Technology
Entries related to technology.
Rapture Road Trip Diary - ShakeDown BBQ
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 11:01As we started our trip to Virginia yesterday, we listened to various tunes appropriate for a pre-rapture road trip. First up was Freebird, “If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me.” At various points along the trip, we listened to other songs that fit the trip. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, we pulled over to switch drivers so Kim could search on the cellphone for restaurants while I drove. The restaurants we had chosen before we left didn’t seem as promising as we had thought. One was about fifteen minutes of the interstate and had mixed reviews. The other was in the middle of a college town that is having graduation today.
Kim spent some time using Yelp’s app, and we finally got off the road in Grantville, PA. There were three choices. One was a hotel restaurant that got good reviews. However, the hotel had some crowd in it and the idea of eating in a hotel restaurant didn’t really fit the bill. The second choice was a dive bar that sounded promising, but perhaps not with Fiona. We ended up using the GPS to find our way to ShakeDown BBQ. It was really good, with a nice smoker and pile of wood out back. We need to go out and give it some good reviews, especially for people heading down I-81. Afterwards, Kim asked what the implications of location based restaurant review sites for national food chains might be.
Why do people stop at McDonald’s or Waffle House? They know what they are going to get. Stopping at The Farmer’s Wife’s Country Kitchen could provide something really good, or something really disappointing. As more people start using location based restaurant reviews, we could see a return to the local mom and pop restaurants that serve up great food the way we used to see before the branding and malling of America.
Of course, a lot of people don’t use location based restaurant reviews on their smartphones yet, so we may not see it as a disrupting technology all that soon, but in my mind, the sooner the better. Oh, and if you’re ever traveling on I-81 around Grantville, PA and looking for some really good food, be sure to checkout ShakeDown BBQ, but check in on your smartphone so you can find it and be sure that they’re open when you are passing by. And yes, they take plastic.
Call me on Skype about the new YouTube Video
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 19:50So, Microsoft is buying Skype, and some people are asking why they are paying so much money for a company that isn’t turning a profit. It sounds an awful lot like the questions people were asking almost five years ago when Google bought YouTube.
I’ll leave those questions for others to answer. Instead, I’ll chat on Skype about one of the latest videos I saw on YouTube.
Moving to the Cloud: Amazon AWS and Cloudplayer, Ubuntu UEC and UbuntuOne, and Rackspace/Slicehost and the Cloud
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/07/2011 - 09:48Slowly, I have been taking steps towards ‘the cloud’ and I expect that I’ll end up using cloud computing more and more over the coming months. With that, let me reflect on some of the steps I’ve taken.
First, I updated my home Ubuntu server to version 10.10. This includes the ability to run the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, or UEC. However, you really need a bunch of Ubuntu machines with sufficient memory and diskspace to make this worth while and my machines are a hobbled together batch of older machines and it just wasn’t worth it. On top of that, I’ve been busy with a bunch of other projects, so I’ve set that aside. If your interesting in exploring this, I’d recommend Ubuntu's Cloud Overview and Information Week's Roll Your Own Ubuntu Private Cloud.
One of the projects I was looking at is The Mapping Project. This would allow people to set up their own redistricting servers. They suggest setting things up on Amazon Web Services. You can get a free AWS account, but I found it very cumbersome and confusing to set up and configure. Once you’ve selected and configured all the opt-in services, actually setting up the server is pretty simple. You just select a pre-defined image. I selected the Mapping Project image, and I was up and running. Unfortunately, the Mapping Project image does not run well in the small instance you can get for free with AWS. So, I shut it down, and figured I’d try something simpler, like Drupal 7.
Drupal 7 ran nicely. However, a month later, I started getting bills for my AWS account. It turns out that the Mapping Project instance that I had shut down somehow got restarted, and I was using two instances at the same time. I contacted AWS customer service and they were less than helpful. After spending a bit of time finally getting my AWS account shutdown (or at least I think and hope it is shut down), I started telling everyone to avoid AWS. It just is not worth the hassle. All of this is on top of their recent outages.
Around the same time, my daughter was given an MP3 player, and I set up things to use Amazon’s CloudPlayer. Right now, the only thing I have in it is the one song that I bought for Fiona’s MP3 player. Given my experiences with AWS, I’m hesitant to do anything more with their Cloudplayer.
My website is hosted using Rackspace’s Slicehost. I’ve been pretty happy with Slicehost for some time, but an announcement came out that Rackspace is looking at rolling Slicehost into Rackspace’s cloud service. The announcement also talked about this in terms of moving to support IPv6. However, the initial response has been less than positive. People have expressed concern over the interface and how easy it will be to set up and administer. I’m also concerned about the billing and I wonder what the cost will be to move to the cloud. Will there be a nice way to cap the expense so I’m not signing a blank check, the way it seems a lot of cloud services are these days? If there is easy administration and a clean way to make sure you don’t get an unexpected bill for $2000 if you get hacked or hit by a DDOS attack, then this might be a good move, especially since I’m interested in IPv6. If they provide images, such as for Wordpress or Drupal, the way AWS does, it could become a very nice way for people to set up their blogs.
Back to Ubuntu, yesterday’s news was that the Ubuntu cloud chief beats CTO to exit door. It isn’t clear what is going on at Canonical, but I’m a little worried about these changes.
At the same time, Ubuntu is now pushing their own Cloud service, Ubuntu one. You can get a free 2 gig online, and there are mobile options and options for additional storage. It will be interesting to see how this compares with Amazon’s Cloudplayer. That is probably next on the list for me to explore.
Roku Channel Review
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/24/2011 - 20:47Yesterday, my eldest daughter was visiting me, so I spent a little time trying to find some new Roku Private Channels that she would like. The, today, I received an email from my brother who has just gotten a Roku and wanted my thoughts on different private channels. With that, let me provide a review, in no particular order, of some of the Roku Channels I’ve played with.
Let me start off by highlighting a few different websites that list Roku Private channels. StreamTV provides a introduction of Roku Private channels, its own list of private channels and links to a couple other good sites.
From the StreamTV site, there are two sections that I like. One is the listing of live news streams. These include Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN International, and RT America. There is also CNN, but I like to watch CNN International better. There is also Russian TV News English. I haven’t really checked closely enough to see the difference between RT America and Russian TV News English. One other international news streaming site that I like is NHK in English. I found it on a different site, and the NHK private channel code is, NHK.
It is also from the StreamTV site that I found RoksBox. This is a channel that lets you play media from your home network. I kicked this around a little bit, and it seemed pretty nice. However, it does have a registration fee if you intend to keep using it, and at least right now, I’m not expecting to use it that much. Since I set that up, there are some new local streaming channels that StreamTV lists, and I may go back and revisit those options again later.
One new local streaming option is IPTVMyWay. I did a quick look at it, and it might be promising if it can work with Linux boxes.
Another interesting list of Roku Private channels is The Nowhere man. This list seems to point mostly to prerecorded streams. There is a Nowhereman channel, that has links to a lot of different prerecorded shows. They also list an Achieve.org channel and a Roku Newscaster channel. Each of these channels seems pretty similar. I haven’t really gone through to see how much they overlap or what is one which channel. However, each of these channels seems pretty good.
StreamTV also points to TheEndless listing of private Roku channels. These include Justin.tv, Sirius|XM and tv.com. The Sirius|XM channel had been flaky and I never tried it. I glanced at tv.com, but it didn’t really have any content I was interested. I’ve heard that sometimes you can find good stuff on Justin.tv, but haven’t seen anything good there yet.
My brother pointed me to Dragon Blogger’s post about finding roku private channels. It has a lot of the same channels that show up on other lists. It mentions the pod tv channel. I seem to recall looking at this and not being all that impressed. Perhaps because I’d spent time looking at a bunch of different channels that had similar content. It mentions the YouTube! channel, which is a great channel. It is probably the channel we watch next to the most. Most of our viewing is on Netflix. It mentions the Woot! channel. That really hasn’t been that interesting to us.
I also like to look at the Flickr channel, the Facebook channel and the Pandora channel from time to time and I’ve thought that a Roku for my mother might be good. We could set it up so she could see pictures and videos from various relatives.
As a final note, another channel that I like is TED tv. However, since most of the TED talks are also on YouTube, it is probably just as good to stick with the YouTube channel.
The other thing to remember is that you can only have about thirty channels, which seems to be a real limitation. So, I often delete one channel so I can add another. With that, my list of channels changes with some regularity.
All of that said, I don’t really watch that much TV and what I do watch is probably more eclectic than most, so you should really look at coming up with a good list of your own.
Taxes, Computers and Cellphones
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/17/2011 - 18:13Well, our taxes our done, and our finances are a little stronger than we expected. That is a relief. However, money is still very tight so I hesitate spending money on any new computer equipment, but it might be that it is getting to be about that time.
You see, my primary computer died again this morning. It does it fairly regularly these days, and each time I managed to eventually resuscitate it. It is an old computer, I am guessing about fifteen years. It still runs Windows NT on it. In a previous life, it had been a corporate server, and I bought it second hand when it was decommissioned. It has four hard disks in in. They were big hard disks by the standards of the time. I think each one may be around 300 megabytes, and when I bought the computer, the people wondered what I would need 1.2 gigabytes for.
Well, since then, one of the hard drives failed. I’ve had memory problems and replaced memory. I think it is the power supply that is going now, and I suspect another hard drive or two are about to fail.
One option would be to power up a couple of the ten year old Windows 2000 boxes. There are three of them that I got when a company I was working for shutdown. I think they’re in reasonable shape and I could probably get by with them for a bit. Perhaps I could mount the disk from the old server into one of these boxes, and copy off the files. I don’t think they have as much disk space, however, and it might be good to get a large external drive for them.
Then, there are three old laptops kicking around. One is about seven years old and runs Ubuntu Linux pretty well, most of the time. It is what I use for a laptop when I need to. However, it crashes fairly frequently. I think the hard disk is dying. There is a heavy ten year old Windows 2000 laptop. It came with the three desktops and is pretty good. I could probably fix that up to be more reliable. If I recall properly, it has a lot of memory in it, but is just heavy. There is a third laptop. This is a nice, newer, sleeker computer. It had been running Windows Vista on it, but it crashed. Besides what appeared to be a hard disk crash, the video has stopped working. I’m not sure what it would take to revive that box.
Then, there is the computer I am using right now. It is only about five years old. I installed Linux on it, and generally, it runs pretty well. However, it is set up as a server, with just about every package imaginable installed on it. It only has half a gig of memory, and has been running pretty slowly, unless I shut down a bunch of different services.
At the same time, I have my trusty Nokia N900 cellphone. It is now a year and a half old and runs pretty nicely. It actually runs as a fairly nice Linux server, besides working as a cellphone. It has also slowed down a bit as I put more stuff on it, and I haven’t really been doing as much programming on it since I started my new job.
I’m also now carrying an HTC Thunderbolt cellphone for work. I’ve really been liking it and am wondering when the time will come that I move off of desktops and laptops over to just a smartphone or a tablet. I’m not quite there, but I’m getting awfully close.
With that, my wife is overdue for a new cellphone. So far, she has not made the leap to a smartphone, but it may be getting time for that.
So, I’ll try to work out something for my desktop and laptop computing needs, as well as my wife’s cellphone needs.
