Mark Mischke's Weblog

The death of e-mail? I think not.

I read an interesting article on the decline of e-mail as a preferred communications mechanism among the sub-25 crowd. While I can appreciate the appeal of instantaneous, synchronous communication, I don't see e-mail's status as being threatened in any way. When I was younger, I probably would have lived and breathed via IM, SMS, Facebook, etc. The concept of a planless Friday night was unthinkable. Funny how that changes with time.

These days I tend to avoid synchronous communication. I've never been much of a phone person, I run an IM client only when required to do so for work and pretty much the only person I text with is my wife. I prefer to manage my general availability and synchronous communication feels too much like an electronic leash. For me, e-mail is the ideal medium. I can reply quickly if I need to or I can take whatever time I need to compose my thoughts.

There will always be a contingent, regardless of age, which places emphasis on synchronous communication and high availability. These people are often seen tapping away at their surgically-attached Crackberries. Sometimes it's because of a job-related need and sometimes it's just because a person likes being connected. No problem there. Some folks enjoy always being 'on'. For those of us who don't, there will always be e-mail.

Back to altitude

This past summer, Ali and I spent a week in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a good time and we did the typical things that a vacation in Flag might entail. We stayed in the center of town, at the historic (and supposedly haunted) Hotel Monte Vista. We hiked in the Grand Canyon, but not too far down because of the heat. We spent a day biking and shopping in Sedona. We saw a herd of wild elk while hiking on Flag's urban trail network. We explored many of the local restaurants. And we climbed Humphreys Peak.

Humphreys was our main goal, although I was quietly skeptical about our chances for success. It rises to 12,600' over a gentle 9.6 mile trail which begins at just over 9,000'. I'd previously been to 14,000', but not for many years, and Ali had never hiked above 10,000'. Neither of us was in the best physical condition (fortunately we've both since turned that around), and going from sea level to 12,000' with only a few days to get used to half that height (Flag is at 7,000') is no mean feat. After steaming up the Grand with surprising stamina earlier in the week, our confidence grew.

We started out early in the day, feeling a bit woozy even at the trailhead. My thought was to take it slowly and steadily. I was concerned that if we pushed too hard, we'd become altitude-sick and be unable to recover. The trail was stunning and it didn't feel at all like the Arizona we'd come to know. We picked up a lone hiker from Canada along the way. He'd been hiking in Colorado, so he had an edge on us, but he apparently wanted company so he kept our pace. We both got on-and-off headaches and Ali had a short bout of nausea. We kept guzzling water and managed to push those effects back. This was my first time at altitude without taking Diamox, which prevents altitude sickness. I wanted to see what it'd be like, but I think I'll have it with me next time.

Before we knew it, we were standing on the summit. It was quite an accomplishment (esp. given that I was 25 lbs. heavier than I am today!). We met some cool folks up top and hung out for awhile before dashing back down to tree-line when we saw the afternoon thunderheads rolling in. The trail itself wasn't too challenging; it was the altitude. I'd rate the trail as moderate if it were in NH's White Mountains; maybe similar to the Garfield Trail. The altitude adds a lot to the mix. All in all, it was a great hike and I highly recommend it.

Leopard pounced on me

Yesterday was an odd day for me, Macintosh-wise. Upon reading about the updated MacBooks, I ran off to the local Apple store. These were 'silently' updated, meaning that Apple had added a few 'under the hood' tweaks and didn't make a big deal about it. In this particular case, it _was_ a big deal. I'd been on the fence about getting a MacBook, but the 2 GB RAM limit and the anemic GMA 950 graphics held me back. The new MacBooks accommodate 4 GB of RAM and incorporate Intel's new Santa Rosa chipset, which boosts the front-side bus speed and integrates the new X3100 graphics chipset. In true Apple fashion, pricing remains the same as before.

Alas, the Apple store didn't yet have the new MacBooks. Unlike officially-heralded product releases, Apple's silent updates are slow to trickle in. I didn't get my MacBook and now I've decided to wait a week or three to hear what early-adopters are saying about them.

I then tried upgrading my venerable Mac mini to Leopard (OS X 10.5). I know that upgrading any OS is generally a very bad move, but I'd had such a great experience going from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4) that I felt compelled to give it a try. I was one of the lucky recipients of the infamous Stunning Blue Screen Which Waits for Godot. I quickly determined that Godot would be a no-show and tried to extricate myself from the mess. I'd backed up my data, so reinstalling from scratch wasn't going to be a problem. I actually prefer to do that once a year, or so. Lo and behold, the mini wouldn't respond to any boot-time keystroke commands. I couldn't force a boot from the CD/DVD. I couldn't boot into single-user mode. I couldn't boot into Open Firmware. I couldn't do much of anything except marvel at how this beautiful little 6"x6" box of brushed aluminum and white plastic refused to acknowledge my existence. I thought it might be my Logitech Elite (Mac & Windows) keyboard, so I bought a Mac keyboard. No go.

Time for surgery. Maybe it was the optical drive upgrade I'd installed earlier this year that was causing the hang. I popped open the case and swapped the stock unit back in. No dice. Despite Googling for solutions the whole time, I found little that helped. I stumbled upon a post which suggested using the mini's remote to select the boot device. I'd forgotten that the mini even _had_ a remote, but it worked. The mini ignored the keyboard, but faithfully obeyed the God of Infrared. This time I did a clean installation of Leopard and I was up and running in just a few minutes. I had to reinstall my apps, but that's never as much of a pain as many make it out to be. Took me less than an hour. Then I pulled my data off a backup disk and now I'm good to go.

Looking back over the settled dust, I now have a clean, working Leopard installation on my mini and a new Mac keyboard that I've quickly fallen in love with. The keyboard takes up less than half the desk space that my Logitech unit occupied and has a great key feel - especially to a guy like me who doesn't touch-type. I don't have a MacBook, but I'll get one one of these days. That day might be next week and it might be next Spring, after MacWorld, when they tend to rev a bunch of products. For now, I'm up and running again and I'm very happy about it.

New Parallels release!

I've mentioned that I run Windows under virtualization on my Mac mini using Parallels Desktop for Mac. Today they released an update which optimizes the use of screen real estate, adds USB 2.0 support, binary file drag & drop and allows Windows and Mac apps to run seamlessly side-by-side via a feature known as Coherence.

Upgrading my current Parallels installation was a snap. I played with Coherence for awhile, running Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio on my Mac desktop, and I was quite impressed by the overall usability. The good folks at Parallels have done an amazing job. Unfortunately, Coherence doesn't jive with the way I work in Windows. I tend to make heavy use of the Windows Desktop, which (obviously) isn't visible when in Coherence mode. I had to back off and settle for the traditional VM window at full-screen resolution. People who just run a few Windows apps and make little use of the Windows Desktop will really benefit from Coherence. It's very well done and extremely cool.

Personally, I'm thrilled by how easy it is to maximize the VM window and take full advantage of my 1280x1024 monitor. I'm constantly switching between Mac & Windows apps, so running the VM full-screen doesn't make much sense. Being able to maximize the VM windows DOES make good sense and that's exactly what I can do now.

Great job, Parallels! I understand that 3-D graphics acceleration and SMP are in the works. I don't care too much about 3-D graphics, but adding this feature means graphics pass-through to the hardware, which translates into faster 2-D, including video, videoconferencing, etc.

Customer service?

My wife bought a Mini Cooper last year and she's very dedicated to its upkeep. During the warmer months she typically washes it every weekend. Needless to say, the lack of an available garden hose during the winter months has left the car looking rather salty. She won't use traditional car washes for fear of scratching the paint, but we've found a touchless wash at a Mobil station in Wellesley, the next town over. It doesn't do a great job, but it removes the road salt and most of the grime. We stopped there last night on the way home from dropping a friend off at the airport.

It's an automated wash. You feed it a credit card, select your wash preferences, drive in and let it do its thing. We got the green light to go in, the door raised and we entered. And nothing happened. There was a very strange, toxic-smelling odor inside the washing station and after about a minute I suggested that we back out (the door hadn't yet closed behind us). Having spent eight years on the bench as an organic chemist, I have a good nose for things which are best not inhaled.

We reported the problem to the attendant and requested a refund. We didn't have a receipt because the wash usually 'just works' and we didn't request one from the machine. We're talking about seven dollars here. But screw the seven bucks. We didn't want to read about someone becoming injured from whatever fumes were in that building. Something was clearly wrong and who knows what would have happened if the door had closed and someone became trapped in there.

The attendant didn't seem to care about any of this - including the safety issue. He insisted that the washer had been running all day. I'm sure it had been, but things break, sieze up, whatever - especially in this recent cold spell we've had here. We got the distinct impression that he thought we were trying to con him in some way. For those unfamiliar with Wellesley, MA, it's a town where crime just isn't that noteworthy. Plus, we didn't exactly look like hooligans. The right thing for the attendant to have done would have been to walk over to the washing station, take a whiff of the toxic/nasty/whatever air, recognize that there was a problem and shut it down. A refund or a future free wash would have been nice, too (they can generate codes which the machine will accept), but that just wasn't going to happen. After all, we were obviously just trying to scam him out of a free wash.

We left, shaking our heads in disbelief. I've never seen such a blatant disregard for concern about safety. The guy didn't even acknowledge what we told him about the fumes. Plus, he totally alienated us over what would surely cost the Mobil franchise a lot less than seven bucks. There was most definitely something being emitted inside that washing station. It took me several minutes in the fresh air to eliminate the irritating feeling in my lungs and Ali was still feeling it when we got home. Fortunately, whatever it was had no lingering effects.

Alas, the Mini is still caked with salt. The forecast for the coming week predicts temperatures in the 40s, so maybe I'll be able to break out the garden hose.

Virtualization and platform freedom

I've been a big fan of running OSs in virtual machines for some time. Virtualization is very useful when you need an isolated environment for evaluating software, a QA test bed encompassing multiple OSs and versions and for a variety of other purposes.

Until fairly recently, virtualization often incurred a minor, but very real, performance penalty. This isn't surprising given that you're running one OS inside of another and each OS is designed to be the sole guardian and caretaker of a computer's hardware resources. Previously, a typical hardware setup might include a notebook with a fast single-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM and a fast hard drive. The host and guest OSs might split the RAM evenly and they'd probably share the same hard drive. To run the guest OS, you'd close all possible apps in the host OS to prevent CPU starvation. In either case, the guest was likely to become starved for RAM if anything too intensive was attempted. Still, this approach worked well enough to make virtualization a very useful tool.

Things have evolved rapidly (or perhaps they've been more intelligently designed - doh!). Now dual-core CPUs with hardware support for virtualization are common, RAM is cheaper and it seems like everyone has an external Firewire drive or three. When virtualization is set up correctly on a modern platform, it's difficult to tell whether you're working with the host OS or the guest OS, provided that accelerated graphics (esp. 3D graphics) don't come into play.

One caveat of virtualization is that disk fragmentation is inevitable, prevalent and cumbersome to correct. When you defrag the guest OS drive, the virtual disk image on the host becomes fragmented, and vice-versa. The only real way to ensure a proper defrag is to defrag the guest, move the disk image to another drive and then copy it back. Perhaps we'll soon see defragmentation products which maintain some kind of coordination between virtual machines and the host environment. This would be particularly useful for virtualized servers.

My current setup is a Mac mini with a 1.66 GHz Core Duo CPU, 2 GB RAM and a 7200 RPM drive. My XP VM is a non-expanding image on an external Firewire 2.5" 5400 RPM drive (no external power source). The disk image is the only file on the external drive. I run Parallels Desktop for Mac as my virtualization package and the 2 GB of RAM is evenly split between OS X and XP. The mini is a great platform. It's small, attractive, quiet and energy-efficient. It costs me about two dollars per month to run at a 50% duty cycle.

I don't baby my XP setup in any way. I use it to make my living. I expect it to compile code quickly and to efficiently run any and all apps which I need to get my work done - all in its 1 GB of RAM (contrary to popular belief, 1 GB of RAM is plenty for a Windows dev machine if it's properly tuned and maintained). In the mean time, I do all my emailing, IMing and Web surfing in OS X. Response on both sides of the fence is crisp, even under load. Multiple cores really make a difference here.

Old sci-fi TV shows on DVD

I recently bought season one of Wild Wild West and seasons one and two of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on DVD. These series ran during the mid-1960s and I remember watching them as recent reruns on our black-and-white TV.

I'm a huge fan of the Wild Wild West movie (Will Smith). Everyone involved did a great job of modernizing the original without disrespecting it. As I watched a few original episodes from the DVD it became apparent just how faithfully they adhered to the details. Kudos!

Voyage has been a lot of fun to revisit, too. I must have built the Flying Sub model kit half a dozen times when I was a kid. Nowadays, those old Aurora model kits sell for several hundred dollars on eBay - when you can find them. The DVD brought back a lot of memories. While the Seaview (the submarine which was the focus of the show) was really cool, I always liked the Flying Sub best. It was a 2 - 4-person mini-sub that could fly (as the name suggests).

Now I've gotta see if Land of the Giants is available yet. :-)

Updated Feb. 04, 2007: GOOD GOD, MAN! What have I done?!!? As the self-anointed worldwide protector of correct apostrophe usage, I have myself committed the very sin I so loathe. I've dutifully removed the offending symbol which, until now, followed the word series in the first paragraph. I humbly thank my lovely wife for pointing out this most unforgivable act of punctuary oversight. And no. 'Punctuary' probably isn't a word, but I'm sure you know what I mean. :-)

Vegetarian for a month

Just after Thanksgiving I decided to go vegetarian for the rest of 2006. I fell off the wagon on Christmas Eve. My motivation was simple. I wanted to see how easy it would be to do, how I'd feel and how much energy I'd have. I was pretty sure that I wouldn't go hungry. I eat a lot of veggie-compatible foods to begin with, and I generally like 'meatless meat' soy products. Being married to a vegetarian ensures that I get to try many of them.

I didn't really miss meat all that much and I didn't feel any different than usual. I stacked the deck in my favor by keeping the 'fridge full of fake meat products.

I fell off the wagon because I let myself get overly hungry. I'd had too much coffee and not enough breakfast. I'd gone out to do a few errands and was trapped by the gravitational pull of McDonald's as I drove by, stomach rumbling. One McChicken sandwich opened the floodgates and I began craving meat. I overdid it for a few days, but that's what the holidays are for, right? Now I'm finding some balance. I'm eating more soy and less red meat than before. When I do eat meat, it's frequently of the lean variety.

I accept that I'm omniverous by nature. I wish I didn't like meat so much, since it's less environmentally friendly than soy products. I can't say that I condone the factory farming techniques which produce much of our meat. I may eliminate non-kosher meats from my diet, since kosher meats must comply with strict humane-treatment standards. I'm not Jewish, so I may not have all my facts straight. My wife is Jewish, but she's a veggie, so she probably can't help me out much here, either. Either way, my goal is to eat better for me and better for the environment.

OS X vs. Logitech Webcams

My Mac mini has become my everyday machine. I use it for everything except for my work (I'm a .Net developer). Even then, I run Windows on my Mac via Parallels virtualization.

Until the other day I'd never had problems getting peripherals to work. My printer (HP PhotoSmart 7760) was automagically detected and configured by OS X and I found OS X drivers for my scanner (Canon LiDE 30) on Canon's site. I have a Logitech Elite keyboard (w/Win & Mac keys) and trackball, both of which have excellent Mac driver support for their non-standard features.

Then I tried to get a Webcam going. I have a Logitech QuickCam Pro 5000 and QuickCam Pro for Notebooks. Both are modern devices. The 5000 is only a few months old. Both cameras work great with Windows, but lack OS X drivers. The QuickCam Pro for Notebooks does have a downloadable OS X driver, but it's circa 2003 and PPC-only.

iOXperts has been providing Webcam drivers for OS X for several years now, but they're all PPC-based and their site doesn't show any evidence of ongoing development. The macam project (freeware) looked promising, but they have the same PPC-only issue. In either case, the 5000 isn't supported and QCP for Notebooks support is questionable.

Needless to say, I'm pretty disappointed with Logitech. They've always seemed like a Mac-friendly vendor and I'm surprised that they haven't hired a person or two to write some OS X drivers for their Webcams. I respect that they're under no obligation to do so, as the cams in question have never claimed to feature Mac support, but c'mon. A year ago, my scanner didn't have a Mac driver and the good folks at Canon managed to create one. The Mac is a reality in the computing world, especially in the home. Customers will increasingly expect hardware to support it.

I'm sure that I can find a high-quality cross-platform Webcam out there somewhere, but there's no way that I can rationalize buying a THIRD unit. Parallels is promising virtualized Webcam support in its next release, so I'll just be patient. I don't expect 30 fps @ 640x480 performance under virtualization, but I'll take what I can get.

Silent plane would cut airport noise

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/11/06/silent.aircraft.ap/index.html

Uhhh... yeah, I expect that it would. Who comes up with these headlines?? :-)