kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: January 2008

Sun Acquires MySQL

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced yesterday that they have acquired the Open-Source database platform MySQL. This is a huge purchase and one of the largest acquisitions of an Open Source entity that we’ve ever seen.

The goal, says Schwartz, is to put a Fortune 500 vendor behind the innovative technology powering many next generation web-based services. To accomplish that goal Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP” (and MAMP, WAMP, and of course Sun’s own SAMP…).

Support of open source projects is nothing new for Sun. They have been a positive force behind several other projects in the past including Java, ZFS, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. This bodes very well for the future of MySQL and companies offering other higher-priced options for production databases will be watching very closely to see what edge this provides in the Enterprise space.

With the acquisition Sun picks up “clients” who may not be using Solaris, or even Java in their implementation but are major players in the Web 2.0 market. These include Google, Facebook, Nokia and WordPress. Kudos to Sun for putting some more muscle behind the Open Source movement, and here’s hoping some more major corporations will now be willing to take a “leap of faith” and make more use of a proven and effective open-source technology.

MacBook Air: An Obsession with Thin

Announced at MacWorld yesterday, the MacBook Air is an ultra-thin laptop that is… well… ultra-thin. It skimps out in almost every other facet from storage to expansion ports and still has the same footprint as larger thicker models.

Kevin Naits put together a great little video montage poking fun at the obsessive nature of the thin MacBook. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate that you can put this bad boy in a manila envelope and be none the wiser that there’s a whole computer in there (well, most of a computer)… The video is quite funny though.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQkdVymW8C8]

iPod Touch: Unboxing

Brand Spankin' New iPod TouchOver the last several months, my 20GB 4th Gen iPod has been giving me some trouble, mainly because I’m hard on my gadgets and this one’s been battered about a few too many times. With hard-drive based media players this usually means that the device is as good as bricked. I’ve been hanging in there with my 2GB iPod nano that I got as a freebie with the Macbook, but 2GB really isn’t enough storage for me. I carry around about 400-500 MB of podcasts on a regular basis, and my favourite four playlists add up to about 2GB. So the nano-diet has meant much more frequent re-synchronizing with iTunes. Enough was enough.

Smooth...I finally took the leap and picked up a 16GB iPod Touch. The price is a bit steep compared to that of some of the more traditional media players, but after having played with it for just a couple of days, I’m completely convinced.

The battery life (albeit on a brand spankin’ new unit) has been quite impressive so far. It easily handles a full work day with a mix of audio and video.

The multi-touch interface is near to the holy-grail of modern-day UI design. Everything moves as I expect it to, and reacts as I expect it to (a couple of 3rd-party apps notwithstanding). The UI does a great job of emulating how objects would move or scroll if they were in the physical world.

Third party software is widely available for the iPhone, and luckily for those of us who bought an iPod touch the device can be cracked (Jailbroken) to allow you to place the installed (and myriad other applications) on it. A wonderful feature to make use of the available wifi.

I’ve got lots more to say about this device in the coming days and weeks, including some examples of some great software and hardware iPod Touch hacks.

Now I’m a Published Photographer!

[[Welcome to this, the 200th post on kdmurray.net!]]

I got confirmation today that the folks over at Schmapp have selected one of my photos for inclusion in their 2007 Los Angeles travel guide in the “Best of the Beach” section.

The photo is one I took of the Santa Monica pier when we were in LA last fall.

I’m proud to have had a photo selected.  I (and hundreds of others) had our Creative Commons licensed photos found on Flickr and were asked to submit them for consideration.

The original image, and all of the other shots I took on that trip are up in my Flickr account.

SimCity Source Code Released Under GPL

Bil Simser has posted an article on his blog about the release of the source code for the original SimCity under the GPL. The GPL’d version has been renamed under the original working title Micropolis to protect the trademarks of Electronic Arts who currently own the intellectual property for the Sim* franchise. If the original title had stuck I wonder what they’d call The Sims these days….

The source code for Micropolis has been published on author Don Hopkins’ website. He has also included a bit of history about this branch of the SimCity project including some technical detail behind this iteration of the code.  The GPL version has also been ported to the version of Fedora Linux being run on the OLPC.  A great way to spread this brilliant game to those who are just getting a computer for the first time.

I love the fact that older software continues to be released to the public domain. I’d love to find a copy of Wing Commander… If there’s anyone out there from Origin (or EA) can we see a GPL’d version of WC1 so that we can play it on our Macs!!

Mac Lab Rat – GGP #74: I Need Help with My Frash

Hey everyone!

I was able to meet up with the geeks to join them for the recording of the 74th edition of the GGP. We covered a ton of stuff in this week’s show, and as promised here’s the details for this week’s Mac Lab Update.

Net News Wire
This was huge news this week. With NewsGator releasing all of it’s personal products as free downloads (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and a few others) they have taken a huge step towards monopolizing the RSS agregation client market. As regular listeners of the GGP already know, Dave is a bit of an RSS afficianado and he highly recommended I check out this app as soon as it became available.

So on Thursday I downloaded and installed it, and gave it a run through it’s paces. Though it caused me a few headaches as it imported the sixty or so feeds that I had in my Google Reader OPML file, over the next few hours it became less finicky and seems to be working as advertised now.

Using a client instead of a web interface is often a more visually rewarding experience, and NNW doesn’t disappoint in this department. The UI is clean and easy to use, and there are enough options available to make organizing and browsing the articles in your feed a breeze.

Net News Wire is (now) a free application.

MAMP
This item came to us from GGP listener Eric Searle. MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL & PHP) is the OS X implementation of the classic open-source development stack LAMP (Linux).

MAMP is a one-stop shop that brings the Mac usability experience to open-source development. Though it’s possible to install and configure all of these components from source code as is done on other systems, the MAMP package provides a quick and easy way to get a PHP development environment running on your Mac.

The open-source MAMP stack, are free applications.

gDisk
gDisk is an OS X utility that gives you the ability to mount a drive to your system that will save files to your GMail account. This is a great way to move relatively small files between different computers or locations, with a backup copy stored in your GMail account.

It’s a simple utility that does exactly what it claims.

gDisk is a free application.

Embedding Google Presentations in your Blog

I took my first stab at Google Presentations today, and was pleasantly surprised. I could certainly lay the ideas for a PowerPoint deck using this setup, or even put together some quick and easy slides.

The real big seller for me was the ability to embed the presentation in your blog or website. Now, admittedly I’m not super-impressed because it’s using an I-Frame instead of a regular Embed tag like a YouTube video… but it’s definitely a start!

Based on the tutorial posted on the site I put together a short slide-deck tutorial of my own both for practice and as a demo!

For the tutorial, I’ll turn you over to my short slide deck. :)

Warner Brothers Backs Blu-Ray

On Friday executives at Warner Brothers announced that they would be committing to support the Blu-Ray format for HD movies and would be ceasing production of movies in the HD-DVD format at the end of May, 2008.

Though the battle is far from over with technology giants like Intel and Microsoft backing the Toshiba-led HD-DVD format.  Disney and Fox have both committed to the Blu-Ray format.  WB has been producing movies in both formats until now.  With the decision to move to the Blu-Ray format, this tilts the scales in the direction of the Sony-backed format quite significantly, particularly for movies.

One possibility we may see is Blu-Ray being adopted for movies, and HD-DVD being adopted for the video game industry, particularly given Microsoft’s support of the format in it’s XBox 360 console.

Enabling the Tab Key in OS X

OK, so it’s been about a month since I installed Leopard, and there are a few things that have been bugging me.  One which is a constant source of frustration for me (since I’m really a keyboard guy at heart) is the fact that by default, OS X won’t allow you to “tab” your way through all the controls of a form.

So now I found by way of a bit of surfing (I started with this post from Knightwise) a page on LifeHacker describing just how to accomplish this magical feat.  Truth be told, I did this last year before the Leopard install, but couldn’t remember how I did it.  This post is as much for me (for the next time I have a fresh OS X install) as for the community at large.

  1. Open System Preferences (Apple Menu –> System Preferences)
  2. Click on Keyboard and Mouse
  3. Click on the All Controls radio button at the bottom of the form

Thank God we’ve got that little mess sorted out.