Ntro’s Official Opinion

I uninstalled Google Desktop today.

Someone on our network has been using 400kb/s 24/7 for the past two months. It’s not exactly my job to hunt around for that kind of thing, so I didn’t really investigate what it was. Turns out, Google Desktop was downloading something from 64.233.179.*, port 443 (HTTPS) the whole time it was running (I installed the new version about two months ago). I switched it off, and the downloading stopped. Switch it back on, it starts up again.

Naturally, I was curious as to what exactly Google Desktop was doing that consistently used up that much bandwidth, so I started disabling features. One by one, I disabled every single feature, from “Index secure pages (HTTPS) in web history” to all of the RSS gadgets in the Sidebar, and still nothing. I disabled everything I could find in the Google Desktop Preferences to the point of making it absolutely useless, and still it sat happily downloading 400kb/s from https://google.com/.

So, finally I gave up. I guess I wasn’t willing to believe that something I downloaded from Google Himself was broken, but I can’t find any other explanation. When I uninstalled it, there was a place to explain what the problem was, so I gave them an abbreviated version of this story.

Hopefully someone reads it. I’ll update this post if I hear back from them.

By the way, the tool I used to monitor my network activity was the excellent PRTG. There’s a freeware edition which is more than adequate for a single user trying to figure out what in the world is eating up their bandwidth.

Here is an interesting take on what it takes to be a good programmer. We’ve all known that good programmers are lazy for quite some time, but dumb?

From now on, I guess that’s one more insult in which I can take pride. Though, I suppose both of those terms can be applied positively or negatively in the world of programming. If I ever use either when describing someone or something, make sure you get me to clarify.

By the way, Google Deskbar and Google Talk rock my face.

Last weekend, Family Guy returned to network television. As a fan of the show, I Tivoed it and watched it that evening. A friend, whose single-tuner Tivo-a-like was occupied by Desperate Housewives, missed it. When he came to me with this sob story, I simply replied “Just download it.” “Huh?” he says, “You mean on the Internets? Where?” Keep in mind, this friend is by no means a Luddite. He’s a regular Nintendo-playing, slashdot-reading, blackberry-having, caffeine-addicted geek, yet he was not familiar with tvtorrents.com or BitTorrent. I won’t dwell too much on my disappointment in him over this, but I will remind you that BitTorrent accounts for one-third of all data transmitted on the Internet, so if you’re not down with BT, start paying attention.

This friend downloaded his Family Guy episode, and decided to do a little reading on what this “BitTorrent” thing is all about. In his research, he discovered that Azureus has an RSS plugin. BitTorrent, unlike most file transfer mechanisms, performs best when there is high demand for a resource, because the load is distributed across all clients, including the ones that have not completed the download. Through RSS, a feed provider can announce a new resource to all subscribers as soon as it available, thereby immediately creating high demand for the file, and fast downloads for all. BitTorrent’s biggest weakness is the inability to view partial content, thus making it suboptimal for on-demand videos, since you can’t start watching the video until you’ve finished downloading it. That’s what makes RSS and BitTorrent such a happy couple– if configured properly, files can be downloaded as they are announced (say, in the middle of the night or while you are at work), and will be complete by the time you are ready to watch them, eliminating the need to stream content.

Back to my friend’s story. He instantly realized the potential implications of Really Simple Syndication of his favorite weekly television programs, but what he realized was only the tip of the iceberg. I gave him a little clue: “If you really want to see the future, check out Torrentocracy.” That sealed the deal.

He gets it, and if you’ve been following the links, you do too. Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, I’ll spell it out for you: With Bittorrent and RSS, one can easily create an internet-based periodical broadcast of huge files with almost zero distribution cost. With MythTV and Torrentocracy, one can create a set-top box such as a Tivo or VCR that consumes such a broadcast. This concept is a few years old, but it’s finally picking up steam. See Broadcatching.

It’s possible to replace (or complement) your satellite receiver and DVD player with a cheap PC running MythTV, and still stay up to date on Desperate Housewives.

Most popular TV programs are available via BitTorrent within hours (sometimes minutes) of their debut. That’s not revolutionary– Tivo has provided that ability (sans BitTorrent) for years. What makes this device (I’ll call it a Media Station) truly revolutionary is this: Not only will this Media Station be able to download scheduled network programs, it will be able to download multimedia content from any feed to which you decide to subscribe. That includes music, movies, and clips of guys getting kicked in the nuts.

If multimedia content costs literally nothing to distribute, and there is a brain-dead simple method of subscribing to that content, some interesting things become possible.

Imagine if:

• The local softball/football/basketball/bowling league provides a video feed of the week’s games. You could come home at the end of the day and watch some real local sporting action.
• You provide a semi-private (password protected) feed of your family photos and videos. Your parents subscribe, and they have something more interesting to watch than Everybody Loves Raymond.
• Your church provides a feed of weekly sermons or lessons or announcements. Would it be so bad to be greeted by a thirty-second video of your pastor every once in a while? Would you watch it if it was automatically delivered to your TV?
• A dozen or a hundred more shows like Red Vs Blue pop up. As costs continue to go down, more people will be producing entertainment like this. Machinima will be a big factor in this.
• The movie/music studios finally catch on and start distributing their content via this system.

Are you beginning to see the magnitude of the implications of this technology? Is its importance starting to become apparent? Can you smell the coming revolution? This is a lot bigger than Family Guy, folks. This has the potential to shift paradigms that have been firmly in place since the invention of the VCR.

I know, I know. “Don’t get too excited about this, Ntro, no one can predict the future, so how do you know any of this will happen?” I’ll respond to that with a quote from science fiction author William Gibson:

The future has arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I finally found something better than Windows XP PowerToys Virtual Desktop Manager. It’s called Enhanced Virtual Desktops.

I’ve been planning a home theater system for the media room (aka The Bonus Room) for quite some time, and I now have almost all of the components I have planned for:

• Denon AVR-2105 receiver (Pictures: Back Front)
• Philips DVP-642 DVD/Divx/MPEG/MP3/pretty much anything that will fit on a DVD-R or CD-R player
• InFocus 4805 DLP projector
• 4 Cerwin Vega V-5M bookshelf speakers
• 2 Cerwin Vega V-15F 3-way floor standing speakers
• 1 Cerwin Vega V-5C center channel speaker
• 1 Cerwin Vega V-12S 12″ powered subwoofer

The speakers are on backorder and haven’t actually arrived yet, and we don’t have a ceiling mount or screen for the projector, just a blank white wall and a card table. Has that stopped us from enjoying it? Of course not.

The original plan was to purchase everything at once, paint the room, buy furniture, and have everything set up before we started actually using it. But, a deal for the projector came along on Woot! that I couldn’t resist, and as soon as it arrived we wanted to “try it out.” That put a bit of a kink in our plans of “doing it right.”

The projector, DVD player, and crappy speakers hijacked from my wife’s computer are all sitting on a table in the back of the room, wires all tangled up and surge protector suspended between the table and wall. Not the elegant setup I was hoping for, but it’s good enough to watch old episodes of Smallville.

Oh, yea, one more thing. “Light control” quickly became an issue, and instead of buying/making curtains, we tacked bath towels on the wall to cover the windows. Pathetic, I know. I’d provide pictures, but I’m pretty sure my wife would have a heart attack (Disclaimer: my wife had nothing to do with the towels. It was all ubu’s idea).

I found myself in the market for an MP3 player, and decided on the Rio Carbon. Here is the article that convinced me. It’s 5GB, which didn’t seem like very much at first, but after I loaded it up with everything I wanted to carry around with me I still had two point something gigs free, so I guess it will do.

Now for the interesting part. I bought this little toy at CompUSA during lunch last week, and the guy at the counter asked if I wanted the purchase protection or warranty or whatever. Usually I immediately refuse, but this time I listened to his little presentation. Apparently CompUSA has followed Best Buy’s lead in their new warranty policy, and transformed it into something useful and attractive.

Here’s the deal: On a $199 purchase (minus $20 mail-in-rebate, but I never count on those things) such as this one, the new plan is $17. Like a normal purchase protection plan it covers damage to the unit, et cetera, but this one has an added benefit. Any time in the next twelve months, I have the opportunity to bring the device back, sans receipt, sans packaging, with only my identification, and tell the customer service guy I’d like a credit for the original purchase price. He gives me a gift card for $199, and I go pick out whatever I want. So, effectively, a year from now I’ll be able to sell my old fashioned MP3 player for $3 more than I paid for it, an appreciation which is unheard of in the world of useless technology.

I’m looking forward to my free 2006 version of the Rio Carbon, maybe it’ll have 20 GB and Ogg Vorbis support.

I’m starting a new job next Monday at a small firm in Addison as a DBA and Senior Developer. It’s going to be interesting, as it’s a .NET/WinForms/ASP.NET (Microsoft’s “New Stuff”) shop, and I’m accustomed to Unixy solutions. At least the Oracle database is on Sun Solaris, but there’s talk of migrating to SQL Server.

The purpose of this post is to share my official opinion on Microsoft and .NET. As a supporter of Linux and OSS, a general assumption people have is that I consider anyone and anything Microsoft evil. Though I haven’t bothered correcting that assumption, it’s not completely accurate.

Though I am reluctant to admit it, Microsoft is on the right path with .NET. Microsoft is only the enemy insofar as they attempt to prevent interoperability, and the New Microsoft seems to be coming to the realization that they are going to have to do business in a world in which they produce only one of many popular computing environments, not the homogeneous landscape they dominate today. Between the various distributions of Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X, competition is on the rise. The iPod Halo Effect is one oft-quoted piece of evidence of this fact.

In the near future, the Mono Project’s open source .NET runtime will have full WinForms support, and Microsoft is “friendly,” according to this rather ancient post and this article by Miguel de Icaza. I’m optimistic about running Office, Money, and other proprietary Microsoft products natively in Linux soon (not Crossover– emulation is merely a stop-gap, and please don’t flame me about how it’s Not An Emulator). I’ll even pay for them! I just want to have the choice of an operating system other than Windows (as ubu once so cleverly pointed out, “the operating system named for a GUI feature”).

I’m confident that some day I’ll be able to run our applications on Mono, but even then I will likely be using Visual Studio .NET, because it’s damn good. I love Vim, but man you should see some of the things vs.net can do. Maybe I’ll find a nice way to use vi keybindings, find and replace, macros, and “.”, or maybe I’ll just get used to the idea of leaving the home row more often.

I haven’t been on board with any Microsoft “initiatives” in the past, oh, six years. In retrospect, the only reason I favored Microsoft back then was an ignorance of alternatives. But I’m on board with .NET.

Do you remember Sun’s hype about Java back in the day (”compile once, run anywhere”)? Do you also remember what a flop that turned out to be? Well, .NET is basically Java Done Right. Let’s face it. If Microsoft is on board with this, it’s going to be popular. That much is inevitable. Microsoft’s enthusiasm about having “other implementations of .NET” is a sign that they’re finally “getting it.” You do the math, folks. At the risk of sounding like a bona fide Microsoft evangelist, .NET will have an impact on the world of technology that is greater than Java’s. Look at the numbers: according to indeed.com, there are 57,618 java job postings and 57,207 .NET job postings. I’d say that’s an impact. Just wait until all of that software “runs anywhere” and supports your favorite programming language.

Well, wish me luck on my new venture, I’m sure I’ll be blogging about it in the near future, so stay tuned.