Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I’ve noticed a wide variation in how disturbed friends and miscellaneous New Englanders feel about the situation in New Orleans.  Some are very emotional while others don’t seem profoundly affected.  I have started asking folks “how much TV news coverage of the event have you seen?”  Feeling distraught seems to be correlated with watching TV.  Those who’ve read textual descriptions of the suffering in newspapers or on the Web aren’t anywhere near as upset as those who’ve seen video clips of people suffering.  Reading the lines “hundreds of people were screaming” isn’t as disturbing as seeing one person scream.

This seems to jibe with something a public TV producer once said:  “Television is useless for conveying information.  If you print out the script for the 20+ minutes of nightly network news it is only a few pages that you could read in a minute or two.  Very few facts are communicated during that newscast.  Television is good for making people feel a certain way.”

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

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http://philip.greenspun.com/images/tools/slide-shows-spec.txt is a spec for the software that I’d like to run on my personal site for doing slide shows.  The core of this requires either some JavaScript or DHTML programming.  I’m looking for advice from those readers experienced with these tools as to the best way of doing this and possibly for some good open-source starting points.

Thanks in advance.

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I posted a shopping list the other day and have actually gotten motivated to buy most of the stuff.  Here’s a report so far on how everything is working.

The Infrant 1 TB network-attached storage (NAS) device came pre-configured as RAID 5 spread across four 250 GB SATA disk drives.  The actual amount of available storage is only around 630 GB because of the RAID 5 overhead and 32 GB reserved for journaling.  It took about fifteen minutes to plug in and set up the Infrant, which sells for about $1200; the Windows XP desktop machine automatically recognized the newly available shared folders served by the Infrant.  The Infrant is very quiet (Net wisdom is that this is quieter than the competitive Buffalo NAS), producing about 10 percent as much noise as the desktop PC, which was custom-assembled supposedly as a “silent PC”.  I copied all of my music files over to the NAS using a new Netgear 16-port gigabit Ethernet switch.  Sadly I think that the Infrant is the only devicein my house that is actually capable of gigabit Ethernet.

Step two was to plug in a Sonos whole-house music system.  This also required about 15 minutes of set up.  I pointed it at the Infrant’s “media” share and the Sonos software automatically indexed my entire music collection, which was in two separate trees.  Each Sonos “zone player” box has the following components:

• 802.11 Wifi receiver
  
• wired 10/100-baseT four-port Ethernet switch (so that if you have a single Ethernet drop in a room you can plug in the Sonos Zone Player and then plug the PC into the Sonos)
  
• 50 watt/channel power amplifier so that you can use the loudspeakers of your choice
  
• audio line input that can digitize a signal from a home audio system or television
  
• audio line output to drive a standard home audio system’s preamp or television
  
• enough hardware and software to convert MP3, WMA, AAC, and WAV streams into 44.1 KHz CD-style digital audio and then convert that to analog to play over the loudspeakers

You can drive all of the Sonos zone players from software installed on a Windows PC or Macintosh OS X machine or from a nifty big-screen wireless controller that has lots of clearly labeled buttons, three soft keys, and an iPod-style wheel.  My plan is to plug one zone player into my legacy home stereo (so old it has vacuum tubes in the preamp!).  This way if I’m playing a Super Audio CD or LP record I will be able to broadcast that to other rooms and if I have a playlist of salsa music on MP3 I can play that on the fancy power amp and speakers (currently B&W 803s).  The other zone players can go into other corners of this miserably chopped up 2BR apartment (http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/house-design/ talks about what I really want for a house).  I will leave the system in “party mode” so that all of the players are playing the same file at the same time.

Limitations so far of the Sonos:  for the moment it can’t understand DRM-encoded files, which I think means that it won’t play music from the iTunes store or Yahoo! Music.  The system does support Rhapsody (though Rhapsody itself is a Windows-only product) and gives you a 30-day free trial for that unlimited listening service.

Possible alternative:  If you’re tight on space and enjoy ripping up the ceilings a traditional in-wall system might make more sense.  Each Sonos player is about the size of two bricks and reasonably good speakers are at least the size of a couple of dictionaries.  On the other hand an in-wall whole-house music system is more maintenance-intensive, is hard to upgrade when it becomes obsolete, and will cost $2000+ for professional installation.

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I was prepared to like Broken Flowers, a movie starring Bill Murray as a leftover 1990s computer business guy.  The portrayal of Don Johnston, retired computer guy, is not very flattering.  Johnston sits and/or lies on the same sofa all day watching movies or listening to music.  One could admire him for his monk-like patience and stillness but by American Ben Franklin-style self-improvement standards he is reprehensibly incurious.  Johnston never reads books or seeks to meet anyone new.  Johnston’s only apparent achievement was appealing to women over the years (“I was in computers and girls,” he explains to a young guy).

Johnston receives an anonymous note informing him that he has a 19-year-old son.  This spurs him to take a four- or five-stop commercial airline trip around our great nation.  Unfortunately the film makers lacked either his budget or his energy and stayed firmly within New York and New Jersey.  All parts of the U.S. appear to be right off the New York State Thruway in the fall.  One of my literary-minded friends says that a bad movie is better than a bad play because there is more to look at.  Why couldn’t one of Johnston’s ex-girlfriends have flaked out to Sedona, Arizona or Santa Fe?

One interesting detail was how Johnston’s world was inhabited by attractive women.  If he goes into a store the clerk is an attractive young woman.  When he is walking out of the airport the terminal is filled not with paunchy business guys as you might expect, but with young leggy females.

For a movie with no tragic deaths, characters becoming paralyzed, sex, violence, or special effects it holds one’s attention fairly well.  My companion, the typical overworked Harvard medical slave (she’s an ob-gyn but sadly has not yet bought her Piper Malibu or Turbo Commander like my more established gynecologist friends), did not fall asleep.

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Here’s a snapshot taken in New Orleans in 1994. I was driving out to take a summer job at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Some additional potentially interesting photos:

• http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200504-legoland/new-orleans-funeral.tcl
  
• http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200504-legoland/french-quarter-new-orleans.tcl
  
• http://photo.net/summer94/new-orleans-zoo.html

My one friend down there is safe and sound: http://ernieattorney.typepad.com/

It is worrisome that the zoo and downtown Aquarium of the Americas have not updated their Web site with any news about the animals: http://www.auduboninstitute.org/aoa/index.php (this news story is hopeful, however).

Best wishes to any readers from New Orleans and good luck with the rebuilding.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-6.tcl shows an especially deranged Samoyed.  http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-7.tcl and http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-8.tcl will interest lovers of the breed as well.

We’re off to Montauk, Long Island today in the Cirrus (beach at one end on the runway; restaurant at the other).  Westchester County Airport (HPN) tomorrow for a family 50th wedding anniversary.

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Maybe these guys who say that women have lower IQs are only able to do so because they live in a country where it is tough to buy a gun (“an armed society is a polite society”).  This part seems less likely to get Professor Lynn killed:

“He published a controversial study in 2003 that identified a clear correlation between the levels of prosperity in 60 countries and the average IQ of their populations.”

[Stop the presses:  Countries in which all of the smart people have emigrated don’t do that well.  Actually that sounds like the U.K. (many of whose smartest citizens are working at American universities where the pay is vastly higher, or have emigrated to Australia for a bit of sunshine).]

It will be interesting to read the full paper when it comes out.  One challenge to this research is the fact that women do better in school than men, even at pretty high levels.  Could it be that a slightly lower IQ helps people get A grades at top high schools and colleges?  What would professors have to say about that?

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Google has offices for its developers in Silicon Valley, New York City, Paris, various spots in Asia, but nothing in Boston.  In theory Boston has a lot of good software engineers, most of whom are happy to work for lower salaries than those paid in Silicon Valley.  It might be easier to retain workers here in Boston due to the fact that a wage slave can afford a family-sized house if he or she is willing to live in an unfashionable suburb.

Google has obviously decided that right now we’re looking at some combination of (1) not enough smart people live in Boston, (2) most of the good people in Boston would be willing to relocate to the land of strip malls and traffic jams, (3) there aren’t any small companies worth acquiring in Boston, and (4) Google is having enough trouble digesting growth that they can’t handle geographic sprawl.

What do folks think?  Should Google be in the Boston area?  If so, what should they specialize in and where should the office be?  If not, should we be depressed that we have nothing to offer an innovative software company?

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Commenters have been talking about how it is worth spending extra $$ to have a Macintosh instead of a Windows machine, or, more likely, in addition to because one still needs the Windows machine.  The implication is that money is infinite that there is nothing better to spend it on that a high-style personal computer.  So what would I buy in the next month or two instead of the Mac?  (We can call this “the straight guy’s dividend” — money that one saves by not having to invest in a fancy wardrobe and an iBook.)

• an Infrant 1 TB network-attached storage (NAS) device to hold my music collection and photos (700 GB in RAID 5 so you’re protected from a hard drive failure)
  
• a Canon EOS 5D full-frame digital camera and 24-105/4L image-stabilized lens (both just announced; finally we have a reasonably light almost cheap full-frame digital camera that lets one’s wide angle lenses be truly wide), not sure about the lens actually because f/4 is kind of slow and will make the viewfinder dim even if the L quality is very good
  
• maybe a brand-new liquid-cooled silent PC, as long as I’m shuffling files around (Sony VAIO seems to be the only major-brand liquid-cooled silent PC; does anyone know of another?  The VAIOs are supposed to be kind of flaky and hard to deal with due to custom drivers.)  Though maybe it is better to wait until there is a stable release of Windows Vista available (anyone know when beta 2 is supposed to be ready?) and do the reinstall of the apps only once.
  
• a Sonos whole-house music system
  
• a Gigabit Ethernet switch to complement the NAS box and all of its clients, including the Sonos (which brand of switch is best these days?)
  
• a Zen Vision from Creative to show off photos when I’m walking or driving around — also good for backing up CF cards though lames out when it comes to displaying Camera RAW format images
  
• Samsung CLP-510 color laser printer, only $300 at the local Microcenter
  
• exercise machine that controls video games from http://www.powergridfitness.com/ and an Xbox to go with it

(There are other toys that would be nice to have, e.g., a Eurocopter EC120, but I’ve excluded them from this list due to the fact that they cost a lot more than a Macintosh.)

Would these be more or less fun to own than a Mac?

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Just downloaded the new Google sidebar software and am playing with its Weblog aggregation features.  It installed and started doing useful things within about 2 minutes.  Yet another impressive showing from our former classmates and students.  In other computer news, Dell is now offering laptops for $499.  These aren’t nearly as good as IBM’s $599 laptop in some ways (only 1/4 GB instead of 3/4 GB; no built-in wireless; on the other hand it does come with a CD burner/DVD combo drive) but it is nice to see the $500 threshold cracked. 

[One wonders if it is a good time to short Apple stock.  A Macintosh is not only 2X the price of one of these IBM or Dell laptops but it can’t run any of the software being put out by the world’s most innovative software company (Google; all of their stuff has been Windows-only so far).  If MP3 jukebox prices start to fall and iPod-like devices become a commodity like all other portable music players, it might be “game over” for Apple shareholders.]

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