I almost want an iPad (Or NO FARMVILLE FOR YOU!)

Quick math quiz - solve for X: Old Dell Laptop + X > iPad - X

The solution in just a minute, but first some background. I, like most of the free world spent a great deal of time following the live coverage of the new Jesus Pad powered by Unicorn Tears presented by Steve Jobs himself (instead of being a productive contributor to my employer). At first I was wondering what was wrong with me. I just wasn't beside myself with crazy fervor over the iPad. I must be running low on Apple Kool-Aid, surely they couldn't have totally whiffed what was supposed to be their most revolutionary gizmo ever. It was just a big ass iPod Touch, no wild hand flailing like a futuristic Tom Cruise in Minority Report, no wireless HDMI, and not even a single camera (let alone two of them).

At least the price was a bit of a surprise. Sure, it still out costs most serviceable netbooks and even some full notebooks, but for a first gen Apple product to be under 7 bones, that was pretty impressive. Still I kept wondering what was wrong with me, why wasn't I trying to figure out the best way to make this thing a part of my life? I simply decided I must be in the process of losing my cool, I am a parent after all, and by the time the kids hit middle school the cool will be completely gone anyway.

So I did something odd, I simply went on with my life and got back to work. Then my thoughts wandered off into the realm of how my wife and I use our computers at home. We each have our own laptops (I inherit her old ones, she gets the new ones.) My wife's MacBook is getting to be of a certain age, so soon it shall be mine, and my old Dell can find a new life on a farm where it can frolic and play with other decrepit computers.

Then thoughts of the iPad and the $499 entry price sunk in. Hey, you know you could buy TWO iPads for the price of a MacBook and each have your own shiny new Unicorn Tear powered device. No more stupid arguments over who's the most downtrodden second-class citizen in the family. Being at work, my mind shifted to use case and workflow analysis.

My wife and I pretty much do the same stuff on our laptops; we just sort of fart around with them after the kids go to bed. You know the same thing everyone does, e-mail, Facebook, web surfing and so forth. Hmm... the iPad does that, and it offers a seemingly better form factor (and no wobbly lid and loose hard drive cage like my Dell). Holy cow, now I get it... NOW I'M COOL AGAIN!

I was ready to start pitching my wife on the idea when we got home from work. And I started thinking a little bit more about the specific sites we visit on our laptops. Then I had a horrible thought: No Tiki Farm! No Farmville! CRAP! My wife more than me is addicted to one of these silly Facebook games, and then I realized, it's Flash based. Early reviews of the iPad confirm there's no Flash. After a quick inventory of the sites I visited frequently, I realized there was a lot of Flash involved. It's kind of a big deal

Sure we've all lived with iPhones without Flash for a long time now, but that's a different animal in my mind. I use the phone differently, sure it's sometimes a bummer to not have Flash support, but I still prefer to do a lot of things on a larger screen. Not having it on the iPad on the other hand is a serious problem. Basically, I would need to have the iPad AND still hang on to my rickety old Dell so I can whip it out when I feel the need to watch Hulu or any number of other tasks. The old laptop still can surf the web, and check e-mail and do everything else the iPad can do, except I can't turn it upside down, the screen would probably fall off or something.

Yeah that seems kinda stupid to me too. So the answer to our math quiz is flash: Old Dell + Flash > iPad - Flash. It can do all the web surfing, watching videos e-mail fairly competently as well as play stupid little games where I have to try and annoy enough friends into joining my quest to plant virtual pineapples.

Ok, well it's early in the game the iPad isn't in anyone's hands yet, maybe Flash can make it into the iPad at or shortly after shipping time. Also, perhaps pigs will fly.

But then again, Steve's reasoning was that the resource hog nature of Flash would melt the poor little iPhone into a quivering mass of molten mobile phone processor bits. The iPhone just couldn't give Flash the necessary resources. Ok, understandable I've seen how some apps simply make my poor phone whimper in pain. And of course being a dedicated fanboi, I'd never question His Jobbiness. Well, except there's one thing I don't quite understand Mr. Jobs - unlike the iPhone, by all accounts, the iPad runs like a stripe-assed ape. Imagine I said that last part like detective Columbo.

So if the iPad is a speed demon, is there actually a reason (other than it is kinda crappy) Apple will put forward as to why Flash won't work on it this time?

While I wouldn't mind cashing in my old Dell for my wife's gently used MacBook, I'd much rather have other options. I burn my incense and swing the dead chicken over my head at my little shrine of the great Apple (while facing Cupertino of course) and pray that there may be a lasting peace made between the houses of Adobe and Apple and the iPad could indeed become a respectable citizen of my leisure time.

I promise you Oh Great Jobs, I won't be greedy, I won't ask for Flash on the iPhone. I will trust in your wisdom in such magics, but please please let me live a peaceful existence of technical equity with my significant other.

Until then, you can find me at the store buying duct tape for my trusty old Dell.

Static Routes on Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard seems to be a mixed bag of core changes to underlying infrastructure. Adding static routes appears to be one of those changes. See the end of this post if you just want to see the new syntax.

Welcome to another sporadic and completely random tech update. This will be a short one as I just have a little bit of info to share that I couldn't quickly find on the interwebs with the google. Turns out there are some slight changes to the terminal command to add a static route.

I am currently running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) on my work MacBook. The update was not pretty and I essentially had to completely wipe my OS X partition and start over. Along with that comes a few incompatibilities, most notably for me, MS Live Mesh doesn't work any more, which is how I had intended to get my data back onto my MacBook after I had to clean install, oops!

But here's a slightly obscure change that probably affects very few people:
The basic command to add a static route has changed slightly. I use a static route to connect to a split tunnel VPN (bad practice I know, but it's a long story).

The old command I used to use:
sudo route add -net 192.168.x.0 192.168.y.z
Appeard to work as it used to, but no traffic would actually route through the VPN tunnel. I searched around and saw no references other than a blog comment from today (Sep 2) saying the command in that how-to wouldn't work for them.

So it seemed to me that somehow the way static routes were added changed a little bit. I broke down and read the man page for route (man route) to see if I could figure anything out. Granted I never read it before so I have no idea if there was a difference, but I noticed the following optional parameters that could be used in the route command like static (indicate a static route) and interface (which tells it the interface is directly connected already). I was then able to successfully create a static route using the following command:

sudo route add -net 192.168.x.0 192.168.y.z -static -interface

The Technorati Apple Kerfuffle: I'm taking my toys and leaving!

It's the "tastes great/less filling" argument of the internet raging between recovering Apple fans and the Kool-Aid imbibing remaining faithful. Only this time it's taking place between parties that have voices heard by many thousands. Thousands of people that include me. Since I have this here little blog that nobody actually reads, I get to be the little guy and complain about the "new media elite".

Not that I want to be a little guy, so for the record, according to Google AdSense, I've made 3 cents since I've started this endeavor. Anyone using this against me in 5 years in some stupid comment flame war, please note that I don't choose to be either famous or unknown, I simply am (how Zen-like).

Now on to the back story. For those of you who somehow missed it or are uninterested and came here looking for a recipe for bourbon chicken, here's a brief rundown of the things about which I'm going to bitch and moan.

CEO of Mahalo.com (some may say internet blowhard) Jason Calacanis wrote a little missive to his mailing list and on his blog about his frustrations with some of the business practices in which Apple is engaged. Previous to that other notable internet-types like Mike Arrington publicly and proudly threw their iPhones into the virtual bonfire and said Apple had abused them for the last time.

Now, I don't want to repost the contents of these posts on this blog, nor do I want to inadvertently put words in others mouths, so I encourage you to, you know, go catch up on this stuff if you haven't already. Anyway, to summarize my understanding of these stances is that Apple is too restrictive, their practices kill innovation, Apple isn't the cool little beatnik writing 'zines and slam poetry it used to be, now it is THE MAN! As they go forward, they're going to be more and more closed and oppressive and one day will own your brain. Oh yeah and AT&T is teh suck.

To be fair, I'll now exaggerate and over simplify the other side's counter arguments. These arguments tend to range between "STFU you M$ Whore" to some well thought out point by point rebuttals. Many of the rebukes tend to go somewhat in the direction of Apple's control makes life easier for the consumer.

Since you didn't ask, here's my opinion on the matter anyway. I think both sides make a valid point. Apple's secret sauce is really its tight control over all aspects of the experience. The reason I love stuff like OS X and the iPhone is because the hardware and software design work together to form a solid experience. You simply can't get that from more diverse platforms, Microsoft has to support far too much hardware. Linux of course can range from really elegant stuff that works to frustrating technical problems and UIs that make MySpace pages look like zen gardens, it's all up to the user and the community so it's a complete mixed bag.

On the other hand, yeah Apple has made more than its share of bungles in the App Store, the latest of which as caught the ire of the government. It'd be great to have Blu-Ray and any number of other innovations that other hardware enjoys. I've jailbroken my iPhone before and managed not to bring down AT&T's network.

Of course, I restored my phone back to factory settings some time after jailbreaking because I preferred my phone to actually be stable. That's really the thing, I mean what's the point of these arguments about openness anyway? Should Apple just open up the doors until they're just another Linux distro? That would totally defeat the purpose of having a player like Apple, sometimes it's nice to have a little bit of a guided experience. It's sort of like the difference between a dune buggy and a monorail. Both will get you somewhere, but the experience is vastly different and appeals to different people.

Ok my dear reader (and I do mean that singularly I think there's only one of you). I promised to rail against the elite bloggers and "new media" bourgeois dammit! It's actually kind of nice to hear the classic Apple based flame war move on from Microsoft v. Mac and into the practices of Apple exclusively, but that's about the only new thing.

I've seen this exact same activity countless times on every subject imaginable. Anyone who has spent any significant time in a forum (or if you're old like me, BBSes and Usenet) has seen this whole thing play out. What I'm talking about is that disgruntled poster who threatens to leave but never actually does because they're attention whores waiting for someone to beg them to stay. Nobody ever begs them to stay. Here's a sample of the average discourse.

Poster 1: You guys are so ignorant and closed-minded about (movie/comic/starship captains/software/anything). I clearly am not appreciated here, so I'm going to stop posting.

Poster 2: Ok

Poster 1: I mean it, this is just a waste of my time, I remember when this forum used to be great and everyone really believed in (x).

Poster 2: I thought you were leaving

Poster 1: I am

Poster 2: Ok

Poster 1: I mean it, I'm really leaving.

Poster 3: sorry you don't like it here, good luck wherever it is you're going.

Poster 1: I just wish you guys would learn to treat everyone with respect

Poster 4: Can I have your stuff?

Poster 1: Hey guys, did you hear that (dubious news source) posted an article about (x) That's (fantastic/retarded).

That's kinda what this whole thing seems to be like to me. People just screaming at the top of their lungs.

Look at me! I'm going against the status quo! I think different. You can't fence me in!

- sent from my iPhone.

It's not that I think people shouldn't move on if they think a particular product isn't right for them. Different people have different needs, that's cool and all. But first of all, does it really need to be a federal case? And more specifically to this topic, if you're really against closed systems, my question to you is what flavor of Linux are you running?

And... Can I have your stuff?