Saskatchewan Plates

Warning: The follow post contains obvious shilling for a company I work for.

Remember way back when I was telling everyone they should get Skype? I was full of shit. You shouldn’t have got Skype. Skype still is a pretty cool application, but it had one major flaw – no one ever used the thing.

Many more people use Gmail. If you don’t, you should really consider it. Gmail has had built-in chat for a number of years. A few weeks ago, the Talk team added voice and video chat for Macs and PCs which works spectacularly. I’ve chatted with Marky in Seoul and Jer in Montreal. And if Jer can figure the thing out, anyone can.

Considering how geographically spread out everyone has become, you should really consider downloading. If you already have a gmail account, you have no excuse.

Go download the browser plug-in here.

No not the Rapper, I’m referring to the much geekier and therefore more appropriate use of the three letters: Network Attached Storage.

I currently have a rather sizable collection of video, music, photos and other misc data that I’ve built up over my years of nerdery. I’ve slowly moved it from a separate partition, to separate disk, to my current set up of a Western Digital MyBook 500gb external drive. Right now, my entire iTunes library resides on the drive, and I stream videos off the drive through my laptop to the XBox 360 hooked up to the TV.

There are a couple downsides to this however:

1. If I take my laptop to school/around the house, my entire library is not available to the rest of the house.
2. One drive, no backups. My data is starting to gather quite intrinsic value, based purely on the time building it up. While it wouldn’t be the end of the world to lose it, it would still suck all sorts.

If I move all this data out to a NAS system of some sort, these go away.

There are two camps when it comes to NAS: Buy one or Roll Your Own.

For campers on the buying one side, I’ve managed to find the closest thing to perfection: the QNAP TS-209 Pro. You can check out the site for all the specs, but here are the key points:

• Two SATA II bays with RAID 0 or 1
• Three USB 2 ports for sharing printers, additional drives
• Very nice Web GUI, frequently updated Firmware
• Comprehensive functionality (Built-in BitTorrent client, iTunes library server, stream to XBox 360, PS3)
• Low power, quiet, small footprint

But these things aren’t cheap (On the order of $400 without drives), and I immediately lose the flexibility of managing a simple Linux server in that I can’t run whatever applications I like/tweak the existing ones. As well, it seems that all of the embedded NAS solutions suffer from inferior performance compared to a simple linux PC file server.

This is where the Roll-your-own campers go off the deep end. And rightfully so. None of the features that QNAP offers are in anyway exclusive. They are all available absolutely free thanks to the wonders of open-source software. For less than $200, a sharp-eyed shopper can pick up a dated desktop with more than enough juice to fill the roll of NAS server (There’s a nice one on craigslist for $119 at the time of writing). The only additional cost is a set of drives (that I’m buying either way) and time to get the software up to snuff.

But the old hardware isn’t bullet-proof, is likely going to need upgrades (SATA card likely), and comes with no warranty. And the “dick-around-with” factor is much much higher. What you gain in flexibility and price, you lose in time and reliability. Not to mention size, noise, and power.

So once again, I’m undecided (though leaning towards the QNAP). Please feel free to weigh in.

I’m looking forward to the day when people stop remembering when people programmed computers with punch cards.

Seriously. I don’t care. But bet on irony for the roles to be reversed in thirty years.

As part of some exploration I did while at Google, I built an iGoogle gadget that displayed the five most recent comments on the blog. It was always too rough around the edges to release, but it was definitely handy. I took a few hours downtime today to polish it up and though the old comments have been a little slow as of late, I have it available for the iGoogle users among you:

Recent comments on sean.boysofsummer.ca

I’ve applied for Google’s full-time conversion process. I’d like to say I have a pretty good shot, but I honestly have absolutely no idea what will happen. It’s one of those things I really don’t want to get my hopes up about. I’ve been told I should know whether or not I got an offer by the end of September. That means, I need to know what the rest of my options are on the exact same time-line. Time to start sending out emails.

So I’ve been trying to compile a list of very cool technology companies to get my foot in at before I hear back from the big G. This list is incomplete and I’m definitely relying on the wisdom of the crowds to fill it out – read: post up suggestions.

The big guns
Microsoft (Particularly the Vancouver office)
Apple
Amazon
Yahoo!

The old jobs
Business Objects
RIM (Only if I can get on this project)

The up-and-comers:
Facebook
Kaleidescape
Pandora
The Feedroom
Any Vancouver Start-up (Now Public comes to mind) – Depending on the job, a Vancouver company could probably have me for 5-10k less a year.

What other great tech companies are all over your respective radars?

So I’m about to buy a new Mac which includes a free 4GB Nano as part of the deal ($229 + tax). If you or someone you know is in the market, I’ll sell you mine for $200. You can get any color you want, and even get it engraved with a custom message. I’ll even consider picking up an 8GB if someone’s interested, though we’ll have to work out the price.

Let me know ASAP as I’m hoping to place the order on Monday.

Update: That’s crappy timing, evidently new iPods are due out on the 5th of September.

Deryk was the only one who submitted any additional ideas: The automated drink mixer. And it’s not like I haven’t always wanted my own Mr. Butlertron.

The only other idea I thought would be doable considering the crowd would be the ticketmaster killer. I know that it doesn’t have a mechatronic aspect to it, but considering we all tend to have incredible taste in music (with the exception of Jarrett), I thought those who couldn’t contribute to the code could definitely contribute to the direction.

Anyway, I’m going to defer to the community on this one.

I’m wondering if anyone else would be interested in starting a Hack Day/Weekend event once we all get back to Waterloo in the fall.

The motivation is that I happen to hang around with the some amazingly intelligent people. Typically though this is completely wasted because we just go out and get drunk rather than exercising our collective cognitive might. So to help resolve this issue, I’d like to set up a planned, hackathon play date if you will, which will probably involve drinking anyway. There’s all sorts of interest technical ideas I’d love to sit around and discuss, and preferably hack something together.

If you’d be interested, just comment on the post. And if you had ideas for neat problems to tackle, post those as well. The hardest part will be trying to come up with an idea that will involve everyone interested in coming, but we can figure that one out later. Here are some ideas to get the brain going (and, as an ulterior motive, something I’d love to do but just haven’t got around to):

A multi touch display
A physical widget under Kenshi’s anti-desktop proposal
Regenerative braking systems for a bike
A better ticketmaster (I should do this anyway)
A Facebook platform something
A solar something

Get’r.

I apologize for the second round of downtime which brought down BoS across the board this time around. Nothing to worry about though, it should *knock on wood* be smooth sailing from here on out. And I promise to pay the ISP bills sooner next time around.

Buy an Xbox 360.

If you need to be on the leading edge, get yourself a Wii just because you can play a lot Gamecube games, and download some N64, super nintendo, nintendo, sega games to play. Wii also has the opportunity for some very cool innovative games to come along, but I’m worried the whole, “Hey I can swing in real life and my video game swings too!” thing might get a bit old after a while.

On the other hand, buying a PS3 is stupid. Really fucking stupid. If you are thinking of buying one, here is what you do:

Give me your $700 right now. In one year, I will buy you a PS3 for $400, because at that point there will actually be games to play. If you buy it now, you’ll be waiting that long anyway, so this way someone can actually do something not fucking stupid with your money in the mean time.

Don’t be fucking stupid. Buy yourself an Xbox 360. Or a Wii.

(Things to take away: I avoid using the word Fuck on my blog. Its use was required in this context. Please take note. )