Author: geoff

Schama on America – read the book, skip the TV series

Before my last overseas trip, I loaded Simon Schama’s book “The American Future” onto my Kindle.
I enjoyed it immensely: a witty ramble across the history and geography of the United States, neatly linked to the momentous political events of late 2008. Highly recommended. Soon afterwards, Kate got it out of the library, and she too enjoyed it. And then we wondered. We’d enjoyed several of Schama’s earlier TV series – on art, and British history – and it seemed plausible that the book of “The American Future” might be tied to a BBC TV series. That’s the way the media business seems to work these days. We checked, and indeed it was, and the DVDs were available. So we ordered them from Netflix. They arrived a couple of days ago.
Oh dear.
Well, there was some beautiful photography. Lots of shots of American landscapes, often with Simon Schama gazing thoughtfully out across the prairie, or the river, or the mountain. But the narrative was slow, and the editing repetitive, and the whole thing was simply dull. Deadly dull. Tedious.
So skip the DVD, but get the book. It’s magnificent. And it’s cheaper.

Up in the Air

Yes, there’s a lesson in this for people like me….

(Which reminds me: I’ve got two trips coming up this month – one to Boston, and one to Shenzhen. Hmmm.)

For those who get easily distracted by the newest toys….

From El Reg:

According to November 2008 stats (PDF) from Datamonitor – the international research firm headquartered in London – the world is still running 200 billion lines of COBOL code and about 5 billion lines are added to live systems every year. Believe it or not, between 1.5 and 2 million developers are still working with the 50-year-old programming language.

(Yeah, I’m looking at you, Ruby.)

Stuff fails

Last week I awoke to a nasty surprise: my Apple Time Capsule had died. I’ve been using it for about three years, as both WiFi access point and back-up disk, and I was dimly aware of reports that early TC’s had a nasty habit of failing when they were out of warranty, but of course nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition it to happen to them. But it did. And as I tweeted, the replacement was quickly installed: an Airport Extreme WiFi access point, an external Iomega 1TB hard disk for backups, and an extra Airport Express to make sure that I had good coverage throughout the apartment.
And that was that. Or rather, it wasn’t. Because both of us had (ahem) used the Time Capsule for more than simple backup. We’d used it as a convenient way of sharing data, especially photographs and genealogical data. And so there was a lingering “action item” to try to recover what was on the TC hard drive.
This morning I received a request for a photograph: one which I knew was on the TC. I got the Time Capsule off the Shelf Of Dead Electronics and… well, on a whim, I decided to plug it in. To my surprise, the light came on! WTF? I quickly unplugged it before it could complete POST and try to take over my WiFi network. Naturally, when I came home this evening, I tried plugging it in again. Nothing. Not a flicker. And then I read the various descriptions of TC failures, and realized that the most likely cause was a capacitor in the power supply, and that such a failure might well taunt me with a random flicker.
So I’ve just completed disassembling the TC, and removing the Hitachi Deskstar HD. Tomorrow I will stop at Fry’s and pick up a 3.5″ AT enclosure, so that I can try mounting the disk on my Mac Mini. I’m not worried about the Time Machine backups – those have been recreated – but I hope I can get the other data off it.
UPDATE #1: After reading this MacRumors thread, I’m going to be extra careful in choosing a HD enclosure. Apparently many of them have feeble power supplies that can’t meet the start-up demands of the Hitachi disk. (The label says that it needs “5V 680mA 12V 850mA”, which is comfortably less than the 2A that most supplies are spec’d for. However I bet that’s steady-state current, not the start-up suckage.)
UPDATE #2: I wound up getting a generic SATA enclosure made by Sabrent. It was a returned item, so I paid only $23.74. It turned out that the TC HD was carved up into two small admin partitions and a partition called “Time Capsule”. One of the subdirectories had been written from Windows, and even though the permissions looked OK, I couldn’t read or copy it, so I had to chown/chmod the whole thing before I could recover it. Otherwise, no problems.

Roku+Netflix=good

Back in Seattle, my cable TV/internet provider Millennium Digital Broadstripe had a pricing model that made it irrational to get anything other than a package with every premium service that they offered.
Here in Palo Alto, we have Comcast, and it didn’t quite work that way. After making sure we had the four essential channels – Fox Soccer, Speed, Turner Classic Movies and BBC – there were plenty of economical, premium-free packages. And they offer a fair number of video-on-demand options, both paid and free. But even so…. Yes, we belong to Netflix, but we’ve found ourselves ordering “worthy” movies on DVD and then being in the mood for something light.
Last week we visited some friends for dinner, and after we’d eaten a couple of us wound up in the den, watching bits of weird Troma movies, streamed from Netflix via their Xbox360. The penny dropped, and that evening I ordered a Roku box. A $99 set-top box that lets me stream video from Netflix and Amazon straight onto my HDTV. Finally I’m getting to enjoy the IT Crowd…
(Oh, and a tip for Amazon: you need to investigate a subscription pricing model for video-on-demand. Yes, it’s more convenient that I can search the Amazon catalog through the Roku, rather than having to add movies to my “Instant queue” on my laptop before I can watch them. But every time I find something on Amazon, I go to check for it on Netflix, because I’ve already paid for all I can watch from them.)

"You didn't lose your country, you just lost an election"

The protestors keep saying that they want their country back. Sorry, my fellow small-governmenters, but this country is a democracy, and you didn’t lose your country, you just lost an election. You had your chance for eight years. You blew it, and you lost. What Obama is doing is what he was elected to do. The principled response is not a massive, extremist-riddled hissy fit a few months in, but a constructive set of proposals to build on universal care for a more market-friendly and cost-conscious system in the future. You have to win some political credibility for that; and then you have to beat the man you lost so badly to last year. That’s the civil and civilized way forward for the right. It also seems, alas, to be the one they are currently refusing to take.

Andrew Sullivan.

San Juan Bautista

Here are some photos from San Juan Bautista, taken on our visit on Labor Day weekend, 2009. San Juan Bautista interiorThey are mostly shots of (and in) the buildings making up the National Park. The final pictures show the San Andreas Fault just below the Mission: you can see how the path has been displaced laterally by as much as 50 feet when it crosses the fault.
This was also the first reasonably long run we’ve tried in the Prius. We told the navigation system where to take us, and it did, competently. However the way that the voice instructions were mixed in with the music from the CD changer was definitely odd. Overall it was very comfortable: the Touring package definitely improves ride and handling.
One thing that remains a challenge is the voice command mode. At first I thought that it was simply my odd, British accent. (I told the system to “Call Kate” and it responded by saying that it was “Setting temperature to 80 degrees”!) But it couldn’t understand Kate either. Time to dig out the manual, I guess.