Thursday 06/30/05
I've started a separate blog for the investments I make in my Roth IRA here. I'll talk about general personal finance topics as well as and giving status updates on how things are going with my own investments. I've put several posts up on it already but you should expect traffic to be sporadic.
It's got the standard Movable Type layout; I'll probably change it eventually. Or maybe not. I will also turn on comments once I get a chance to fiddle with the MT templates some more.
Wednesday 06/29/05
Telltale Signs: a famous Edgar Allan Poe story told by highway signs. Strangely awesome.
Monday 06/27/05
A classic from 1927: Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.
Having apparently discovered that his unsolicited "stock alerts" are being regularly blocked by filters, a spammer today sent me a "Spock alert." Live long and prosper.
The end of mechanical engineering?
Thursday 06/23/05
Earlier this month I described my disappointment with Linksys's RT042 router. It was just the latest in a long string of disappointments with routers. The first router I tried was a Buffalo WYR-G54. Unfortunately, it had problems with the Mac version of AOL; without tweaking the AOL configuration, you couldn't connect at all, and if you tweaked the AOL config, every TCP/IP connection on your machine would go down whenever you logged on or off of AOL. Clearly unacceptable. You could make a case that an old hand like myself shouldn't have an AOL account anyway, but, well, nuts to you! Also, AOL Radio is pretty cool.
The second was a Netgear WGR614. I'd used Netgear's venerable FR314 firewall router before, and it was utterly bulletproof until it blew a capacitor after a couple years and I had to retire it (I suspect a power surge -- I had bought it used for about $40 off eBay, so I got my money's worth) and I assumed the newer product was even better. Wrong! Some of the Amazon reviews are pretty brutal. It was none too fast to begin with, and after launching Azureus it became essentially catatonic, rejecting connections left and right and requiring a restart before you could even surf the Web. Oh, and my Roku Soundbridge couldn't pick up an IP off its DHCP server, forcing me to look up how to configure the Roku with a static IP (hint: it requires telnet).
Then came the beautiful but beastly Linksys RT042. For those who missed my earlier rant, allow me to summarize: I was quite incensed by its suckitude. 'Nuff said about that.
The latest router to grace my home network is a D-Link DGL-4300 GamerLounge, and it's a keeper. The UI looks quite slick, with Flash-based animation for the main menu -- what with that and the blue LEDs and the tiny wall wart that doesn't eat space on a power strip, it made quite a good first impression. It does want to be rebooted for nearly every freaking change in configuration (although you can defer this if you are making a bunch of changes, and just reboot once) and it has a few quirks which I haven't quite wrapped my brain around, such as the admin pages not working right with Safari or OmniWeb (Firefox works fine), but I did finally get it doing what I want. It's quite speedy, noticeably faster than the Netgear, and it even comes with a gigabit Ethernet switch instead of the 10/100 Ether that most similar products have. Not that I have much use for the gig-E given that the router's in the other room from the computers at the end of a 50-foot Cat5 cable, but it's a nice gesture. It has quality-of-service features somewhat similar to those claimed by the Linksys, albeit just for outbound connections (no problem, that's enough for my needs) and the $30 rebate that's on now means that you basically get the wireless features for free. On the wireless side, it includes WPA as well as WEP, and has D-Link's proprietary dual-channel 802.11g that can deliver up to 108Mbps if you use their wireless NICs.
The last time I tried a D-Link product, an early cable/DSL router they came out with in 1999 or so, I found it to be feature-poor (no DMZ or port forwarding) and not very well designed. Today their products are better than Netgear's or Linksys's, or at least this one is. If the DGL-4300 starts smoking or something my opinion will change -- though I seriously doubt anything like that would happen because it barely gets warm, especially compared to the Netgear. The Netgear was so hot it attracted my cat to lie on it.
In short, the D-Link DGL-4300 is a product I can recommend for nerds with sophisticated home networks. Despite its name, it's not just for gamers.
Wednesday 06/22/05
I recently made some (fairly large) prints of some of my photos for a friend who's opening a new clinic. Naturally I wanted to get them matted and framed. After checking out what that cost, I decided to do it myself. Then I discovered that local framing shops (Aaron Bros, Jo-Ann, etc.) all want $30 each to cut the mats I need. Thirty bucks. For a piece of frickin' cardboard. Of which I absolutely need eight and could use as many as thirteen. That's in the range of $250 to $400 for frickin' cardboard.
Thank God for the Internet. Documounts had matting for under $10 each, delivered. That's still too much to pay for a piece of frickin' cardboard, but my anus does not feel quite as brutally stretched by Documounts as it might have by some other vendors. As a bonus, they're in Portland, so shipping won't take forever.
As an aside, some of these outfits warn you it takes them 3-4 days to get around to cutting your custom mats, not counting shipping time. You know they have computerized mat cutters that can cut 'em in like a minute, right? If they're hand-cutting, it could take a little longer, but machine-cutting is so much faster and more accurate, why would you hand-cut? In any case, cutting pieces of frickin' cardboard is not brain surgery; there is no way anyone has a three-day backlog of mat-cutting.
Yeah, yeah, I know, you get what you pay for. But it's still a piece of frickin' cardboard. And it shouldn't cost more because you left out something, like acid, which shouldn't be there in the first place because it eventually ruins the art, thus making the mat unsuitable for the purpose for which it is being sold, i.e., matting artwork. Not ruining the art should be a basic feature here, not one you have to pay extra for.
Some day I'm going to try selling some of my photos and then this post is going to come along and bite me in the ass because people will think I'm being unprofessional. In reality, I'm just trying to educate. When you buy a nice photo to hang on your wall, the photographer paid $5-$20 to have the actual print made (depending on size) and quite possibly four or five or even ten times that amount for the framing and matting depending on how fancy it is. (A lot of fine art photos are double-matted at $30 a mat.) A frame and mat certainly do enhance the presentation of the art, but there's really no excuse for a piece of frickin' cardboard to cost more than the print it covers. You should be outraged that the artist is forced to pay so much more for the presentation than for the actual art. Because, after all, he's passing that cost on to you.
Bitching about the price of art is petty? That's exactly the attitude that lets companies get away with charging $30 for a piece of frickin' cardboard. I'm not saying that having something beautiful to look at isn't worth money -- quite the reverse, actually. It'd just be nice if more of the money went to the artist and less went to cardboard manufacturers and cutters.
Monday 06/06/05
The unthinkable has happened. Starting in 2006, the Macintosh will begin using Intel processors.
This is the end of the Macintosh and the end of Apple. Why? WINE. Microsoft Virtual PC. Within a year, probably by the time the first Intel-based Mac ships, it will be possible to run Windows apps at near-hardware speeds under Mac OS X, possibly as first-class citizens with Aqua UI widgets. The UI won't be as nice as a real Mac version of the application, but it'll be "good enough." Within two or three years, Adobe, Microsoft, and the rest of the biggies will stop making Macintosh versions of their apps. Instead you'll get a Windows version that comes bundled with WINE or a licensed version of Virtual PC. Microsoft will release a version of Longhorn that runs on Apple's hardware (assuming it is proprietary enough that it wouldn't "just work" anyway, which it probably will be) and price it competitively. The next time Apple wants $129 for a Mac OS X upgrade, or at the next hardware upgrade cycle, users will go, "well heck, most of my software is already Windows anyway, Longhorn is all right, and I'll get a slight speed boost by ditching the emulation," and they'll move over to Windows.
Mark my words: within five years, there will be no Macintosh. There will probably be no Apple. Bill Gates will have his last little sliver of marketshare. He's sitting in his office in Redmond, not ten miles from where I am right now, cackling with glee. Apple's only hope is to get out of the computer business entirely, and that's too speculative to hang their entire company on. The Macintosh today has been declared end-of-life and the userbase is being transitioned to Windows. I wouldn't be surprised to see many small Mac developers decide to jump to Windows development today.
I bleed six colors, but I've made my peace with Windows too. R.I.P. Macintosh, you had a good run. And goodbye Steve Jobs, the board will be ousting you again in the next few years. I think it might be the first time in history a company has fired the same CEO twice.
Addendum: I'm seeing a lot of "Apple won't sell any Macs for the next year or so" comments out there. "I can't think of a reason I'd buy a PowerPC Mac today." That, of course, is balderdash. If you were inclined to buy a Mac yesterday, there's no real reason not to buy one today. Sure, the first Intel-based Macs will probably be faster than the Mac you could buy today, but that's because they're a year away. Apple's demise is still several years out, I don't think in the short term there's any reason to abandon their products.
Addendum 2: Another line I'm hearing a lot of is "Well if they're still using proprietary hardware aside from the processor, they won't see any cost savings from going to Intel." This isn't about making Macs cheaper, it's about the fact that IBM can't deliver competitive performance.
Addendum 3: There's a lot for users to like about this plan in the short term. I certainly would love to be able to run Windows apps on my Mac at decent speeds. I will personally probably stick with the Mac as long as it's around and I expect my next machine, in 2007 or so, to be a Macintel. It's just that now, I don't think the Mac will be around indefinitely. I've already lost one beloved Apple platform and I'm saddened that I'll likely have to do so again. I made my peace with Windows long ago, but Apple will always have a piece of my heart.
Wednesday 06/01/05
Linksys has an interesting-looking new router, the RT042, which has a novel QoS ("Quality of Service") feature that lets you define priorities for specific machines on your network or for specific ports. Hmm, I thought: I could give my Vonage box first priority to keep my calls from breaking up (an occasional nuisance), then I could give the Web/mail server second priority so that if I'm downloading something big on the Mac it won't keep anyone from getting to my Web site. Best of all, it's under $100, which is pretty darn reasonable for something with QoS. I'll buy one!
Well, I got it today, and it's total and utter crap. It requires that the machines on your local network be assigned addresses dynamically (i.e. with DHCP). Otherwise, not only do the QoS features not work, you can't access the Internet at all. That's right, the router doesn't work with static IPs! (Oddly enough, you can port-forward incoming connections to static IPs. Which would be great if I wanted to receive e-mail but never send it.) There's not even a way to force particular devices to be assigned specific IP addresses via DHCP, as with Netgear routers; that would be kind of a pain, but it'd be acceptable. Basically the RT042 is completely useless for anyone whose home network is of any complexity whatever -- in other words, for exactly the kinds of nerds who would buy it to begin with.
I sent their support desk a scathing e-mail telling them in great detail just how lame the product and the company are; we'll see what they say. (Full text of letter in the comment thread.)
Update: Someone in the comment thread discovered how to use static IPs with the router. You have to use their (Windows-only) setup software to do it, though; it can't be done through the Web interface. Still lame.
Important: This page still gets a lot of hits because of its Google pagerank. Please keep in mind that my review is more than a year old at this point and Linksys may well have improved their product. (In fact I hope to God they have, if they haven't they're even more of a disaster.) Still, you may be interested in reading my more recent experience with Linksys products.
