Archive for April, 2006

Actually, it’s not as bad as we’d been told to expect. It’s been raining pretty heartily, with a very small amount of hail, but it’s not the utter downpour that Nashville was getting nailed with earlier.

There are some indications in the weather reports that it might get worse later during the night, so we’ll see.

As I already mentioend in a previous post, I installed Windows XP using Boot Camp last night, and it works phenomenally well. This evening, I used the beta of Parallels Virtual Workstation for Mac OS X on the iMac, setting up Windows XP there as well. Runs very nicely in a window alongside Mac OS X. Really eats up the CPU, but it works well.

The UI has serious issues. Between being pre-release quality and pretty obviously being designed by someone without much Mac UI experience, it’s an interesting experience. There are also some features that just don’t work yet.

However, the Windows virtual machine runs at a very good clip and is vastly superior, performance-wise, to Virtual PC running on anything I ever saw it running on, which is very cool.

Kinda wish these had come out before I installed my one copy of Windows XP Pro on the real PC sitting next to me — I’d have junked the PC and just installed XP on the Mac. Unfortunately, Microsoft won’t let me reuse the activation key — even if right now I were to nuke Windows off the real PC.

That’s pretty crazy. It’s not like they’re hurting for cash.

Finally everything seems to be working. We’ll see if it lasts. The new DVR is all synched up and quite nice. The built-in games are pretty neat, if basic. The interface is slick. And it’s true — we can record two shows at once, while watching another. Amazing. Beats our old ReplayTV.

And our cable modem is doing all right. Uplink speed is still slower than I’d like, but that’s largely because Charter doesn’t really offer very good uplink speeds. But downlink is just shy of 3 Mbps. Woohoo!

A guy from Charter called this morning to let me know they were on their way. “Great,” I think to myself, “they’re coming to finish repairing all the problems with our wiring.”

When they showed up, I opened the door, and there’s a guy with a DVR. He’s been told to install it. He was quite confused when I said that was done yesterday and that we were waiting for someone to finish other repairs.

Him and his partner putzed around the house for over an hour before my wife got fed up with them being completely clueless and threw them out. They were clearly in way over their heads.

The guy that was here yesterday called about half an hour ago and says he’s still coming today, although it might be late. Apparently all Charter’s techs have been called out to do a repair on a fiber conduit that some yahoo shot. With a gun.

Life in the South. Gotta love it.

We watched last night’s episode of Lost fairly late last night. It was… interesting.

Not the best episode by a long shot. But very interesting to learn that Libby was in the same psych ward as Hurley. I wonder why. Was she ever a shrink, or did she just learn to fake it from being around them for a long time?

I was hoping for more new revelations about the hatch and Dharma than we got.

Something interesting my wife, Sarah, and I noticed, though. It’s a lot harder to get satisfaction from individual episodes than it is a number of them at once. We watched the first season and the first 17 episodes of the second season over the course of about a week and a half, so we were seeing something like three episodes every night for that time, more or less. You got a lot of information very fast that way.

Now it feels like it’s coming at a trickle, and it’s strangely unsatisfying.

We’ll get used to it.

Cable guys left after a couple of hours. They’ve grounded our cable line now, but there’s still a resistance problem on the line, which is causing cable modem dropouts and serious problems with our digital channels.

That also means that our brand new Charter DVR can’t sync up to grab channel and program guides, so I’m steering the TV blind.

Anyway, the cable guys are coming back tomorrow to finish the job — they need to find and fix the resistance problem, then possibly install an amplifier. There’s so much cable draped around our house due to its layout and where all the boxes and whatnot are, that there may be some serious signal loss.

They seem pretty confident that they’ll be able to get everything fixed tomorrow. I’m not holding my breath; I’ve had pretty much nothing but trouble with Charter. For example, about two years ago, I called them to get a billing adjustment because we had been getting the wrong cable modem speed for the amount we were paying. Derek, the support goon of the day, told me that it was obvious I was using multiple computers on the line, that nobody has more than one computer in their home, and therefore I was running a business on the cable modem connection, and he started spewing quite a number of threats about cutting me off or charging me hundreds of dollars.

Man, that really got me angry. I explained that I was paying for a DSL line at another location to run my servers off of, paying $175/mo for them, because I didn’t want to violate the terms of use of my home connection, and that he could basically stuff it. In the end, I had to fax them a copy of my latest invoice for that service. Never heard from Derek again. But my friends and I still wonder, any time any of us have any kind of problem with customer service, if Derek’s on the job.

Also discovered today that ReplayTV doesn’t support the serial connection to our cable box — I’d hoped to sling the Replay to another TV with that instead of having to use the IR blaster, which only marginally works. So I guess if we’re going to use the old ReplayTV still, it’s back to infrared. OTOH, this makes me more inclined to sell off the ReplayTV box. Assuming of course that the Charter DVR works out.

Twiddled the old ReplayTV so I could record Lost tonight. My wife’s out for a while tonight, so we’ll watch it when she gets home. Can’t wait to see what happens next!

My home is temporarily broadband-free. The cable company is here trying to fix problems they caused over the last couple of years through a series of botched upgrades and the like. Apparently our cable has never been grounded, which is obviously bad. They’re trying to run a bunch of wire to do that — someone paved concrete down for several yards under the power box they want to ground to, so there’s going to be wire run along under the eaves of the house for quite a distance.

So right now, I’m using Bluetooth dial-up networking through my Treo 650 to do some little bits of stuff online.

I’ve got my new MacBook Pro partly set up. It has Windows XP on it, courtesy of Boot Camp, and it runs very nicely. They do indeed have real drivers for the graphics; I’ve played a bit of Doom 3 on it and it’s quite playable, getting around 35 FPS on average. Not bad for a laptop.

Of course, Firefox was the first thing I installed on it, so I could use real software to download everything else I need. Feel free to chuckle, but one of the things I downloaded is AOL. I don’t really use AOL much anymore, but I keep my account because I use the account name for iChat, don’t want to give it up, and am a charter member, having signed up back in the days when it was still AppleLink Personal Edition. So I get a nice discount.

I actually mostly use AOL for the bundled virus and spyware protection you get on Windows, nowadays. And I use it for dialup in emergencies.

Hitting “DHCP Refresh” in my router’s configuration setup, I see that I’m still getting a bogus IP address, so I guess they’re still not done with the repairs. I sure hope they get the cable working again tonight — I don’t want to miss Lost, now that I’m all caught up at last!

I received my new MacBook Pro for work about 30 minutes ago, and am working on getting it all configured the way I want it. It’s in the middle of installing software updates right now. After that, I can sync .Mac to get all my information over to it, and get the rest of the software I need installed.

Although… before I install the software… I’m going to try installing Boot Camp on it. It’d be interesting to see WinXP in action on it, and I can think of cases in which it would be handy to have XP along with me on the road. Good thing I happen to have a Windows XP with Service Pack 2 install CD here. Lucky me.

The unit I have is the 2 GHz model with a gigabyte of memory, and I have a second stick of a gigabyte here to install when I get to it.

I’m going to need to drive this machine hard for a while to be sure it’s in good shape — it appears to be a revision C board instead of the newer, less glitchy, revision D. If I don’t run into any trouble, great, but if I do, I’m going to need to know sooner rather than later.

The next few days will tell.

In other news, I’ve posted my second article, Creating a dynamic status bar extension. This article covers creating a status bar extension that fetches a stock quote that updates every few minutes, along with a dynamic tooltip that shows more detailed information about the stock.

So this one is actually kind of useful, as long as you’re either comfortable editing the JavaScript code or don’t mind only being able to see Google stock quotes. An upcoming article will expand the sample to include the ability to configure what stock to watch.

Just finished up a while ago my first article in a series I’m going to be doing covering various aspects of creating extensions for Firefox. This first one is a really simple “put static text in the status bar” extension, which is pretty dull, except that it’s going to be the basis for other, more interesting extensions. Feel free to let me know if you see anything wacky about it.

The advantage to this plan to do this series of articles is that I can be productive, writing useful material while at the same time learning concepts I need to know myself. Can’t beat that.

The next article will make the status bar item dynamic, with content being updated periodically from the web. So it actually has some JavaScript code for various chores. Hope to get that posted to MDC in the next day or two.

And so forth. A little more stuff in each version, gradually introducing new concepts. Each article will be accompanied by a downloadable sample developers can use as the basis for their own extensions.

I get a kick out of learning new stuff, so when I get to do that for a living, that’s a great thing.

Just finished watching tonight’s episode of “24.” What the heck?

Has that loser wimp of a president been faking it all this time? Suddenly he’s the mastermind of this whole conspiracy? Is it just me or is that really, really hard to believe?

“Next week on 24: Jack jumps a shark on the way to kill more terrorists.” Woohoo!