Grammerjack

I just bought a Buffalo LinkStation Mini 500GB Networked Attached Storage (NAS) device. It's a very small fanless Linux file server with two 250 GB hard drives, 128 MB of RAM, a 266 MHz ARM CPU and a gigabit Ethernet port. My reasons for buying a NAS I wanted to provide a reliable backup of family photos and documents, and I was getting tired of burning CDs and DVDs. I wanted a small Linux-based server I could play with. My reason for buying the LinkStation Mini It's fanless. It's tiny. Buffalo has a good reputation for NAS quality. There is a decent sized Buffalo NAS hacking community. Fry's had it on sale. :-) Setting it up Setup was very easy -- I unpacked the box, pluged everything in, and installed a CD of utility programs. The main feature of the utility program is that it helps find the IP address of the NAS. All the actual administration of the NAS is done via a Web UI. To RAID or not to RAID The LinkStation Mini comes with two identical drives...

I went to the Computer History Museum today. I saw the Visual Storage exhibit, which is a collection of famous computers, the Babbage Difference Engine, which is a very elaborate reproduction of a never-actually-built Victorian era mechanical calculator, and the PDP-1 demo. This last demo was very special to me, because I finally got to play the original Spacewar! game, and meet and chat with Steve Russell , the main developer. (Perusing Wikipedia I now realize that Steve was also an early Lisp hacker. D'Oh!, I was going to ask a question about Lisp on the PDP-1, but I got distracted.) There's a Java Spacewar! emulator , but it doesn't properly convey the look of the PDP-1 radar-scope-based display. The scope displays individual dots, 20,000 times per second. Each dot starts as a fuzzy bright blue-white dot, but then fades quickly to a dim yellow-green spot, which takes another 10 seconds to fade to black. This means that dim yell0w-green trails form behind the ships as ...

I recently spent a lot of time using two different in-flight entertainment systems: one on Eva Air, and another on Virgin Atlantic. For people who haven't flown recently, I should explain that these systems consist of a touch-sensitive TV monitor combined with a remote-control-sized controller. The systems typically offer music, TV, movies, flight status, and video games. I believe both systems were based on Linux. I saw the Eva system crash and reboot, and the Virgin Air system has a number of Linux freeware games. The GUI frameworks were pretty weak -- both systems made poor use of the touch screen and had obvious graphical polish issues. The Virgin system was much higher resolution, and was 16:9 aspect ratio. I expect it was running on slightly higher-spec hardware. Both systems worked pretty well for playing music and watching TV or movies. The media controls were pretty limited - neither system allowed seeking to a particular point in a movie, or even reliably fast forwarding....

Here's a very long, quite good post on Nintendo's strategy with the Wii: http://malstrom.50webs.com/birdman.html The thesis is that the mainstream video game market arms race of every-more-complicated games ended up overshooting enough of the potential game market to allow an opening for simpler "down-market" games, and that Wii was able to exploit this opening. The article predicts that Nintendo will now move up-market, producing more complicated games over time, pushing PS3 and Xbox 360 into very up-market niches. Sort of how consoles took over from PC games.

OS X is by and large a good OS, but once you get past the sexy UI you find a lot of rough edges. For example, this month I've been working remotely over a flakey DSL connection. I ran into a very frustrating problem: if you're using a PPTP-based VPN, and your network connection is poor quality, the whole Apple UI will frequently freeze up with the "Spinning beachball" cursor for minutes at a time. Luckily for me the work-around is to reboot my DSL modem. But it seems like poor system design for the VPN packet performance to affect the UI of non-networked applications.

Another superb rant by Steve Yegge on dynamic languages: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html The comment section's good too -- especially the long comment by Dan Weinreb of Lisp / ITA software fame. Steve's got the same problem some of my self-taught friends do (hi Bob, hi Jim!): he'll say something in a strongly opinionated way, without giving supporting evidence. I think that makes people think he doesn't know what he's talking about. So people tend to write him off. But if you talk with him, it almost always turns out his strong opinions are backed by some pretty deep experience and insight. I've learned to give Steve (and my self-taught friends) the benefit of the doubt.

Check out this teardown of a Sony OLED TV . It looks like Sony has a standardized architecture for their TVs, which makes sense, but which also means that some TVs have unused capabilities (such as a multi-core CPU powerful enough to run a web browser. I wish an enterprising hacker would figure out how to download code and run them on the TVs -- my understanding from reading Sony's GPL web site is that they already have Linux and busybox installed. Oh well, maybe GPL 3.0 will force Sony to make their TVs user-upgradable in the future. It's significant that Sony's not using the Cell CPU in their TVs. That was part of the justification for spending so much on Cell. I assume this means that Cell's just not cost-effective for TVs.