Blogger to Wordpress think about it first! Part 2

Welcome the second part in my series about my journey from Blogger to Wordpress.  After reading the first installment in this series, it may sound like Wordpress is all that and a side of chips.  Well, there is a reason it's the most popular blogging platform.  But, don't discount Blogger just yet.  Google's platform has a lot to offer.

Blogger to Wordpress think about it first! Part 1

A lot of people start blogging on free platforms like Google's Blogger.  And why not?  It's free, it's reliable and you can run ads to your heart's content.  Heck, they even have adsense integration built right in! But, there comes a time when a move to a platform like Wordpress may be prudent.

High Bounce Rate? Blame Google Analytics

I've read a lot of stuff online from the experts, especially about having a quality blog.  One of the indicators that gets thrown around a lot is something called bounce rate. According to those in the know, if you have a high bounce rate in tools like Google Analytics, it means readers simply aren't engaged and sticking around.

The rebirth of SKW, is there more to come?

I've been spending time thinking about this original blog.  Steve K's World was started to function as a personal blog, a place for me to say random stuff out loud. Of course, lately I haven't had time to update this site (I didn't really update it before.  However, I have some ideas that might bring this blog back to life.

random check-in

Greetings!

I still feel bad abandoning the original SKW for SKVW my new project for e-cigarette reviews and news. Originally I thought I could mantain both this site and the other, especially as a boneheaded co-worker comes into my office going on about buying a more expensive Android tablet over an iPad because it has a faster CPU listed in the specs.

No, the real reason is that the e-cigarette review site has really taken off.  Between that and real-world obligations, I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to pick this site back up again.  I plan on keeping this here for the occasional time I have to rant about said boneheaded co-worker, or when it's time to put out an update on a new project but for now, you can find me at Steve K's Vaping World.

Here's some popular articles if you want to pay me a visit.

Finding the best e-cigarette
Advanced "mod" e-cigarette reviews
Reviews of standard starter kits
e-Cigarette News Roundups

It sure is quiet in here

My apologies for not updating the blog recently.  I hope to get back to it some day when things calm down.  For now, I'm onto my next blog project: Steve K's Vaping World which is my site for reviews, news and information on all things E Cigaratte.  So if you're an electronic cigarette vaper, stop on by and check it out.  Otherwise, enjoy the fine article archive here, until I make my triumphant return.

All the best,

Steve K

Control Apple TV 2 with TiVo Peanut Remote

One remote to rule them all!  Ok, that was cheesy, but couldn't resist.  Here's a little tidbit I stumbled onto that has made living with a blended TiVo and Apple TV family a little happier. This may seem like a silly tip, but if you've had a TiVo forever, you know that your brain is programmed to control the peanut remote on an instinctual level.  I find the control layout is a fantastic match to the functions of the Apple TV.

 In addition to the cool, space-age aluminum remote bundled with the ATV, the ok iPhone Remote app, and the awesome iPad remote app, there is another option.  In the remote control settings page of the Apple TV lies a feature that allows the device to learn the codes from pretty much any other remote you might have laying around.  It's sort of like a reverse learning remote control.

Now here's the trick, the remote control for my TiVo has the little 1-2 slider switch that is designed to control two separate TiVo boxes in the same location (hey, some people LOVE them some TiVo).  By default, this little switch doesn't do anything, it controls the DVR in either position until it is trained to do otherwise.  I simply programmed my TiVo to be DVR #1 and programmed the remote accordingly.  That left position 2 on the clicker doing nothing at all.  Once that was done, I just followed the prompts to program the basic and advanced remote features of the TiVo peanut into the Apple TV and everything worked great (as long as I remembered to put the switch in the right position).

The links below will walk you through the steps necessary to set up each device.

TiVo support article for controlling multiple devices with one remote.  
important note: when performing step 5, DO NOT point the remote at your TiVo (go to another room or keep the remote covered) otherwise you will simply change your TiVo to use the DVR 2 IR codes.

Apple support article for "learn remote" feature of Apple TV 2

Final note, if you lack the 1-2 switch on your remote, in addition to the sponsored links above, you can purchase replacement remotes (and pretty much everything else TiVo related) from weaKnees.  I am also not totally sure if the older style remotes that have this switch can can control a Premier unit or not.  They work fine for everything from the Series 1 to the HD units I've had.

Converting "unsupported" Video files for Apple TV 2

Let's explore the least painful way to convert incompatible files like mkv and avi to Apple TV compatible mp4 videos. Also, the solution I'm using is a Mac only application, so if you're on another platform, I'm afraid you'll need to keep searching.

Hello again and welcome back to my nearly abandoned blog!  A couple posts per year ain't bad, right?

For my last post of the year, I wanted to share some of what I learned about beating various video formats (.mkv, .avi, etc) into something that both imported to iTunes and would play on the Apple TV 2. The main thing we want to do is avoid re-encoding the video if it's already stored in the original file with the correct codec.

I want to try and break this post up into sections to make it a little easier to digest since I tend to be a bit verbose sometimes.  I'll break this up into sections for an overview of my experience, technical details on codecs, transcoding and conversion tools and finally audio formats (which is the main problem I had with conversion).  If you don't really want the back story or the details on codecs and tools, jump to the summary section at the end of the post that explains the process.

My Foray into Apple TV
This Christmas, I found that Santa left me a shiny new Apple TV under the tree.  Interestingly, I found it does stuff that my TiVos already also do, but the Apple TV is much more elegant, and streaming content located on my Mac super fast and much more user friendly.  That is to say once I was able to actually get content loaded into iTunes and playable on my new device.

Since I have been using PyTivo  for ages to get various video copied over to the TiVo boxes in the house, I've amassed a fair collection of content in a number of different formats.  Of course all of this content is perfectly legitimate, I would never condone any sort of piracy or circumvention of the DMCA, that is just wrong, mmmkay?

At first, I just started dropping my files into Handbrake using either the built-in presets (high profile was the recommended one on the forums) or by downloading and using specific presets for new Apple devices.  That worked great, the converted files played just fine on the Apple TV, save for two problems.  First was that since I was re-encoding stuff that was already compressed, there was a loss in video quality (though it was slight) and second was the process took an eternity.  With my dual core iMac it would take a few hours to convert a full-length 720P video.

Being an impatient person, I decided to school myself in the world of video conversion, so with some quality time with Google and some trial and error I was able to come up with a solution that will save countless hours of encoding, I hope.  Now is a good time to point out that none of this stuff is really original though, just things I found online. I will try my best to provide links wherever possible, but if I missed something, please let me know.  So let's move on to some of the technical details.

Tech Overview (or really basic things I should have known but didn't)
To understand the most efficient way to get video compatible with the Apple TV, I found it was important to learn about some basics like the ATV's capabilities, the difference between codecs and containers and some of the more common formats for (totally legit) files out there.

Supported Video Formats for the Apple TV 2:  There are basically a few highlights to take away from the spec details.  The only videos ATV can play must be MP4 files (.mp4, m4v, or mov), have to be encoded as h.264 and have an AAC soundtrack with a bit rate no higher than 160kbps.  Alternately, the files can have an AC3 soundtrack ONLY IF your Apple TV is connected to a receiver or TV that can decode that format.  That last part is where I ran into most of my trouble, more on that later.

Ok, let's dissect the supported format details a little bit more to try and get a feel for what we need to look out for.  The first part of the specs are what I tend to refer to as the container, which is probably not technically correct, but it's my blog dammit and I can call it whatever I want.  So by container I'm referring to the actual file type that stores the video and audio information that makes up a video file.  There are a number of containers running around out there in the wild, there are of course the ones directly supported by Apple like mp4, then there are the more popular and unsupported ones that we are mostly interested in like mkv and avi.

As mentioned, these container files contain video and audio streams, in many cases, the video stream included in a container unsupported by Apple TV is actually compatible with the Apple TV.  If a video file includes a stream encoded with h.264 (you may also see it called x264) then assuming it's not encoded at an outrageous bit or frame rate, it will be playable without transcoding into a different format.  If your file uses a different codec like XviD or DivX, you'll have no choice but to re-encode the entire file.

The same thing applies to the audio codec stored in the file, if it's compatible, it won't need to be converted.  The bad news is that I haven't seen a lot of mkv files with stereo AAC.  This particular point is where I ran into issues, especially finding a utility that could do video pass through while re-encoding the audio.  The good news is it takes WAY less time to just transcode audio when converting a video to an mp4.

ProTip: Most video players (like VLC or Quicktime) have an option to bring up information on a particular video which should tell you exactly what codecs are being used as well as bit rates and frame rates.

Get info in Quicktime X (using Perian). We would need to transcode the video in this file since it's DivX.  The audio is compatible, however.

Ok, that's great but...
So let's cover some of the applications and techniques required to actually make this thing work.  There are a bunch of different things you can use, depending on what you need to do and your individual preferences.   Tools that I personally use a lot are Handbrake (for full on encoding), Quicktime X (with Perian installed to allow me to load most types of videos) and finally, MKVtools.  Of the three applications listed here, MKVtools can actually do everything and will be the focus of the rest of this post.

Using the information I had up to this point, I was using QuickTime to simply convert the container to MOV for existing h.264 video by using save as and selecting the movie format.  This resulted in a file that imported into iTunes and played just fine, hooray!  Then I tried to open it up on my Apple TV, it attempted to stream it, but quickly produced the dreaded "An Error Occurred Loading this Content. Try Again Later" message.  Researching the error message, I found this blog post that indicated the ATV might have trouble detecting the AC3 audio stream.  I switched the AC3 setting to on, but alas, my super cheap-o house brand TV couldn't handle an AC3 signal apparently as I continued to get the error message when attempting to play the video.

Create Apple TV magic with MKVtools
Ok, so I need to find a tool to allow me to pass through the video stream while transcoding the audio stream to a compatible AAC format.  I keep a number of tools around, but I found none of them really offered the ability to pass through video, most could pass through audio, but not video.  Some searching revealed that the old version of QuickTime Pro would let you do that when saving as, but that wasn't available to me.  I also have a copy of VisualHub laying around, which lets you use the pass through flags for both video and audio.  For some reason the resulting video files were unplayable in anything.  Since VisualHub has been abandoned for years, I decided to keep looking.

I stumbled across this thread on the Mac Rumors forum that was discussing methods of using a bunch of different command line open source tools to manually extract/convert the video and audio streams and then re-combine (mux) them back into a playable mp4 file.  Too much work for me :)  However, the thread was 18 pages long, and in the latter pages there was mention of a graphical front end for these tools called MKVtools.  

MKVtools is available with an unlimited trial that limits a few minor features (like queuing) but otherwise is fully functional.  The author wants to make sure the application works for you before you pony up the princely sum of... 5 bucks!

MKVtools can take a variety of formats as input and produce avi and most importantly mp4 files as the results.  It can do full encoding of video and audio or selectively let you select either or none for conversion to an mp4 file.  As an additional bonus, you can also keep (or convert to) an AC3 sound track and just add your AAC stereo stream as a secondary stream.  This solution worked for me and allows me 5.1 compatibility with my TiVo that is connected to a proper AV receiver.  As an added bonus you can also work with subtitles, though if you want to hard code a subtitle stream from an mkv file to your mp4, you will have to re-encode your video file.

The main MKVtools window with our sample file loaded

Once your video file is loaded, the main window will show you the specifics of the streams included in your video file.  Note the track info for the video stream.  It is listed as mpeg4.  This is NOT compatible with the ATV, if it were it would be listed as h.264.  Therefore, in this particular example we would need to do a full re-encode, this tool would work, or you could always use your favorite tool to re-encode.

The MP4 section

Here's the mp4 section where we'll be creating our compatible mp4.  We'll ignore the incompatible format for the moment and pretend we have a real h.264 stream.  To convert, check the boxes next to the audio and video streams in the top window.  Then simply click on the pass thru button in the video section, this video already has an aac stream, so we'll also select pass thru for audio and allow the application to just repackage the file as an mp4 file.  If the packaged audio were AC3, you could also leave pass-thru selected and simply check the add 2 Ch. track button, it will leave the existing audio alone and add an AAC secondary track which could be read by the Apple TV.  Finally if you have some other type of 5.1 soundtrack, like DTS, you could select either AAC 2ch or AC3 (5.1) and then check the add 2 Ch. track button.

Click convert and the resulting file will by default be saved to the same location as the original (along with the log file and intermediate audio and video files).  You can change the save location and the retention of the extra files in the preferences.

Thanks for sticking with me this far.  The summary of all this is below if you need a quick reference (or didn't want to read this massive article).

Summary
Ok, so here's the basic steps for conversion happiness in numbered list form.  The moral of the story is if you have a video already encoded in h.264, you want to avoid re-encoding the video if at all possible.

1. Download MKVTools
2. Open your video file in MKVTools and click the MP4 tab
3. Select the video and audio streams check boxes, note the codecs of each
4. If video is listed as h.264, select pass thru in the video section.  Otherwise, select one of the options to re-encode the video (or use your favorite other video encoding tool, you can't pass through the video for this file).
5. If the audio is listed as aac 2ch. no futher steps are required, select pass thru for audio then click convert.
6. If the audio is AC3, click the add 2 Ch. track button then click convert
7. If the audio is something else, select AAC 2ch and click convert, you may be able to convert 5.1 sound to ac3 5.1 but make sure to click the add 2 ch. track option, click convert.
8. import the resulting mp4 file into itunes when it's done.
9. View the file on the Apple TV.

TiVo's Late Adopter Penalty

Hello friends, and welcome to today's Grandpa Simpson rant!

So TiVo's next big thing has finally been announced.  The TiVo premiere will be shipping in April and is being touted as the one set top box you need to provide a way to get all kinds of content on your living room TV.  Cool!  I've been a proponent of using a TiVo as a multi-purpose media box for ages.  The current TiVO HD units have a lot of options for content besides cable programming, TiVo has just never done a great job of beating that drum. 

Now the company has started figuring out they should really get into the integration game and push that existing stuff (and some new) front-and-center.  Even better, there will be a real, honest-to-goodness HD interface.

Hooray! I'm sure some of these things will get pushed to the existing HD units since they have that capability, no more ugly stretched SD interface.

Wait... What's that? Oh, so the new platform has a lot more processing horsepower, and they're not going to be refreshing the UI on the HD units?  Sure, it's understandable, the thing uses Flash after all, that's not gonna cut it with the HD's geriatric computing power.  After all, the HD and Series 3 units have been around for years, time for them to go.

Based on the way TiVo has dropped support for the previous platform as soon as the next new and shiny platform comes up, this doesn't bode well for those of us sitting on Series 3 and HD units.  I can understand that, except for one small thing, I just bought a unit in December for Christmas, so I'm not over here like Grandpa refusing to give up my Windows 98 box and dial up modem because it hasn't caught on fire just yet.

Fine, my fault for not waiting, for being a late adopter and all.  My unit will keep working no harm no fail. 

As long as I keep paying TiVo that monthly fee.

Gee, no new features, no update to the UI that was pretty much a stop-gap to begin with, and I get to pay for that privilege?  Awesome!  It's like the mob is running things over there.  We're sorry we can't really give you new features, but you should pay up, we'd sure hate for something to happen to your ability to access your videos over the network or your season passes.

Sure, stuff gets obsoleted all the time, and someone has to get stuck with holding the bag on legacy hardware, but even Microsoft and Apple usually keep supporting a platform at least past the damn warranty expiration.

I'm still a fan of my TiVos, mostly because of the convergence, I can stream my DVD collection, or online content right along side of the stuff I record from old school TV.  So far there's not really much that can compete with it (HTPC maybe, but it's still a bigger pain in the ass, and has a way lower wife acceptance factor.)

More and more I become filled with dread over the prospect of getting a new TiVo.  First there's buying the unit, then the monthly service charge which eventually will be to pay for nothing other than to be able to use the thing.  And that's after the dreaded 7th ring of hell which is getting the cable company to figure out how the hell to make the stupid cable card work.

I'm thinking maybe it's time just to live with a so-so DVR experience paired with a second, internet-enabled set top box to get all the modern content.

Play any Shoutcast stream through TiVo (OS X and iTunes)

I discovered this feature by total accident the other day.  This may be well known, but who knows, I figured it might be worth sharing to anyone that stumbles across this.

Those of us with TiVos and Macs are kind of left out in the cold when it comes to the built-in functionality of the TiVo supplied TiVo Desktop for Macs.  You get only photo and music sharing (and some basic video publishing if you hack it).  If you want anything more advanced you have to spring for commercial software from Roxio (or go with one of the unsupported, but excellent community apps like PyTiVoX).  Anyway, there's one thing the stock software offers that as far as I know the Windows version doesn't: sharing your iTunes library complete with playlists to your TiVo units.

The fact you can share iTunes playlists with the Mac version of the default desktop is nice to begin with.  But, it turns out if you have a ShoutCast (or similar streaming audio) location saved within iTunes, you can select it from your library and the stream will play. I noticed this simply because a streaming station ended up in a smart playlist and just started playing along with my regular MP3 files.

It's pretty simple to setup, here's the details:

The first step is to download and install the TiVo Desktop then configure iTunes Sharing.

Next, add the address for a stream in iTunes, which can be found under the Advanced menu.  As an example, I'm using the audio feed from TWiT, which steams live and recorded audio from the podcasts being recorded by Leo Laporte's TWiT network.

Enter the URL:

When you click OK, a link to the stream will show up in your music library like any other audio file.  To make it easier to find on the TiVo side you can add it to or create a new playlist so it's listed on the top level of your iTunes listing on your DVR.

Once you have the file in iTunes, go over to your DVR and select your shared iTunes library from the Music, Photos and Showcases menu.  From there you can navigate to the location of your newly added stream and just hit play to begin streaming.

Keep in mind this is just simple streaming, as far as I can tell it won't send across any metadata such as current track or play times, but it's a nice little undocumented feature to have.

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?

Ubuntu - Initial impressions from a grumpy Linux skeptic

You'd think being a fan of free stuff I'd be all about open source and Linux. Well... not really. I've toyed with Linux over the last 10 or so years in various capacities. Generally, each of these flirtations is short lived and more of a passing curiosity or a desire to at least have some working knowledge of alternate systems.

Obviously, from a usability and compatibility standpoint, any operating system will evolve over the course of a decade. The same holds true for Linux, and specific builds of Linux such as Mepis and Ubuntu pop into mind when it comes to ease of use. In my mind, Linux's biggest problem is also what makes it great: the rich diversity of features and customizability of the system.

The fact is there's groups of people going in many different directions at once. Since there's no central company like Apple or Microsoft to direct the vision of armies of developers, things tend to scatter in many different directions. There are endless options of distros, applications, features, and even a fairly big schism in the actual main GUI of the OS (KDE and Gnome being the two big camps). In the desktop world, where end users, AKA consumers, live, this diversity is a detriment to wide adoption as it causes massive levels of consumer confusion.

Indeed, the Linux community itself is even divided over whether or not it cares about average end users. Some groups like the ones behind Ubuntu care deeply about making an easy to use version that anyone can use, while others believe that Linux should remain a mostly hobbyist/IT platform reserved for people who are true believers.

I personally tend to want the ease of use camp to win. While I love technology in general, I'm sort of over the hobbyist thing. I stopped building my own computers years ago, and I want my OS experience to be simple. After a prolonged absence, I've come back into the Mac user flock because I like the integrated hardware and software design, it just feels to me like a sold, flowing unit.

I think the hardware and software combo really is what makes the Mac a Mac. I've played with running OS X on my decrepit Dell E1505 laptop. While I got most of the pieces running, the experience just lacked something.

That Dell has seen a lot of different operating systems, and is the basis for my impressions of the latest build of Ubuntu. When I began this little adventure, I was running Windows 7 on the machine. 7 was working pretty well until recently where it just suddenly started thrashing wildly and generally misbehaving. Rather than go through the trouble of actually trying to figure out what's wrong, or consider the possibility that I got myself stuck in a botnet, I decided maybe it was yet again time to change operating systems.

I've pretty much been through the range of systems, and was kind of bored. I already had Windows 7, so didn't see much of a point there. I use XP at work all the time, and it's not really interesting. Vista? Yeah right. I didn't want to go through the OS X headache when I had real Macs at my disposal. That left Linux.

I knew I wanted to actually use this machine for general purpose browsing, so I didn't want anything over complicated. I like Mepis, so that was an option, but I wanted to be a little different. I briefly ran a couple of incarnations of Ubuntu on the machine, and version 9 (Jaunty Jackalope) had been available for a while, and was starting to gain even more buzz as the most likely winner of the desktop distro wars.

Based on my previous experience with Ubuntu, I knew there were some hiccups getting a fully working version on my particular machine. I went ahead and Googled all of the info I figured I'd need ahead of time (particularly the howto for getting wireless up and running). Interestingly enough, there were no specifics of that wireless card and version 9.04 of Ubuntu.

With the relevant information bookmarked on another machine, I downloaded and burned the boot CD (yes a CD, it still fits on a CD!). I booted from the CD on the trusty old Dell and went straight to the install mode from the boot menu. Testing on the live CD first is for wimps! The installer for Ubuntu has always been a pretty simple affair and fairly straight forward if you take the default options. I told it to feel free to destroy my hard drive and let it do its thing.

20 minutes or so later I was booted into the trademark ugly, ugly brown and orange desktop. Step 1 after any new OS install is to get networking up and running so you can consult with the wise sage, Google for next steps. Just as I figured I would need to get the Windows driver for the wireless card onto the machine, a window popped saying that I need a wireless driver that isn't open source, if I wanted to enable it, click here.

Wait, what? There's no way that would actually work. I remember you have to do all this stuff to blacklist the built-in driver and download and setup stuff like NDIS wrapper, light the black candles and sacrifice a rubber chicken. Well why not, let's just click it. A minute later, the little wifi light on the machine lit up. I still didn't believe it. I hit the menu bar icon for the wireless, and there right in front of me was a list of available networks, including my own.

I watched in amazement as it connected to the network and put me back in touch with my dear friend, Google. I wondered to myself how long it would actually stay connected to the wifi network as older versions of Ubuntu often disconnected me several times an hour. The network has only dropped me once in about a week of usage.

As for the rest of the system? Everything worked. Sound, track pad, video resolution, everything was good to go. I even found myself absentmindedly using two finger scrolling to page through a website (as I'm used to doing on Macbooks), only to realize that I was using two finger scrolling without having to do anything to turn it on or make it work!

I am just blown away with how well hardware recognition and configuration works in this version of Ubuntu. I think this alone is a huge leap in the potential adoption of Linux by more typical users. The appeal in Ubuntu also comes in its pre-packaged software offerings. Out of the box it comes with key things like Open Office, FireFox and Pidgin, and has a nice graphical front-end for downloading even more packages.

While the initial offerings are limited, additional stuff due to a number of reasons such as licensing and possible legality do prevent Ubuntu from having all of the features like DVD playback of a closed source system. A number of third party repositories by default are disabled as well which further limits software options for the uninitiated.

The good news is there are a ton of blog articles and how-to's to help a newcomer get up and running. It may be a little off putting for some as a lot of the steps involve modifying text files and running commands in the terminal window. Through the magic of copy and paste, the steps are easy to follow and will get a new system to pretty much be feature equal to any other system in short order.

Another tutorial covered how to get more eye pleasing themes in place. Going a little more advanced, I was able to turn on the Emerald theme manager and make some tweaks to the general appearance so I have at least some of the eye candy that I enjoy in the other systems such as transparency and window minimize effects.

After spending that first evening setting everything up, I actually found myself at a loss over what to do. For some reason I wanted to go do "Linux stuff" instead of just actually using the machine to surf the web. It was basically too functional, it already did everything it was supposed to without me having to mess with it as I was accustomed.

The OS had faded to the background of my computing experience, which really is what it's supposed to do. I don't think I'm quite ready to join the neckbeard crowd and cast away the evils of closed software, but I'm actually content using a Linux distro. I imagine modified versions of Ubuntu designed for specific manufacturers' hardware (like netbooks) could be even more seamless. Adoption of Linux has been mixed at best because of consumer choices. I certainly understand that, but then again I'd love to have the option to pay 100 bucks less for a new piece of hardware.

I do think that it should be an option since there still is a bit of a culture shock and learning curve going to Linux. I wouldn't really recommend it to someone like my mother-in-law or anything, but it may be a way to go if you have at least a middling level of computer experience, and for some reason don't want a Mac that is ;-)

I'm terrified of Twitter Trending Topics

I am watching with great interest, the activity on Twitter surrounding the current events in Iran. Based on the fact that there are seemingly hundreds of messages per minute with the tag #iranelection flying across the interwebs as I type this.

To be sure, it's both a fascinating thing to watch events unfold in real time (along with some serious cluelessness) and a horrifying thought to witness there are people experiencing some really horrible things at the same time as we watch.

Of course that really isn't my point, since there are hundreds of other blogs to analyze the actual events and how social media is changing the face of news or whatever. Use Google, go find 'em you're in the wrong place ;-)

No, rather as I watch this seemingly endless stream of raw data, I noticed one thing in common with most of them. There are links to other things. Shortened links. Shortened links that when viewed in the raw display no indication of where they might lead.

And?

Well since most people just follow the trending topic, they are getting random links from completely untrusted sources. Remember how you're not supposed to click on random untrusted links in e-mail? This is the same sort of thing, only I suspect people don't quite think about it since it's not e-mail, it must be safe, right? RIGHT?

So if I'm a bad guy, I just put a link to my site featuring the latest drive-by JavaScript attack on it into a Tweet with the most popular tag in trending topics. I will instantly have thousands of eyeballs looking at that URL and maybe clicking on it. No real work involved, no real need to even go through the trouble of injecting my naughty jscript into a legit site.

That was enough to keep me from clicking on anything I saw when I was following along with today's events. Sure, I use a cool (and free, remember where you are, after all) little Firefox Plugin called PowerTwitter that will go check the shortened link and translate that to the tile of the page. That's somewhat helpful, but really, how hard is it to simply put a legitmate looking title on your malware site?

Unfortuately, I don't really have anything resembeling a useful reccommendation besides use an aftermarket Twitter client or plugin that enumerates shortened links along with a little bit of healthy paranoia (try to go the the site independant of the Twittered link). So if anyone else out there actually stumbles upon my humble little musings and has suggestions or tips, I'd love to hear them.

How To: Connect a DroboPro to a VMWare ESX host via iSCSI

Originally I was going to publish an article talking about my trials and tribulations (and really rudimentary performance info) around testing a DroboPro in my work VMWare infrastructure. Well, I found myself burning a bunch of time figuring out how to just get VMWare to see the Drobo. I figured the steps were worthy of mention as there's a couple of things on the VMWare side I missed that caused issues. I opened a ticket to Drobo, but have yet heard back from them on the matter yet, so I don't know if they have it documented or not. I also didn't see anything Drobo specific on the interwebs, so I thought maybe there's others out there who would be able to benefit from my misery.

Also an apology, being as this relates to a Drobo Pro and VMWare ESX, this clearly has no business on a blog about free stuff. However, for a small business, this could potentially allow for the use of big boy technology at a fraction of the cost of enterpise class gear. (My DroboPro as configured is about 10% the cost of a similarly sized EMC unit).

Now onto the details. This article assumes you have an ESX server licensed to use iSCSI, an available NIC port, and of course a DroboPro with some drives in it.

After a little bit of reasearch and experimenting, I have successfully gotten an ESX host to talk to the DroboPro. Below are the basic steps required.

1. Attach the Pro to a Windows or Mac desktop via USB or Firewire. Install the Drobo Dashboard per the included documentation
2. Configure the volumes on the unit to not exceed 2TB (the limit for VMWare) using the wizard.
3. Once attached and configured, go into the advanced settings in the drobo dashboard to configure a static IP address for iSCSI
4. Reboot the unit and test ethernet connectivity
5. Connect the unit to a dedicated NIC port on the ESX host either direct cable or via a switch (reccommend jumbo frames and flow control if using a switch)
6. On the ESX host, create a new network segment for the DroboPro. Under the networking tab, click add networking, select VMKernel, click next. Select the appropriate NIC, and follow the rest of the steps to add an IP address on the same segment as the Drobo. Save the changes
7. (This is the step that got me, as it's not obvious.) Click the newly created network and select properties. Click Add and add Service Console. Assign the Service Console a unique IP in the same subnet as the drobo and VMkernel settings. Edit the original VMkernel network to allow VMotion. Save the changes.
8. If you are running a version of ESX prior to 3.5 you will need to add a firewall exception under security for outbound traffic for the iSCSI client. This is done for you in 3.5 and newer.
9. Under configuration for the ESX host, select Storage adapters. Click on the iSCSI adapter then click properties in the detail window below.
10. In the general tab of the pop up window, click configure and then check enable to turn on iSCSI. The name is not important.
11. Under the dynamic discovery tab, click Add and enter the IP information for the drobo unit. Click OK and close the wizard. A dialogue will come up asking to rescan all storage, click no.
12. Right click the iSCSI adapter in the adapter list and click rescan. Wait patiently this could take several minutes
13. If all went well you should now see the number of targets change to 1. This indicates the host is successfully talking to the Drobo.
14. In the hardware section of the configuration pane, select storage. Click Add storage. The available volumes on the Drobo should appear in the window. Select one of the LUNS and follow the wizard to configure as desired.
    

A call to Mac users: stop with the malware huberis already!

Ok, first of all I am currently a Mac user and have been off and on for years. I say this as a friend, not some sort of anti-mac PC geek: Stop being so damned smug. I am talking about the stance on the lack of malware. This stance is pretty much echoed by everyone on the pro-Mac side of the fence from users all the way to Apple itself (just watch a random I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ad).

I was listening to the latest installment of Macbreak Weekly, and a couple of panelists were extolling the virtue of the malware free paradise that is OS X. Well here's the deal folks. This sort of thing is absolutely a dangerous attitude. How many Mac users use any sort of anti-virus at all? Pretty few. To that point, there actually ARE very few AV programs to begin with. Edit, there is the open source (and keeping to my roots, free)ClamXav.

Sure, the Mac OS is actually reasonably secure out of the box (we'll ignore the fact that the firewall is OFF by default) but some of the other protections work very well and are what Windows Vista wanted to be *cough* UAC *cough*

What we have here is the calm before the storm or so to speak. These days, malware, botnets viruses (virii?) are all about dollars and sense. Gone are the days of the pimply faced kid writing a little code to erase hard drives. The bad guys are writing stuff to make money by stealing personal data, sending spam, DDOS blackmail, you name it. Since this is a business, it's simply much more profitable to target the PC world.

Therefore, many Mac users sit around sneering at the PC world because the Mac folk live some sort of mythical land of rainbows and unicorn tears that no virus dare enter. I'm pretty sure the people in Pompeii kinda thought the same thing about volcanoes too.

That will always be the case, a target rich environment will always get the attention, but think about the Mac side of things for a while. There's a 10% or so slice of the market that's almost completely unprotected. Once somebody really takes advantage of this situation (and I do mean when, not if) it will be an unmitigated crisis.

Think I'm being a little bit alarmist? You might have missed this, but there's a currently exploitable (as in drive by scripting) vulnerability in the Java implementation of OS X. Despite 10.5.7 being put out mere days ago, this vulnerability has not been patched even though it's been known for at least six months. For more, visit this site which even features a proof of concept that will execute arbitrary (but harmless) code on your very own magic, walled unicorn powered Garden of Eden.

So my Mac friends, enjoy your beautifuly designed hardware, (mostly) reliable OS and fantastic UI. But please, please, stop thinking it's a freakin' suit of armor and go install some sort of anti-malware. Tin foil hat optional.

Off Topic, an ironic rant about Twitter advice from bloggers

I know, I know, I've been promising actual content to all (3) of my readers for weeks now. I've got some stuff in the works, a meta post with various updates and musings. I'm currently waiting my DroboPro (alas, not free) shipment to write a real article about trying to get it to play with VMWare ESX and some non-scientific performance stats. But that's not why I'm here now!

No, I am here because I've become irritated about blog posts from the "technorati" expounding on their detailed criteria to get you, the common plebeian, followed by them. I say.. enough already. Seriously. The universal rule should be, do you have interesting things to say? If so, people who find them interesting will follow you.

So far, my favorite bit of advise from these neo-sages is to make sure you are active so you're @ replying a lot. Yeah, ok. I've looked at the tweets from some of these people. Half of what they say is replies to other people I'm not following. So you get this disjointed mess of random half conversations.

Before Twitter, society used to have a term for that: Crazy dude at the bus station.

Some mini updates and random thoughts

Ok, it's been a while since I've updated the blog. To my one reader, I apologize for my slacker tendencies. The family is about to embark on a vacation to Orlando for a couple nights then a 3 night Disney cruise with a baby and a really rambunctious toddler, should be entertaining. Which of course there's another week with out an article. I am planning on tweeting photos as I go (during the non-international roaming parts of the trip.) So if you're interested, play along on Twitter

In the mean time, I'm just going to throw out a few notes on the great TiVo crisis and a couple of articles I have bouncing around in my head.

TiVo crisis update: After a lot of troubleshooting which involved ripping apart the Western Digital TiVo extender (really an over glorified mybook eSATA drive) as well as the TiVo itself to run extensive hard drive tests from WD. Both tests came back clean which was odd. So that essentially left either the SATA cable, the CableCard (yikes!) or some actual hardware issue. Unfortunately the next option I had was to disconnect the extender and let the TiVo divorce it (therefore deleting all of my videos).

This test so far has proven successful, no issues, and my wife's American Idol episodes actually recorded. For some reason Idol was the first program that started showing signs of distress and it ALWAYS got screwed up after that. The unit has been crusing along for over a week with no signs of distress, so I am calling the issue as a bad SATA cable (or connector on one of the units, we'll soon find out when I order a new cable.

In the pipeline.
One the IT Pro font, I've gotten approval for the Drobo Pro to extend the Dell NAS server we use for our disk to disk backup system. Before I attach it there, I'd like to slap it on a workstation to play with it a little and get some peliminary performance numbers. Then I want to see if I can get it talking with a VMWare ESX host as an iSCSI device. If I can I'll then try to run some numbers on it vs. direct storage and our 2gbps fibre channel SAN. I don't expect a lot on the VMWare front as I think the unit will probably take a beating on I/O. But if it can actually work, it might be a good solution for guest machines that don't hit the disk system a lot or are low use type machines.

Finally, some iPhone love is in the works too. I went crazy and downloaded a ton of apps trying to win the billionth app contest (alas I lost). They were all free apps, and I've been culling the ones I deem crappy. When the reckoning is finally over, I'll write about what's left as I did find a couple of cool, or at least amusing (I'm talking about you, iPity (link opens to random review I found on Google)) apps.

That's it for now folks, time to find some sandals to pack!

iStat Menus

I'm not sure why I haven't written about iStat Menus before. I think it's because it's about the first thing I grab on any Mac I'll be using for more than 10 minutes. Some people do the same with Quicksilver (I have yet to figure out why it would make my life that much better, call me backwards). iStat Menus is the menu bar version of iStat, which is a utility for viewing a number of different meters representing system performance.

While I generally learned pretty quickly that menu bar apps add a whole lot of clutter very quickly, iStat has earned a spot on the second most coveted real estate on my screen. The first is the desktop and nothing goes there 'cept the little hard drive icons.

iStat gives you the ability to view CPU, Memory, drives, network, temp, fans, power, and Bluetooth status. You can throw all of these into your menu, or pick and chose which ones grace your screen. I personally like the CPU, Memory, Network, and oddly enough, date and time.

Date and time? Not exactly a performance measure, is it? Well no, but I happen to like it better than the default option (I hide that one in system prefs) It is more compact when you are displaying the date, and if you click the date it gives you a neat-o pop up calendar.


One thing I miss about my life in the PC world is my PC machines generally had some sort of hard disk indicator light somewhere on them. So when the PC was acting odd, I could always glance down at the hardware and see that the disk was thrashing around like mad. I was slightly clueless when my Mac did the same thing (oh yes Macs are just as capable at sucking as PCs). Now I have a cool blue icon that does the same thing. It's hard to tell from any screen shots, but it even has indicators on the icon to show if the disk is reading or writing.

The other three indicators are pretty much common stuff (you Vista users are familiar with the little desktop gadget that looks like a car instrument cluster and shows this stuff off, everyone has that one.) I have at a glance my physical memory in use, cpu usage and network activity. One cool thing about it is that you can click on one of the indicators and it will give you the top processes using the resource. This was great for finding out that our stupid printer driver goes nuts on occasion and ties up an entire core for no good reason whatsoever.


Sure, most of the stuff the app does isn't exactly revolutionary, there's tons of other apps out there that do the same thing. My favorite thing about this one is that it's a simple heads up at-a-glance indicator that takes up little screen real estate. I can easily click to get more in depth details on what's happening and even launch OS X's native task management software to kill misbehaving processes. The only thing I really wish I could do with this would be to kill an app directly from the menu rather than having to jump over to Activity Monitor.

The price is right at zero dollars, you can grab it at the iSlayer website.