indulge your technolust

Switching between Plex, Hulu, and Boxee on a Mac HTPC

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:04:00 -0800

So you want a Mac HTPC but you can't decide whether to use Boxee, Hulu, or Plex.

Neither can I -- that's why I use all three.

The biggest annoyance in doing that is switching between them. While I won't call this method the cleanest out there, it gets the job done.

The remote I use is actually the Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard. It retails for $150 but I know I got it a lot cheaper by looking for it in discount places. Since this is a computer I like having a full keyboard. If the Boxee remote had been out at the time I would have considered getting that, but I am not sure I would be able to do the switching I am going to describe below.

For switching I use a combination of Spark (global hotkeys) and the pkill command. I took the script from here, copied below:

#!/bin/sh

for X in `ps acx | grep -i $1 | awk {'print $1'}`; do

kill $X;

done

and put it in /usr/bin with the name pkill. Don't forget to chmod 755 it so it will execute.

NOTE: I wish I didn't have to kill the process and could do it more gracefully, but this is the best I have for now.

From there I created 3 scripts to do the killing and starting. Here is my script called SwitchToBoxee which I put in my user bill's .scripts directory (that I created):

pkill Plex

pkill Hulu

sleep 5

open "/Applications/Boxee.app"

All you need to do is change the killing and the starting to create SwitchToPlex and SwitchToBoxee.

Finally I created the Applescripts in Spark to call these scripts. Here's mine for Boxee, I use -7 to launch:

do shell script "/Users/bill/.scripts/SwitchToBoxee"

Repeat for Hulu and Plex.

Don't forget to stop and restart the Spark daemon. I stared at the screen for about 5 minutes before realizing that's why my hot keys weren't working.

I hope this is helpful for someone else, I know this is much nicer than switching between apps manually. You can also create another script to launch your browser if you want.

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Perceived shortcomings on the iPad

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:13:25 -0800

I sent a modified version of this to Chris Pirillo's site, still waiting to be accepted. Chris thinks people may be jumping the gun on perceived shortcomings. He's right on one point -- making judgement on something you haven't touched yet before isn't fair. But I do think it is fair for all of us to think about what kinds of things we want on a tablet and deciding if the iPad meets those needs.

So here are items he raised as things we should perhaps look past, and mostly I disagree with for my use:

1) Lack of Flash capability -- Does Flash suck (slow, resource hog)? Yes. Do most games and video-sharing sites use Flash as a standard? Yes they do. The fact Apple omits it is because it is in Apple's best interest to do so, not us the consumers. Netbooks can handle Flash fine.

2) No USB port/It isn't a netbook -- No, it isn't a netbook, but Jobs himself put it in the same space (between a computer and a phone). It also doesn't have HDMI-out. I can see many reasons I'd want to connect an iPad to a TV, the iPad that has all my pictures and videos?

3) AT&T/3G -- I was impressed with the unlimited price personally. Would I like to see another carrier? Sure, but if I can use it with a MiFi that's probably a better deal anyway.

4) Oversized iPod Touch -- For people that wanted a real OS, this matters. For the rest it shouldn't.

5) $499 price -- I don't know many complaining about this part and they shouldn't. As Apple products go this is a very reasonable price point.

6) Not a tablet -- Well I don't get anyone saying that. It's bigger than a phone with no keyboard. If that isn't a tablet then I don't know what a tablet is.

7) Still no multi-tasking -- This is a religious war. That said, Apple seems to be the only company that isn't giving this feature in 2010. (I'd still like to have a better way of managing background apps on Android though.)

8) Still no background apps -- You may not find it useful, but as a happy DROID user (and previous iPhone user) I think it is short-sighted to not understand that someone might want it.

9) Too much bezel -- A friend gave me the best answer on this. Why not have apps take less space (software bezel) and allow full-screen mode for apps and videos that use the whole screen? It would seem the bezel issue is due to where your hands on and a smarter design could have worked.

10) iPad name -- No debate here. The name stinks. Of everything I am amazed Steve the marketing genius would sign off on that one.

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Reflecting to see the future

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:13:00 -0800

During the 3 years I was a manager at IBM, our uber-manager sent her management team a book on leadership. I never read this tome of a read, instead opting to read a passage at a time when I had a few minutes to spare.

One passage I always seem to come back to is about exploring your past. A study was done by Omar El Sawy (USC) on 34 CEOs, split into 2 groups. Both groups were asked to look into their future, and list/date out ten events they think might (or will) happen. Both groups were also asked to look into their past, and list/date events that have happened in their past.

The differences in the two groups was order -- one group listed out their future first, the other their past first.

Both groups had similar past horizons -- averaging around 20 years. But the future horizons were interesting. On average the CEOs that reflected first had future horizons of nearly double (3.2 vs. 1.8 years), with maximums of 9.2 vs. 5.1 years.

El Sowy believes his research supports the "one-way-mirror hypothesis", saying, "We make sense of our world retrospectively, and all our understanding originates in reflection and looking backward.... e construct the future by some kind of extrapolation, in which the past is prologue, and the approach to the future is backward-looking."

The holidays are a time for reflection, and a time for prognosticating -- the famous New Year's resolutions. This year I think I'll do a little more reflecting first, in hopes of elongating my future!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

----

PS- The book is called "The Leadership Challenge" by James Kouzes and Barry Posner

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Ford Sync is getting in-car Wi-Fi

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:52:35 -0800

If you haven't heard of Ford Sync, it is Ford's in-car communication and entertainment system (developed by Ford and MSFT). What does that mean? It means it gives you the ability to use your media players and cellular phones into the vehicle and use them with voice-activated commands. For example you can say "Call Mike's cell" or "Play Radiohead" and it will perform those actions using the car's speakers and microphones. It also offers features with GPS ("Find nearest pizzeria"), 911 services, vehicle reports, and more.

Next up sounds like Wi-Fi, per this article on Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/5431162/ford-syncs-in+car-wi+fi-is-going-to-cause-some-hulu+related-accidents-next-year

So now if I have an air-card (wireless internet anywhere) I can use that to stream things on the internet.

While that sounds very good, air-cards aren't cheap... However what most people already have is a wireless connection at home. It would be great if I could connect to my home network while I'm home and download all of the great media (such as podcasts) I have waiting for me. Sure I could just sync my iPhone or Zune, but wouldn't it be better if my car could just see I am home and just get whatever it has waiting for it while I am there? (If this exists already, my bad, I drive a Japanese car -- although stuff like this could sway me when I am considering my next car.)

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Do you chumby?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:03:20 -0800

I just got myself one of these Chumby's a week ago... It hasn't arrived yet but I am shamefully anxious to get it. If I think it is useful to even non-techy's I might have a few gifts...

If you don't know what a Chumby is, it's basically

- a widget-driven touch-screen photo-phrame, or....

- maybe it's an internet-based laptop in an alarm clock, or....

- maybe it's an alarm clock that gets information from the internet

What it does is cycles through widgets that you put in channels... So you select a channel and those widgets will rotate on your Chumby.

Whatever it is, it looks like a fun device to use. I've already played with some of the widgets on their "virtual chumby" which you get in your browser. Some of the widgets I like:

- The Human Clock - a clock that changes pictures ever minute and shows a user-submitted picture of the time

- CBSSports.com - a scoreboard widget (which right now is painfully reminding me of the Giants loss to Denver on Thursday)

- Weather by The Weather Channel - something I would want to look at when I get up in the morning

- Umbrella - you give it a zip code, it tells you if you need an umbrella. Brilliant.

- Twitter - because, well, I like Twitter

- Facebook News Feed - self-explanatory, if it works

- Stock Quotes - because I need to know how much money I am losing

- GMail Viewer - I love the idea of getting my latest personal email in a widget when I get up or before I go to bed

- New York Times - Top Stories - Good news widget

- Zoltar and the Magic Carpet Ride - a little addictive game for your Chumby

- Word of the Day - looks broken but if it is I think I might just have to code up my own

- Tea Timer - cute widget and great concept, tells you how long to steep, how many possible re-steeps, and a timer

There are a bunch more out there too, they claim 1500 but extendible by anyone. Sounds like fun to me!

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3 minute photo montage of my nephew Luca

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:36:34 -0800

Luca.avi Watch on Posterous

High quality version here.

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The Right Stuff - Cast Name Pairs

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:26:03 -0800

I'm watching the movie Swordfish -- the hacker movie with John Travolta, Hugh Jackman... Sam Shepard is in it, known for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

There are some interesting casting names in the movie:

Sam Shepard plays Chuck Yeagar

Scott Glenn plays Alan Shepard

Ed Harris plays John Glenn

OK, I'm sure it isn't that weird, but it's a little weird.

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William Safire dead at 79

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:01:58 -0700

Pullitzer Prize winner William Safire died today of Pancreatic Cancer. He was 79.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/us/28safire.html?_r=1

I like his "rules for writers": Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

Safire was a conservative that could be distinguished from the extreme right. Though I certainly don't agree with everything he said or wrote, there is no denying the fact I enjoyed his style... He knew how to spark an emotion.

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My tweeting/RSS setup

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:52:10 -0700

My tweeting setup keeps evolving, but now I am using Vienna (with my custom enhancements which helps retweet and shortens URLs) along with Tweetie. This seems to give me the best of both worlds:
- An uncluttered client for posting and seeing tweets coming in
- An RSS client which I can use for tweeting, archival, searches, as well as getting all of my RSS content and sharing with others

I am sure I am going to change this 10 more times until I find a setup I really like.

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Changing Vienna to be a Twitter Client

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:08:14 -0700

I like Twitter, but I actually dislike most of the twitter clients. I don't think they are all bad, they just don't suit my needs.

For me they are:

- one more thing to open up and look at

- resource-heavy (thinking of the ones built on AIR)

- not easy to scan long lists of tweets to find one I want to read

I have Eventbox from Macheist but they have locked me into the beta version they released at the time, which was buggy and not fully-featured. I'll admit that put me in a foul mood about the software, those bundles should be an alternate way to get your software purchased and building an audience, not a way to convince people to install and get hooked on pre-release software.

Recently I started using Vienna again for feedreading. Vienna is a Mac-only RSS reader; I had stopped using Vienna when I started using NetNewsWire both on my Mac and on my iPhone, but now that NNW has undergone changes (one being ads) I decided to try the open-source, ad-free VIenna again.

Here's what my interface looks like with Twitter (and some of my other social networks:

I like that tweets fit on one line, it is easy to scan the first few words to see if I want to read the rest, and I can easily see 35 tweets without scrolling.

It's also pretty easy to manage lists. I have a group folder called User feeds that I can use to create individual feed lists -- for example Chris Pirillo above. (The way it works is it will actually find anything with ChrisPirillo in it, but that is OK for me.

The last thing I needed was to be able to retweet from Vienna. Vienna is extensible to be able to run scripts but it also is open source, so I just downloaded the source and made changes to the code. I can now retweet an article, or simply clear the retweet box and tweet anything I want:

All in all it's been a fun experiment. The code needs a little work - right now I am hardcoding the username and it pulls the password from my Keychain, I'll look into a preference to request the username and still use the keychain for the password - but it works for my needs.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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United Breaks Guitars

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:30:33 -0700

Was telling some folks about a funny video regarding an airline breaking guitars. The summary is the guy's guitar was broken and the airline (United) refused to reimburse him for the damage, so he decided to write a song about it.

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SaaS vs. Cloud - So many opinions!

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:19:46 -0700

My colleague Bill Higgins posted a great blog post (internal IBM) asking about the difference between Software as a Service (SaaS) and the Cloud. Here are some of the distinctions he received, which I think all of have some subtle and not-so-subtle differences. I didn't include some that were similar to others, and I've edited them but kept the gist of each:

(1) SaaS is just a different way of distributing your product compared to shink-wrap. Something like SugarCRM, SalesForce, even Flickr or Google Mail. I don't install that software, I use it over the network. The software itself has been designed as a set of "services" (loosely - in some cases huge wads of icky HTML, CSS, JS, maybe some back-end HTTP accessible "API"s).

Cloud is a different way of obtaining and using hardware and middleware.

I don't need a "cloud" to build a SaaS-based application or publish a SaaS or whatever. Likewise, I might use a cloud to just provide a backing store or cache, as opposed to a "service".

A developer might still consider some of these middleware Cloud accesses a "service", but that's just because typically Cloud stuff is also accessed over the web, in the same ways that a SaaS is. It's convenient that they use the same transports and protocols, but it's not a requirement. Not too long ago, IBM had "cloud" services available for some customers, but instead of providing web-based tooling to configure/setup, it was all done via email. It was still a cloud in the end though, by my definition.

(2) SaaS is a "client" of cloud, or if you like, a specific solution for a specific problem that can be deployed on a "cloud". Almost certainly SaaS connotes access to a solution over the public internet, purchased on a subscription or metered rate plan, requiring minimal effort to obtain and on-board

The business model aspects of SaaS are a vital to the definition. But, I also believe that SaaS is best viewed as a solution, and the SaaS operator holding the role of Solution Integrator (SI).

(3) SaaS may not just a different way of distributing your product. It could also be a way of offering a set of capabilities directly to end-users of the product rather than administrators of the product. If I had a SaaS offering of RTC, I'd start at a url, register myself, pay for my intended level of use, and start using the services -- creating projects, adding team members, creating work items, etc.

If instead I am concerned with choosing an RTC image from a catalog, deploying and configuring it for a particular cloud and ultimate end-user environment, then I am dealing with a different way of distributing RTC compared to shrinkwrap, but it doesn't feel like SaaS. It feels very much like the shrink-wrap version except I am saved from all of the effort in setting up and maintaining the underlying hardware and software stack. This is a product that is consumed by an administrator type. That administrator may turn around and offer it to end-users as a public service or maybe just for use inside my company(kind of like Rational Engineering Services does for internal users).

(4) [I]n my mind SaaS is the software vehicle we serve or service via the Web/Internet. Cloud is the infrastructure (which includes things like the business and operational layers) that serves the software service(s). I think of SaaS as the "client" and cloud as the "hardware". Then there's this concept of managed vs. unmanaged SaaS. In other words, the amount of flexibility consumers have to manipulate/customize their SaaS environment...but that's a different can of worms ;-)

(5) I think the most important part of SaaS is the "aaS". I think most of us think of cloud as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or sometimes called Hardware as a Service (HaaS) like Amazon's EC2, or GoGrid, or Rackspace's Mosso and SliceHost. Some of us extend our cloud definition to include Platform as a Service (PaaS) like SFDC's AppEx, MSFT's Azure, or Google's AppEngine. Some stretch their cloud definition to include "private" clouds.

To me, the common thread is the "aaS" - everything is an aaS ;-). To me, cloud computing means a programmable system on the web. I would include IaaS, PaaS, and even vendors like ning that let you program your own facebook-like websites. SaaS generally implies the delivery of an application aaS. So it gets a bit grey because many applications are somewhat programmable. Just look at the "programmableweb.com".

Some people use the term "the cloud" to refer to the internet. So SaaS is just an application running on the cloud. IMHO, that is not cloud computing - just an application service on the web. By analogy, cloud computing is a programmable (or computing) service on the web (aka cloud). You don't have to buy it - but it works for me.

(6) SaaS is a business model

* SaaS allows a customer to pay for a specific software service hosted by a provider

* SaaS can be hosted on a cloud infrastructure but this is not required

* Saas provides the ‘full service’ solution-> Software + infrastructure + other services

* Usually located off-premise, for public use, with Pay-as-you go or Bring-your-own-license model.

* Consumers have little or no control on the infrastructure

Cloud is a platform or deployment model

* Cloud supports multiple services

* Infrastructure as-a Service

* Platform as-a Service

* Software as-a Service

* Can be located On-premise, off-premise and hosted as a virtual private

--------------------

Clear as mud, eh?

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Who will win the netbook war?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:38:37 -0700

Interesting post on "Who will win the netbook war" from an OS perspective, with odds. I have an immense interest in this, being a netbook owner:

- who thought the Ubuntu Netbook Remix was "OK"

- who likes his current Hackintosh which is "Nice but basically unsupported and updates are a nightmare if possible at all"

- who would love to use Moblin which is "Great in theory but the devil is in execution and the beta now is very buggy"

And what about Google's Chrome OS? No one outside Google has seen anything yet to judge...

http://gigaom.com/2009/07/08/netbook-os-oddsmaking-who-will-win-the-war/

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