General

Om Malik had a heart attack on December 28. Thankfully he was able to walk to the hospital and is recovering. My thoughts are with him.

Two of my friends were in San Francisco during the holidays, and another friend lives in New Jersey and only comes down here for a few weekends, so this was the first time all of us were here since Christmas so we got together and exchanged gifts tonight.

Among the gifts was a Royal PF110 digital picture keychain. Unfortunately it isn’t Mac compatible. I could probably use it with Windows under Parallels, but the software came on a mini CD that can’t be used in a slot-loading drive. I couldn’t find a download of the full software online, only a Vista upgrade. It doesn’t appear as a USB mass storage device when I connect it, so it looks like it can only be used with their proprietary software.

The biggest story of 2007 of course is the iPhone. It offers the best balance of features in any mobile device. Even though I can’t fit my entire music and video library on it, I use it instead of my 80G video iPod wherever I go. I like being able to carry only one device instead of an iPod and a cell phone.

Twitter also became one of the fastest growing web services in 2007. I first heard of events like Bhutto’s assassination from Twitter, not the TV, radio, or newspaper. I also met a lot of interesting people through Twitter.

The OLPC XO Laptop has the potential to make a big difference in many parts of the world, if the distribution is done right. A lot of people argue that we should be sending food & water to developing countries, but all we’ll be doing is making them dependent on handouts. A big problem is lack of education, so anything that can help educate the children will help those nations become self-sufficient.

Another way to help developing nations is with small loans to individual businesses. Kiva allows anyone to get involved, for as little as $25. A small business will help the entire area’s economy and also help them become self-sufficient.

I know it’s a cliche, but children are the future. Young bloggers and podcasters like Daniel Brusilovsky, Taylor McNeil, Chris Thompson, and too many others to mention are making their mark and sparking innovation.

The Mac market share grew to its largest ever and continues to grow. Several of my friends who never would have considered a Mac at one time bought one last year. Unless Apple stumbles badly, I expect it to continue.

We made it through another year! I had a quiet new years eve, since nobody around here really felt like having a party. We’re all still sort of burned out from the big Christmas Eve party.

My goals for 2008:

1. Get Organized and get rid of clutter. When mail arrives, instead of just putting it down somewhere to deal with later, I’ll deal with it immediately. I will stop using every horizontal surface in my office to stack books & papers.
2. Learn Ruby On Rails and get deeper into Python
3. Turn my websites into a source of income
4. Turn techblast.tv into a major network by getting a few major podcasters to sign up, getting sponsors, and hosting a few popular podcasts.
5. Improve my2unz.com. Among other things, I hope to add a Facebook application to let you publish playlists to your profile.
6. Rewrite Mii Transfer. I’d like to eliminate the WiiRemote framework, since the DarwiinRemote project is stagnating and I think it would be more solid if I used a standard Bluetooth HID driver. I’d also like to add some editing capabilities.

Christmas Present, originally uploaded by mike3k.

This arrived today from the gang in Vancouver.

A Prius loves company, originally uploaded by mike3k.

I often find another Prius parked next to mine.

All of the mess, noise, and confusion is taking its toll on the cats, especially Midnight. Cody spends most of the day outside, so it doesn’t bother him as much.

Midnight hides most of the day and occasionally shows his face when he wants to eat or use the litterbox. Somehow he managed to get out today, most likely while the door was open when they delivered the stove. I didn’t notice he was gone until about 7; I figured he was just hiding under the bed like he usually does. I looked for about 90 minutes with a few of my neighbors helping. Finally my friend heard a little cry by the side of my building. It took a few minutes to finally coax him out so I could carry him home.

I spent most of the weekend tinkering with my home network.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my Airport Extreme. The wireless connection is extremely unreliable and would randomly drop out or become unresponsive. I ended up going back to my Linksys WRT54G, which seems a lot more robust, and setting the Airport Extreme to 802.11n and acting as a bridge with the WRT54G handling the DSL connection and DHCP service. Only my MacBook Pro supports 802.11n, so everything else now connects to the WRT54G.

I’ve also been having various problems with my Linux box. I never could get Netatalk working and had a lot of trouble connecting to Samba shares on it. It had accumulated lots of crud over the years from installing various packages. Since I have my /home directory on a separate file system, I did a clean install of Ubuntu 7.04 server edition, preserving my old home file system. I installed Ubuntu Desktop, development tools, Netatalk, and Samba over it and I now have a usable home server.

Finally, I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP under VMware on my MacBook Pro, since my old Windows VM had also accumulated lots of crud and I was having lots of networking problems with it. I spent almost a full day getting it set up with all of my applications and configuring it for the office VPN connection.

Today has been a day when everything went wrong. To start things off, my car battery died yet again, even though I left it only one day without using my car. Once again I’ll bring it to my Toyota dealer and see that I get a new battery. The last two times they tried to tell me there was nothing wrong with the battery. Running down 8 times has to have done some permanent damage to the battery.

Later, Dreamhost had some problems with their web server, which is why all of my sites have been down for several hours. I’ve signed up for an account at MediaTemple and will be starting to move at least one site over there to see how well it works.

To top it off, my new MacBook Pro is having disk problems. I’m now backing it up and getting ready to reformat the drive. Hopefully it won’t have to be replaced.