Darryl Mocek

As the world moves ever towards everything online, one thing I'll miss in music are those obscure songs which make it onto an album, but which never make it to the airwaves. Some of my favorite songs from artists over the years have been these. The catalyst to me hearing these songs, of course, is the 'at least one hit' on the album which prompts me to purchase the album in the first place. Wanting to get my money's worth and hear more of what the artist has to offer, I listen to the entire album. And often, I hear a song which I like better then the song which prompted me to purchase the album in the first place. Sometimes it takes me several listens of a song to warm up to it.

In this day and age of MP3 players and being able to purchase single songs, it think it's going to be more and more likely that artists will shoot for creating that one hit song, rather then a compilation which will make an entire traditional album. There will be some, to be sure, which will compile entire albums, but then, will I want to purchase those non-hit songs? At least with an album you pay for the entire thing up front. You're stuck. You've made your investment, so you might as well listen to the whole album at least once. But with single-song purchases, will I want to buy 15 songs when I really only know I like one? Will a sampling of a non-hit song be enough for me to buy it or warm up to it? I fear not. Those obscure but favorite songs might go the way of the dinosaurs.

I just found a really nice utility named Launchy. Launchy is a utility which is always in the background. You bring it up by hitting a key combination (Alt-Space is the default). It displays a simple box into which you can type commands to launch applications (e.g. firefox). Launchy indexes your hard drive and creates a catalog of the files on your system. When you start typing, Launchy suggests an application in which you might be interested. When it finds an application, it displays the applications icon and the name of the application. If it found the correct application, you can just hit the Enter key and it will launch the application. If it didn't find the correct one, you can hit the down arrow to see a list of all applications which match.

On Windows, Launchy indexes what is in your Start menu by default. You can modify this list. You can also change the default key combination to bring up Launchy. You can also enter file names into Launchy and it will launch that file using the default application for that file. For those of us who don't like reaching for the mouse, Launchy is a really useful utility.

Does anyone remember Borland's Sidekick?

Yesterday I received my new phone in the mail. It's a Palm Centro. This wasn't my first choice since I believe Palm to be a dead platform (it was great for a while, but it has not evolved), however, my service provider wants to require me to pay for a data plan for every other smartphone in which I'm interested (but not the Centro)...and a data plan is something I'm not interested in...at least not yet. So the Centro it is. I actually wanted the RIM Blackberry Curve 8330 as the Blackberry platform has good market share and is growing. I require a decent platform mainly so I can get applications for it. I want to do more with my phone then just make phone calls.

I've had Palm devices for a while now, so I'm already familiar with the platform. The Centro is smaller then the Treo 700p it replaced, which I don't like as I have big hands and fingers. My service provider does offer some of the larger Palm phones, but they run Windows, and I'm not going there. Other then that...it's just like my old phone.

The biggest surprise for me, was just how much I missed having a more capable phone. I was using a really old Audiovox flip phone, with just the basic features and no QWERTY keyboard (which mean texting was a *real* pain) because I didn't want to fork out full price to replace my broken phone and I wasn't due for a phone upgrade from my provider for several months. The basic phone had no real scheduler with alarms, no memos, no ability to run decent apps, little memory (I had to delete SMS messages constantly to keep under the 99 message limitation for inbox and outbox), a crappy UI, poor battery life, and many other issues. Man, am I happy to have a smartphone again.

First of all, I'm happy to see democracy is alive and well in the U.S.. It's great to see the election turnout we had this year...over 60%. Wow.

Second, I think we need a new party here in America. I like the idea of a small government and individual rights (ala Republicans), but I also like the liberal rights (isn't that part of the Republican's individual rights?) and help for those who *really* need it afforded by the Democrats, plus some, but not *too* much, security for the masses (in between the Democrats and Republicans). Until we have such a party and it gains traction, we need to balance what the Republicans and Democrats do in office by switching the elected official of each party, like the swinging of a pendulum...going one way for a while, then swinging back the other way. Currently, the pendulum has swung way too much to the right...it needs to come back a ways.

Third, I'm sad to see that Prop 8, here in California, passed. Discrimination in any form is wrong. I hope this goes to the state Supreme Court and is ruled unconstitutional. I find it ironic that we can pass such a discriminatory proposition in the shadow of such as historic presidential election.

I found this website which displays a graph of gas prices over the past six years (http://www.sanjosegasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx). You can select from specific areas, or the U.S. average. Guess what the price of gas was six years ago? The U.S. average was $1.31. The U.S. average is now $3.94. Something is clearly wrong here.

I've recently had a chance to take Mercurial for a test drive. For those of you who haven't tried it yet, get ready for a mind-shift. The biggest difference between Mercurial and other Source Code Control Systems (SCCS's) is that most other SCCS's enforce a master-child relationship between the master repository and "child" repositories. You typically create a master repository which is used by everyone as the place into which changes will be put. This is a good thing. Everyone must commit to the master repository and everyone must make sure their commit is correct and doesn't break the build. Everyone gets the latest updates from the master repository. It's a central "meeting" place for code. One problem with this is you don't have a full, complete copy of the repository from which to work. This may cause a problem when you're taking your code mobile.

Mercurial is different in that it is a distributed peer-to-peer system. If you create a repository on a server in your group, there is nothing special about that repository from Mercurial's perspective. You pull the code from the repository on that server and now you have a copy of the code on your local machine which is equivalent to the one on the server...commit comments and all. Need to take the code on the road? Pull the code from either your local copy or the server's copy to your laptop...both are the same. Need to commit changes? Commit from your laptop to your local copy or the server's. If you commit from your laptop to the server, you'll need to pull the committed changes from either your laptop or the server to your local copy...again, both are the same.

In Mercurial, the "master" repository on the server is a convention only. You and your group decide you want to have a "master" repository on the server and so you treat it as such. Mercurial doesn't care. I think this model works better in our increasingly distributed, increasingly mobile work force.

Sun recently announced the release of a SAMP stack optimized for Solaris 10, also known as the CoolStack. For those familiar with the AMP stack on other platforms, there is a 'recipe for success' which has step-by-step instructions to get up and running quickly. If you're interested in running an AMP stack on a really fast, robust platform, you owe it to yourself to try this out.

If the only OS going into Palm's new phones is Microsoft Windows, then I currently own my last Palm device, and I've been a Palm user from day one. I've owned the original Palm Pilot, the Palm III, the Palm Vx, the Kyocera 6135 Smartphone, the Kyocera 7135 Smartphone, and now the Treo 600. I was looking forward to a Linux version of the Palm phone. I think there is still hope, but now that Palm is shipping a Windows device, possibly because they're late with their Linux-based OS replacement to the PalmOS, I think the chance for a Linux-based Palm phone is diminishing. I plan use more applications with a "back-end" component with my upcoming phone and security is a *big* concern of mine. I just don't think Windows delivers as a secure platform. Security on mobile devices is even a bigger issue then on the desktop, especially considering the upcoming pay features coming to mobile devices. If Palm doesn't ship a Linux phone by the time I'm ready to upgrade, then I'll be looking for a Linux phone from another manufacturer. How disappointing.

I watched 'From Ape To Man' on the History Channel over the weekend. It's a two hour show on how science has determined we (Homo Sapien) evolved from apes to upright, walking humans. The show was pretty much what you expected, with one twist (at least to my mind). The show follows science's search for "the missing link". That one being that hallmarks the halfway point between what is ape and what is man. Specifically, they discuss the discovery of Neanderthal man (lived about 40,000 years ago) and Lucy (lived about 3.2 million years ago). But instead of finding a single being which defined the evolutionary step from ape to man, they found a natural, slow evolution of beings which, strung together, shows the slow evolution of man from ape. All this is stuff expected from science and I learned nothing new here. However, the twist, which I found fascinating, is that there have, at various times over the past 3 million years, been more then one bi-pedal species living on the planet. Fairly recently a German scientist took DNA from the bone of a Neanderthal man, tested the DNA, and compared it with that of modern man. The conclusion is that Neanderthal man is a different species then Homo Sapien. Science believes that both Neanderthal man and Homo Sapien lived at the same time. Homo Sapien, due to their better intellect, flourished while Neanderthals became extinct. Apparently, there have been multiple times when more then one "human" species lived during the same period. Through natural selection, one species died out while the other continued...to become man.

BTW, scientists currently believe that the defining moment in our evolution is not when our anscestors starting using tools, but when they started walking on two legs. Scientists believe we started life in Africa, back when it was full of trees. As the trees started dying and the grasslands took over, our anscestors spent less time in the trees and more on the ground. When this happened, they started walking on two legs, to see over the tall grass for possible predators. As they became less dependent on their hands for "walking", their hands started to develop for other uses. As they started using their hands for other uses, their brains started to develop.

Sony sells the Sony DVDirect VRD-VC20 machine, which transfers your VHS and camcorder tapes to DVD. A machine like this has been out for a while, but this is a new version of the box. The big advantage is that you don't have to deal with your PC to transfer videos from VHS to DVD, the machine does everything for you. You can hook your VCR directly up to the machine, or if you have a camcorder, you can hook the camcorder up to the DVDirect device and transfer directly from your camcorder to DVD. You can also hook up your computer if you want to do video editing before you burn the DVD. All this for under $300.

There was an announcement today regarding a reorganization of the Mozilla Foundation. They've stated they're starting a Mozilla Corporation. I suppose in this day of "give the source code away for free and charge for support or a better version", it make sense that Mozilla would do this. On the web page they've dedicated to this issue, they state the corporation will "provide funds to support development, testing, and productization of the various Mozilla open source technologies". It appears the Mozilla Corporation will distribute Firefox and Thunderbird, but still give others the right to distribute Firefox and Thunderbird in accordance with the Mozilla trademark policy. They'll also make money by integrating various search engines into the product. There are no plans to charge for support or for the product. Most of the Mozilla Foundation "employees" (36) will move the new Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation will still oversee the Mozilla open source projects.

I have no problem with them doing this, I just hope it doesn't scare off all of the engineers who have volunteered their time to make such great products and I hope they can continue to update it with new and inventive features..

Congratulations to the OpenSolaris Team for getting the long awaited OpenSolaris source code on the www.opensolaris.org website. If you're interested, you can browse the www.opensolaris.org source code using your web browser here.

I look forward to seeing how www.opensolaris.org fares out in the world now that it has been released. It certainly doesn't have the momentum that Linux currently enjoys, but I do feel it is technically superior.

I recently came upon ZoomQuilt, a collaborative art project. This is a collaboration of 15 people who created an interactive art piece. The interesting thing is that once you go to the website, you can click and move the mouse from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen and "move forward" (or backward) through the piece. As you do this, you're "zooming" into the center of the piece (you can't pan around). Eventually you will "move through" the current art piece and into the next art piece. There are several pieces you will move through, eventually coming back to where you started. I think one of the most interesting things is being able to enlarge what you see. It's like looking at you favorite painting and being able to zoom in to see it in more detail, you're surprised to see things you didn't even know were there. Of course, in this art piece, as you zoom in, you really do see things that "weren't there". The images are a bit "dark", but I'd like to see more of these zoom quilt's on the Net.