The Penalty Box

Disclaimer: If you have no interest in me griping about computer-y things, you probably want to stop reading now because it’ll get boring really fast for you.

Say what you will about Apple’s products, but if there’s one thing Steve Jobs has it’s an incredible ability to make stuff look pretty. I’m not saying it’s all him, but he at the very least approves everything down to the fonts that go into OS X. So when all is said and done, the buck stops at Jobs. My beef with Apple almost exclusively comes down to hardware: it’s crappy and overpriced. OS X is actually fairly decent to work with (I have to use it at work), and aside from the near complete failure in the implementation of Workspaces, I don’t have many complaints on it as an operating system.

No, what currently has me up in arms is this. Sure it’s sorta pretty to look at, but it is most definitely a case of function taking a back seat to form. Hell, function got punted to the side of the road while form took a bloody road trip to Mexico. Why you ask? Well in finally giving into the the fact that two button mice are a necessity, Apple decided to put forth this not-so-mighty creation. The scroll ball, while neat in theory, gets dirty faster than a 5 year old in a mud pit. The difference is that a 5 year old is easier to clean and still functions like a child afterwards; the same cannot be said for a cleaned Apple Mighty Mouse. The one-piece top is aesthetically pleasing, but it makes it more difficult to discern between left, middle and right clicks. I’ve had the mouse insist I’ve right-clicked even though I’m quite firmly pressing the left side of the mouse. And before you go suggesting that perhaps the buttons got interchanged, right-clicking STILL RIGHT CLICKS. After some experimenting, it seems hitting command click turns everything back to normal…until the next time it doesn’t feel like left clicking. As such, I have endeavoured to use the mouse as little as possible for work, which is odd for such an operating system that has so much mouse-based eye candy. Asking for a new mouse gives me the same type of mouse, so short of bringing in my own mouse, I’m stuck.

So what is a geek to do when a useful tool of his disposal is more gimped than Christopher Reeves? (Okay that’s an unfair comparison. Reeves didn’t get gimped on purpose.) I turn to the old standby text editor vim for inspiration. Now I’m not here to start an emacs vs vi flameware. You can Internet jihad that until your keyboard wears out for all I care, I’m not interested. But the usefulness of vim to me recently extended beyond just editing code. The solution for my problem? Using Spotlight to launch programs, terminal to do everything outside of the browser, and the vimperator Firefox extension.

Why vimperator? Well given how used to vim keyboard shortcuts I am, it was a short hop to making browser commands do what I wanted just through the keyboard. The efficiency of movement got me all giddy because there was no longer any wasted movement from keyboard to mouse to do browser stuff AND everything went more quickly too (shut up, it’s efficiency not laziness). I finally realized what my old co-worker Jesse was talking about when he said the mouse was a clumsy way to interact with an internet browser (he was the first one to demonstrate vimperator to me about a year ago). Of course, that weird look that I gave him, you know the same one you give crazy old uncle Jack for his hippie conspiracies (hurrr Jack Layton), is the same look that my current co-workers are giving me when they see me give me as much care to my mouse as a red headed stepchild.

This setup isn’t for everyone, and I must admit I likely would never have gone to using the vimperator extension had it not been for the spectacular fail that is the Apple Mighty Mouse. I haven’t yet set up vimperator on my browser at home, but that’s because I have a mouse that does what I tell it rather than what it feels like it should do. You can insert your own joke about wives, children or cats here if you wish. But efficiency is winning out, and more and more I’m seeing just how damn slow that mouse is. For note, the vimperator extension doesn’t do everything; interacting with Flash and other similar media objects still needs the mouse. Using it less has to be a win for everyone (or at least me).

I do believe HD hockey is one of the prettiest things on this here planet Earth. Hell, even curling in HD is pretty.

I really don’t spend my day on Youtube, honest. I just had to share this song though. It’s already made the rounds of the various social networking and content aggregation sites, but hey, just in case you didn’t see it, you can watch it here.

Crazy base64 encoded PHP in a database record was causing all of it. Hooray for Wordpress and its idiotic security holes.

For the curious, I found the solution here.

It seems to only affect Google Reader. Feed readers for Thunderbird, Opera and Safari all display my RSS fine, with complete posts and no spam. The feed itself contains no spam, yet it seems Google Reader keeps getting it and does not display the entire post.

I’m not sure what’s going on, and damn near broke my Wordpress install trying solutions from the interweb. I think this’ll bump up the “Re-do my site/blog in Django” task on the queue of things I need to do. Until I figure out what’s going on, sorry for the spam, Google Reader users.

Nokia has a new device coming out which is a combination of their N8xx series tablet and their N97/86 phone, the N900. It looks pretty slick. With rumours that they’re transitioning away from Symbian into the fully open sourced Maemo OS, this could be a good competitor with any Android-based phone.

Of course, this will be a first generation device because Nokia has generally kept its phone-like devices separate from its internet tablets. Given how niche the non-phone MID market is, this seems like a logical step for Nokia to take. It did take Nokia a couple iterations of their N-series tablets to get it down right, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be the same for this new phone tablet. The smartphone market is bristling with innovation now that everyone has to do something to distract the masses from Apple’s “Look! Shiny!” approach. HTC’s got something going with their Hero/Dream line and hopefully Blackberry’s next phone will be something better than the underwhelming Storm.

I suppose the upside to my contract lasting another year is that a lot of kinks ought to be ironed out of these things. I imagine I’ll find something to gripe about though. Wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about getting a non-laptop mobile computing device. I still haven’t gotten one, as once again I am plagued by indecision. My views on getting an all-in-one phone/PMP/PIM device haven’t changed a whole lot; I’d still rather keep the phone at least separate and I haven’t yet encountered a device that does all three in a fashion that doesn’t fail horribly at one of these functions. The iPhone’s phone sucks (not to mention random blowups yielding an unusable phone), Blackberry’s media player is terrible (and the Storm’s interface bloooooooows) and various entries from Samsung and LG have produced have been plagued with interface issues and twitchy firmware. Oh, and I’m still stuck on my contract for another year and a half. However, recent Samsung phones (like the Instinct and Omnia) have shown some promise and Nokia’s smartphones (like the N97) have less retarded operating systems (Symbian).
I actually was really leaning towards buying a Nokia N810 tablet, but of course reddit had to show me the next thing up and coming: the N900. My plan was to get a data plan for my phone and tether the tablet via Bluetooth (though I hadn’t actually walked into a Bell store and asked if this was possible yet). But the N900 looks a lot sexier, has a better profile than the N810 and Maemo > Symbian in comparison to the N97. Of course, it really is only worth it if you utilize the cellular feature of it (otherwise, it’s just an N810 with a slightly better profile and Maemo 5). Considering I’m locked in for another year and a half with Bell, that won’t work. But it’s so shinyyyyyy…

I suppose step 1 is to talk to a Bell monkey to see if tethering is actually allowable on a Bell phone without ludicrous data charges. If not, then there’s no point in getting a new tablet for now; I might as well continue trying to hack my old Palm into working with Linux. The one upside to all this indecisiveness is that it’s keeping money in my bank account.

The intarwebs reports that there’s a script, the entire original original cast is back and that it’ll be a “passing of the torch” type movie with a new generation of Ghostbusters. As much as I love the franchise (Ghostbusters and Ninja Turtles were the staples of my childhood), nostalgia can only get you so far.  The original guys are in their 60s and are fat.  There’s a reason why Schwarzeneggar wasn’t in Terminator 4 and why Harrison Ford looked awful in Indy 4.

While I have a faint hope that this could work (Aykroyd’s a decent writer), this has the potential to be like Blues Brothers 2000.  I suppose if it is, at least the soundtrack will be awesome.

It’s Pi Day! Bake a pie, eat a pie, calculate digits of pi, watch Pi or do with pi.  Mmmm…pie.

I blame the engineers. Why? Because they’re there.

I’ve been trying for a while now to get my Rocketfish Bluetooth dongle to work in Linux so I can pair my phone and Bluetooth headset with my laptop to do useful wireless things. Unfortunately, despite a few claims of “just works” my dongle has yet to register as a Bluetooth device. Currently it registers as a mouse, keyboard and hub. Why? I haven’t a clue, and ye olde Google turns up no help.

The thing works in Windows, mainly because it comes with a CD that has Windows drivers on it.  I’m wondering if this is a hardware issue at this point because there are a few other dongle success stories on the Internet with plug-n-play ease after the appropriate Bluetooth packages were installed. I am having no such luck.

Does anyone have a USB Bluetooth dongle I could borrow to see if it’s just a hardware incompatibility? I’d rather not gamble on another device only to encounter the same problem again.