Marketing and Markets Both Windows and Mac enthusiasts love to evangelize about their platform of choice.  It’s human nature, we all want people to know how smart we are for choosing the best of what’s available.

As is often the case with most of these “holy wars” the smaller market tends to be more vocal, and more likely to point out all the flaws in its larger competitor.  This is certainly the case with the Apple community.  From the endless stream of “Get a Mac” ads and their YouTube parody counterparts to news releases and security firms touting the reduced target area of not running Windows, those who have and love Macs are always there to tell you that the solution to every problem with MS Windows is to simply get a mac.

And it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t provided a great deal of ammo for the pundits to use in their PR-muskets.  From the troubled launch of Windows Vista to the sad state of what is the Zune to the rather pathetic I’m a PC ad campaign Apple has certainly made up ground on the Redmond-based software giant.  Since 2001, Apple has nearly tripled their market share.  That’s a very significant jump for any company.  But let’s be realistic about what that really means.  The Mac maker has raised its market share from about 3.5% to somewhere around the 10% mark.  Even with Apple’s huge growth over the past 8 years, nine out of every 10 computers sold is running a version of Microsoft Windows.

As a result, Microsoft for their part shrugs off the attacks of the all things “i” maker, often ignoring the marketing onslaught and focusing on its target market: the Enterprise.  Does anyone remember when Apple launched the 3G iPhone, App Store and support for Enterprise features on the iPhone?  Apple certainly hasn’t made great strides into the corporate handheld market, which is something the Microsoft does better, but that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry does extremely well — but that’s a topic for another post.  Microsoft and Apple both make products which can be used in the business markets.  But time after time, companies are continuing to choose the Microsoft platform over that of Apple, a huge percentage of the 90% that Microsoft controls in the operating systems space is thanks to the purchases of large companies.  If one were to examine only consumer purchases of computers, Apple would fare much better, probably somewhere around the 20% mark in parts of the world.

The consumer market is without question Apple’s strongest.  By developing a series of technologies and services that all work well together, it’s quite possible to change over your entire home to run on Apple technology.  From beautifully designed iMacs that can sit proudly in your living room, to powerful Mac Pros that can serve content for the entire household, to AppleTV which can sit atop your HD digital cable box and serve as an all-in-one media centre, to the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule backup consoles to manage your network and keep everything interconnected.  Add to that Apple’s iTunes and Mobile Me services and you’ve got an entire suite of hardware and software that talks to each other almost flawlessly, and really does make your day-to-day computing experience much smoother.  There’s only one catch, the Apple Tax.

The Apple Tax is what those outside the Apple community call the difference between the price of a Mac, and the price of the most closely aligned (in hardware specs at least) PC.  Often times the difference between a Mac and a PC comes in between 20% and 40%, with the Macs invariably being the more expensive machines.  PC enthusiasts will shame people for wasting their money on “pretty hardware” while the Mac community talks about security, ease of use and bundled software.  Over the past three years or so I’ve come to realize that the reason this debate won’t die is that they’re all right.

My Mac Experience

When I first picked up my Macbook one of the things that excited me about the experience was the new-ness of it.  This was a computing platform that I wasn’t particularly familiar with, and since I considered myself to be something of a technology afficionado I figured I should jump in and see what all the fuss was really about.

Within hours I had posted my first blog post and was happily exploring the features of OS X Tiger.  There were a few quirks of the Mac OS that drove (drive) me nuts but overall it was a pretty good experience.  Much more polished than other Windows alternatives (RedHat, Ubuntu, Fedora) that I’d looked at in the past.  One of the strongest points in the Mac’s favour early on was the Unix-style BSD-based terminal.  This is where, for me at least, some of the magic of OS X came into play.

I’ve always been a command-line geek.  There’s no question in my mind that computers function at their best when they don’t need to worry about drawing a “pretty picture” for us lazy humans.  Command-line applications (and for that matter services/daemons) run better, and more often than not, more reliably than applications with elegant user-interfaces.  Being able to explore the world of the UNIX/Linux command line on my shiny new Mac was indeed a revelation for me.  It even led to me porting the wget application to run on Mac OS X.  This wasn’t something that I’d ever consider trying to do for Windows, though it probably isn’t much more difficult.

As time moved forward I really enjoyed my MacBook. Adding new applications to the computer was as simple as downloading them from the Internet and in most cases dragging the application to the Applications folder.  In other cases I would need to double-click an .mpkg file to run the installer.

But I noticed after a while that all the software I’d been downloading for my Mac Lab Rat segments for the old version of the podcast had really cluttered up my system.  Thankfully OS X allows you to clean up all of that mess from the installations with just the drag of a mouse.  Yep, that’s right. To uninstall an application from OS X, you just need to drag it to the trash can.  That’s much simpler than un-installing programs on Windows, right?  Well, that’s not really the whole truth.

First off, you need to understand how a Mac stores applications.  Each application is stored in a package ending with a .app extension.  This is, in reality, just a folder that contains the majority of the files that the application uses.  Dragging “the application” to the trash is really just a way of deleting the application folder.  But with many applications this doesn’t delete the entire application footprint.

There are two folders where applications store the majority of their extra files and these are the /Library and the /Users/<username>/Library folders.  Apple’s own recording application GarageBand stores over 1.5GB of files in these library folders, removing the application using the Drag-and-Drop method will leave those files on your computer.

Malware & Baddies There’s no question that anyone who buys a Mac today, or has bought one in the past 10 years has experienced but a fraction of a percentage of the malware, spyware, viruses and badness that Windows owners have to deal with on a regular basis.  Apple touts this fact when they promote their Macs as one would expect, and as they should. The lack of these problems on a Mac is a great reason to use the system.  Mac fanboys would have you believe that the Mac Operating System is fundamentally designed to be more secure. They talk about the fact that because you’re less likely to be infected by problems on a Mac, the Mac OS is orders of magnitude more secure than Windows.  But notice nowhere does it say that there are fewer vulnerabilities in OS X than in Windows.

The reality is that with Windows’ huge market share (remember the 90% number we talked about earlier?) they are the 10,000lb gorilla.  When your next biggest competitor makes up less than 10% of the market, it’s clear who will be the target. (For those in the business of building gorilla killin’ helicopters (malware), the real target is King Kong not Nim Chimpsky.)

If you’re writing malware of any kind, you’re typically doing it in one of two ways:

1. Target companies
2. Target the highest number of people possible

The majority of malware authors choose to go with option #2: cast a wide net and see how many fish you can catch.  If your net is set to catch Windows machines, the sheer math of it will get you more infected machines than if you were to target the much smaller Mac market.  That said, with success comes difficulty.  Mac users are starting to see pockets of activity targeting OS X.  Consider the Pwn to Own competitions that security companies have run for the past few years. Invariably, OS X has been compromised at each of them, and in most cases extremely quickly. Modern operating systems are all susceptible to exploits and security holes. Even linux systems are vulnerable to attacks, they simply have the benefit of a large number of people to quickly patch holes and a user community generally less susceptible to getting themselves infected.  OS X is not an invulnerable operating system.

Software – Included and Excluded

It’s often touted that the software included on Mac Systems helps to justify the increased price tag of purchasing these machines. It does help, to be sure. The quality of the included software is quite high, and allows you to manage photos, music & email, make videos, burn movies, and record audio.  What Apple doesn’t want you to know is that there are lots of applications out there for Windows too, some of which may even be bundled with your system when you buy it.  Consistency is Apple’s strongest point. They can use phrases like “iLife comes with every new Mac”.

I’ve used every application that comes with iLife at least once.  The most frequently used applications being iPhoto and GarageBand; unfortunately I’ve not been overly satisfied with either and the only reason I stuck with them is that they were for all intents and purposes free applications.  iPhoto in particular lacked a number of features, the most obvious of which is the ability to organize images into folder hierarchies.  This has been fixed in the latest version, but I don’t feel like paying $69 for something that free apps like Picasa can do for free.

GarageBand has worked out quite well for the most part, but does leave a few things to be desired.  The interface is excellent, making creating podcasts and other recorded audio quick and fairly intuitive.  It becomes obvious fairly quickly though that this product too is targeted at a consumer audience as there are a number of audio manipulation features missing including fine grain control over cutting and pasting audio, and the application crashes with my podcast files once it gets over an hour in length.

While the iLife suite is touted as being partial justification of the increased cost of the Macs, in many cases I’ve abandoned these applications in favour of free applications that I was able to download from the Internet.  I’m in the midst of replacing iPhoto with Picasa and GarageBand with Audacity (which admittedly is missing a bunch of features too, so I’ll probably have to use both).

Coming from a Windows world, I was accustomed to being able to find software online that did what I needed my computer to do, and the vast majority of the time not having to pay for it — and let me be clear, I’m talking SourceForge, not PirateBay.  What I found in coming to the Mac world is that commercial ISVs (independent software vendors) were far more common for home-use applications on the Mac than for Windows.  Translation: If you want it, be prepared to pay for it.  Third-party developers have done a great job of writing software that has a Mac look & feel.  Apple and Microsoft both publish guidelines on best practices for developing software for their respective platforms.  The ISVs that publish software for the Mac do a great job of creating a quality product the only catch of course being that you need to buy the apps.  There is open-source software available on the Mac, but as with the malware developers. the open-source community prefers to stick to platforms where they can get the most eyeballs on their product.

Getting Things Done This is far and away the most subjective category in my review.  There is no question that I’ve been extremely productive with my MacBook over the past three years.  I’ve written hundreds of blog posts, contributed to my online forums, remotely managed software on my websites, handled email, instant messaging, twitter, virtualization and managed my online life.  The thing is, most of the time I’m not using a Mac specific application to do those tasks.  All of my Internet activity is done using FireFox rather than Apple’s own Safari browser.  The main reason for that is that I find Safari to be a bit clumsy to use, and above all else, I miss the ability to download tons of free plugins and extensions for the browser that make my online life better.

One task where the Mac has a leg up on Windows, conceptually at least, is the fact that it’s built-in command-line interface is based on BSD.  This means that all of the default tools for handling command-line operations in a Unix environment are already present, and the most important of those for me is SSH.  Native command-line support of SSH makes administering my web servers a more seamless task, and despite the fact that it’s command-line in nature, that may be the most Mac-like feature of my Macbook.  I can get this done on windows without much effort as well, but with the Mac, this truly was built-in from the get-go.

Re-Staging Systems I’m hard on my computers.  I always have been.  Every system I’ve ever owned prior to my MacBook has been re-staged or re-imaged about once per year.  Sometimes this was for OS upgrades, sometimes because it had become slow and unusable, and sometimes because I wanted to try a major configuration change to make the computer more useful to me.  Something that really appealed to me about the Mac from those I’d spoken to prior to purchasing it was the idea that all of this would be gone once I got a mac.  Never would I need to do the dreaded “wipe and reload” operation that I’d become used to in Windows.  The reality is, I’ve re-staged my Macbook about the same number of times (if not more) than I had originally done on Windows.

1. Bought a new Mac
2. Over the course of the first 6-8 months, downloaded every piece of Mac software I could find. Un-installing them left me with a clutter of junk in the “Library folder” for the dozens and dozens of apps I had removed. To clear this up permanently, I re-staged the computer.
3. About 6 months later, I wanted to try out the pre-release version of Boot-Camp that came with OS X 10.4.  Unfortunately after the previous re-installation I had chosen a “case-sensitive” file system — this doesn’t work well with Boot Camp.  I re-staged the computer.
4. When OS X 10.5 came out, I felt somewhat duty-bound to pick up the new release on it’s first day of RTM.  To put this on, I followed my policy with all OS updates (and the advice I had found online) which is to always start clean. I re-staged the computer.
5. I decided a few months later that I wanted to try dual-booting my computer with Windows and OS X 10.5, unfortunately I had filled up my 80 GB hard drive so much that the OS X couldn’t create a decent boot partition.  I re-staged the computer.
6. Several months later I bought a new 320 GB hard drive and promptly proceeded to load it into my Mac.  Since the Boot-camp thing wasn’t really working out anyway I decided this would be a great time to get a fresh start.  I re-staged the computer.

Over the 32 months since I’ve owned the Macbook, I’ve re-staged the machine five times.  That’s about once every 6 months give-or-take.  That’s a bit more often than my Windows machines annual re-load, but I figure two of them were due to my unfamiliarity with the Mac OS.  So three times in three years, I call that a draw.

Conclusion – Will my next computer be a Mac? After looking at my Mac experience objectively for a couple of months as I’ve written this article on and off, I’ve come to two undeniable truths about how the Mac fits in to my life.

1. The Mac is an outstanding computer, that does nearly everything that I’ve ever needed it to.
2. For me, it isn’t worth the 30-40% premium over a comparable Windows-based notebook.

I really do love my Macbook, and I’m going to find a way to keep it running and in active service until it simply becomes too expensive to maintain (read: need to replace the battery, or a system component out of warranty).  But I also know that my next machine, which will be a replacement for the desktops in my basement will most likely be an off-the-shelf PC.  The vast majority of what I do on my computer is done on the Internet.  The applications I use on my Mac every single day are Firefox, Thunderbird, MSN, TweetDeck, TextPad and the CLI SSH client.  All of those applications are available on every single computer that I’ve ever used.  So when I buy the next system, the only decision for me as far as operating systems go, will be whether I buy Windows, or install the latest LTS edition of Ubuntu.

Over the past year or so I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting up a podcast of my own to go along with the efforts that I’ve put in with Dave and Cait on the Aussie Geek Podcast. I love doing the AGP and it helps to stimulate a large portion of the geek side of my personality… but not all of it. The one piece that it leaves off is the developer piece.

I’ve tried to stimulate this in a few different ways in the past, writing blog posts around pieces of code; trying to kick off a standalone open-source project and writing my two plugins for WordPress (Admin Links Widget, Random Image Selector). Though these were all items that I enjoyed they lacked a certain interactivity.

When Jeff offered to let me co-host WordPress Weekly to provide a developer’s perspective it gave me the unique opportunity of mixing my interest in software development with an interaction with a community. I only did a handful of shows at the end of last year, but it helped to reinforce that I really enjoyed putting my skills to use providing information for other people.

There are a great number of development-focused podcasts which discuss wider abstract concepts, and complex topics but precious few which dive into the nuts and bolts of specific software development topics.  Examples of a couple that I’ve really enjoyed listening to lately are the .NET Rocks! podcast (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell) and the Stack Overflow podcast (Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky).

Realistically, this new show idea won’t come to pass until later this year, probably in the April-May timeframe as I have several weeks of school to get through before I explain to my lovely wife why I’m spending yet more time in front of the computer.

So there it is, out in the open: I hope to be releasing a development-focused show sometime later this year.

If you’re interested in the offer, visit the CodeWeavers website to sign up.

If you want to read more about the background of this story, check out Michael Rose’s post on TUAW.

The long and the short of it: You have George W. Bush to thank (sorta) for your opportunity to buy free software.

It was great to see a few familiar faces like Rebecca and Raul.

I also got to meet some of the folks who I’d only known online.  Duane, John, John & Andy.  Looking forward to meeting lots of other great people tomorrow.

I did forget one thing tonight: Business Cards.  However, I did manage to find a few spare sheets of my Avery business card blanks tonight.  I also discovered (somewhat to my surprise) that Google Docs supports Avery business card templates.

sample business card from google docs

The implementation isn’t quite as slick as MS-Word, but it will more than do in a pinch.  I managed to whip up this snazzy little number in a matter of minutes.  Now I feel more prepared for tomorrow.  Hopefully Dave doesn’t mind that I borrowed the show logo, I promise I’ll promote the show! 

This week due to some issues beyond his control, Dave is without is usual podcasting rig, including the computer and all of his audio editing tools.  So in an effort to make sure that the AGP #003 gets out as close to on-time as possible, I’ll be doing the editing and post-production for this week’s episode.

I’ve been learning some new skills, mostly thanks to Dave and with some input from the Interwebs.  So if you haven’t subscribed to the Aussie Geek Podcast yet, I suggest you do so right now and listen to last week’s show and this, and see if I did an OK job. 

Organize your Photos This is a relatively time consuming task that I rarely take the time to do.  A “net-outage” is a great time to pour through the photos in your computer and group or rename the files.  If you use a photo organizing program like iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac, or Google’s very popular Picasa on Windows you can use these programs to do much of the tedious file management for you.

Blog Something I find that one of my biggest impediments to getting a bunch of blogging done is my rather short attention span.  When I’m online researching a story for an article I tend to get lost surfing the Internet looking for new and exciting things.  Being offline for a few hours, or  even a couple of days, can provide you extra time to focus on getting that article written, or in some cases provide inspiration for a whole new article (or two).  I managed to a get a couple of good articles out of my unexpected “grey mode” period.

Write a Letter We’ve all said it at one time or another, often when frustrated or annoyed, “I’m going to write a letter!”  Well, here’s your chance.  Bring up your favourite word processor, or text editor and bang out some phrases that are sure to convince your audience that you’re right (and that you should get a free case of coke the next time you shop there).  Letters to politicians or other elected officials are also great candidates.

Play a Game Assuming you have games on your computer which aren’t of the MMO variety playing them can be a great way to kill some time.  A couple of games that I’ve purchased over the last couple of years are Escape Velocity: Nova (EV:Nova) and WingNuts 2.  Both of these games are sci-fi shooters, with EV:Nova extending the genre with trading and other somewhat less violent activities.  EV:Nova also supports a wide ranging plugin architecture that will allow you to download (prior to the network outage, of course) plugins from other players to extend the game or cheat the system.

So there you have it.  A few ways to get your geek on without access to the cloud.  So the next time you find yourself in a coffee shop and don’t feel like paying exorbitant fees to check your email.  Try out a cloud-free activity.  Hey you might even find yourself more productive!

With a vulnerability so wide-reaching, security researchers decided it would be wise to keep the exact nature of the vulnerability something of a secret until the patches were ready.  They did however announce that a vulnerability had been found.

This announcement was all it took for security-savvy netizens (the ones who know just enough to be dangerous) to start speculating and researching the nature of the DNS defect.  The good thing?  They figured it out.  The bad thing?  They publicized it.

As a keen observer of the whole mess, security expert and blogger Chris Hoff decided to dedicate a poem to the DNS Debacle.  I’ve included a short excerpt:

A bunch of big egos called Dan on a bluff said his vuln was a copy of 10 year old stuff So Dan swore them on handshakes and details were provided and those same cocky claims soon all but subsided

Go and check the poem out.  It’s extremely creative, and as far as I can tell factually accurate to the events that took place.  My hat’s off to Chris Hoff for providing the prose, now we’ll all cross our fingers and see how it goes… 

I saw a rather significant spike in traffic as millions of Gmail users checked out the blog, and a few hundred of them clicked through on the trackback which showed up as a result of the post.  Go figure.

Crud.  Now what?  I have my MacBook with me which is where this post is originating, but I don’t have a PCMCIA slot in the MacBook to accommodate the AirCard.  I will probably be able to pick up a wi-fi hotspot from one of the neighbours, but that’s going to involve getting in the car and parking, rather suspiciously, on the street outside someone’s house to get access to the internets.  Am I that desperate?  Can I truly not live for three days without my Internets??

I’m sad to report that the answer is yes.  My name is Keith, and I’m a Webaholic.  And it’s not just me, both my wife and I felt a mild sense of panic when we realized that our access to the Internet was going to be seriously curtailed this weekend, if not eliminated altogether.

1. I was going to work on some Flickr reorganization.
2. She was going to watch the olympics via CBC.ca’s on-line Olympic coverage.
3. I was going to use my VPN to connect up to work and get a few things straightened out for a couple of projects I’m working on.
4. She was going to connect to the iTunes store and download the new iPod Touch software and play around with some applications.
5. I was going to work on a revised version of the blog template (yes, the same revision I blogged about months ago).
6. I was going to get the next post in my Hardy for the Home series written (and use SSH into the server back home to do it).

Suffice to say the plans have been revised somewhat.  We were both quite happy to do other things, we brought books to read, we walked on the beach, we spent some tourist time in a nearby village shopping in the local mom & pop shops.  It was just a shift from what we had originally planned.  Despite the fact that we traveled out of the Lower Mainland for nearly 6 hours to get where we are, we had still intended a rather Internet-focused long weekend.  I managed to find a HotSpot (read: parked on the side of an unlit road stealing unsecured wi-fi) to check email, but the connection was a bit too unreliable to try using WordPress.

Well there’s my story of net addiction.  What’s yours?

Photo Credit: Nataliej on Flickr

In setting up this new environment, I needed to decide how to cope with my Windows XP disc being an original, pre SP1 disc.  The solution: Slipstream.

Slipstreaming allows you to create a Windows XP CD that has updates like the most current Service Packs.  In this case, I’ll be adding Service Pack 3.

There are lots of guides on how to do the Slipstream process, including these two on HowToHeaven and Invisibill.  These are great step-by-step tutorials that show you everything involved in the process.  But they’re also very manual.

The tool I’ve chosen to go with is nLite.  This slick little application provides the ability to not only Service Pack your XP installation, but apply lots of other custom features as well.  Here are the steps I went through for my Slipstreaming adventure.  (There is also a step-by-step guide on the nLite Website)

Step 1: When running nLite is to show it where the Windows installation is located.  After that, you’ll need to specify a location for nLite to perform it’s magic.  I chose C:slipstream.

Step 2: The next phase is to select the options for your installation.  I’m a whole-hog kinda guy, so I elected to go with every option if for no other reason than to browse the options and screens.

Step 3: Pick your Service Pack.  Once you’ve selected a service pack and applied it, nLite will perform the Slipstream operation and integrate the service pack.

Step 4: Updates & Hotfixes.  The more that you can download and apply here, the fewer there will be to apply once the windows installation is completed.

Step 5: Select components to remove.  nLite gives you the opportunity to eliminate components from the final installation.  This can lighten not only the ISO, but also the final installation.  Beware removing too many options.  By eliminating support for hardware or drivers the usage of the installation will become more limited.  However, if you have a specific application in mind it can help to streamline the process.

Step 6: Unattended Install. The next screen provides the ability to streamline the installation for a smooth unattended install.  If you want to use this option, you’ll need your Windows XP CD key at this stage.

Step 7: Installer Options. This screen allows you to customize some of the behaviours of the installation process including boot-time messages and BIOS backup retention.  If you don’t understand an option, take the default.

Step 8: Tweaks. Wow.  This section has dozens upon dozens of options to tweak and adjust virtually every major setting in Windows.  And a whole bunch that aren’t so major.  Take your time with this and make sure to read the little captions for each option.  There are so many possibilities.

Step 9: Integrate all the changes.  nLite will begin to create the installation image, merging together all the changes you’ve selected.  This process will take quite a while.  On my machine it took about 10 minutes.

Step 10: Burn the ISO.  Set any last settings you want for the ISO, and click the Create ISO button to start writing the image.  Once the image is written, it can be installed to a VM (VMWare/VirtualServer) or burned to a disk for installation at a later time.

In a short post titled “Thanks for waiting ” released yesterday, the iPhone Dev Team released Pwnage 2.0 for jailbreaking iPhones running the iPhone firmware version 2.0.

It should be noted that this doesn’t unlock your iPhone, it only opens up all the things that the old Jailbreak used to do.  With the advent of the app store, this is now more of a “hardcore” change than ever before… but nonetheless, Kudos to the iPhone Dev team!

Update #1: I also meant to note that un the first day since this was released, the blog entry received over 2800 comments.  Thats one way to get traffic. 

First, the before.  Click through to get a full view of the disaster that was my office.

In taking the opportunity to do the cleanup, I decided it was time to replace the small Ikea computer desk which had served me faithfully for about five years, but is just too small to accomodate all the gear that I use on a regular basis (podcasting setup, flat-panel, printer, server, etc. etc.).

To set up the new desk, I decided pretty early on that it wasn’t going to be another $149 Ikea special.  Though the products work well for me in most cases (judging by the amount of Ikea stuff in the house) it just isn’t rugged enough to go into my daily-abuse-cycle in my office.  No, I decided that I needed something stronger and more durable.

I also decided that I wanted to have a hand in designing and building my desk but at the same time put as little effort into it as possible.  I finally decided on a DIY geek project involving only three main components.

I picked up a couple of basic filing cabinets from a local office-supply store to make-up the legs of my desk.  The cabinets are two drawer letter-size (A4) filing cabinets which are about 29 inches in height, and 26 inches deep.  Long deep file drawers were a must, because I found a very special desk top.

The top of the desk came from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.  The ReStore sells donated building supplies to contractors and DIY-ers with all proceeds going to support the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.  The unit itself didn’t start out life as a desk, but as a door.  That’s right a door.  I picked up an eight foot by three foot door that sits proudly atop the two filing cabinets, and gives me a huge open expanse of desk top to store all my gear.

Surprisingly enough, within days of me devising this particular desk strategy, Knightwise did an episode of the Knightcast entitled “KC0013: A Geek’s Palace” in which he described an almost identical desk setup.  Nice to know I’m in good company.

So anyway, the office is much tidier, and my new workspace is working out brilliantly.  I now have sufficient room to spread out all my gear, and not have to sit a secondary keyboard on my lap if I need to access another computer.

The image above shows all the stuff in “the nerve centre”.  From left-to-right:

• Ubuntu Server (with my wife’s photo, box-o-batteries and 500GB WD MyBook)
• Keyboard and Mouse for the server (I don’t have a USB KVM yet…)
• Coasters from the Grasshopper
• Behringer XENYX-802 mixer (for podcasting)
• Behringer C-1 Condenser mic (also for podcasting)
• Labtec speakers (I’m too lazy to crawl down and look up the model number on the sub)
• Samsung SyncMaster 2253LW flat screen
• MS Natural Keyboard Pro
• RSA authentication fob for VPN at work
• Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse
• 13″ MacBook
• HP PSC (P.o.S?) All-in-one printer
• Obligatory tin of Altoids

So be good and organize your gear.  Get yourself a nice flat surface and get your geek on. 

In the house, we’ve got four computers running various editions of OS X and Windows.  What I’ve been looking for is a solution which would serve all these platforms seamlessly.

The first part of the project was to sift through the guts of all the computers that I had in my house and see if I could get something put together which would serve the duty of the home server.  The server needed to perform a few specific functions:

• Backup Server
• Web Server (LAMP)
• SFTP Server
• DNS Server

In addition, I may extend the capabilities of the server to include:

• VMWare Server
• TorrentFlux Client

With those requirements in mind I set about scrounging through the working, and not-so working hulks that I had laying around the basement.  I was able to come up with the following configuration:

• P4 1.5GHz
• 512MB DDR SDRAM
• 3 NICs (Onboard + 2 — will explain later)
• DVD Burner (just in case)
• 2x 80GB IDE Drives
• 1x 40GB IDE Drive

The first priority is to get some backups going for the house and get some of our data copied.  There were two priorities for the backup: seamless and automatic.   This last item is particularly important because as many experts have noted a backup is useless unless it will happen automatically for you.  If you have to think about it, you won’t do it.

After looking at the hardware configuration it was obvious I was going to need some additional storage.  2 80GB drives would hardly do to backup data from four separate computers.  So I picked up a 500GB Western Digital MyBook.

And with that the gear was complete.  Now all I had to do was image the franken-box with a copy of Hardy Heron and actually put it to use.

Go download it!  I’ll wait….

There now… doesn’t that feel better?

Many of the extensions have already been upgraded to work with the new version, and others are sure to follow soon.  I’ll keep an eye on things and try to let you know when PortableApps releases Firefox3.

Also, if you download today (or by 10:00am PT tomorrow), you can be among those participating in Mozilla’s Guinness World-Record attempt.

This thing is a beast.  24 CPU Cores and 48GB of memory sure beats the hell out of the server I was planning to put in my basement.  I ran the numbers on the components he used and it looks like it would cost about C$6500.00.  Of that the funky Ikea case is less than 1% of the total.  Pretty spanky! 

The day started off in the hotel room poaching free wi-fii off a local hospital.  It’s damn decent of them to offer a wi-fi hotspot free to patients and their families (and geeks who are willing to sit at an odd angle near the hotel window).  I was completing a draft of an email that I was planning to send to the mayors of Burnaby and Vancouver on the topic of municipally supported wi-fi.  The email got written up, I checked the twitter feeds (fired off a tweet or two I think) and then headed to my first destination.

I hopped on the “T” as they call it in Boston and took the Green line all into the heart of the city and Government Center.  This is the central government complex and one end of the area served by Boston’s open wi-fi pilot that they’re conducting with ISP Galaxy Internet.  I headed across the street to the Faneuil marketplace and parked myself on a bench.  I wasn’t gonna hang around very long because it was bloody cold and windy, but I stuck it out long enough to fire off the email and quickly blog the experience.  As much as I was enjoying the free signal and 5-bar signal strength (over 90%) it was time for me to g as there were three more stops on this tour and it was already approaching 11:00am.

I re-boarded the “T” and headed out towards Cambridge.  My first stop was the MIT museum.  I got off the train and walked through the streets of Cambridge past several campus buildings.  The architecture on some was quite unique, and there were a great deal fewer old buildings in and around the area.  Much of it appeared to be mid-20th century construction or newer.  The walk from the “T” station to the museum was longer than I had anticipated but provided me a look at a side of Cambridge I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to see.

When I arrived at the museum the first thing that struck me was the austere, spartan look of the main floor.  It was very functionally laid out, with lots of “white space”.  The most interesting exhibit on the main floor was that of the CityCar.  This is a project being proposed by MIT professors and graduate students to create a pool of electrically powered cars for use in urban settings, much the same way bicycle pools exist in major European cities today.

On the upper floor was an extensive robotics exhibit and though much of the material was dated (mid-late 1990s) it gave great insight into the directions of artificial intelligence research and robotics.  I got a chance to see the original “Kismet” robot which was neat after having seen so many Discovery channel programs about it.  There was also some DNA and genetics research on display, and through I read and was able to understand the words, much of the significance escaped me this time around.

After MIT’s museum, I re-boarded the “T” and headed for Harvard Square.  Once I arrived, the only thing I could contemplate was lunch, it was nearly 2:00pm after all,  On the recommendation of Miss604 via the Twtittersphere I was able to find a great place for a pint and a quick meal.  I stopped in at John Harvard’s Brew House.  The atmosphere was a bit dead in the lull between lunchtime and happy hour, but I was able to get my geek on by getting some writing done on the Technological Dependence post, and it was in fact my lack of a paper map and an attempt to Google-search my way to directions (instead of asking for directions or a map) which inspired that post.  (Sidenote: I did eventually FAIL with the digital maps and find my way to one of the paper variety.)  The food was pretty good.  I followed the aforementioned recommendation and tried out the Meatloaf (in sandwich form at lunchtime) and with it a pint of the Sam Adams Nut-brown ale (they were out of the porter).  I don’t know if there’s enough for a Ho Yummy.com review but it was certainly a decent pub lunch.

After lunch was the final stop for the afternoon, a trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Peabody Museum.  This was geekery of a different kind.  I’ve always been a fan of history, and this gave me a chance to explore some great exhibits on geology, archaeology and to a lesser degree, palaeontology.  There wasn’t a whole lot to differentiate this museum from other similar ones I’ve visited in the past.  In fact it was relatively small when compared to the Field museum in Chicago or even the Royal BC Museum in Victoria; however for a school museum it was very well maintained and they allowed flash photography.

All in all it was a very enjoyable day.  I took a few dozen shots, some of which I’ve featured here, the rest of which are in the Flickr set for the trip.  If you’re ever in Boston, take a day trip out to Cambridge and check out the sights.  They’re wonderful cities, full of history, and a great place for a little geeky adventure.

Image Credit: carolclarinet on Flickr

DISCLAIMER: As with all of its brethren, the iPod mini does not ship with a “user-servicable” battery (or anything else for that matter).  This means that if you run into any trouble with the unit, you need to take it to an Apple-authorized service centre.  Opening the unit yourself WILL void the warranty.  Unless of course your warranty has already run out, in which case: fill yer boots!

Alright, with that out of the way, on to the deed at hand.

As my guide to the process I used this guide from CNET.  It was extremely helpful and provides detailed instructions as well as a tour of the inside of your mini.  For that reason I’ll link to their guide and only provide a “Coles notes” version here. (For those of you outside Canada, Coles is a book supplier that produces a guide series similar to Cliffs Notes.)

Step 1 – Get yourself a replacement battery Chances are when you get the new battery it will ship with some sort of tool.  For this process you need a flat screwdriver (primarily for use as a pry-bar), and a small [Phillips screwdriver -- wiki].  If you have a small jewellers set you can use that, though you may suffer some minor damage to the flat-head if it’s not very strong.

Step 2 – Remove the covers Use the flat-head screwdriver to pry off the top and bottom covers.  Keep in mind that the lock switch will come off with the top cover.  Both covers were originally secured with glue, so place them sticky-side up to not mess with it too much.

Step 3 – Remove the bottom spring-plate Use the flat-head screwdriver again to remove the spring-plate from the bottom side.  This is holding the unit in place.

Step 4 – Remove the screws Using the small Phillips screwdriver remove all the small screws. I realize I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but DON’T LOSE THEM!.  You will need them later.

Step 5 – Remove the command-interface jumper If you look at the bottom of the unit, you’ll see a small plastic connector on one side.  Carefully remove this (this is the interface to the command buttons on the front of the casing).  Once it is removed, the guts of the iPod should be unencumbered.  Slide the whole unit out the top.

Step 6 – Replace the battery The battery will be stuck to the unit with a small piece of adhesive which is sticking it to one of the chips on the iPod’s mainboard.  Slowly peel off the battery and hold it perpendicular to the board.  Take note of the placement of the different coloured wires then remove the jumper.  Place the new battery on the device and reverse the process, taking special care to ensure the wires are on the correct pins.  This is pretty much the easiest part of the whole process.

Step 7 – Charge and Test (technically optional) I highly recommend doing a full charge-and-test while the unit is disassembled.  This will ensure that if anything isn’t hooked up correctly, it can be corrected without having to re-dissecting the iPod.

Step 8 – Re-assemble Follow Steps five through one to re-assemble that mini.  Take care to smooth out the top and bottom casings, and to place them back sticky side down.  That’s all she wrote.

Overall the experience for me went pretty well.  The article CNET article was very helpful in getting this completed quickly and with a minimum of fuss.  Admittedly I didn’t read through the whole article, and had a touch of difficulty as a result.  Follow Step 7… for the love of God.

Once I got the unit reassembled, it ran into exactly the same problem as with the original unit.  It didn’t want to retain a charge.  Since the new battery was still, well, new I decided to swap in the original again to make sure its behaviour hand not changed.  They were both the same.  This leads be to believe that there are is a problem with the charging circuit and not with the battery.  Oh well… win some and lose some I guess.

As these devices have made their way into our lives, the concept of convergence has helped them stick.  Two hundred years ago, the only way to communicate with someone was either in person, or by post.  Then came the invention of the telegraph.  This would allow someone to send a text-message to someone in another city by way of an electrical current.  Really, this was the predecessor to email, fax and text messaging.

Seventy years later, Alexander Graham Bell was busy working on a device to help his wife hear, and in the process managed to invent the telephone.  Imagine, being able to have a conversation with someone across the country much the way you would if they were sitting in the next room.  Before long these technologies began to make their way into every home in the Western world.  You could contact anyone, at home or at their place of business and speak to them directly.  The information age was upon us.

By the time I made my way on the scene in the early 1980s phones were commonplace, analog phones were beginning to give way to faster and higher-capacity digital phone systems.  With these came the advent of the modem — a device solely designed to translate analog telephone signals into digital signals for processing by a computer.  The age of the Internet was beginning.

This brings me to the 1990s and the start of my serious involvement with technology.  I was fascinated by the ability of computers to connect and talk to each other pretty early on.  Being able to exchange files with my friends via the local BBS was quite amazing to me at first, but soon became a primary method of communication (even if it did take an hour to download a file over ZMODEM on my 2400 baud modem!) for passing geekery, photos and games back and forth with a few friends who “got it” early on.

As technology continued to improve, so did my Internet experience.  We soon upgraded to a 56k modem which allowed us to download more than 20 times faster.  I could download the new 1.2MB Wolfenstein Demo (which wasn’t really new) in only several minutes.  But this really was only beginning, because a few short years later came ADSL.  This may have been the beginning of my technological dependence.

As things were progressing on the home Internet side of things, things were also progressing with my own personal communications.  By the mid-1990s (sometime between 56k and ADSL) I managed to convince my parents to buy me a cell phone.  A communications device of my very own.  We had tried to convince our parents to get us a second phone line, just for the kids.  Something they begrudgingly did as the Internet became more popular because, well, they couldn’t get or make a phone call after we came home in the evening.  But back to the cell phone, my first phone was what I liked to call the Motorola “Brick”.  I don’t know the exact model for it.  This phone lasted me for about three years and quickly became my constant companion.   This may also have been the beginning of my technological dependence.

When I speak of my technological dependence, I do so in the context of activities that I used to be able to do unassisted, but which now seem to require some sort of technological intervention.  Let me provide an example.  When I go to a large event, or even a shopping mall with friends or my family, often times we’ll split up and explore individual activities.  If one of us has forgotten their cell phone, or has managed to run out of batteries this tends to propose a rather large problem: how will we meet up later if I can’t call Jimmy on his cell phone?  In these instances I’m reminded that I haven’t always had a cell phone, and at some point in the past nobody did.  How did they manage to co-ordinate their activities?  Pre-arrange a meeting time with friends?  Wow.  What a concept.

In other cases the technological dependence has taken the shape of changes in the fundamental ways that we conduct certain activities.  For this example, I’ll employ an experience from a recent trip to the airport.  When checking in at the airport the airlines now have a vastly reduced number of check-in agents.  Why?  Because all they need to do now is check your bags and place a sticker on them.  Your boarding pass?  You deal with that at a computer terminal before you queue up.  Not handy with computers?  Well, you’ll just have to figure it out for yourself.  The process is entirely computerized.  Add to this that all the security equipment is powered by computers and you’ve got a pretty technology dependent industry.  Never mind a power failure.  If there were to be a major failure in an airport’s computer network (border router failure, cable cut) it would put the entire airport out of commission until it was fixed.

In still other cases our dependence shows in our inability to follow the guidelines that technology gurus have been spouting for years.  The one that comes foremost to my mind is that of “Backup! Backup! Backup!”  The majority of people who use computers on a daily basis don’t back up their data regularly, if at all.  I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion, and have been remarkably fortunate with relatively few disastrous events though I’m far from immune to the data-loss syndrome.  Our lack of ability to simply copy and paste data into another location is astounding.  As with most things in life it’s the people who’ve had the most dire failures who tend to be the advocates for helping people to avoid future catastrophes, so considering their wealth of knowledge, why don’t we listen?

Now despite my deliberately negative slant on the first two examples of technological dependence, the news isn’t all bad.  Technological dependence is simply and indication of how society has developed technologies which are so useful that they’ve permeated the daily lives of billions of people around the globe.  What we need to do as a collective in the years and decades to come is to develop methods to keep the technology we use sustainable and mitigate failures of the technology so that only the most disastrous events could ever disrupt the service.  Some of these solutions will be high-tech solutions that will require investment in infrastructure or new product development.

For the airport example, and admittedly this is something that is probably already done to some degree, ensure that there are multiple points where a network connects to the outside world.  By ensuring that network infrastructure is made redundant and is kept as physically separate as possible, the airport can continue to operate with little or no time spent with systems being offline.  The same would apply for connections to the power grid.  Though simple in concept, a solution like this is relatively complex compared to those for some of the other problems I presented.

The backup problem represents trying to a fundamental behaviour in people: we’re lazy.  The only backup solutions that tend to work very effectively are those which are automated and which we don’t have to think about unless disaster strikes and we need to recover our data.  To solve this problem there are a few possibilities.  Backup services which with only a few clicks of the mouse we can connect to and have them store our data.  Easy enough for most people, and as long as you’re happy with your information sitting on some company’s servers this is a viable solution.  The second (and admittedly more complex solution) is to back up everything to an external hard drive and store that in another location.  This requires planning, forethought and at the very least a spare drawer in the desk in your office to store the drive offsite.  This also requires more up-front investment than the previous example, but doesn’t have any ongoing monthly charges.  In both cases the backup can be relatively automated and off your mind.

Let’s not forget about that pesky dead cellphone problem either.  There is one really easy solution for this one too.  Plan ahead.  Try it sometime, all the cool kids are doing it.  By agreeing on a predetermined time and place to meet up, you can avoid those nasty “Where’s Jimmy??” scenarios and save on precious cellphone minutes to boot!  Now if anyone raises their hand and says that “but I use my cell phone to tell time?  I can’t check the time if I don’t have my phone!” — I have two solutions for you, ask someone or build a sundial.  Oh wait; you probably need the internet access from your phone to get the sundial instructions off Google… scratch that.  The second solution is to bring your iPod.

Photo Credits: marcin wichary, lady madonna, rebelniko, alexmuse, kevin

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed4CHkN-Dkw]

Still not quite as cool as the guys and gals from “Redefined” though…

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFTT01Symx4]

The Background

This story begins, as so many do, at the beginning.  I have been using a rather sketchy headset for the past several months.  It’s one that I’ve had since 2003 and really, has held up pretty well for a $20 LD Special.  But it was breaking down and it doesn’t provide sufficient audio quality for a really good-sounding podcast.  I’ve been considering starting up a small podcast of my own (see below) and am contributing regularly to the Global Geek Podcast, where Dave puts a supreme effort into audio quality, so I came to the decision that it was time for some new equipment.

Step 1: Fix the old mic

Being the cheap bastard that I am, the first solution involved, time, ingenuity and duct tape.  Suffice to say the solution didn’t exactly work, and may have caused some of the later instabilities in the microphone’s USB adapter.  ((sorry Dave!))

Step 2: Use the built-in Macbook mic

This was a great idea, because it didn’t cost anything.  The only big downside: the mic is hyper-sensitive, and omni-directional.

Step 3: Buy a new cheap mic

The first mic I bought was another cheap inexpensive mic.  The sound was actually worse.  Back to the store.

Step 4: Upgrade to a mid-range headset

After the mic debacle, I realized I probably wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I actually spent some money trying to upgrade the system.  I used this headset for one episode of the GGP, and quite frankly it didn’t cut it.  I could hear that this was the “inexpensive” mic when the show aired.  Back to the store with it.

Step 5: Get some proper gear

After a few chats with Dave and Knightwise, listening to a few equipment reviews on other podcasts and doing a whole lot of reading I figured out what I thought I needed.  I bought the stuff, and after a couple of mix-ups at the store I had everything at home and was ready to start podcasting!

Components

There are two main components to this set up.  The microphone and the mixer.  The reason that we need the mixer is primarly due to the type of mic that I bought.  But more on that later…

Behringer C-1 Studio Condenser Mic

This microphone is a studio-quality microphone that features a cardioid design.  This is a method of keeping the mic directional which dramatically cuts down on ambient noise.  This was one of the first things that struck me when I first tested it.  I was able to record some tests while my lovely wife was watching TV, and you couldn’t hear the TV at all (well you could during the silent parts if you turned up the volume enough).

The mic comes with a standard XLR plug.  This is the same kind of plug that microphones in a recording studio or on stage use.  And since most computers don’t have any way to receive an XLR connection directly, that necessitated an extra piece of hardware: the mixer.

Behringer XENYX 802 Mixer

The mixer I’ve chosen is the second in a line of mixers from Behringer that they produce for everything from basic recording (like a podcast) to professional studio recording.   The mixer has enough inputs for me to hook up the microphone, my keyboard and my ipod (and a few other things) and feed them through the mixer.  The whole works plugs into my macbook through the line-in (mic) port.

There are lots of knobs and controls to adjust the quality and shape of the sound as it passes through the mixer.  A couple of people have suggested that I sound much more “bassey” on the show than I do in person, so I am able to easily turn some knobs (once I figure out which ones) and clean up my sound.

So far I’ve really liked the sound quality that I’ve gotten from the new setup.  I even recorded a video reply on Seesmic using the new mic (at a comfortable enough distance to keep it out of the shot).

Odds and Ends

Then there were the little odds and ends, a cable to connect the mixer to the mic, the mixer to the mac, the ipod to the mixer and the synth to the mixer.  A mic-stand to hold everything up, and a pop-filter to keep me from exploding through your earbuds.  Finally, a late addition to the show, a tie-dyed t-shirt that serves as a vibration dampener.  This allows me to type while I’m recording without messing up the sound quality.  Without the t-shirt it sounds like I’ve mic’d a drum set!

The Foreground

So why am I doing all this?  The simple answer is so that when I want to record something, it doesn’t sound like I’m talking from deep inside a tin-can mounted inside the shower in my bathroom.  Okay maybe the old mic wasn’t quite that bad but you get my point.  Ever since joining the GGP last summer I’ve wanted to help make the show better.  This new setup helps with that goal.  The Global Geek Podcast is one of the best-sounding shows on TPN, and on the whole of the Interwebs.

But that’s not all….

Ever since I really got going with the blog a little more than a year ago, I’ve also been intrigued by podcasting.  I’ve been an avid podcast subscriber and listener (and occasional unsubscriber) for almost two years now.  Right now I have 32 different podcasts subscribed.  Mostly tech shows of various descriptions, but there’s a few more academic shows as well as a travel show and a food show thrown in for good measure.

I’ve always been one who likes to contribute back.  The GGP has given me a fabulous opportunity to stretch my wings and it’s been a great ride.  I’ve been wanting to do my own show since the fall and have batted around several ideas in the process.  I’m getting close to finalizing that decision now.  I have no intention of leaving the GGP; I’ll stay as long as we are able to work together and deliver great content.  This is simply to expand my podcasting repretoire and put out a show with my own personal touches.

So give the new shows a listen and let me know what you think.  If you’re a podcaster, feel free to share your thoughts on gear and podcasting in general.