Deep’s “not so evil” lair

This is a big screen TV in the window of a Bank in Philly! Folks make sure if you are using Windows XP driving a screen thats intended for every passerby to view, turn off the auto update feature in Windows XP. It is very easy:

I have been toying with the idea of giving a little Ruby/Ruby on Rails presentation at work. If I get around to it, I am thinking of giving vnc2swf a try to show how quick and easy it is to set up a working application or just to illustrate certain features of the language.  Its easy to demo stuff when you have access to an interactive shell as is the case with Python and Ruby.

I feel it is great to have an interactive presentation but I have sat through many a presentation where the presenter was running commands, clicking on buttons and selecting options. It is awesome during the presentation to see and appreciate second hand as how easy or difficult a certain tool is. However, once I try to replicate same thing on my own, it takes me a while to replicate what the presenter did. I think having an interactive presentation recorded might aid an audience better post presentation. Will post if I ever get around to it. But if you have had good experiences with something similar, please feel free to comment.

Yes, I have been seeing it for years and it is admittedly funny on many an occasion, I do feel Apple’s arrogance has peaked to a higher level.

Apple’s brand spankin’ new OS displays an old CRT monitor with a BSOD as an icon for a Windows PC connected to your network. Not to mention it uses the same icon for drives shared over Samba. I wonder who is looking more stupid here. The old Windows or the new OS X Leopard?

Anil Dash put it very aptly. But I am surprised to see how many people want to dismiss this as a joke. Yes, I understand that all the Mac vs PC ads are to sell Macs and to tell people how much cooler Macs are compared to PC. One however has to question the logic behind this one. Apple has grown in the last couple of years. It is high time they act grown up too.

Hey Mr. Jobs, the folks who bought this machine already know (or are about to find out) how cool your Mac is! Your ad campaign is working. You can stop with the PC bashing for folks who see your ads and buy your computers.

Engadget has some good instructions to make your brand new Mac be a little more politically correct.

So, I do know for a fact that there are some people who read my blog prior to it being unceremoniously being taken down due to us moving to Philadelphia and choosing Verizon as our ISP. I have to apologize for being down for the last 7 months.

I was checking out ISP’s just before we moved from Rochester and realized that Verizon was offering FIOS Internet in my building. I quickly signed up for it with a one year contract.

I love the speed. It is awesome. I have never had an outage so far with respect to the internet connectivity. I do have to reboot the crappy Actiontec router that came with it once in a while. It just seems to hang when I try to download or stream copious amounts of data.

However, what I did not know was the fact that Verizon blocks incoming traffic to port 80 and port 25. C’mon now, are you kidding me? Such policies make me laugh and cringe at the same time. I can run bittorrent to dowload massive amounts of content, all of it legal BTW ;-), run servers on all other ports but cannot have incoming traffic to these two ports. I just do not understand. I read some forums, Verizon lets you run servers only if you buy their business package.

I wish I were smart enough to realize what Verizon was thinking.

As a result however, I have had to transfer all my content from my trusty old AMD K6/2 to a managed ISP. I have had 1 and 1 as my domain registrar for the last couple of years and they have reasonable hosting plans. I have decided to move my domains over there till either Verizon changes its policy or I move to Comcast, the other ISP in Philadelphia. I am currently paying $4.99 a month to host this blog and my website. Do check it out. It has a nice slide show going now. The 1 and 1 package also comes with 2 blogs that can be set up through their control panel and use Wordpress, something I am comfortable with and have used i the past. The only drawback is, with the cheap plan, I miss out on all the little customizations I had going on with the older version of the blog.

I was also able to hack the Kubrick template to suit my needs for the main page. I may change it later but I am happy with the way it looks now.

Well, all said and done, we are back online. Hope I can continue to post on a regular basis.

WTH???!! I heard about Windows Genuine Advantage a while ago on TWiT but I never got a notification via Windows Update to install it on my windows box up until today.
Microsoft has now decided that it will tell me if I am running genuine Windows software. Nice!! What a wonderful idea. Wonder what difference does it make. I canceled the installation even though I have a genuine copy of XP professional running on my desktop. I am just vary of false positives that the folks on TWiT talked about. Let’s see if I am asked to install it again.

BTW, someone should tell M$ that things like thse piss off paying buyers of their products and does not effect pirates in any way. It is very similar to the DRM dilemma. DRM hurts people who actually purchase music. I cannot transfer a song that I bought off itunes to Benita’s creative Zen without undergoing some creative process. Wheras had I just downloaded it off a p2p software, I would not have to deal with this issue. Hey, I am willing to pay for the content but try don’t control what I do with it.

I should seriously consider joining some anti-DRM campaign.

Now that I have been using my new T-mobile SDA for a while, I have been pretty pleased with it on occasions. It is a decent phone with a plethora of features. Lots of software available for download. Good predictive text features. It is a decent phone with a plethora of features. Lots of software available for download. Good predictive text features.
It does serve my basic needs of a phone that can check email and browse the web for some quick stuff. It has already come in handy a couple of times.

• I was able to check my email on my way to work when I was running late and was able to call the sender back with answers to his queries. He would have had to wait for me to come in if I did not have the phone
• Benita has been able to chat with my parents online while we were driving to our whale trip near Boston.
• I usually take pictures and forget to email them to other people, having a phone handy helps. I took a picture of my friend Nishant at Times Square and emailed it to him from Times Square! How cool!
• It helped Benita and me get driving directions when we were lost in Queens trying to get to the US Open.
• I have been able to watch the BBC news, check my gmail account, read engadget while waiting in line for tickets at the US Open.

Now the bad:

• Windows mobile sucks sucks sucks!!!
  • I have had to deal with multiple hangs and reboots/resets.
  • The only way to close out apps is via the task manager.
  • The phone went into “hang mode” one night and my alarm never rang!
• Camera quality sucks but I did not buy this phone for it’s picture taking abilities. But a better camera would have been kinda cool.

All in all it is a decent phone with many features. It is not a PDA-phone but definitely a phone with some PDA features which seems to suffice my needs for the time being.