbs…those high efficiency ones that are going to save the world…come in non-recyclable packaging?

Ugg, where to start. Apple released yesterday an entirely new Macbook and Macbook Pro. The primary chassis of the laptops, the upper part that holds the keyboard, palm rests and touch pad, are now made from a solid piece of aluminum. This is great because it improves structural rigidity and the laptop can be made from fewer parts. The Macbook also gets to take advantage of some new nvidia chipset/video card which improves performance greatly over the old intel option.

Now for the bad part. There is no eff’n firewire port. None, just two USB ports. WTF? Why would Apple ditch a port they created on a consumer level laptop that costs $1300? “Hey, look at this laptop, it comes with iMovie so you can edit all those family vacation movies that you CAN’T GET OFF OF YOUR CAMCORDER.” Want to edit video with a firewire camcorder, pony up $2000 and get a Pro model! Got firewire external drives or peripherals…get a Pro model!

I’ve always recognized and understood why some people are so anti-Apple. They hate that lack of choice in hardware, among other things, but it has never bothered me. Apple hardware has always been pretty good and looked ok. Looks are subjective but I’ve always found Apple’s products agreeable. But when a company decides to strong arm you into buying their more expensive product by cutting out a key part…it’s ridiculous.

I always thought it was just the tech crowd complaining about Vista but that isn’t so. Apparently “average users” are unimpressed with Vista and/or the machines it comes on or they’re having such a difficult time they need to buy a book.

Exhibit A) College student is upset with her junk laptop. Vista won’t access certain university resources and the battery is always dying.

Exhibit B) Book store worker says she has gotten a half dozen or so people in the last couple of weeks looking for books on using Vista. For an OS touted as being easier to use that doesn’t sound promising. One customer was a trained IT professional.

Exhibit C) My own experience. Windows explorer and the save dialogs are a complete cluster fu*&. Browsing for files is a royal pain because the explorer window shows three different views of the same crap, it is just overwhelming and even with all the information you still feel lost. Also, why does the entire machine hang off of the desktop? Doesn’t make sense.

Or how about the borked send to compressed file thing? If you right click on a file and choose send to compressed file the OS will dutifully compress the file and then highlight the part of the file name you want to rename. How convenient! Only problem however is that the highlight doesn’t have keyboard focus, you have to use your mouse anyway. Maybe it’s because I choose to show extensions but either way, pretty lame.

Where I work, I routinely get a zip file that contains files for a website. It has multiple file and folders. I simply copy these files into the directory for the website but this time I thought I’d unzip the file first to see just how long it takes. I’ve heard Vista’s extraction is slow…but I didn’t think it could be this bad.

This system is pretty new, 10k drives, 2.4Ghz C2D processors.

I have an online photo album that, when a file is uploaded, will create a thumbnail size and an intermediate sized photo along with the full size version. I needed to copy the full size version of the file out while skipping the thumb and sized versions. I was able to accomplish this task using a single command:

[root@drue Wedding]# for I in `ls | grep -v sized | grep -v thumb`; do cp $I /var/www/html/pics/; done

This would have taken a lot longer using any other method. Using a GUI, say, Windows Explorer, I’d still be selecting which files to copy by the time the above command completed the work.

I picked up the above mentioned monitor a couple of days ago. It’s a 22″ flat panel, 1680×1050 native resolution, 2ms response 3000:1 contrast ratio (using dynamic contrast). Sounds great on paper but is actually surprisingly bad in practice. What I’ve learned is that virtually all 22″ monitors use the same type of LCD panel, a TN (twisted nematic). These panels are cheaper than the other types available and have the poorest viewing angles of all available types. For some reason this panel is raved about on the Internet and gets top picks in reviews. Maybe I’m overly picky compared to most people but it really bothers me to see different colors on the screen depending on where I site, and even worse to see contrast so different between the top and the bottom of the display. My laptop’s display suffers from the same issue, but on such a small screen it’s hardly an issue. With a screen this large, it’s not acceptable.

I’ve had the Mac mini for a few weeks now so I thought I’d write a bit my thoughts on the mini and OS X in general. There is a lot to like about the mini and OS X but there are also a few items I’ve come to dislike which I’ll discuss below.

The Mac mini is a tiny computer that looks great. I am personally not aware of any sort of PC that is this small, includes the same features AND looks good doing it. That said, aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder and are a matter of opinion. With that in mind I’ll try to steer clear of personal opinion and concentrate more on practicality and usability.

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Here is a tip for anyone who may read this. When you send an email, it should always have a subject. Always. It’s just common net etiquette. An email without a subject is like a book without a title and a book without a title is not something you would want to read because it apparently has no point. If you’re writing an email and you can’t come up with a subject, then you need to rethink whether or not your email has any purpose in the first place and if not, then don’t send the email.

Subjects provide the potential reader with a starting point of what your message is probably about. It sets the tone, makes it so the message is easy to find again later and sets it apart from all of the others. A subject allows the reader to sort messages, follow a conversation, group related messages and most importantly it tells the reader that your message has some sort of purpose.

So please, the next time you’re about to click that send button, take a moment to check your subject field. If it’s empty, fill it in. If it’s not then kudos to you my friend.

So I have a little something to admit. I’ve never played a console game over the internet. No really, I never have. Way back in the day when 56k was the next best thing I played a Star Wars game online with a buddy but that’s pretty much the extent of what I’m done.

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A while back I wrote about my luck when it comes to items I purchase and the service we get. Well it just seems to continue for me.

I just sent my Wii off for repair. It would begin to buzz loudly after playing for a while as the system reached operating temp. The “nice” thing about working with Nintendo is I got someone on the phone right away, they didn’t speak with any kind of accent and they didn’t try to walk me through some automated script that had nothing to do with my problem. They even told me my warranty would be extended another year from the date it was sent back to me. That’s good service.

Now tonight, as I write this, I’m on my laptop, plugged directly into my network because my wireless router, which is less than a year old, has seemingly gone haywire. I’m within 10 feet of the thing and I’m connected at 1Mbps. If I get connected at all, it isn’t for long and it’s very slow.

Poor me.