So, I finally got an iPhone. I know it’s a few years behind the time, but the 3GS and 3.0 OS finally made it seem like a complete product. Also, the 32GB model seemed like it was the first to really be big enough as a convergence device. Additionally, the App Store “ecosystem” looked like it had reached the size needed to sustain itself. So, I dumped my no-longer-on-a-contract T-mobile account over to AT&T. So far so good. It’s nice to have a reasonable Internet browser all the time. I’m an NPR addict, so having instant access to their podcasts is awesome. Weather radar in your hand is amazing. I’ve got enough space to hold an enormous number of apps, music, podcasts, pictures, movies, and TV shows to remain computerless for a good chunk of time. I’ve even managed to connect to my office VPN, but I haven’t bought an SSH app to do my normal thing with yet (I live on a terminal). I even found this blog app, so maybe I will get back to posting again.

Well, I never got around to finishing the job of cleaning up after the last major software update and yet another has come along. This looked pretty important so I did. I wonder how long it will take for me to figure out what else broke. Hopefully, it didn’t make it impossible for me to track it all down.

As anyone that works with software knows, upgrades don’t go as smoothly as you’d like.  Well, my latest here with the site has been the biggest bugger.  I don’t know how long it’ll take me to sort it out.  I don’t seem to have lost any data (yet), but I have missed a lot of organization that I’ll have to re-do.  That sucks.  So, things will be out of whack for a while…

The latest OpenBSD Hackathon has produced some truly amazing results. Sure, every Calgary based Hackathon has produced something cool or amazing, but this one has resulted in 3 things that are home runs to me:

FFS2 – no, it is not done yet, but it is in a testable state and big disk/partition support has been lacking and this will bring OpenBSD back into the fold for my consideration as a fileserver. I’ve got one of those 750GB disks in my TV, you can imagine how much data I want to be able to store on the network, and I’d prefer it to be logically contiguous.

Bluetooth – I can just imagine a bluetooth access point with all the magic of PF, plus the simplicity of OpenBSD.

PF performance optimizations – the sheer amount of performance increase they’ve achieved in this Hackathon is nothing short of amazing. PF was pretty dang fast before, but now …. wow. Should be able to use lower power boxes for the same throughput in most of the situations I’m imagining.

Big thumbs up!

I just saw the exciting announcement: ZFS has been imported into the FreeBSD tree. Awesome work by pjd@ . It’s amazing what he’s done basically by himself. I’m not brave enough to run -CURRENT, but I’ll certainly be trying out the 7.0 Release. By that time someone might have added the ACL support so we can have fully featured Samba shares. I’m excited to try it out and see where this goes.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-April/070544.html

I updated the TV this weekend.  I should first clarify a bit.  Our TV is a computer.  I use a PC with a dual TV tuner in it and Snapstream’s BeyondTV to manage them.  This basically gives us a PVR/DVR.  It’s really nice and takes TV watching to a new level.  With the dual tuners we can record 2 TV shows simultaneously (or watch one while recording another, etc).  Recording shows is as easy as looking them up in the title, keyword, and genre searchable programming guide and telling it to record.  You can even select option like only recording all new episodes of a TV series.  Anyway, we’ve had problems with the box for a couple of years now where it doesn’t like to boot.  If it goes down (crash, reboot, shutdown, power loss, etc) it doesn’t like to come back up.  I’ve suspected that it was the hard drive.  I can’t guarantee that’s it, but I’ve had enough anecdotal evidence to truly convince me.  Well, it finally bugged Shinta enough that we went and bought a new hard drive for the thing on Saturday and I went about the long, arduous process of backing up all our saved TV shows over the network, reinstalling Windows XP (from a pre SP1 disc, I was an early XP adopter), the hours and hours of running Windows Update, installing Snapstream’s software suite (I also have BeyondMedia and the Firefly Remote), and then transferring the backups back.  It took about 24 hours to complete the process.  Things are looking good.  Reboots are clean and easy.  The box works great with just a remote for control.  Now all I need is a big LCD HDTV with DVI or HDMI inputs to hook it up to.

I saw this posted somewhere and thought it quite accurate. Anyone that’s actually used a decent man page knows my pain when dealing with Linux man pages.

http://deanna.freeshell.org/why-openbsd-rocks.jpg

http://deanna.freeshell.org/why-linux-sucks.jpg

Well, in moving to our new offices at work I’ve got a very nice cube that I wanted to decorate.  It’s prompted me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for about four years (and that’s no exaggeration).  I wanted to do a really good panoramic composition and get it made as a large print.  Well, I’ve finally done it.  I looked at some large resolution work I’d done before and it turns out that they alignment was pretty bad.  I needed some software to do a better job.  I’ve previously posted about some software I found and while it’s cool, it was more of a proof of concept.  I’ve dug around more and found AutoPano Pro (based on Autostitch).  After spending a few hours with the trial I thought it was worth it and bought it.  I then proceeded to really work on getting some print worthy panoramas assembled.  After several done I decided on this composition to be my first try for printing over at Kinkos:

The print turned out to be much more expensive that I had thought it would be, but at 71 inches by 11 inches it isn’t exactly small.  It has me wondering if I actually want to put pin holes in it to get it put up.  We’ll see.

After some prodding, I’ve added some extra navigation buttons in the photo gallery.  Now when you view a specific picture you have a next / previous link available instead of having to back up to the thumbnail view to select an adjacent picture.  It required less code than I thought it would.  Maybe I’ll get around to the slideshow suggestion next.

We went and purchased Great Planes RealFlight G3 from Hobbytown USA this weekend.  It’s really cool.  I was concerned that maybe my one machine with a 3D card in it might not have the power to run it, but I was wrong.  It is fast enough to run in “Photo field” mode.  I need something a little better to run in full 3D mode.  Compared to the old Dave Brown simulator we used to have (almost 10 years ago), it’s very advanced.  The physics feel pretty good to me, and the graphics are great.  Looks like I’ll get plenty of practice in before I start back flying again.