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So here I sit on the couch, moonlight spilling in over the summer heat. Posting this message from a portable electronic device, an order of magnitude more powerful than the unix machines I explored and learned on.
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4 weeks ago or so I decided to replace my aging 19″ non-stero tv. So I poked around and found a HD LCD TV I liked that was good on price, because I could not spend much money on something where I also have to spend money to effectively use (Comcast). So I decided on the LM320EM8 by Emerson and I snagged it for under the $480 mark.

So this gives me a 32″ HD LCD TV, now comes the strong desire to wall mount it and get it out of the way. After some hunting I located the Articulating Swingout Arm (AM2) by Premier Mounts. Most mounts for 32″ and up are the single plane rotation and expensive, where as I wanted a proper arm to move it off the wall. Plus, paying 1/5th the cost of the tv on a hunk of metal also seemed wrong, so I grabbed this arm for well under $50 with S&H (1/10th tv cost). The reviews were good and like the reviews I used my own hex bolts instead of the screws they included (all stripped). I’d recommend both products for the price minded consumer, and especially the mount because they all seem excessively priced. Assuming the TV lasts that long, I should be set for another 5+ years.

I’ve got a refurb MacBook Pro that I love and use as my mobile machine. When I first got it, first thing I did was replace the standard memory with 2GB of non-apple memory. Apples prices at the time were too high (not so any more).

Worked perfectly for almost 10 months. Then after some 10.4 updates everything seemed to go downhill. Frequent and unexplained kernel panics. I lived with it for a while, tried to a narrow it down, in the end I decided to just reinstall after talking with AppleCare.

I picked the option that let me keep all my files, and after a reinstall I actually got all my data back. Was quite happy about that…. and no panics so far (crosses fingers).

So, if your getting kernel panics that seem recent and unexplained, consider an OS X reinstall.

Earlier today I was glad to start watching part of the Sun/Intel announcement… but, I had some phone calls and paused it. When I un-paused it, real player croaked. I reloaded the page and to my surprise saw ‘The Webcast is being archived. Please come back shortly for the replay.’!

Fine, I can wait a bit… several hours later… still says the same thing. I used to work heavily with Sun gear when I was a SysAdmin at Genuity. My love for *BSD and my acceptance of linux caused me to wonder what Solaris was doing years ago. I used to love those big 32 cpu boxen, but I’d hate to have to use whatever technology takes them this long to do an archive…

With the apple keynote yesterday, Jobs introduced the iPhone and Apple TV. With the iPhone getting much of the attention (watch the keynote videos if you have not). Both look like great products and should ruffle enough feathers of traditional companies to make heads turn. But I think there are some unmentioned opportunities at play.

If internet content can get onto tv in an easy manner, suddenly owning the most popular online video provider with the possibility to show adds around the page, or before/after the video, or do handle the transactions surrounding the video would seem like a good idea. Especially if you get to buy the company for very little cash, but lots of stock. Google did that when they bought YouTube.

It also might explain the net neutrality concerns these companies have, understandably. I still stick by some comments I made a while back on /..

The iPhone is out in 6 months, AppleTV in 1 month. I do not see Microsoft moving fast enough to keep apple out of the homes of many this year. Yeah for innovation, this stuff is long, long overdue.

Want to get a feel for the possible future of Google, check out their test bed.

I have been playing around with a free opcode cache recently called XCache. I’ve been fairly happy with the performance gains, given the price and the cost of the competition at Zend. I love their ZDE and debugger, but their prices have always been an issue with me and the wallet. XCache is still being developed, but I’ve seen some nice speed increases on my windows development box, but have yet to deploy it to a production box. This sort of mechanism should be built into the language, but I’ll have to wait for a future version of PHP before that happens. At least JSON is now in the language by default.

I was present for a few of Douglas Crockford‘s presentations at The Ajax Experience back in October, and wanted to post links to help raise awareness of his proposals. It was his pages which started me using JSON in web applications about a year or so ago. It is so much easier and cleaner than XML.

His more recent related requests include JSON Request and The < Module > tag, both of which are very interesting and could have a big impact on web applications.

I like watching ee380 presentations, but this one was particularly relevant to my interests. So here is the abstract and a link to the video.

He talks about the action script virtual machine (avm) and recent changes, expect these to indirectly ripple into Javascript, and thus web apps. There are tons of interesting talks on here from previous years, if you are so inclined check them out.