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Women, Misogyny, Tech et. al

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If you haven’t seen the recent thread going around, please read Francie’s post, Kathy’s additional points, and my man Rob’s excellent throw down. Go ahead I’ll wait. Alrighty, now that you have some perspective, here are my thoughts on this (which have been brewing for quite awhile.)

I personally like to hang out with intelligent, quick-witted, strong-willed, fun-loving people. Notice I didn’t specify a gender. To me, if I can have intelligent conversations, punctuated by funny dialog with someone who has definite opinions, then I’m thrilled. I do this with men AND women. But responses to this are different whether I am hanging out with women or men.

For example, I have a friend who I hung out with on a regular basis at Lotusphere for several years. She happened to fit all of my fun criteria above, but she was a pretty woman. I can’t tell you how many times I had people comment about us hanging out together. I even had some people insinuate that we were sleeping together since we were together so much. No one has ever done that when I hang out with Paul Mooney or Rob McDonagh. I mean, couldn’t it be that I was hanging out with her because I enjoyed her company, not that she had tits or I was fucking her?

Now I do want to make a distinction; there are catty bitch women as well as sexist pig men. Tech women have a tendency to crucify popular and good looking women in this field with as much frequency as the men do. That isn’t acceptable either. You all need to get over yourselves. You set everything back just as much if not worse than the men do. Also, pretty tech women ARE NOT sleeping with your husbands, for fuck’s sake…

For the record, my wife has never come to this conclusion, and she has seen pictures of me with many pretty women. You know why? Because she is an intelligent, quick-witted, strong willed, fun-loving person. She isn’t threatened by other pretty women. The thing is, the wife and I are both scary liberal types that believe that everyone is equal. Wow, what a fucking concept? The coder girl is equal to the stay at home mom in our eyes. Looks have nothing to do with skill at what you do.

So here’s the thing folks, stop with the little offhand gender comments, no matter how innocuous you think they are. Because something that seems like a throwaway comment to you can hurt others. And if those people respond, then they are bitches, right? No, they are human, and they are having to fight against stupid stereotypes when proving technical prowess. Our community should be better than that, and I hope we move beyond this.

Review: Harmony Adapter for PS3

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I own, and love, my Logitech Harmony remote control. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Harmony remotes, here’s a little explanation. Harmony remotes connect to your computer through a USB cable, and then your computer connects to a Harmony web application. In that application you tell it what devices you have (TV, Receiver, Blu-Ray player, Game system etc.) and then it downloads all of the codes for that device into your remote. You also set up Activities (Such as Watch TV, Play XBox) that control all of your systems functions. For example, when I press Watch TV, it turns on the TV, sets it to the TV input, turns on my Receiver, Turns it to the TV input and then makes sure the cable box is on.

So as you can see, the Harmony remotes rock pretty hard. You can take a non programmer and have a completely customized remote control within 15 minutes. Now the thing here is, the remote does Infrared (IR) remote codes. That’s great for 90% of the things you want to run. But the Playstation 3 kinda screwed that up.

When the PS3 came out, Sony decided to forgo IR remote commands and instead make everything Bluetooth. What that meant for me was, I had a remote that controlled everything in my system except for my PS3. As I use my PS3 almost exclusively for Blu-Ray and DVD movies, that meant that every time I wanted to control a movie, I needed to use a game controller, or buy a bluetooth remote from Sony. This was annoying to say the least, but Logitech has finally come up with a good solution.

Logitech has released the Harmony Adapter for PS3. It’s a small device that you plug into a power outlet, and then sit within view of your IR remote. All it does is accept IR commands for the PS3 and convert them into Bluetooth to control the PS3. You pair the adapter with the bluetooth on the PS3, and then you add the PS3 to your Harmony remote and are good to go. I used it all weekend long, and it worked flawlessly. Now I no longer have to switch remotes when doing PS3 stuff. And that’s damn well worth the $60 in my opinion. If you have a Harmony and a PS3, this couldn’t come more highly recommended!

REVIEW: HP MediaSmart EX487

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For the longest time, I backed up stuff in my house simply by copying files from computers to USB drives. I did it all manually and it was obviously a pain in the ass. I’ve always run servers at home for testing, but I never really used them as file servers as they were never big enough for RAID5 or anything like that. So, I’ve been wanting some network attached storage of some sort for awhile. I wanted file redundancy (RAID5 or similar), easy expansion and it had to be somewhat affordable. Here’s my environment:

  • 1 XP Home laptop
  • 1 iMac 24″
  • 1 Vista desktop (used as my Domino server)
  • Sonos music distribution system
  • I also wanted to back up my in-laws Vista laptop whenever I connected it to my network

I wanted to be able to back up the Windows boxes (maybe even the Mac), use it as a file server (with redundancy of files) serve up my music to Sonos, and stream stuff to my Xbox 360. Well, the HP MediaSmart EX487 completely fit the bill.

The EX487 is built on the Microsoft Windows Home Server platform. It’s a server that’s meant for up to ten user accounts in a person’s home. It comes with four drive bays, and two of them are filled with 750GB drives. It doesn’t use RAID, but rather it takes your important files and makes sure they are copied to two different drives. This allows for redundancy, but can be done more cheaply. I can add disks to the other two drive bays to expand storage, or I can also add via USB ports or eSata on the back of the machine. So down the road I can add additional storage rather easily.

The hardware also comes with gigabit ethernet and is headless. That means there is no mouse, keyboard or monitor connection. All you do is plug in your ethernet connection and turn it on. You then have to install software on your Windows or Mac in order to connect and manage the server.

After you install the software on Windows, you can connect to the admin application. It seems to be based on a customized version of terminal services, and thus you cannot manage the box from a Mac, which is a bit of a drawback. But if you have a Windows box, the connection is really easy. Once you login, you can configure all of the features of the box. You can set up file shares, backups, and media sharing. Let’s look at backups first.

Backups for windows machines are taken on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Daily backups are incremental, and weekly and monthly are full backups. You can also set how long you want to retain the backups in the system. These backups are full windows backups. So, if my wife’s XP laptop’s hard drive fails, all I have to do is install a new drive, boot up with the HP recovery disk, and the machine will be restored to where it was prior to the hard drive crash. You can do this backup on up to ten machines in your network, which should be enough for most ‘home’ users.

On the Mac side, the server can be used as your Time Machine target. So you can install the HP software on the Mac and then configure Time Machine to use the Windows Home Server. Now there is one caveat, and it’s a big one. It’s not full backup of the OS like you get with Time Machine on a USB drive. This means that if your Mac dies, you have to reinstall Leopard FIRST and then you can restore files from the server. So it’s not rebuilding your Mac with all of the user accounts and everything already set up. That will be manual on your part AFTER you reinstall the OS. So to me, it’s not quite good enough. I applaud MS for putting in the Time Machine support, and it might be enough for some users, but I want the full backup.

Another thing the box can do is act as file shares. There are defaults for Music, Pictures, Video, Software, Public, Mac, and individual user folders for each user. You can set those up to save files on multiple internal drives too. So everything is still redundant. One thing I’ve done was move my iTunes library from my Mac to the Music share.

Basically I told iTunes to move my library to the home server instead of the hard drive. It copied everything over and made all the references point to the server now. I still use iTunes like I always did before, but the music isn’t local on my machine, it’s on the server. This backs it up, makes it redundant, and it’s available there for my Sonos to stream from. You can turn on the default music sharing, and you can even use the built-in Twonky Media server to serve it up to anything else on the network. For example Twonky Media can be seen by my XBox 360 AND my PS3, so I can stream to either of those or the Sonos. And now it’s always available and I don’t have to leave the Mac on all the time.

You can do the same thing with Pictures and Video. Putting files in those default shares makes them available if you have the sharing turned on. The server also has a media collection agent (Windows only for now) that will scan folders on your computer at set intervals and then copy any new files to the shares on the server. So, you could turn on the agent and tell it to watch a folder on your local hard drive, and any time you put new files in that folder, the server will copy them and make them available. It’s a nice addition to the auto backups.

The server also has some additional capabilities around media that are nice. You can basically set up the server to stream music, photos and videos to the internet. You can turn on internet sharing and then set up a website where you can get to all of the media (and files) remotely from anywhere with an internet connection. So if you NEED remote access to your stuff, this is a great way to be able to do it. And in a nice twist, you can have your photos automatically uploaded to services like flickr and Facebook. So, you can turn on the capability and make sure everything is posted to those sites without lifting a finger. It’s a very nice way to integrate with the cloud.

Your server can also backup up itself to the Amazon S3 storage service. The ability is built-in and you can set it up so all of your files are backed up to Amazon’s service across the internet. So, you can always add that layer of extra protection if you need it. Of course the Amazon service is a little pricey, but if you want automatic offsite backup, it’s really easy to do.

One last thing you can do is install Add-Ons to do all sorts of things. You can either do it as a sanctioned Add-On, or you can simply use a Terminal Services client to remote into the box and install a program locally. I know people that have done this with many things including PlayOn, the streaming software that allows Netflix and Hulu integration to the PS3 and Xbox. I haven’t tried VMWare or Domino, although who knows, they may run just fine.

Needless to say, I love this box. It was inexpensive compared to full-on RAID-5 Terra Stations, and much more feature-rich than the Drobo. It’s easy to upgrade capacity, backs up all my windows machines, acts as a file server, stores my music library, streams to my 360, PS3 and Sonos and allows me to reach everything remotely. I can even have it shut down automatically overnight and restart in the morning to save electricity. I don’t think I could do better for the money.

I’ll point to a few additional reviews here so you can get more info:

Carl Tyler: Drobo vs. Windows Home Server
MediaSmartServer.net Review: HP MediaSmart Server EX487
We Got Served: Hands On: MediaSmart Server EX487
Slash Gear HP MediaSmart EX487 Home Server Review

Location awareness creeps me out

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At Lotusphere I decided to try out Brightkite for the first time in conjunction with Chris Miller and his IDoCheckin site. Basically what Brightkite does is allow you to say where you are location-wise, and then you can see where all your friends are as well. You can look and see who is in a similar location.

At first glance, that just seems really creepy to me. I don’t really want people knowing where I am at all times. After thinking about it I can see the utility at conferences where you are trying to meet people, or even if I was still in college, having it to see where all my friends are partying. But now, I don’t really want anyone knowing that I’m away from my home, at the doctor, the strip club or at the cigar shop. Sure, you have controls where you can only share your location with certain people you allow, but all software is made to be hacked, and I’m sure there are people seeing private data right now.

Anyway, back to Lotusphere. I decided to start using Brightkite, and it seemed pretty cool at first. Then when things got into full swing and I was moving all over the place in short timeframes, and I started to forget to update. Then after forgetting so many times, I just stopped updating. It became a hassle. I was more apt to just check Twitter and see what people were up to. That was good enough for me.

Well today, Google announced Latitude . I’m sure the guys at Brightkite just peed themselves a little, because they are about to become irrelevant pretty soon. Basically Google announced their own Brightkite-like service that links right into Google Maps. This is a location service that users can opt into. You make your friends and then you can see exactly where they are in Google Maps. People can manually set their location, or it can be automatically updated.

Let me repeat that, it can be automatically updated.

So you turn it on, and every time you move somewhere Google updates your location automatically. Doesn’t that seem way too big brotherish? It sure does take the hassle out of what I was experiencing with Brightkite, but on another level, Google knows so much about me already, tying in my location just seems a little much. I just see too much opportunity for abuse.

Who knows, I may come around eventually… like when I my daughters start dating 🙂

Oh iPhone, how I love thee

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Every day I use my IPhone, I fall more in love with the device. This morning on the way to work, I used it to take a picture of the temperature reading in my car (-21 F) and then I did something unexpected.

I thought I would be at work to checkin and reserve my boarding pass with Southwest airlines. Well, traffic completely sucked, so I was going to miss the start time to log in and reserve. The longer you wait, the worse assignment you get. So, I thought “what the hell?” and whipped out the iPhone.

A quick trip to gmail to get the confirmation number and another trip to Southwest and I was checked in, all from my iPhone, in Chicago traffic.

I know that other phones can do this, but nothing really comes close in my opinion. Oh, and by the way, this whole blog post was done with iBlogger on the iPhone. More on that later.


[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Greyhawks Digital Music Class – 5 – Ratings and Smart Playlists

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In the last installment, I discussed what I think is one of the most important aspects of really managing your music library, and that is making sure the genres are correct and actually mean something to you as a listener. That lays the foundation to the next topic, and that is rating your music.

Most all music jukeboxes allow you to rate your music from one to five stars. This can help you manage your library in some automatic ways, and I’ll show you how. What I like to do is listen to a new album and then rate each song as I go through, here’s how I think about it.

***** Absolute awesome song – A top hit in my opinion that I could listen to any time
**** One of the best songs by this artist on the album, could be on the artists greatest hits album
*** Decent song that is listenable once in awhile
** An okay song that I might not skip while listening to an album
* I don’t use a 1 star rating at all, just the top 4

Now rating these this way affords me some luxuries when I create playlists. Lets say I only want to hear the most awesome Punk songs in my library? Well I can create a smart playlists that only includes songs in the Punk genre that I’ve rated at 5 stars. If I wanted the greatest hits of an artist, I could create a smart playlist for that artist that included all songs 4 stars and above. If I wanted to go deeper into the music catalog I could go lower on the star ratings.

The key here is the Smart Playlist. Basically a smart playlist lets you set some criteria and then it automatically makes playlists based on that criteria. So in my 5 Star Punk example, it plays all the best punk songs. If tomorrow I get a new Punk album and mark some songs as 5 stars, they automatically become part of the playlist. So once you set your system in place, and get your Smart Playlists set up, the only maintenance going forward is making sure that when you add new music to your library that you get the genre and star ratings correct. Everything else falls into place.

All of these things take awhile to set up initially, but once they are all ready, your library updates itself every time you add and rate a new album. It makes it much easier to find your favorite music, and that’s really what it’s all about.

SnTT: The Same Lotus App Inside Outside the Firewall

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My August article for Intranet Journal is out a little late, but it’s called The Same Lotus App Inside, Outside the Firewall. This one was kind of a hard article to write, because it was hard to explain it completely in an easy-to-digest article. Hopefully I did well.

The gist of the article is this: You have a web application, and inside your network, you want Anonymous access to work on your application. But, when someone accesses the same application (and same URL) from the internet, you want them to have to authenticate. You generally cannot have it both ways, but I show you how to do it with some replicas, some non-replicating ACLs, and some DNS/internet site document fun.

Hope it helps some folks out!

Domino Administrator FAIL – Thus I FAIL

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Editing Multiple ACL's
Okay, when you are in the Domino Administrator, you can choose multiple databases and then manage their ACL all at once. You can add an entry, or like what I wanted to do above, you might want to change the Administration server of your databases.

Well I had seen some inconsistencies in the administration server of several databases that was causing adminp processes to fail. So I figured I would just select all the mail files on a server, and properly set the Administration server using the above method. Should be pretty easy.

Well look at the screenshot. I clicked the Modify Administration Server setting check box, and then I chose the server I wanted to change it to (the blue blurred out bit.) I then clicked OK and it set the admin server for all of the databases I had selected. Any eagle-eyed admins notice what’s wrong? The NONE radio button is still chosen. It didn’t automatically change to SERVER when I actually chose a server. Also, even though the radio button was on NONE, it still allowed me to choose a server from the drop-down. So even though I thought I added the right admin server, I actually set the admin server on all the databases to NONE. Makes it kinda hard for adminp to do its job dontchathink?

Now I KNOW that this is my fault because I didn’t notice that the radio button still said NONE, but I think that from a UI standard perspective, I shouldn’t be allowed to choose a server if the radio button says NONE. Or if I can choose a server, the radio button should automatically change to say SERVER.

Oh well, At least by setting all of my mail file’s Administration Servers to say NONE, I can now be a part of Worst Practices.

🙂

Becoming a social butterfly

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There are so many new social networks and microblogging tools out there now, that it’s hard to figure out which ones to use, so basically I’ve started subscribing to all of them to figure out which ones are good. Currently I have accounts on the following:

  • Facebook – Personal Social Networking
  • MySpace – Personal Social Networking
  • Linked In – Business Social Networking
  • Twitter – Microblogging
  • Pownce – Microblogging
  • Jaiku – Microblogging
  • Tumblr – Microblogging
  • Plurk – Microblogging
  • Ping.fm – Post to all of the above at once
  • del.icio.us – Personal Social Bookmarking
  • Digg.com – Social news site
  • Flickr – Photo hosting and social networking
  • Friendfeed – Aggregate all of the above content into one place

I imagine I’ll keep all of the microblogging tools, so that anyone that wants to follow me can do so at whichever one they want. To me it’s kind of like having IM accounts on all of the systems and using one client to hit them all. Most of my effort is spent on Twitter though as conversations generally take place there.

Friendfeed is better than I expected, and a nice place to kind of put everything. Gotta see if there’s an easy way to widgetize it or put it on a webpage on my personal site too. Or is there a better overall aggregator out there that I should be using? Profilactic looks kind of decent, any of you readers using it?

So the question is, are there any really good sites I’m missing? Are there any that I should completely avoid? I’ve pretty much written off Orkut, and Brightkite and their ilk don’t appeal to me. I don’t need people knowing my physical location all the time. In fact, I prefer that they believe I just live in the ether… I’m not a big fan of MySpace either, but I maintain that just to talk with people who only have MySpace, or to check out band stuff.

So how about you folks, are you getting overwhelmed with all the options, or just using one or two, or avoiding social tools altogether. Am I a complete nutbag for using this many? Let me know…

The Comcast Resolution

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If you read my last post, you realized I wasn’t overly happy with Comcast. Missed appointments, no callbacks when promised, failed phones transfers, lengthy wait times, etc. Well I also mentioned Frank who was @comcastcares on Twitter. Well he passed my info on to higher ups in Chicago, and I did manage to get a callback from the Executive office at about 4:30PM that day.

The rep asked if things were fixed to satisfaction. I wasn’t sure yet because no one was home, but calling my home number went to voicemail instead of forwarding to my wife’s phone, so I thought we were back in business (we were.) He also offered me something for my troubles, and it was something I had referenced in my blog post. I’m still not thrilled with the whole situation up to that point, but I think they nicely tried to make up for it after the fact. In addition, they actually READ my blog post on the situation.

So I will give the Comcast Twitter team their due, they deserve it. I’m actually very impressed that they monitor Twitter and try to take appropriate action. They are actually forward thinking in that regard, so that’s nice. Thanks Frank and the @comcastcares team.

Comcast still has a ton of issues and I still dread outages, but maybe they are on the right path. For both of our sakes, here’s hoping so.

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