Ten Months with a Luggable Server: The Dell M6500

According to Dell, my Precision M6500 shipped around May 15th of 2010, which seems right to me. It has been pretty satisfying, but not without bumps.

The iTunes Advantage: Not What You Think

Apple’s enormously successful iPod/iPhone/iPad line have something in common with their iPod ancestors: you can’t even get started without a computer and iTunes.

This is given Apple a huge advantage, one that Apple’s competitors have failed to do anything about. And that advantage has nothing to do with songs, videos, apps or podcasts.

No, the real advantage of iTunes is that it ensures every iDevice user, first generation Nano to Verizon iPhone 4 to iPad, is an Apple customer.

Apple’s Goes Evil, Heads Toward Diabolical

Sadly, the latest actions by Apple push them from the control-fanatics state to Lawful-Evil. No way to argue it.

CEO Larry Page: Please Call Larry Ellison

Google has had extraordinary success. The king of search, created a mobile market out of thin air, spins off interesting new technologies as naturally as breathing, and generally are thought of as the apex of geek-success culture.

After ten years at the helm, Eric Schmidt is stepping aside, with co-founder Larry Page moving into the CEO seat. This will prove and interesting time for Google, no doubt.

Also interesting is Google’s current intellectual property death-match with Oracle over Android/Java issues. Feel free to read about this elsewhere.

This leads naturally to what Google really needs to do next.

The Epic Fail of Music Syncing under Linux

Ouch. Ask a silly question, get a ridiculous answer.

I have, as has been noted before, a Motorola Droid X. Mostly, I use Grooveshark, Slacker, and Pandora for my music needs, but I do have 5000+ songs on a server at home. On my desktop (wherever I might be) I access those songs via Ampache, streaming as I need them.

To sync some songs with my Droid, I turned to the wonderful Media Monkey, under Windows. The Monkey is a truly awesome piece of software; the kids and I have used it forever to sync music into various MP3 players. Always works. Edits tags with ease. Displays none of iTunes despicable bloat. Doesn’t crash. Handles a network music collection with aplomb. My oldest daughter goes to sleep to a playlist in Media Monkey!

I’ve used MM for so long, on so many different little players, of course it was where I turned first for my Droid.

Trivial. Plug in with Mass Storage mode, configure the directories for Music and Playlists, boom, works.

I promptly forgot about it. I don’t sync that often. Local content is music of last resort for me.

Until this weekend, when I was recovering from my Number One Daughter’s ten-girl sleepover. Traumatic events prompt the strangest questions.

In this case I asked, “Surely I can sync my playlists and music from Linux, right?”

A Volatile Look At HSQLDB

Recently, I had cause to look at HSQLDB, one of several pure Java databases out there. At my job, we use RDBMS technology to back our deductive database systems. As such, we have need for a small-scale development RDBMS to accompany larger enterprise-grade RDBMS’s. For several years we have used H2, and it has been good to us. It is small, fast, very complete and reliable.

However, a couple years ago H2 changes it’s on-disk storage system. The new storage system is neater and cleaner, but it had a side effect: H2 is now significant less concurrent. Our deductive engine is highly concurrent (we implemented a form of Actor concurrency before we knew what Actors were), and we routinely run hundreds of SQL queries simultaneously. We treat the RDBMS backend much like a NoSQL database, and really thrash it at times, especially before the caching and materialization layers kick in. In recent years, as every machine gained cores like mad, this has become a problem. H2′s lack of concurrent execution sometimes slows the system down to the point where even on small datasets, Postgres is faster, despite the network hop. (This is not a knock on H2; highly concurrent access is not a design goal that seems to be emphasized. Fair enough.)

So this is a problem, so I decided it was time to survey embedded DB’s again. In the past, I had looked at HSQLDB and Derby and rejected them for performance reasons. Perhaps, in the intervening three years something had changed?

The Curious Case of Netflix Streaming Quality

We stream a lot of media in my house. Yes, we have a full Comcast triple-play package, and we take full advantage of on-demand programming. We have HBO and Showtime subscriptions. You’ll pry my TiVo from my cold, dead hands. No immediate danger of cutting the cable here.

Is an Email Address a Social Contract?

Seriously. If you know my email address, am I bound by some social custom to answer every email you send me? Within some particular time frame? Am I required to even read every email you send me?

A scenario:

1. I have an email address.
2. You send me an email
3. I have, you know, a life. I don’t read your email for a couple days.
4. You get annoyed at me for not answering, so you send another email: “Did you get my email?”
5. I, still possessing a life, family and a job, still don’t read your email.
6. You get downright pissed, and send me a screed as to my personal failings.
7. Email checking finally bubbles to the top of my todo-list, and I read your first email. Possibly even respond to it.
8. By the time I read your last email, I am baffled as to how my personal scheduling became offensive to you.

Been there? Me too.

Must-Have Apps for My Droid-X

I’ve had the Droid-X since July; long enough to settle into a groove as far as applications go. These are my go-to apps; the ones I would recommend without hesitation.

Note that these apps are not all free; after spending $200 for a phone and $60/month for the phone, spending $5 for an app doesn’t bother me. My logic, doesn’t have to be yours. The links are not links into the Marketplace though most should lead you there eventually. No order or ranking implied, and the prices are merely what I found on the net.

Can You Program a VCR? Are You Sure?

Anybody over say, thirty years old, will remember when VCRs ruled the TV recording roost. They were magical machines, allowing you to record your favorite shows at will, and then re-watch them while mostly skipping the commercials. Truly cool. Life changing. Amazing.

But do you remember what your parents (or perhaps your grandparents) reaction was? Do you remember how hard it was to teach them how to use the remotes? How you couldn’t easily explain that there was a separate tuner in the VCR, allowing them to record one channel while watching another? Some of you laughed at their confusion. Some of you no doubt cried in frustration.

In the end we are all tech support for someone, I suppose.

But do you recall the single defining visual of “old people” and their VCR’s?