LookIt

You get to laugh

The venerable Santa Cruz Comic News finally has a web site that makes it looks like a newspaper. If you prefer to get your news in single-panel cartoon form, and you have a lefty-progressive-dare-I-say-it-liberal bent, this is the place.

To me, the more interesting part of this is the news comics blog. The blog's feed shows the great potential for feeds with images. There are plenty of places that have incidental art with the news, and a few that are about pretty pictures with a bit of explanation. This one is entertainment through political comics aligned with the straight news stories that the comic is related to.

On a techie note, the reason the feed is RSS version 2 instead of Atom as it should be is that the Comic News is using WordPress, and the people at WordPress are about the last to implement the no-longer-new Atom standard.

NIST competition for a new hash algorithm announced

NIST has an announcement for a search for a new hash function. See the proposed timeline and the the U.S. Federal Register announcement for the gory details. The proposed guidelines are in the Federal Register announcement, not on the NIST site.

How to feel small

Watch this compelling animation on the relative size of planets and stars.

We're not all geeks

My mother wanted to subscribe to a particular Yahoo group, and needed to sign up. She was presented with the following form:

Note the wording before the captcha: "Enter the code shown". It was not at all clear to her that the "code" was the jumble of characters below the entry box. Those of us who have seen a captcha before would probably recognize that, but she kept looking around the form for a code. Strike one for Yahoo.

After I explained what the "code" was and why it was there, she asked "do I need to include the two slash characters?". Good question: strike two and three. Yahoo could really make this more user-friendly without making it any more attacker-friendly.

Labeling in the lab

A lot of my work is in the lab, and I end up putting labels on all sorts of machines and cables. The other day, someone asked me what I use for my labeling, and I remembered "Brother" but didn't remember the model. I use a Brother P-touch PT-1750, but it looks like that has been supplanted by the PT-1830.

It is really nice having a real keyboard where you don't have to use some alt-key for digits like you do on most hand-held labelers. The TZ tapes are inexpensive, and there is a huge variety of sizes, colors, and adhesion properties. It is a great workhorse labeler.

What I learned at Macworld Expo

AppleTV has a good shot at making the living room more fun. The price is reasonable, but more importantly, the usability is extremely high. The only way Microsoft can "win" against AppleTV is to "win" in an Xbox fashion: loose huge amounts of money for many years. I suspect they may be willing to do that, but it will just be embarrassing.

OS X 10.5 ("Leopard", but I'm getting sick of the cat names since I can't keep them straight) will be worth the expected $130 upgrade cost. I'm surprised to be saying this because I normally grumble at the cost. The demo in the Apple booth showed why Apple is Apple and Microsoft isn't. It's not just about new features: the user interface for them is flawless. Time Machine is amazingly good, and I hope that the developers of all my other apps integrate with it. The Spaces interface may be the first workspace app that is understandable by typical users (not just the dweebs). And the screen sharing / help feature in iChat is also excellent (although I expect Apple to badly muff some of the implementation like they do with every version of iChat and Mail). All in all: it looks great.

The iPhone (and I really do hope it will be called "iPhone"; Cisco is just being greedy here) will be very popular even among non-Mac folks. Many people said "Palm is dead", including two people using recently-bought Palm devices, and one person who recently worked at Palm. "There is no reason for them to exist any more." When the iPod came out, there was a general feeling of "this is an MP3 player that has the elegance and feature set of a Mac"; the iPhone has that exact feeling. Two people noted important missing capabilities: 3G networking and GPS. I suspect those will show up at the release or in the first feature bump.

VMware is about to blow it with their competitor to Parallels. Fusion is extremely late, the first beta is very buggy, it is expected to cost as much as Parallels, and it will not have any significant features that Parallels doesn't already have today. As a long-time VMware fanboy, I'm really disappointed.

I saw exactly two people carrying iPod Shuffles, as compared to hundreds carrying iPods with screens. I have no idea why this is.

Without the iPod skins booths and the iPod speaker dock booths, Macworld Expo would be at least one third smaller. That's scary.

SATA just works. That's good to know.

Weighing hell against the chance of going there

Randy Cassingham 's Dell Hell page starts off with the line "I've recommended Dell computers for many years". I agree. And I also have a friend who when through Dell Hell last year: (Summary: he got botted, we reformatted his hard drive, we reinstalled from the CDs, we discovered that they CDs have no Dell-specific drivers, he discovered that it is impossible to get all the drivers from Dell, and now he cannot use the built-in wireless and his screen resolutions are wrong.)

The problem is that Dell is still rated near the top of Consumer Report's service ratings for PCs for reliability. This means that, when I suggest to people which brand of PC to buy, I have to balance the chance that the PC will fail (low for Dell) versus the hell they will go through if it does (high for Dell). Yuck.

Update: I think Frank and Ernest nail it: