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Required Reading

My new favorite magazine and website is brought to you by the geniuses behind Make Magazine.

From their website:

The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.

It’s like Popular Science was, except for the 21st century.

The MAKE Blog is fantastic, updated often with lots of DIY tricks and links.

I even downloaded two of their Podcasts last week, and those were pretty good too.

The magazine is fantastic – it’s a quarterly, nice and thick, with information on what others are out there hacking on, one project with detailed step by steps per month, and tons of cool other articles.

O’Reilly has done it again.

Zoe is smarter than me

I came home today to my desktop looking like this (look at the top panel):

Zoe killed my desktop

You can’t even tell there is a panel there in the screenshot, click for full view.

A normal panel should look like:

Normal GNOME desktop

I unlocked the Firefox icon so I was able to move it around, I moved the panel to the side just to check, I added a new panel to the top and clicked properties, but no joy on re-adding the Applications / Places / System drop down menus. I’ve played with the menu settings, and you can add specific programs to the panel, but I haven’t found the menu settings.

I’ll have to reach out to the Ubuntu community and figure this one out. Gotta love that a 1 year old can remove it with a few clicks, and it stumps me.

Update about 5 minutes later: To reinforce the discussion Novell gave at the recent GUADEC, there are some usability issues in GNOME, this being one of them. Right click on the panel, click add to panel and choose “Menu Bar – a custom menu bar”. What’s so custom about it? It’s the default panel menu option in GNOME – it’s not custom at all.

At least it’s back.

OS X for x86

Mac Daily News is reporting that OS X for x86 is available on P2P networks after someone took the developer version and seeded it.

Supposedly, it will work on any Intel processor, and the iLife applications are already compiled for x86. Mac Daily News goes on to theorize that Apple knew exactly what it was doing when it offered the developer edition after watching Tiger burn up the p2p circuit. The theory is Apple is offering a try before you buy scenario for OS X right now.

I wish I could say I thought Apple was that smart… they had to know this would happen, but that they planned it? A bit of a stretch.

Some people just don't get it

Some people just don’t get it, and Jack Valenti is one of them. The former head of the Motion Picture Assoc. of America, his voice is still heard in Hollywood as an advocate against movie piracy.

We all know who this is: in the early 80’s, he’s the one who predicted doom for the movie industry if the VCR was allowed to be legal – and we all know how that turned out for the movie industry – 20 years later 40% of their revenues are from DVD.

In a recent interview Mr. Valenti has many choice quotes of how he still doesn’t get it. Locking content to protect against “piracy” isn’t the answer. Embrace technology, share, and don’t get in the way of innovation and let people use their legally bought content how they want to.

I’d like to ask one question about the DMCA, and its effect on home moviemaking for personal use: Let’s say a homeowner is making an amateur video using video footage of his son playing pee-wee football. To jazz it up, he buys a copy of the movie Rudy and uses the De CSS program to strip it of its copy protection—

[Jack Valenti:]Well, then he’s committing a violation of federal law.

So if he wants to add a few seconds of crowd shots to the final version of the new home video he’s creating—

[Jack Valenti:]He should go to the company that owns the movie and get permission to do it. If you start that, where does it end? How much is a little snippet? Is it 10 seconds? Ten minutes? Thirty minutes? He might want the first 23 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, or all of Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain. Once people have the power to do a snippet, they could do a whole movie.

So you’re suggesting there is no fair use right to a few seconds?

[Jack Valenti:]There is no fair use to take something that doesn’t belong to you. That’s not fair use. If you’re a professor in a classroom, you show Singin’ in the Rain to your class. You can fast forward it, and there’s no performance fee for that. That’s fair use. Now, fair use is not in the law. People are taking fair use and changing it to unfair use and claiming that it’s fair use.

Mac Mini First Impressions

I’ve had a Mac Mini for the last week. I am ecstatic about getting it for a couple of reasons:

  • Mac OS X is the only operating system I don’t own.

  • Max OS X is based on Unix, and I’m a big Linux guy.

  • Finder’s new functionality in Tiger is supposed to be similar to Beagle.

  • PowerPC processor – again, only processor architecture I don’t own (Pentium 4, AMD, AMD64).

Ok, so I’m bragging a little bit, but I’ve wanted a Mac for a long time, and they’ve just been too darn expensive. Even the Mac Mini I customized on Apple.com when they came out for over a $1000 (this one was a gift, it’s the entry level one).

Initial thoughts: Mac OS X is as well done as everyone says. It’s polished, the bundle iLife applications are very good, and the OS is very intuitive. It has it’s quirks – I still haven’t found where to launch Dashboard and play with the desktop widgets. I’ve looked in the software folder, I’ve looked in the dock, and I’m stumped.

The form factor is awesome. This thing is about 20% smaller than I really expected it to be. It’s just so darn cute.

The bad: The entry level Mac Mini is way too damn slow. 256 megs in a modern day operating system just doesn’t cut it. It feels sluggish. And for a real kick in the teeth, the Apple store offered to upgrade it to 512 megs for $150 with free installation. $150 for 512 meg DDR 333 stick? I can go to the local Best Buy store and get a 512 stick for $30-$40 on ad and have the Geek Squad install it for $30. I didn’t even bother to ask Apple how much 1 gig is.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed. The tiny, tiny footprint of the machine combined with a well done operating system bodes well for Apple as they switch to Intel over the next two years. I still won’t switch from Linux though.

X3 Follow-Up

As I blogged the other day, talking to a cow-orker in the know, Kelsey Grammar will be playing Beast in the upcoming X-men 3 movie.

My cow-orker is pretty excited about it as he thinks it’s the perfect role. I can see it – he has the speech mannerisms down to play a smart scientist. He and I share the same concerns about Bret Ratner directing though.

Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere column had a brief mention of Ratner taking over in his “Wired” blog like piece on the front page, seperate from the stories he writes, that’s pretty harsh as well:

06/ 9/2005 5:53 AM

The fanboy community freaked last week when 20th Century Fox announced their decision to hire Breet Ratner to direct X-Men 3. Ratner will of course degrade the franchise. Not in any thuddingly obvious way but in a hundred little ways. One of these is his decision to add more laughs. “Not jokes for the sake of jokes,” Ratner said in a recent interview, but “jokes that come from character humor, that come from characters and that come from the situations.” This sounds to me like a guy saying he doesn’t entirely get (much less get off on) the X-Men mythology or metaphor, and that he’s a tiny bit bored by it so why not throw in some more gags? As Red Dragon was to Silence of the Lambs, X-Men 3…we know how this sentence ends, dont we? X-Men 3 will begin shooting in Vancouver in mid-August.

Apple & Intel

Icculus sums up similar thoughts to mine on Apple picking up Intel much better than I can.

He’s 100% right when it comes to gaming. And that’s me saying that after making the switch to Linux 100% this week (more on that later).

Episode III, Part 2

I figured out what’s been bothering me about Episode III. For as much as I love it, it’s Padme’s role that bothers me. In Episode I, Queen Amidala was portrayed as a strong character, who loved her planet, and fought the evils of the Trade Federation’s invasion. In Episode II, she was again a strong character as a Senator, trying to keep the Republic together when the Separtists threatened to destroy it.

In Episode III, her role is to be in love with Anakin. She’s not shown as a strong political figure anymore, just as someone who questions what side she’s on. Her love for Anakin is the major plot line, and she’s, at best, a secondary character relegated to worrying, instead of taking action like she did in the first two movies, whether it was traveling to Coruscant to defend Naboo, or going to rescue Obi-Wan in AOTC.

It’s too bad really – she’s much more emotive in this film, and for as good as an actor as she is, and her two awful performances in the first two (which I blame Lucas for more than her), it’s too bad too see her relegated to the sidelines in Episode III.

Some other interesting thoughts on Episode III.