Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

… what part of “Thou shalt not steal” does Apple not understand?
Update: as usual, Daring Fireball has a contrary opinion.

I installed Panther on the cube upstairs. It’s stunning. So, I’m going for broke and installing it on my main machine downstairs.

This is so cool: “Microsoft expands ‘shared source’ effort”. That means that some MVPs will now have partial access to some parts of the Windows source code. What a learning experience! I’m stoked; I just hope Exchange MVPs qualify.

Bill Gates is reported to have said that the Longhorn project will cost more than the entire Apollo program. That’s scary. (Hat tip: Christian). It makes me fervently wish for the kind of program described in Benford’s The Mars Race: a privately backed prize fund for a manned mission to Mars. The X Prize is a great start, and its eventual success will hopefully spur the creation of bigger prizes for bigger explorations.

After being seriously tempted by the Kameleon, I ultimately rejected it because there’s no way to add buttons, and its macro programmability is limited. Instead, I (somewhat reluctantly) bought a Home Theater Master MX-500, which is butt ugly but remarkably easy to program. So far, I have it doing everything I want to except for the one-button macros; once that’s programmed, someone (like, oh, Betty) can just press the “DVD” button to turn on and switch around the appropriate components. Mmmm, macros…
In other news, Amazon has a promo: if you order Krikorian’s TiVo Hacks and Keegan’s Hacking the TiVo together, you get both books for about $38. Since I love books, I bought both of ’em. All I need now is enough time to actually perform the surgery.

Thanks to John, I am now running MTBlacklist, a plugin that blocks comment spam. Lots of other people have been looking for solutions to this problem, and although this may only be a temporary fix, it’s a welcome one. Thanks, Jay!

One thing I learned from my dear mother: always clean up when you’re expecting company. The Toledo Blade is supposed to be running Karin Kowalski’s story on area bloggers tomorrow, and I want to be ready for the ten or fifteen visitors I expect to drop by– thus the new layout. Expect some bugs; I probably won’t get it all fixed before the paper hits tomorrow.
Update: I would be remiss in not acknowledging that my layout mostly came from PVRblog, and that Doug hooked me up with the initial template.

Despite what Ogden Nash has to say, I just preordered my copy of Mac OS X 10.3, code-named Panther.

On the one hand, the charming Kasia says she loves her new Powerbook’s packaging and the aesthetics of the OOBE (out-of-box experience). Then on the other (sort of), we have this column from the San Francisco Chronicle, which I guess is intending to praise the same thing but takes a slightly different tack:

Oh right like you even care.
Like careful sexy product design even matters and as if you give a twit for packaging and aesthetics and user experience anymore in this overly plastic bloatedly excessive landfill wasteland Wal-Mart dystopia we call proud capitalist gimme gimme gimme America.
And OK maybe every now and then you sigh and give in and buy yourself a new tech gadget, because you’re just that kind of consumer lackey and not really expecting much anyway but who the hell cares it’s just one more hunk of tech landfill but what can you do.

Me, I think my Powerbook would be much more aesthetically pleasing if it would boot.

Microsoft has a cool new IPsec white paper, cowritten with Foundstone, describing how IPsec is used to harden Microsoft’s own internal network: “Using Microsoft Windows IPSec to Help Secure an Internal Corporate Network Server.” From the abstract:

This paper describes how to configure Microsoft® Windows® 2000 IPSec and Windows XP IPSec to help secure an internal corporate network server against network-based attacks from untrusted computers. You can significantly enhance the ability of a server to defend against such attacks by requiring IPSec-authenticated, signed, and encrypted communication between computers. This paper describes the security threats to, and the benefits of using IPSec on, an internal corporate network server and uses a scenario to describe the process of IPSec policy design for an internal corporate network. Although the focus of this paper is Windows 2000 and Windows XP IPSec, it also provides information about IPSec functionality enhancements in Windows 2000 service packs and in the Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 family.

When you combine it with the material in the Windows 2003 hardening and threats/countermeasures guides, you can really do some nifty stuff to harden your network.

There’s been a lot of misreporting of Verizon’s new 1xEV-DO service; the WSJ yesterday called it “Wi-Fi you can tote around.” THis is way wrong, since WiFi offers 1Mbps up to 11Mbps for 802.11b, with faster speeds for 802.11g and 802.11a and 1xEV-DO seems to top out around 200Kbps or so. However, this is still a nice improvement over Verizon’s existing 1xRTT (“Express Network”) service, which tops out at 144Kbps. Alan Reiter has some speed tests of 1xEV-DO, and they look pretty promising.

News today that Disney is launching a new service called Moviebeam that uses a Samsung set-top box, datacasting over PBS or ABC broadcast stations, and a simple PVR-style package to allow movies on demand, sort of. Your box automatically receives movie streams from the local datacasting station, and when you want to watch one, you order it up on the remote, at which point you have 24hrs to watch it. See the stories at cnet and the WSJ for more details.
Of course, this isn’t a direct attack on TiVo et al, but it’s pretty clearly a shot across the bow. They’re obviously aiming squarely at the video rental market, but it would be fairly simple for Disney to expand the Samsung box’s capabilities, perhaps by integrating it with a PVR. Interestingly, Disney has arranged to carry films by a number of other major distributors; this is more inclusive than I’d suspected them of being. ABC is one of the networks that doesn’t have an investment in any PVR vendors (or technology, AFAIK), so this might be their opening move to enter the market.

Steve Crandall asks whether air cars will ever catch on. Maybe not, but Ford is working on a hydraulic power assist system that promises improved performance, better fuel economy, and lower emissions. To simplify, braking energy is used to compress hydraulic fluid and transfer it to a high-pressure accumulator. On launch, the pressurized fluid is used to apply torque to the driveshaft, giving ponderous vehicles like the E-series van or the F350 Super Duty a nice push off the line. Supposedly, we’ll start to see these appearing in fleet vehicles in the first half of 2004.

Considering how much we use it, it’s a little surprising that our TiVo (a Sony SVR2000, bought in June 2000) hasn’t fallen over and died. Jeremy’s upgrade plaint the other day helped me decide to upgrade it. I’m still vacillating over whether to add a network card or not. I think I’ll hold off, but I did order a nifty drive bracket after seeing it on PVRBlogs. This should make for a neater installation than the duct tape I originally planned to use.

The PVR Blog has everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about personal video recorders, including TiVos and the Dish Network series. Well-written, nicely designed, lots of good information.
The MS Exchange Blog is a group blog written by three knowledgeable Exchange administrators. They have already amassed quite a bit of Exchange 2003 content, and I only expect things to get better.