Starting this baseball season, SBC will offer free Wi-Fi at SBC Park, formerly known as Pacific Bell Park. Next year they start charging. As SBC is a telco, it kind of makes sense, but isn’t the point to watch the game? Are we so attention challenged that we’ll pay for entertainment and then pay for something else to do instead? Someone on Slashdot wondered how long it would take for the first lawsuit due to someone getting smacked by a foul ball and saying they didn’t see it coming because their face was buried in their laptop.

I modified “Take me out to the ballgame” to reflect our new reality.

Take me out to the ballgame.
Take me out with my chain.
Buy me some wi-fi and garlic fries,
I don’t care if I never get back,
I can work, work, work for my company,
At home, at play and on train,
I am here but,
I didn’t see a thing
At the old ballgame.

Yes this is lifted from Slashdot, but I was excited to see Congress following up on my idea (!) is looking into outrageous Cable TV rates and is threatening legislative action. Might as well get my Comcast bashing all done in one day. On the idea of cable channel packages,

“When I go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk, I don’t have to buy a package of celery and a bunch of broccoli,” (Senator) McCain said. “I don’t like broccoli.”

I love the a la carte idea. It will cut my cable bill in half. Except they will probably charge $2/mo/channel making their packages look like a bargain.

When we moved to Marin from San Francisco, one of my early annoyances was constantly missing Stargate SG1 on the Sci-Fi channel Friday night. (When we stayed home of course. I mean we go out. Sometimes. Okay, not often. But hey, we’re married. Dinner and a movie are cheaper at home.)

I did some cursory troubleshooting to see if I was missing it by an hour (i.e Central Time Zone), but no. I was always very late. It wasn’t a big deal as Season 7 had Daniel’s replacement (who just wasn’t the same), and the story lines were somehow lacking. Daniel has since returned and since I haven’t been watching I have no idea how or why that happened nor what happened to his replacement. Anyway, I let it go figuring I’d figure it out with the reruns.

Then, at the beginning of this month, Tripping the Rift, started on Sci-Fi. I had seen the short demo version a couple years back and was interested in seeing a real show. The Sci-Fi channel said Thursday 10:30 pm, which makes sense, its pretty bawdy, but at 7:30pm it started. So once again I decided to find out what was going on. After visiting the Sci-Fi channels channel lineup, I realized they offer many different feeds (east coast, west coast, etc.) and I was obviously seeing the wrong one.

So I called Comcast twice, both times explaining the problem and I was assured a call back. Nada. I called again today and the operator told me there was no call history for the past month. Nice. I asked for a Supervisor. She took down my story and has assured me a call. We’ll see.

I’m pretty sure this is only happening in my little service area. But if any other Marinites are having this issue, let me know.

Last week the California Lottery site switched from the old IIS/ASP setup to an Apache/JRun/Cold Fusion setup. I applaud the first two, but what are they thinking using Cold Fusion on a site that is so heavily trafficked?

I visited the site yesterday, the day after a biweekly drawing and it was a pitiable mess. Most of the pages were unresponsive, the pages that did come up took forever, JRun errors were popping up all over the place, all the signs of a bogged down server, and one I have seen too often with Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion is just not up to the task.

So I wrote an email to the CEO of the company that performed the site redesign lambasting his choice of Server environments on a site that, as a lottery player and taxpayer, I help to pay for. I’ll paste the letter below.

“As a California taxpayer and lottery player who helps to pay your contract with the California Lottery site, I needed to write to you and question the choice of Cold Fusion as the scripting language for the California Lottery site. I am encountering JRun errors all over the site and the site is unbearably slow if not totally unresponsive.

“I realize you changed the pages last week and while the old ASP pages may have been dated, they did not completely fail like Cold Fusion is currently doing.

“As an experienced web developer I would never use Cold Fusion on a heavily trafficked site like calottery.com. It is not up to the task and never has been.

“I would urge you to switch to Java, ASP or PHP ASAP. You also might consider a distributed environment like Akamai, or generating daily static pages that don’t need to go through Cold Fusion’s horribly inefficient engine.”

As you may surmise I’ve never liked Cold Fusion. Given the (IMHO better) available options, and the fickleness of Macromedia, I would never base a project on it. Not surprisingly, the development company for the California Lottery site uses Cold Fusion for their own site, so CF is probably their language of choice.

Oh well, another pork barrel project that will have to be redone at our expense. Hey Arnold, how about scrapping this contract and restoring funding to care for the elderly poor!

My theory as to why Apple made the radical OS switch from OS 9 to Unix-based OS X has finally been borne out.

I have long surmised that an ego like Steve Jobs must have been incredibly irked when walking around Pixar and not seeing any Apple hardware. And for good reason, the Apple OS was not up to any serious office task, much less digital animation. And before the Mac zealots chime in, just admit it. The ‘Classic’ OS suffered a good many faults. It didn’t play well with other OSes (a requirement in most offices), networking with that piecemeal garbage called Open Transport was a mess, and the daily crashes that Mac users came to expect were not well tolerated by people who just wanted to get their document typed and didn’t care about pretty user interfaces.

Steve Jobs knew of the problems with the Classic OS when he came back to Apple in 1997 with the merger of NeXT. This was no coincidence. At that time Pixar was running alot of IRIX and Sun-based hardware, some even running NeXT, but most importantly, they were running a Unix-based OS, because it was solid and dependable. Recently they even started running Intel-based Linux render farms. Same Unix principle combined with relatively cheap hardware.

So the decision was made early on that the Classic OS was to be dumped and completely replaced by a new OS based largely around NeXT. The OS X Finder is the NeXT finder, the same one many of us thirty-somethings used in College. The internal transition was not smooth. In another ego battle, the NeXT team did not heed any advice from the former Classic teams, and so we witnessed the complaints of missing Apple OS features in the first iterations of OS X. Yet from the start, OS X achieved what the Classic OS could not, it was much more stable than Classic, networking was solid, and due to the memory protection inherent in Unix kernels, one misbehaving application couldn’t drag the whole system down. By OS X version 10.2, Apple had finally arrived at a decent marriage of the former Classic OS and NeXT. Now it just needed hardware.

Throughout 2001 and 2002, as Apple improved OS X, G4 hardware improvements lagged. It was at this time that Apple tried to push the theory that clockspeed wasn’t everything, but they knew it wasn’t true. It was increasingly hard to sell a 1Ghz machine for almost $1000 more than a 2+Ghz Intel box. On top of clock speed, most afficianados knew that the bus speed was the real killer. Apple for the most part hadn’t moved their bus speed much above 100mhz. Only achieving 133Mhz with the last G4s. With this kind of bus, the CPU was basically starving for RAM as the hardware couldn’t deliver it fast enough. In late 2002, rumors were heard of a new IBM processor that had a likely suitor in Apple. A 64-bit chip starting at 1.6Ghz and capable of using a much faster bus speed, the ‘G5’ was the hardware Apple was waiting to pair with its new OS.

In early 2003 Apple G4 hardware sales were flat. Rumors were flying and everyone knew the G5 was coming. Finally in June 2003 at Apple’s WWDC Apple announced the slick looking G5, with dual-processor support, up to 8GB of RAM, and up to 400Mhz main memory bus. To complement the new 64-bit chip, Apple would also release a 64-bit version of the forthcoming OS X version 10.3.

The G5 started shipping in late September 2003. At MacWorld January 2004, Apple introduced the G5 version of their rack-mountable XServe hardware. All the pieces were finally in place.

Yesterday at Apple’s Uncompressed for Final Cut Pro, it was announced that Pixar would be switching to OS X and G5 workstations for it production work.

I think the side benefit of a consumer-level Unix-based OS supported by a major player is a good thing for all. Most of us in the IT biz knew that a unix-like kernel-based system would be the final victor, and looking at the current market of Windows XP, OS X and Linux, this has also been borne out. If Apple is serious about increasing market share, look for an increased committment to business computing and enterprise services. OS X can play in a mixed-OS environment and has alot to offer many businesses, but management systems are lacking. I expect some overtures from Apple to convince IT managers that Apple is committed to the enterprise and business computing.

And when you see Steve Jobs walking around Pixar with that smug look on his face, you’ll know why.

Seems that the founders of Google were very affected by the movie Mary Poppins. Not only is Google feeding the birds, but they are actually employing them to perform their complex page ranking decisions. Yes, PigeonRank™ has finally been unveiled as the heart of the Google search engine. From the article …

“PigeonRank’s success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.”

It goes on to say …

“The ease of training pigeons was documented early in the annals of science and fully explored by noted psychologist B.F. Skinner, who demonstrated that with only minor incentives, pigeons could be trained to execute complex tasks such as playing ping pong, piloting bombs or revising the Abatements, Credits and Refunds section of the national tax code.”

The whole article can be found here, http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html. And yes, it’s a little early for April Fools, but if I need to sit through a 3 year election cycle, I’ll take humor wherever I can find it.

SBC activated my new and improved DSL this past Monday on schedule. I have seen sustained downloads of 6mbps. Of course not everything is lightning fast, many web sites are still running on T1’s which are limited to 1.54mbps. But for sites on fatter pipes, or downloads from akamai-based servers or the like, things are quite zippy and I’m a happy camper.

I upgraded my DSL package today to the new SBC Expert Plus plan. While the website touts 1.5Mbps to 3Mbps, the operator said it may be as fast as 6Mbps. Wow! We are almost to 10BaseT! All for $45/mo. which is $10 less than I am paying now. Sweet. Of course this was prodded by Comcast’s boost of their Cable Internet Service to 3Mbps down.

I continue to use my old modem with no loss of service (there better not be!). Activation date is Feb. 23rd. We’ll see …

TiVo just bought another six months in the Bay Area as once again Comcast couldn’t get its act together for a planned Q1 rollout of its new DVR service. Comcast now plans a ‘late summer’ (read Q4) rollout. With the Bay Area hosting one of the most tech-literate populations in the U.S., it is maddening when Comcast repeatedly decides to screw their customers with delayed and ‘limited’ rollouts. It is almost as if they want people to switch to Satellite. Satellite services in the Bay Area already sport a full-complement of HD stations (Comcast lacks CBS) as well as DVR/PVR devices.

Luckily TiVo has extended their $50 rebate program through January 2004. So those 40GB and 80GB units at CostCo may be the closest that Comcast customers will come to DVR/PVR service this year.

When and if Comcast ever gets its act together, the DVR unit will be Motorola’s DCT6208. It will be able to record standard as well as HDTV cable signals, though only 8-10 hours of HDTV recording. The DCT6208 features a full array of I/O ports like Ethernet, S-Video, YpbPr, USB, firewire and DVI, but expect Comcast to cripple all of them except YpbPr, even the now standard HDTV DVI port, just to make things more infuriating. Expect the DVR service to cost an additional $10/month with no cost associated with the Motorola box. Compared to buying a TiVo and then spending $12.95/month for program schedules, expect Comcast and Cable TV DVRs (which don’t use TiVo technology) to eventually wipe out TiVo regardless of how slowly and poorly the cable companies manage their DVR rollout.

Yes, XML is the big addition to Office 2003, but until everyone else starts using it, it’s really only good for inter-office materials. But for me, there are two big improvements in Outlook 2003 that make the purchase worthwhile. The first is the new movable reading pane. I kind of like it over on the right. The second is that the export function no longer barfs with my three IMAP accounts. I regularly export a mailbox with new bounces for a newsletter I manage, and through Outlook XP, the export function would hang as it inventoried and did who knows what else to all my IMAP folders. In Outlook 2003, it doesn’t try, which is the behavior I want.