Happy New Year!

Tonight we're off to the Duck Drop in our hometown of Havre de Grace. (Our town is known for its famous decoy museum and decoy shows, so we drop a lighted duck instead of a ball for New Year's.) This is our first year to go. I'm looking forward to the accompanying fireworks display.

Hope your own New Year celebration is a happy one!

Acrobat Reader 7

Via Scott Yang, Acrobat Reader 7 is out, and I've confirmed it's way better than v6.

Kids slam on classic video games

This feature from 1up.com is hilarious. I love the comments about Pong.

Need for Speed

I now have NFS: Hot Pursuit 1 and 2 and a new Logitech force-feedback steering wheel. If anyone's up for some multiplayer racing, let me know!

More on Apple

We tried looking for Apple computers when we were in Pensacola, but there were none to be found. I thought that Best Buy sold them, but it turns out that I was actually thinking of CompUSA instead. The nearest CompUSA store from my mom's house is in Tallahassee, so that was a no-go.

After some discussion, she decided she would be happy just having me order it for her. Looks like I'll end up ordering the iBook I mentioned in my previous post sometime after the first of the year. She's going to end up getting broadband with Cox Cable, and I'll hook her up sometime with an AirPort Express sometime in Jan./Feb. so she has wireless.

I think it will be fun to compare the setup experience vs. Windows XP or Ubuntu. It's not clear to me whether Mac has as big an advantage in user friendliness as they once did, but I'm eager to see.

The Linux for people who hate Linux

Ubuntu 4.10 Linux is another Linux distro that I tried over the past few weeks, but I didn't have time to post about it before. Its main difference from other distros is that it's intended to be a desktop Linux. In a word, I think it's fantastic. I downloaded it as a single ISO image and burned it to a CD. I popped it in my old 1.4 GHz Athlon machine, and it booted without a hitch.

The Ubuntu installer offered to setup two partitions on my blank 40GB hard drive, and I simply went with the defaults. After a quick format of the partitions, it copied over the basic setup files, autodetected my network card and obtained an IP (via DHCP) from my router. The install finished copying over the rest of the files to the hard drive, and my base install was done in ~20 minutes. Then it offered to pull off all security updates off the Debian website (Ubuntu is built on the Debian distro), and this extended the install time to 40 minutes in all (including one reboot). I was impressed, but it got better.

When my system rebooted, I had a 2.6 kernel and the latest GNOME desktop. I logged in and began exploring. Ubuntu comes with a complete install of OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird. (Unfortunately, Firefox and Thunderbird are not at their 1.0 releases, but a quick search on the Ubuntu newsgroup confirms that it's not hard to install these.) I really like OpenOffice -- especially the equation editor which just beats Microsoft Word's editor hands-down.

There's also a sophisticated groupware/email program called Evolution that I haven't really had a chance to look at. I also found a DVD player and other media players, which might have been impressive if I'd had a sound card installed on my Athlon. As it was, they just crapped out.

The cons that I found were that Ubuntu is really not set up for a developer. For instance, there's no Java development environment like Eclipse installed. Since Eclipse is notoriously hard to install on Debian, this would be nice to have. (A little reading of the newsgroup confirmed that this is planned for the next release.) Mono (the Linux version of .NET) would also be good as a default install too.

Another downside is that there doesn't appear to be a full install of Samba on the system (there's no smbmount), so it's difficult to share information between Linux and Windows. It would also be a very good idea if there was some wizard to set up shared directories with a Windows machine, so you didn't have to edit fstab either.

Still, I was very impressed. I think if I had to ... not saying I want to ... but if I had to, I could run run Ubuntu as my only environment. Shocking to say, I think desktop Linux is almost here, and in a year or less, it could be a better (and safer) experience than Windows.

Reporting from Pensacola

We're back from Florida. Pensacola is still a big disaster. As we approached the runway from the air, we could see that the landscape was dotted with houses that still had blue tarps on their roofs. Not a good sign.

Going around town, we could see that FEMA still had a big presence. They have offices set up several places around the city. There are also many areas with gov't-provided trailers that people have been living in since the hurricane.

Dad took us out to Pensacola NAS, and we got to see the extent of damage there. The golf course is filled with uprooted trees or branches, and it was hard to believe that much cleanup had taken place yet. Apparently many of the Navy personnel had their quarters damaged as well, so they've been relocated to other places in town.

The beach is a complete mess. Hardly anything is open. Construction crews are everywhere, moving debris or gutting hotels/condos. Many businesses (like those along the Boardwalk) were simply empty shells. It's very sad.

Of course, while we were down there, news broke of the terrible earthquake and tsunamis in south Asia. As my mom said, "we sure didn't go through anything compared to those people." On that note, one of the places to contribute to the relief effort is through Amazon.com.

Mom and Apple ... Computer?

When Doris and I go down to FL, my mom wants me to go with her to Best Buy and look at Apple computers. She currently has an old Win95 laptop that seems to be slower every time I visit. (I tried loading Firefox on it last time I was there, and I just about killed the computer entirely.)

Mom is really afraid of picking up viruses when she switches to a new PC, so that's why she's picking an Apple. I could probably set her up on WinXP with SP2 safely enough, but I know she'd have a problem keeping up with the Windows Updates. (Rant: Why doesn't Microsoft have an option download and install these immediately? Why do you have to schedule them or click on an icon? This is not really set up for the inexperienced user.)

I think I'll steer Mom toward an iBook with a 14-inch screen and 512 MB of RAM. The standard 256 MB seems a little paltry. If the last computer was any indication, we'll probably be computer shopping again in 2015, so this one better last awhile.

I think I'll also have to get her set up with DSL -- ugh. I don't think that's going to happen during Christmas.

Blog as Discourse

I'm already noticing that the lack of an RSS feed for the blog comments makes the level of discourse very impoverished. I was about to reply to one of Steven's comments when I realized ... how will he know that I replied?

I've seen many complaints on other blogs when people don't have an RSS feed for comments as well as their main page. I know for myself that since I use the RSS feeder in Mozilla Thunderbird, I don't have enough use for a program like WebMon anymore (which monitors websites for changes at user-defined intervals).

I'm guessing I have to graduate to a PHP-enabled site to effectively create RSS feeds for comments anyway. This low-tech Verizon site doesn't qualify.

Colors and comments

I guess my first order of business for the site will be to change this color scheme. Boy, it's hideous. Perhaps a nice blue instead?

I've also heard maybe it's not a good idea to open blog comments since I've known other people to have trouble with comment spam. I guess it might be a problem if someone actually knows about this page!

Bed

OK, I really need to get some sleep.

New music

I downloaded some new music tonight from iTunes.

I started with Play That Funky Music, White Boy. (I know what you're thinking ...) Then I saw they were advertising a Seal: Best of... album on the main page. So I downloaded Crazy, Prayer for the Dying and Don't Cry. Then I grabbed I Will Survive by Cake (the clean version), which I think is a hilarious take on the original.

I also got the latest free song of the week called Stumblin'. Nothing special, but it's not terrible either.

I've seen a script or two floating around the web which will implement a "Recently Played" list on a weblog by hooking into iTunes. That would be nice for my new page. Will my desire for that outweigh my complete disinterest in modifying HTML?? Stay tuned.

Sequence prediction

I spent last night working on a sequence prediction program in Python. I'd been thinking about it for a day before I decided to code it. Inspired by John Nash's approach in A Beautiful Mind, I purposefully didn't look at any material on the web before I attacked the problem. I wanted to see how well I would do with my own creative energies.

I guess it wasn't too bad for an evening's work. I got the program to work with some basic additive and multiplicative sequences.

It turns out what I'm trying to do would be better accomplished with Newton's Forward Difference Formula. I'm just not looking forward to solving linear equations in code.

Maybe when I get back from vacation in FL.

It's started

I've started a new blog tonight, right before I head off to bed. Great timing, huh? I believe a lot of my (future) posts will probably be programming-related, but we'll see -- I'll probably end up sharing thoughts on family, faith, music, movies and anything else that comes to mind.