razmaspaz

I love Google Calendar, its a great interface, easy to use, feature rich tool.  It does everything I want it to, except sync.  Well, OK it syncs, but sync sucks.  Calendaring is more and more becoming the line in the sand for every big software company out there.  I have an iPhone, use Google Calendar and have Exchange for work.  I would like one simple thing.  Give me a place to manage my calendar on the web, a view of it on my phone, and my work calendar should be visible everywhere, but my personal calendar should stay off the work calendar, unless I want the time to show as busy at work.  My boss doesn’t need to know the details of my medical appointments.This should be incredibly easy.  In fact it IS incredible easy, except for one thing: nobody wants to give away my data.  Calendaring is not hard, the data is uniform, and sync is well understood 99% of the time.  Why can’t everyone agree on an interop standard, create a subscription interface and share my data?  Someone explain?  Hint: I already know the answer is monetary.Today was an exciting day though, I created a new calendar account at google, synced my work calendar to it, and gave my personal account permission to manage it.  I think I am 99% of the way there.  now if the iPhone would just allow more than one exchange account to be sync’d I would be in calendar heaven.

I upgraded to Snow Leopard this week, and was rudely greeted by an error message when booting Aperture for the first time yesterday.  Aparrently Aperture 1.5.6 is no longer supported under Snow Leopard.  I have been holding out upgrading to Aperture 2 because I am hoping Aperture 3 will have some features like non destructive dodge and burn, and I can pick it up without grabbing Aperture 2. I was content to limp along hoping all would be fine, but then Apple cut me off at the knees.  Its so bad that I can’t even open the app to read my projects to get export the pictures.

So here I am stuck in roadmap limbo. With no smoke signals coming from Cupertino, I have 30 days to run the trial of Aperture, after that I have to have all of my projects converted, so that I can get my pictures out of Aperture libraries.  Then its on to Lightroom. Its a shame, because despite the risk of having a file format go obselete (see the above paragraph) I much prefer my files stored in databases rather than on the file system, and I really like the way Aperture feels.  But despite all of that my next chunk of change will go to Adobe.  At this point I know Adobe is behind their product, that they will continue to release updates, and whatnot, plus I have the comfort of knowing I’m on the industry standard platform.  I can’t say a single one of those things about Aperture.

If anyone has any experience migrating and how to get some of the data off the platform and into Lightroom (as if I would get any of my edits…) I would love to hear it.

After I got the TV the first thing I wanted to check out was the DLNA capabilities it has.  Its taken a while because standing in my way was a pesky little home wiring project, and a time sink known affectionately as having a baby.  The baby is settling into a routine, and the last wires were pulled through the walls this morning, so its on to the fun part.  I’ve been testing out Twonky Media Server.

Twonky is a DLNA reference implementation and it serves up media on Mac, Linux, and PC.  Its esentially a web server that keeps a database of all of your media and streams it on demand.  So far I’ve been able to use it to view pictures, watch youTube, and play MP3s from my MacBook Pro.  All of this is great, but the real challenge is video.  Its been a dream for a while to have a system for watching movies from a server on the TV without a vga cable strung across the room.  DLNA seems to deliver on this promose.  The biggest hurdle is getting over video formats.  Video_TS, ISO, MPEG-4, wmv, H.264, whats a technically savvy but video stupid guy to do?  Ideally you would rip your DVD to thefile system as an ISO or something and the server would serve up whatever format was necessary.  Thats close, very close actually, but not quite there.  And the not quite there is a royal pain in the ass.

I think this afternoon I will have all the kinks worked out and a m4v file will be streamed to my TV with sound played over my stereo.  I don’t have rear speakers wired up in the ceiling yet, so I won’t be able to verify 5.1 sound, but soon, very soon.  Keep your fingers crossed and I will report back soon.

I went down to the local criterium today to watch the pros face off and take some pictures.  It was a pretty exciting race with two guys off the front the whole time.  They managed to stay away and it was an impressive display of strength.  Here is what I snapped

Well the new TV came today.  I went to Best Buy, for once they had the best price going, and picked up a Pioneer 5020FD and an HD TiVo.  I’ve had the TiVo for a couple days now, and the netflix on demand feature came through this morning, so I am able to get some HD content and it looks great.  Rattotouie looks fantastic on it.  I’m sure it will occupy most of my free time while we are waiting for the baby to show up, and I am guessing it will occupy me while I am soothing the little one to sleep.

I’m doing some initial investigation into DLNA because the TV supports it.  It should be interesting to see if I can stream DVDs direct to the TV.   I will report back when I know more.

I really like the Chicago Botanic Garden.  Its relatively close to the house and full of interesting photo subjects.  Yesterday I had some free time so I headed down there for the evening.  The weather was perfect, sunny and warm.  Then I got there, and it wasn’t.  Sunny anyway.  About twenty minutes after I showed up it got cloudy and stayed that way all evening.   I headed indoors to the greenhouse, where I shot this.

I’m TV shopping.  I live in SD land, with my SD TiVo, my SDTV, and my SD cable.  We don’t even have digital.  I’ve been drooling over a new TV for I don’t know, 10 years.  Knowing what I know about tech, and knowing what these things cost, I’ve been fence sitting.  HD has been changing so rapidly its crazy.  I bought a reciever 5 years ago, a really nice one, and when I got it HDMI wasn’t even on the radar.  It seemed pretty future proof at the time, in fact I remember thinking that I wouldn’t need a new one for a very long time, if ever.  Now devices like Apple TV don’t have analog outputs, HDMI is the only was to get data out of a number of devices, and I know there is no way around it, I’m gonna need it when I go to Blu-Ray, or should I say if!

So here I am, looking at a TV, and hoping this crazy adoption of a new standard every week is over.  You don’t think its crazy, well HDMI is on version 1.3a or something like that, will it ever stop?  Maybe a global recession is just what we need to remind hardware makers obsoleting standards every year is not profitable.

Anyway back to the TV.  I’ve got my eye on the Pioneer KURO 5020FD 50″.  See waiting a decade to take the plunge means you can buy the good stuff when you do.  I’ve been looking around at reviews and it seems like there is a lot of good about this TV, and not much bad.  I checked it out at Best Buy tonight for like the 50th time.  It was sitting next to a Panasonic.  It was ever so slightly greyer in the greens.  I don’t know if that is just the calibration, or if the TV really can’t do greens that well.  If anyone out there has the thing, I would love to know.  Blacks were great, as the detail in the shadows looked really nice.  I don’t know much else about what I should be looking for in the TV, but it sure will be fun to get it home soon.  Just have to sell the wife.

I am working on updating an old batch job that is written in Java at work.  It was written in such a way as to make me think that it was written by a COBOL programmer.  The code makes my stomach turn, with its obvious disregard for modern Java best practices.  I don’t know why but preceding member variables with m_’s and organizing the world by “job” is just grating on me.  To top it off there are no parametrized queries and the whole thing just ignores OO.  Its exhausting working with it.

All of this is manageable I guess, I mean not everyone spends their day buried in Java, and people are allowed to be language newbs.  I have no doubt the transition from mainframe programming to OO is dificult, and its forgivible.  What really gets me though, is that as I was writing an ANT buildscript for this thing it was failing on a major minor version error wen it got to the server.  No problem I thought, I will throw a target=1.3 in the javac task and it will all be good.  Still got the error, turns out java -version kicked back a 1.2.2.  WTF?  Thats all I can say to that.  How long has that been neglected?  I really wonder how much production code sits out there running on a VM that has been out of support for I don’t know, the better part of a decade.

I live in IBM land, which means I am barely getting to Java 1.5 if I’m lucky, but it came as an absolute shock to me that 1.2 was on the server.  I have been developing professionally for 5 years and as a hobby for another 7 or 8 before that.  I don’t think I got involved in Java before 1.3 was GA, and I can’t remember not at least knowing about features in 1.4.  Java is 6 is the standard now, and 7 is just around the corner.

WTF, seriously, WTF?

I got around to updating the banner on the site.  It is some of the photos I have taken over the past year or so.  If you read the site through an rss reader, click through to check it out.

I was driving in the car the other day listening to an add for Cubs tickets.  What would normally have gotten me excited about spring prompted a mix of anger and dissapointment so here it is:

Dear baseball,

I don’t know how to say this any other way.  You let me down for the last time, and its over.  I’ve never been a rabid fan, but I’ve been loyal.  I’ve attended a couple games a year, cheered on my team, and watched the world series almost every year for as long as I can remember.  In fact I think its fair to say that baseball has helped shape my identity.  And so its sad to do this, but I’m turning my back.  This year I will not watch a game, catch highlights, or read the box scores.  I will not watch the All Star Game, the playoffs, or the world series.  In short, I will not care about baseball.

I know this sounds harsh, but I think it is for your own good.  You’ve got a problem.  I don’t see any way that you won’t decide to lick it unless you hit rock bottom, so this is my contribution to your first step to recovery.  I hope you change, I really do.