I did run into one snag: Since WordPress’s own default theme is really formatted for a fixed width 800×600 screen, it doesn’t jive with my new design & content areas. I looked around and found this theme, which is a 1024 adaptation of the original WordPress template. You can download this template here:

WordPress Default Theme 1024 Wide

Warning: htmlspecialchars_decode() expects parameter 1 to be string, NULL given in /home2

/pixelpu1/public_html/blog/wp-includes/compat.php on line 105

I can’t figure out what that means… there are nothing in the configuration that even points to that directory. Comparing the old “compat.php” in WP 2.7 and WP 2.7.1 revealed that the new compat.php file is incredibly huge compared to the old one, seemingly with a lot more error checking routine than before.

The only thing I can do for now, is revert back to WP 2.7. I’m also considering a new blog layout that will probably make AJAxed WordPress unnecessary anyway…. Things to ponder…

• Disabling all addons other than AJAXed WP.
• Re-uploading all the files from WP 2.7.1.
• Re-uploading AJAXed WP files manually.
• Changing back to default theme.

Nothing’s worked so far… I’m gonna try a database repair or something next.

Update:

Performed some database maintenance routines… optimizing and removing overhead. It’s not having any effects.

Hope they fix it soon.

Update: Temporarily disabled the addon and inserted old school —more— tags on the more recent posts.

In the past year though, the development of QuickSilver came to a grinding halt. It was put into the open source community but received very little attention since. The original developer of QuickSilver now works for Google’s Mac division, and has been focused on other projects. So imagine my excitement when I came across the article on Smoking Apples Blog that the same developer has unveiled his latest project, Google Quick Search for the Mac.

I immediately switched over and messed with Google Quick Search for about two days. For a very early beta, Google Quicks Search shows some promise, but I still prefer QuickSilver by a fair margin.

The Good:

• Google Quick Search is easier to use for the first time user. The straight forward presentation of search results are easy to understand.
• For the advanced user who wants to perform specific action on search results, QuickSilver does this with two-to-three panels, where the first panel is the search result, second panel performs action with third panel for any additional action. By default, the second panel action is “open”, which works well for the application launching aspect of QuickSilver. However, to learn how to perform additional actions and drill deeper into menus becomes a convoluted key combination of arrows and tabs. GQS does better in this regard, because all the items are organized in a single view. You can drill down into deeper action menus in very consistent manner, and the presentation isn’t necessarily limited to only three panels.
• GQS also allows performing web searches more straight forward. In QuickSilver, you have to first install the web search plugin. Type in the name of the appropriate search engine, then tab over to the text field (third panel) to type in the search text. In GQS, performing web searches with your default browser is just a key press away.

The Bad:

• QuickSilver is a desktop search tool first,  with some web featured attached via plugin. So by default it does what I want it to do, which is search for documents and applications on my local folder. GQS has a mixed approach to presenting some applications/folders/documents, with some links to search for text on Google. Sometimes, even searching for applications that’s simply in the default application folder, will end up with web searches as the first result. For example, I typed in “adium” when I first installed GQS, and my default option was “search for ‘adium’ on google”. Of course, these results do improve overtime as GQS learns which result you care about more; but the default for a desktop searching app should be what’s on my desktop, not the web.
• Related problem to issue #1, is that to some extent, you can never really get what you want in the results because of the way web search options are mixed in with local options. I typed in “log” and came up with three folders named “log” in my results, but none of the three is the log folder I was looking for. Drilling down deeper into local results, I finally found the correct log folder as the #6 choice. The problem is, I look for the other log folder quite often as well, so as long as GQS insists on displaying the top 3 local search results mixed in with their own web search options, I’ll probably be looking for the wrong log folder half of the time.
• QuickSilver also maintains its own index, as opposed to relying on hooking to Spotlight for its searches. The downside is that QuickSilver only index folders you tell it to look into (by default it looks for Application & Documents, for the most part, all you need), while you can still use it to manually navigate into folders that you don’t index. GQS’s hook into Spotlight allows it to look for everything and anything on your hard drive, but that means the performance suffers. Just about every search result I attempted with GQS resulted in a few seconds of lag while it processed Spotlight results. It’s really not a huge amount of time, except I’m completely spoiled by QuickSilver’s instantaneous response. You don’t have an option to turn Spotlight off, because there are no way to index individual folders within its preferences right now, and if you turn Spotlight searches off, GQS will only display web search options.

Google Quick Search also suffers from a lot of instability issues currently. At one point it was hanging while consuming an increasing amount of memory, by the time I noticed it and force the application to shut down from Activity Monitor, it was using up 360MB of RAM, while consuming 99% of all the processing cycles on one of my cores. Keep in mind that this is a really, really early beta, so I assume that the performance issue will be fixed over time. Given the popularity of this download already, I hope it’s relatively quick.

However, whether or not they will change some interface behavior issues (for example, making web search results a secondary option on a different keypress, ability to monitor folders instead of relying on Spotlight) remains to be seen.

For now, I’m sticking with QuickSilver, it is still more robust & flexible, and I’ve already endured the learning curve.

Granted, I don’t use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn’t live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It’s also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.

Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:

delicious blog – Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you

Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it’s been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.

Well, Google released the Android SDK today. The SDK was pretty impressive, giving us a good preview of the the OS user interface (via Engadget). However, one can’t help notice how much the “mockup” looks like a Palm Centro, or any myriad of Palm or Windows Mobile device that’s been available so far. One also can’t help but notice how the UI takes many lessons from iPhone’s UI. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose, but didn’t everyone expect a *lot* more from Google than just another software platform that looks just like any other software platform?

I listen to podcasts when I bike to work every morning (my form of reading the newspaper while having breakfast?), and one of the panelist on TWIT made a lot of sense, although I can’t recall it verbatim (and I’m too lazy to listen through a one-hour long podcast to find the exact quote). Whenever Google can’t conquer a market, they fragment.

Take for example, the “OpenSocial” initiative that Google just started. Google had their own social networking property (www.orkut.com), which was almost completely forgotten as a footnote to all their other services. Facebook became the monstrosity that overtook MySpace, which long before had overtaken Friendster. Orkut, however, was nowhere in anyone’s distant memory. By introducing OpenSocial, Google is undoing Facebook’s dominance in building web applets specifically for their service. In away, it seems like a move that benefits every developer, who can now develop for every social networking site (other than Facebook) and support many “platforms” at once. Of course, the “side” benefit is that Google has planted the seed that could possibly unseat Facebook from its dominance at the top, and also insert themselves as the tour-de-force of any social networking site that may eventually take the throne.

Taking a look at what they’ve done with Android, they’ve essentially fragmented any previous mobile Linux development, again inserted themselves at the helm of the movement. Furthermore, they’ve even fragmented the Java development community as well. CNet’s Crave blog has a great post on this, which touches on some of the issues with Android’s SDK and overall Java development. Of course this isn’t all bad, since Java in itself is a platform that has failed to satisfy anyone. However, once again it shows Google as a very shrewd company at being able to project themselves as a kind, gentle company that can do no evil; and at the same time, position themselves as the titan that is able to undermine an entire industry in one fell swoop.

Who does that sound like? You know it, it’s on the tip of your tongue, you know exactly who I’m talking about.

Yup, Apple.

It was another day of soul-searching later, that I said to myself, “Wait, is that all there is to this news? That’s it? Really? You mean, I didn’t miss anything? I mean.. I combed through my RSS reader for hours and hours looking for more detailed information, something more exciting, something with actual substance…. and… really? That’s it?” For at least a few hours, I thought I was caught in some sort of temporal anomaly and was missing vital information that Google has apparently announced to the entire world minus little ol’ me.

The truth is rather, disappointing? Underwhelming? Indeed, the news outlets were positive on Day 1, and almost all universally speculative and introspective on Day 2. How many times have we been promised a “mobile phone OS based on Linux & open-source”? This harkens back to the Linux PDA days, and we all know how that went. The only difference between Google’s announcement and all the other dozen open-source mobile OS initiative, is that Google has a lot of money. Shitloads of money. Certainly a lot more money than open source Linux companies that’s been trying to figure out how to make any money at all by doing, anything and everything?

Of course you’ll see an impressive list of partners, it’s Google for god’s sake! Everyone jump in the pool! The question is, how many of those partners really have any product development plans? How many of those partners will be looking for their own competitive advantage once the SDK is out? How many of those partners will actually, actively contribute to the initiative once they realized that they are at very high risk to put themselves out of business?

The answer for now is, “It’s Google, they’ll make it work.” We’ll see what develops in the coming months. I see it as Google just throwing a piece of SDK out there, and allowing the sharks to battle it out for supremacy. After all, taking this strategy really means they have very little stake in any particular company. It’s a smart way to position themselves, as a software platform provider that doesn’t really care which hardware wins out. If Sony Ericsson develops something great and put HTC out of business, so be it. If Nokia collapse (well, they haven’t made a commitment to the consortium at all yet, probably a smart move at this point for them), it really doesn’t matter to Google either.

I’m starting to see a bunch of executives & software engineers from companies gather at a coliseum built in Google’s backyard (or maybe by naval airbase or something), and someone from Google is sitting atop in the Emperor’s seat and just giggling at the bloodshed that’s about to happen.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way that Google is going about this. In fact, it’s probably the smartest thing they could do to get into the mobile device arena without actually becoming involved in it. The style just disagrees with me on a personal level. I like companies that design end-to-end solutions that satisfies consumer needs. For example, Tivo is a great company that threw themselves into the heat of the battle, and forever changed the way we interact with televisions.

That kind of a company earns my respect. Google’s Open Handset initiative makes me wonder, “Is this just going to be a Linux version of Windows Mobile?”

Upon installing WP 2.3, I immediately was being fed errors due to the use of Simple Tagging plugin that I had before to manage tags. I had to disable Simple Tagging, then import the tags into WP’s new format. The import process was pretty easy and smooth. However I immediately found that there are no tag management UI built into WP 2.3 at all. Good thing that someone had already wrote a plugin to help manage tags, but it’s perplexing that you would have a blog that supports tags without any UI that help manage tags.

Furthermore, the tag cloud display that shipped with WP has no options whatsoever. It just displays a cloud, it doesn’t give you any customization capabilities. You can’t display a list view that I had before (although arguably I may stick with the cloud view anyway). Although there are a few early plugins that can help you customize the tag cloud display just a little bit, none of them had the flexibility of the Simple Tagging Widget.

Of course, retaining Simple Tagging isn’t possible, because the database structure that Simple Tagging used before is completely invalid with WP 2.3. So even though now there’s an “official” tagging structure in place, overall it is much less effective and usable than previous third party implementations. Over time, there will be third party enhancments to the built-in tagging mechanism for WP 2.3, but I’m really disappointed in how bad the out-of-the-box experience is.

Despite of how much I love the iPhone, I still don’t believe in signing  a two year contract for AT&T/Cingular. I’ve been a customer with Cingular back since when they were PacBell PCS, I have no reason to be locked down to a contract to prove my loyalty to a carrier. Especially since the iPhone isn’t subsidized at all. If signing a contract meant I can save a few hundred dollars, then at least the value proposition is existent. There is absolutely no reason to a sign a contract for a phone that will inevitably be unlocked (and probably be available at the same price).

Service issues aside, the iPhone itself is simply one of the most brilliant consumer product ever made. It is a device that will completely reshape the mobile phone market. The problem is, the other phone manufacturers seem to be thinking, “Wow, the iPhone has a touchscreen, we must all move to touchscreen-only phones as well.” I’m not saying that iPhone’s touchscreen isn’t brilliant, but it isn’t the end-all solution to the woes of the mobile phone design we’ve seen in the past decade.

There are already several manufacturers that’s decided to manufacture their own versions of a touchscreen phone. Some of which has been offering touchscreen capability for years (for example, most of HTC’s Windows Mobile based phones). The problem with these phones isn’t whether or not your buttons are placed on a screen or engraved into a rubber nub, the problem is the underlying unresponsive, inadequate, and sometimes down-right ugly software.

It’s easy to credit an obvious invention (even though touchscreen has always been around, the type that iPhone uses, basically a type of clear laptop touchpad, is completely new to the market) for the success of a hardware product; ultimately it isn’t just the hardware design, but how the hardware design interact, melds and works with the underlying software. I don’t find the buttons on my Razr hard to press, I don’t find the features on my HTC Windows Mobile phone to be so hard to access or inadequate; but I also don’t understand why everything I do on either of these phones seems to take place 3 seconds after I’ve executed a command, clicked a button, or even just scrolling through the address book.

Years and years ago, there was this great, ambitious operating system called BeOS. It was built from the ground up to be a multi-threaded, multi-CPU operating system. The most impressive aspect of BeOS, was how responsive it was at handling tasks that were extremely taxing to other operating system at the time. You can run multiple windows of videos, move them around the screen, resize them and still have lightning fast response. Mind you, this was the age when most users were still living with Windows 3.1 (maybe some on Windows 95?). The software engineers of BeOS were able to achieve this, because they were very aware that the outward responsiveness of an OS is just as important to its interaction with the user as the underlying operations.

For example, while another OS will prioritize the task of writing files to the disk, BeOS prioritized the playback of that file being written, saved, copied. The writing of the file can still be finished up in the background, but the immediate feedback of that file being worked on is the most important thing to the user, and delivered a level of interactivity that was far more appreciable.  The OS was instantaneously more robust because it made sure that you knew what it is doing, what you’ve done, then went ahead and finished up all those tasks in the background where it wouldn’t bother you.

That is in essence one of the most important aspect about the iPhone. On the first week of iPhone’s release, CNet even performed a real-life, side-by-side test of iPhone’s UI speed against what Apple were showing in the commercial. There were all sorts of accusation that Apple had fussed with the footage, sped up some parts, edited out the lag time in between. Well, the CNet guys found that almost second by second, they can do everything that was done in the commercial with their iPhone. Sure, the touchscreen UI is slick and intuitive, but it is also the amazing responsiveness of the UI, the underlying robustness of the software, that really sets the iPhone apart from any phone that you’ve ever used before.

Another company named Pasen put out this video on Youtube recently:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Sure, it’s a touchscreen device that completely rips off the iPhone. Look at the video, watch the number of times you had to click, double-click, drag fingers around, try to see if the device is responding. Wait, what is it doing now? Did I just select that? Is that playing now? How do I.. wait, let me click on that again.

I hope the rest of the consumer electronics industry doesn’t follow suit. It’s not just about the touchscreen.

A few weeks prior, Apple made a similar announcement in regards to OS X. In order to get iPhone delivered and out on the market on time, they had to shift resouces from the OS X team to work on the iPhone. Therefore, they had to delay the release of OS X until after iPhone.

The general reaction to both of these events are about the same, although Apple’s announcement created a much more visible ripple through news coverage (and understandably so). Most people would think, a company with the size, resource as Microsoft and Apple, shouldn’t have any issues simply pulling in new resources and get the software released on time. Having gone through the responsibilities of finding new hire and contractors myself, I can sympathize with the difficulty of simply bringing in new resources. It’s never as easy as finding qualified people and bringing them in.

Besides the process of finding and filtering through the number of talents out there available, you have to find the one that culturally fits into the company’s general atmosphere. That process in itself can take more than a few weeks. Multiple interviews are scheduled with each interviewee, each person in the process will take up at least half of a work day. If you were lucky enough to find someone who is equally qualified in both skill set and personality (usually you end up with more of one, or not enough of the other), it will take anywhere between a week to a month to integrate the new hire into the processes of your workflow.

All in all, for just one new hire into an established team, you’re looking at a hiring and development cycle that ranges anywhere between 3 weeks to 2 months. Not to mention that getting the new hire attuned, probably takes attention and time away from the rest of your team. By the time that new hire is an active, autonomously contributing member of your team, you’re looking at 2 months down the road.

This situation is even worse when you’re dealing with short-term hires to finish specific projects. You need to ramp them up to speed to finish the project on time, then after the project is done, you have to figure out if the long term plan of your company justifies keeping that person on tab. The obvious solution is to not make any permanent hires, and simply contract out the work. However, the process of finding a contractor, and maintaining the relationship with the contractor isn’t any easier than finding a permanent hire.

It’s easy to criticize these companies for not expanding resources to get their products out on time. The question is, would you rather put up with shoddy quality on the final product because of improper resource expansion? Under the same situation, I would always choose to maintain the quality of the product, rather than the schedule of the product.

As I was listening to Windows Weekly podcast this morning, I found out that Leo Laporte had gotten a new sponsor (for at least this episode) that makes a software called “Engage”. It offers a bit of the same functionality as QuickSilver for those envious Windows users. Although most likely, Windows users never knew such an approach to program launcher existed, but Mac users dual-booting or virtualizing Windows on their machine is probably incredibly frustrated every time they had to reach into that Start Menu. It is still far less powerful than QuickSilver in terms of extensibility and integration via plugins into other programs, but at least it’s better than the bare minimum Start Menu that Windows comes with.

Engage – the automatic start menu organizer

Personally, I think the delay doesn’t really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there’s nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren’t any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren’t any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, “I wish MacOS had this…”

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple’s continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It’s funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job’s return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990′s for Apple).

Brute force keygen cracks open Vista

It’s certainly not an easy hack, but at the end of the day is that it *will* work. Microsoft will probably also attempt to figure which keys are hacked and which ones aren’t, and disable those which are. The problem is, if hacked keys become widespread and varied enough, it will become harder and harder to track & keep everything “clean”. If two people calls up the Windows Activation hotline, who do you trust?

“Show Us The Code” is pushing for Steve Ballmer to show the open source world exactly what part of Microsoft’s source code is being used in Linux:

Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

Publicly pledge your support for Microsoft showing the public the code within Linux that violates their intellectual property by May 1st, 2007.

So far, the support seems to be gathering steam. Let’s hope this one doesn’t fizzle out like previous movements.

Vista Month: Welcome To The DRM?

It’s a good, short & concise post that pretty much summarizes all the ideas behind Vista’s new content protection scheme without going into too much details. Although the post itself is relative old news by now (not to say that my post isn’t), the comments following the post is most entertaining.

There are quite a few people who swear they’ll never use Vista. Which will most likely be challenged when they purchase their next machine which will inevitably ship with Vista preinstalled. A few said they would rather switch to Linux, and even fewer said they will switch to MacOS. Completely understandable, since you can get Linux distributions for free, and you would have to pay for a new machine to get MacOS.

The number of people who are willing to defend Microsoft on this point is also surprising. While a few valid counter arguments has been made, including that most of these security features are turned on/off depending on the policy of the content provider; the fact remains that the studio has absolute, revocable control over what we paid for.

As history has shown us, it’s really hard to disable or extend pre-existing devices of any sort. For example, add-on drives to enable extra functions in consoles has never really panned out (even XBox 360′s HD-DVD drive is nothing more than offering an value add to watch HD-DVD content. No games will ever come out in that format). Destroying backward compatibility, as some early CD-DRM methods has proven, is also nearly impossible. With all the non-compliant stand-alone HD players out there, it’s hard to say if the studios will ever enforce complete security profiles on HD content.

However, this isn’t about the practical application of such ideals, but the fact that our rights to some degree has been completely taken away by these implementation of technology. If we allow them to get away with it this round, they will make sure it was implemented the “right way” the next time around. That’s an argument that everyone seems to be missing.

Part of me didn’t believe that even Microsoft would go as far as implementing a content protection system that would come at a such detriment to the consumer. So I waited for weeks to see if Microsoft had any sort of public statement and rebuttal against it. Microsoft did eventually comment on the content protection behind Vista, and really couldn’t say much more other than admitting, and putting a good spin on what has been done.

Short blurb about AACS
To understand Windows Vista content protection, we have to first understand the difference between DVD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Our good ol’ DVD format was made during the adolescence of the digital content era. At the time the movie studios were promised that this complex encryption algorithm would never be cracked. As it turns out, CSS (the method of encryption used on DVD) wasn’t as impervious as we thought. If I recall correctly, the key to decrypting CSS was discovered in one of the software that plays back DVD on the PC. Since there’s no way to revoke that key once discovered, CSS encryption was hence cracked forever.

Thus, with HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the studios sought out a much more effective method of protecting their content. What they arrived at is what’s known as AACS (Advanced Access Content System). The key differences between AACS and CSS are:

• AACS seems to have a more modern public/private key encryption system, where there are many more keys assigned than there are in CSS encryption. The granularity of key distribution is unknown. Keys can be handed out on a per-player or per-model number basis, or perhaps even a per-company basis. This is unknown.What is for sure, is that there is a very complex & established backend that manages the distribution & licensing of all these keys.
• AACS uses a revocable broadcast system, where the content providers can revoke keys that has been hacked & distributed illegally. So if they realize a certain key has been compromised, they could distribute future content where they no longer will play and decrypt by using that pirated key.
• Manufacturers of players, either software or hardware based, has to pay licensing fee to AACS in order to use the keys. If a certain manufacturer say, goes out of business and then fails to pay the licensing fee, there are no guarantee that your player from that said manufacturer will continue to function. They could revoke the key and you would essentially be stuck with a brick (or useless bytes on your hard drive, if it’s a software player).
• AACS is also “policy-based”. Meaning that each Blu-ray and HD-DVD has a list of configurable policy to act with the hardware/software system that it is playing on. The content provider can choose to enable & disable certain features. For example, a lot of first-generation players shipped with component output which does not support HDCP (the end-to-end encryption from your player to your TV set), and a lot of current content does not have the policy to disable or degrade playback at the lack of HDCP. However content providers can choose to enable this feature in the future and once again, render your current hardware/software potentially useless.

How doe this affect Windows Vista?
Microsoft has an obvious strategy on making Windows Vista the next “media center” for every home, which probably also led to the decision for them to comply with just about everything that content providers wanted, even above and beyond the normal amount of compliance that is expected from a hardware manufacturer of traditional players.

AACS on its own is much more resource intensive; which explains why very early first generation Blu-ray and HD-DVD players can take as long as a minute to just “load” the disc. Of course that has improved with better & cheaper processors in the players, and won’t be much of an issue on your PC. Other than this resource being taken up by decryption, there are still other issues.

Like the aforementioned flexible policy with AACS, Windows Vista is also designed to “degrade” video & sound playback quality if the policy of the content calls for it. Of course all players has to deal with this, but PC users has the worst of it, because there’s a severe lack of completely compliant hardware available. To have complete compliance with AACS, you need to have HDCP, the end-to-end data encryption protection from the disc all the way to your monitor/speakers. There are very few hardware available that has HDCP compliance. There are very few HDCP compliant video cards, I’m not aware of any HDCP compliant sound card at all (which means you can’t get a digital output, only analog), and there are next to none HDCP compliant computer monitor on the market.

Furthermore, complete HDCP compliance requires part of the video/sound driver to become a “black box”. Obviously if the driver source code is available completely, HDCP would be easily hacked or bypassed by some method. So those users who chooses to run alternative operating systems, such as Linux, may be completely out of luck when it comes to HD content on their computer. There would be no open-source driver development to support HDCP components.

However, like I said earlier, most content available now do not have the entire set of compliance rules enabled, simply because there are still plenty of HD components on the market that doesn’t have compliance, and will *never* be compliant. It’s hard to say whether the content provider will eventually enable these features, and essentially shut out all first generation HD adopters (players & TV without HDCP support are all going to be obsolete if they choose to do so). It remains a fact that they are the ones in control, the consumers are not.

Other than HDCP compliance checks, Microsoft also implemented a “tilt-bit”. This is where they go much further to ensure content provider’s happiness than even the stand-alone players. A “tilt-bit” is a term derived from pinball machines, where there’s a detection that if you tilt the machine too much, the machine would consider that you were cheating & stop your ability to continue play. There is a constant system check that runs in the background every 30ms (milliseconds) when you are playing HD content. It checks against all the drivers in the system, all the processes, to make sure that nothing “weird” is going on. Nothing out of “expectation” is going on.

The reality is that computers are rather fickle machines. When you have millions of microscopic circuits on a tiny little chip smaller than your nails, there are a lot of errors that happens on a very small scale at all times. Computer chip do deteriorate over time as well, resulting very small breakdowns in circuits. Most people don’t realize that their computer is very much like their car, where “wear & tear” over time eventually degrades performance and kills a computer (which answers a lot of the questions like, “Why did my computer break down? I’ve only had it for 5 years and only ran one software on it!”). A “tilt-bit” check essentially catches errors similar to what your computer will naturally produce, and then decides what is deemed “appropriate” and what might be “hostile” and then restarts your graphic subsystem if it detects any potentially “harmful” behavior.

This is done to ensure that there isn’t any memory resident hack that’s capturing the decrypted output somehow. It’s also a very wide-area check for any potential hack of any sort that the system just can’t even predict or even know about. It’s like catching brim shrimps with a fishnet.

Lastly, there is a 128-bit encryption for all data sent through the PCI bus to your video card during playback, to ensure that no one can use any sort of a hardware snoop to capture unencrypted data going from the disc to your video card. HD content already takes up much higher bandwidth than DVD, now imagine having to encrypt/decrypt that content over PCI bus in real time. That’s an incredible amount of resource being eaten up for no reason other to service the content providers.

Will other OS’s follow suit?
This kind of insanely taxing implementations of content protection, is what I believe to be the reason that we have yet to see any sort of next-gen content announcement from Apple.

As much as people criticize Apple’s FairPlay DRM for being a closed & proprietary system, people also forget how much Apple fought to reach the compromise that became FairPlay. FairPlay came at a time where record companies weren’t happy about distributing digital content, and even those who did, did not want to license more than one device at a time. They wanted to charge people money for every device that their music played on. Apple fought back, got the contract so people can play their music on up to 5 devices, and are able to disable licensing on devices that they no longer use.

Even before the iTunes Music Store (I’m also surprised at how many people forgot that iTunes existed without the music store at first, and the first iPods did not have downloadable content; it was just a MP3 player), iPod implemented a really screwy one-direction music download to the device, where the song names would be completely scrambled & referenced by a XML file to provide a “soft-protection”. This was part of the design that convinced the music industry that Apple were at least somewhat reasonable to work with. Apple didn’t do these things for no reason at all, they did it so they can negotiate some sort of a compromise that could appease both content provider and the consumers.

Microsoft had made absolutely no attempt at negotiating for a compromise of any sort. Even with their Zune player, they agreed to “pay” music labels for each Zune they sold, even if none of that label’s music would ever make it onto a Zune. Microsoft has certainly made a terrible example of how to deliver content protection to their consumer, and I hope other companies will not follow in their footsteps.

Although this response could be universally applied to all software, it is hilariously funny that the president of Romania would say this right in front of Bill Gates… and basically thank him for the one issue he hates the most.

So here are a few annoyance that I’ve found with my Mac:

• The Finder -
  The Finder is an adequate file management system. Part of my unhappiness with it is due to my experience with Windows Explorer for the past several years. Although Windows Explorer has its share of flaws, both file management system can take a few tips from the other. Although the more time I’ve spent with Finder, the more familiar and comfortable I became. It is also quite apparent that since moving to the Mac, I tend to interact with files a lot less with Finders than individual applications. For example, organizing my photos is done through iPhoto, music through iTunes. However, this also brings me to the next caveat…

Despite those complaints, the nuisances that I’m experiencing with OS X are far less troublesome than I had with Windows. I had installed Windows XP on this machine in Bootcamp, anticipating needing to run some Windows app at some point. I also pondered getting Parallels. The truth is, I haven’t found any software in Windows that I can’t find a replacement for in OS X. Often times the replacement software is much more intuitive than its Windows counterpart (that’s entirely another blog entry, eh?). The only thing I wish I can do is run Windows games, and I haven’t found a single game that really makes me want to dual-boot back to Windows at all.

I heard rumors that Parallels is working on getting game API calls routed through their virtual machine. There has always been such software for Linux to get Windows games to play within Linux. So… I guess that day will come.. eventually.

Although it isn’t perfect in the world of Mac, it’s close enough to convince me to get a Macbook Pro to go with my quiet behemoth at home.

I just spent half a day of work fixing Windows on my work computer, which Windows Update broke. Apparently, somewhere along the line, the automatic update got some corrupted install files. Every time I started up my computer, it attempts to run itself, then crashes svchost.exe with some memory error.

If you looked into your task manager, you’ll probably see several entries by svchost.exe. This is a process that Windows uses to execute DLL’s, thus an integral process of the system that just can’t be allowed to fail by any extent. After my svchost.exe took a dump (and not all of them, just one of the many processes), my XP-styled UI disappeared, reverting back to “classic style”. I couldn’t run certain applications, Internet Explorer hung & crashed, and I could not access any networked drives.

The solution was, to turn off automatic Windows Update completely. Reboot the computer so it no longer tries to run the Windows Update process. Then manually go to the Windows Update site to get my updates. After wasting a few hours figuring out what’s going on, and fixing it… now my computer is up and running again. Still, isn’t this the type of thing that should *never* happen with an automatic update process? Now I’m leaving my automatic update off permanently to prevent any future occurrences of this issue.

As much as I adore Paul Thurrot (and that’s no sarcasm, I really do admire how much time & effort he put into giving us accurate & detailed information), I can’t help but note the enthusiasm and appreciation he has towards one of the “most important Windows release in years.” I mean, if you only release one major OS revision ever fives years, are there anything less important? However the review eschews every possible comparison to other existing operating system and turns a blind eye towards the alternatives. There’s much to be said about judging an OS release on its own merit, but the whole mega-multi-part review just reminds me of how much Windows Vista is just playing catch-up.

The most apparent example of this, is the 3d-accelerated UI of Vista. The Aero/Glass (I’m still not sure exactly how it’s branded, Aero Glass, Glass Aero? Aero, then Glass? *shrug*) interface in itself is close to being unusable. For those of you who has not seen it yet, there are basically translucent UI element all throughout the operating system. The windows in background are blurred through the translucent elements, thus giving you the frosted “glass” effect for which the UI is named after. Problem is, having multiple windows stacked this way causes visual confusion and provides no improvement to productivity. Transparency in Windows has been done before via third party addons, although not accelerated by hardware, and from an usability stand point has never worked well.

So if the interface is so bad, why did Microsoft put it in? It’s the same reason why people mod their computer cases, cut out windows on the side and put in a bunch of neon lights. Anyone who thinks a bunch of tied down cables and liquid cooling tubes lit by a dozen LED and neon light is “cool” clearly has no appreciation for aesthetics and design. At some point Microsoft thought that’s the user base that they had to impress.

Flip3D is equally atrocious as a task-switcher. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to make something that resembles Expose, without just copying it completely. Expose on the Mac instantly zooms out all of the windows you have open, allowing you to look through the windows and find the application that you are working with. Flip3D, places the windows at a diagonal view that detracts from readability. Furthermore, it stacks the windows up, so a single view of all your open windows isn’t really possible. At the end of the day, it is no more effective the good ol’ alt+tab. What I found most offensive, is that for all the 3d accelerated power, the windows aren’t even anti-aliased, giving you an ugly jagged edge as it is repositioned into an isometric/diagonal viewing angle.

Interface aside, the underlying security improvements of Windows is nothing more than just catching up to Unix, the underpinning of MacOS X. The one thing that would’ve taken Vista past OS X, instead of just playing catch up, was the ambitious database-driven file system. So ambitious in fact, that WinFS was axed years before the final development cycle. Who knows when we’ll get WinFS? Another five years? Would WinFS still be relevant?

What about the bundled software? Vista finally has a built-in Calendar without people having to shell out money for their own PIM or Outlook. It also now has separate applications that handles photos and other media, instead of dealing with those media organization strictly from Explorer (not IE, but Windows Explorer) as it was in Windows XP. Basically, Microsoft just copied iCal, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. Way to go Microsoft.

The last item that I’ve found extremely disappointing, is that Windows Vista is supposed to be the version of Windows that finally allows us to take advantage of the 64-bit processor now found in most PC’s. It seems silly that all of our AMD Athlon and Intel Core chips has had 64-bit extension for more than a year now, and still yet to be able to take full advantage of it. However, Vista 32-bit and 64-bit are actually different installs. So if you install 32-bit Vista, you’ll have to reinstall completely if you want to use 64-bit. If you install 64-bit today, you’ll probably find software or device driver conflicts as they weren’t written for the 64-bit Vista.

MacOS X, btw, is 64-bit (even though I think few apps are written to take advantage of that yet), and has been for almost an entire year now. No separate installs, no separate drivers. It just works.

Vista will do just fine, because people with PC will eventually upgrade, new PC’s will ship with it, corporations will adopt. However, it is nevertheless a disappointing and underwhelming release. Anyone who sees through that will heavily consider switching to a Mac, just as I have.

IE 7 optimized for Google

I’m conflicted, cheer or jeer?

Just doing a bit of digging though, I came across the solution. Turns out this is a behavior that wasn’t just browser specific, but applied across the entire OS. All you have to do is change the option of how your keyboard behaves. Tony Spencer has a blog post on how it’s done:

“Un-skip” those dropdown boxes now!

Extract text out of Word 2007

There are a lot of fear in switching to a new platform. Although going from Windows to Mac really isn’t that hard, a bit of a learning curve is involved in acclimation to the slight differences in their UI. Honestly, Windows has always emulated Mac, and then Mac emulated some parts of Window, it’s really not that hard to get accustomed. What is a bigger problem though, is getting replacement software for what you’re used to in Windows.

Here’s the good news, there is a plethora of budget to free Mac software that can probably cover everything you do in Windows, and in many cases, do it even better.

Mail, Address & Calendar
Most people has seen plenty of iTunes, heard about iMovie and iDVD in the barrage of Apple TV ads. I’m surprised at how many people who don’t know about the other very useful, and powerful software that Mac comes with.

Mail (sometimes called Mail.app to not confuse it with… well, mail) is the default email program shipped with Mac. It does look extremely simple and straight forward at first, but it does have a good amount of hidden power under its UI. The rules are extremely robust and easy to configure. It comes with a very decent built-in junkmail filter. What impressed me the most, is one silly little feature (as with everything in life, it’s the little details that makes a huge difference): Mail automatically sorts your email into separate inboxes by account, along with a top level inbox. So you can view each individual account or all your email at once. I used to spend minutes in Outlook creating rules to sort my email into different boxes by account, now that’s all done automatically as soon as I create an account. Like I said, little thing that counts.

Mail doesn’t have its own contact list, instead it is integrated with Address Book (sometimes I really wish they would come up with some awesome superhero-sounding names for these applications). This idea of having many smaller application that does one particular task well, and also allows other application to integrate & access that data seamlessly, is one you’ll find across many Mac applications (even third party apps does a great job at doing this). For example, adding a birthday to my friend in Address Book, automatically creates an appointment entry in iCal. Similarly, any email request for appointment that comes through Mail, is also added to iCal automatically.

Between Mail, Address Book, and iCal, I’ve found absolutely no reason to use any other PIM software. If you’re really into Microsoft Outlook, and just can’t abandone its all-in-one behemoth-like philosophy, then you can still get Microsoft Entourage. Of course, you’d have to pay Microsoft for that one.

Web Browsers
MacOS comes with Safari, but I’m really not too hot on Safari. It’s a decent browser, but the lack of support & worries over the adaptation of standards (at least, the interpreted web standards) just doesn’t float my boat. Instead, I always fall back on Firefox, just as I did with my PC. The number of available extensions, open source community development still makes Firefox the best browser on both Mac & Windows.

There is another viable option. OmniWeb is also based on WebKit, like Safari, but it offers some additional functionality that is at least somewhat intriguing. You may find it to your likings, but you do have to pay for OmniWeb.

Other Internet Utilities
For FTP I use CyberDuck, which is another one of those great, free and open-source application. I use Speed Download to manage my downloads, it’s faster than Firefox’s built-in downloader by a huge margin, and at $25, it’s not an expensive purchase. Shrook is one of the best RSS reader out there, and again, available for free. The only downside to Shrook is the UI heavily depends on having a wide-screen. Given most default Mac configuration these days, that’s not much of a problem.

Productivity
I don’t use Microsoft Office anymore. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the Mac development team at Microsoft is all huddled up in this little corner of one building, with the rest of the employees walking by them pretending they don’t exist. They do turn out excellent software at times, but it’s always short on a few features here and there, not enough resource for development… etc.. etc… Just look at the crippled MSN Messenger for Mac.

So, Microsoft Office is not universal binary and have no plans to be in its current iteration. There are no clear plans of what’s going to happen after Office 2007 comes out for PC. As mentioned in my previous post, there are going to file incompatibility problem between Mac version of Office and Office 2007.

Instead, I’ve switched over to NeoOffice, the open-source alternative based on OpenOffice. The performance of NeoOffice isn’t the best, but it gets most of what I need out of an office suite for no cost at all.

Another great productivity software is OmniGraffle, by the same people that makes OmniWeb. This is one robust application that allows you to create flowcharts that are highly functional, and much better looking than Visio.

Multimedia
As great as iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie can be, at times they still can’t do everything you want them to do. For example, iTunes is a great music player and manager, but it doesn’t want to do anything outside of its library-based UI, and it doesn’t offer a convient way of converting files. I store all my music in Apple Lossless, but some of my friends don’t want files in that format (they’re gigantic). Converting file format in iTunes can be done, but it’s pretty awkward to create a second copy of the same songs in a different format, especially since it’s only for my friends, not me. This is where I’ve found Switch Plus to be a great application. It can basically convert anything that QuickTime can play (thus, all the formats, other than protected formats, from iTunes) into a different music file format.

I also download a lot of manga, which is a pain to import into iPhoto & view, because they’re not really the same as family vacation photos. Instead, I use another freeware application called FFView, which has built-in capability to view into Zip, Rar, and a few other compressed file archives without having to expand the files. It’s the best way to keep my manga organized and kept away from my vacation photos.

Lastly, if you do in fact, have vacation photos that you want to edit, but iPhoto just doesn’t quite do it for you… try out Gimp. It’s a long-standing open-source image editing software that aimed to compete against Photoshop (but never quite gets there). It’s been around Unix/Linux for ages, and the MacOS is just as good.

For movies, you have to get Flip4Mac and VLC. The combination of these two software will allow you to view most of the DivX, ogm, mkv, wmv, and various other movie files you’ll find on the net.

System Utilities
These software utilities are hard to categorize, but they are all what I would consider must-haves.

SteerMouse – an almost-universal mouse software that can configure almost any of the popular mouse on the market. Often giving you much more flexibility than the commercial driver of the mouse. It adds more feature to Apple’s own Might Mouse, and even beats the Logitech driver for my MX1000 hands down.

Zooom – this gives you the ability to resize and move windows without having to grab onto the title bar and the corner. Hold down a customized function key anywhere within your current window, and you can resize & move the window at ease. It may sound trivial at first, but once you get used to it, you’ll never want to move your mouse to the corner of the window just to resize it.

Email Backup Pro & ChronoSync – These two applications makes backing up your email & other files a breeze. I have Email Backup Pro scheduled to backup all my mailbox on a nightly basis, and ChronoSync setup to synchronize my documents folder. I don’t know if TimeMachine , when OS X 10.5 comes out, will make either of these software obsolete. I can still use ChronoSync to synchronize my files between work & home computer.

As you can see, there are plenty of softwares out there for the Mac, and chances are if you just took a bit of time, did a little bit of research, you’ll find software that allows you to do everything that you could’ve done with your Windows machine. Most of the time, even better.

New Office file format could cause headaches

This makes me wonder, if OpenOffice (or its Mac cousin, NeoOffice) would have an easier time at opening the new file formats & types than the Mac or Windows’s previous version of Office. I’ve been using NeoOffice exclusively since switching over to the Mac. I’ve never personally required any of the advanced capabilities of Microsoft Office anyway.

As much as Microsoft champion the idea of backward compatibility (after all, that’s why it took so long to get us from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP, right?), it’s surprising to me that they would devise a format that causes so much backward compatibility issues.

Even then, I still faded away from Mac in the 90′s. The mid-90′s was a dark period for Apple. Steve Jobs was gone, and Apple stopped innovating on new technology, instead focused heavily on marketing and diluting their own product line by introducing a seemingly endless number of models that catered to no particular segments (well, they were supposed to, just never did a very good job at it). The only memorable about Apple during those periods were the endless informercials I would see on Sundays about their line of Performa, Quadra, Classic… so on & so forth.

After many happy years with Windows (and I do stress, that I was in fact, happy with Windows), I finally made the switch back to Mac. So what prompted me to finally make the switch?…

I never had much “brand loyalty” of any type to begin with. As a personal mantra I have with all of my purchasing decisions in life, I go with what works. Throughout the 90′s, Windows kept on getting better. Despite what Mac zealots may be led to believe by the great Apple marketing machine, Windows 95 was at least on par, if not better than Mac at the time. The subsequent Windows 98 and Windows 2000 releases (we can just try to forget about ME and most versions of NT up to that point.. those were.. *cough*… software I’d rather not traverse) were all heading towards the right direction. Windows XP is really the pinnacle of it all, where Microsoft finally consolidated their codebase, giving backward compatibility & forward progress at the same time. Meanwhile Mac struggled along with System 7, 7.5, 8, and finally the horrible mess that was System 9.

It really wasn’t until Steve Jobs came back, made the decision to completely scrap backward compatibility and ditch MacOS 9, that Apple started to get back on the right track. At least from the software standpoint. PowerPC was a pretty good platform for a while, but the lack of developmental support from Motorola & IBM really allowed PowerPC to fall behind by a fair margin. Forget the talk about how great G3, G4, and G5 was. The fact is, those CPU’s didn’t live up to their performance unless given a very specific situation & specific benchmark that made it look good for the marketing team. Intel and AMD was faster, dollar for dollar. The awesome advancements such as Alvitec was nothing more than glorified MMX and SSE. Good thing those did for our x86 chips, right? (To a point, those features have somewhat became an integrated part of the chip design.. but I’m not an engineer… so I won’t go into it. Ars-technica is great for that type of info)

This year though, I’ve finally hit a “tipping point”, as the scale fell back into Apple’s favor, prompting my switch back to the Mac after nearly 15 years of using Windows exclusively:

1. The switch to Intel
   This is a huge reason for me to switch over to the Mac. Finally I don’t feel like I’m paying extra $$$ for an inferior CPU. The playing field in terms of hardware advancement, is finally even between PC and Mac.
2. PC, despite conventional wisdom, aren’t cheaper
   Pricing a Mac Pro configuration on Dell’s website, as many have suggested before, will actually give you a more expensive PC than the Mac. An equivalently configured Dell will atually cost more. I think part of the reason that Mac seems more expensive, has to do with their configuration & pricing scheme. You have iMac, which would be cheaper if the monitor isn’t integrated. Mac Mini which is a great entry-level machine, but gamers can’t play games on it. Mac Pro which has great, awesome power, but usually is more than what your typical user would need. If you can sell a system configured like a high-end iMac without the built-in LCD screen, that would be the price “sweet spot” for the typical PC buyer right now.
3. I can’t just “upgrade” my PC anymore
   I used to just upgrade bits and pieces of my PC to keep myself up to date. As computer development sped up rapidly due to competition between AMD and Intel, that just isn’t possible anymore. My last major computer upgrade consisted of an entire motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive, video card and power supply swap. I’ve literally gutted my entire computer to keep myself “up to date”. The price of keeping up went from just a few pieces of hardware, to basically half of a system. Next time I want to upgrade my CPU, I can guarantee that my motherboard wouldn’t be compatible, and who knows what other parts needs to be retired (my hard drives has already fallen behind the current SATA standard).
4. When I buy a Mac, I’m buying a PC too
   Mac can run Windows, either using a virtual machine via Parallels or dual-boot using Bootcamp. Parallels can be a tiny bit slower (you probably won’t notice unless you’re running benchmarks) and it can’t play games (just yet, they are planning to do that in the future), but since you no longer need to emulate CPU, it runs extremely well and extremely fast. In fact, some users reports Photoshop CS2 being faster in Parallels than MacOS (CS2 is not Universal Binary, so it runs via Rosetta emulation mode on Intel Macs. This may not be true anymore, since MacOS X 10.4.8 brought a lot of speed improvements in Rosetta. Still a remarkable fact though). Bootcamp is literally booting your machine like a PC, no compromise in speed whatsoever.
5. MacOS X has matured
   OS X had several years to refine itself. I remember seeing the very first OS X, it was a resource hog and had a lot of inconsistency throughout its UI and file structures. All these problems were slowly ironed out over the past few years. The GUI is extremely stable and flexible. The file system really screams in comparison to NTFS. While Windows Vista is just catching up to where OS X is today, OS X is already moving forward. Which brings me to the last point…
6. Windows Vista
   Ironically, this was probably the nail in the coffin for me. Windows Vista, despite all its praises compared to Windows XP, simply wasn’t impressive to me. It attempts to do everything that OS X already does, poorly. “Aero Glass” is a disgusting attempt at making an eye-catching GUI while giving us no more functional improvements. Sure, it may look cool the first few times, but does transparency really help me work better, or just make everything more cluttered? Flip3D is a complete joke compared to Expose. There just aren’t enough improvements in Vista to prompt me to invest in “Vista Ultimate”, which invariably will be the version I would want to run if I was still a Windows user. Vista isn’t bad, but it’s just not good enough.

Now, I’ll admit that I miss playing some games in Windows. It’s still frustrating to see the extremely wide variety of games available on Windows as opposed to Mac. I’m just happy that some of the best game developers out there do care about Mac (for example, Blizzard with all of their games). There are several promising developments that will perhaps continue to bring more games to the Mac platform.

Meanwhile, I haven’t been this happy with a computer in years.