Geeky: August 2007 Archives

Thank God that someone finally unlocked the iPhone from AT&T.  It's about damn time. 

While there's been a lot of speculation as to why Apple would make such a bonehead move as tie themselves to AT&T, I can kind of see how it works for them.  For one, I'm sure that AT&T paid ridiculous dollars to become The Provider of Choice.  Second, I'm sure that Apple was happy to have a carrier that would offer the whole supercool voicemail thing, which is one of the 'big' features of the iPhone.  Third, why not?  AT&T's wrangling of the Cingular network (which is actually the other way around - Cingular grabbed up the ATT mobile division and is using it to rebrand their unbelievably tarnished brand identity and reputation) makes it one of the largest (if not the largest) networks around. 

So you alienate the poor jerks who are fighting the overpriced, bloated, horrible customer service companies and use T-Mobile (like me.)  No big deal, we're a minority anyway.  Locking the iPhone down to AT&T seems like a low blow though.  Offering it primarily through AT&T, that's one thing.  Locking it down?  Low.

And everyone knows I'm a huge fan of Apple and all things Apple.  Their product line, their philosophies (most of them, anyway), and their general Way has been something I've been preaching for years.  This latest move doesn't impress me (and I know it hasn't impressed many others.)  Unfortunately (and Apple knows this) the phone rocks.  It's really impressive.  I don't do first runs, I always wait for revisions, and I was sorely tempted to score one an iPhone.  I hate AT&T/Cingular, and I was sorely tempted to get an iPhone.  This lockdown crap had me up in arms, yet I was sorely tempted to nab one of these puppies. 

So yeah, they're doing their thing, dancing with the devil, whatever.  Their products still rule.  Even though the process of unlocking the sucker requires 2 hours of skilled soldering and software manipulation (i.e. hacking this shit out of it), I'm glad it was accomplished.  I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there's a simpler, more easily accomplished solution or, like was mentioned in the article, the cottage industry of unlocking iPhones will spring up to provide the rest of us with phones.  I think a lot of whether this cottage industry will thrive will depend entirely on how much more expensive the iPhone will get after the unlocking process.  We'll see.

What'd be great would be to see Apple actually offering to unlock iPhones.  Or heck, why not just sell unlocked iPhones to begin with?

This may be old to some, but it's news to me.  Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to make a mouse out of a hot cup of coffee.  Right.  Don't believe me?  Oh, please, click the link to see the hot, steamin'  Cuppa Mouse.

One of the biggest complaints (if you could call it that, really) I've heard about Movable Type is that it costs money.  There's little enough regard these days for the craftsmanship that it takes to put out good software, but to complain because a developer is trying to make a few duckets is a little silly - although Six Apart *does* ask for some steep numbers. 

What I'm not a fan of is the $300+ price tag on some IDEs.  That kills me.  But I digress.

Anyway, while there's a dearth of completely free (as in beer?  I keep running into that.  Sounds like a Stahlmanism) software out there for blogging, there's another semi-commercial package that we installed on Sillysmart, and it's actually worth taking a longer look at.  I say semi-commercial, by the way, because they offer a 'free' license for a less-feature-rich version of their software alongside super-expensive 'fuller' versions.  Anyway, I'm talking about Expression Engine.

Installation was a breeze - easily as simple and straightforward as MT (although nothing, nothing in the world, is easier than Wordpress.  It's like, two screens.)  Getting started is a tiny bit rough - the interface is clean and fast, but the paradigm isn't the clearest.  MT now has this big red "Write Entry" button that couldn't be any clearer.  Oh, and did I mention it was fast?  Yeah, extremely fast.  As fast as MT3 was, as fast as Textpattern. 

It's touted as being very flexible.  I take this to mean a lot of things, but on a basic level, we'll see how tough it is to skin correctly (this'll inspire me to actually do something about my damn website.  I keep putting off redesigning it.)  I have to skin MT4 too, so I'll be able to draw some comparisons, no doubt.

I seriously considered throwing MT4 on Sillysmart, but I like this decision.  Expression Engine seems like a very well put together, very forward engine that hasn't disappointed and (I hope) won't.  In the meantime, I have a pb&j to scarf down.  Hack the planet.

So many hours burned, so many bruises.  The final result?  A working, spanktastic copy of MT4, chilling mackadaciously and looking good.  How did I achieve this, after so many entries of how unbelievably painful the process is?  The solution is very simple.  In fact, I should really have thought of it earlier, but I wasn't thinking clearly.

I exported all my entries.  I blew away the MT directory.  I did a fresh install into a fresh database.  Then I went in and re-imported all my entries. 

This method is not without its caveats.  All my customizations are gone, my theme modifications are gone, heck, my themes are all gone.  My images are all gone.  That means I have to go through each entry that had an image associated with it and 'fix' it.  Fortunately, I don't have that many images, since I only recently discovered the joy of adding pictures to my unbelievably engaging text.  Still, it's a touch on the annoying side, for sure.

Now, on to The Good News.  I've had a chance to give the MT4 interface a nice run, it's been put through some paces, and I've taken the opportunity to do a few things here and there.  It's good.  Really, really good.  Significantly better than it used to be (and I kinda liked the ol' 3.3 interface).  It's a good bit better than Wordpress or even Textpattern (which I love for its sheer flexibility).  Oh, and the speed issue?  Apparently the sluggish behavior of MT was due to my attempts at upgrading.  Now that I've done a fresh install, I'm having no speed issues whatsoever.  Oh, so very nice. 

The final verdict: I take back all the nasty things I said about MT4 - well, most of them anyway.  In the end, totally worthy.  But be prepared to do it The Hard Way - there's no easy way to eat a Rhesus.

After even more bloody knuckle slugging with MT4, it's finally at the point where the theme is showing up. But wait, there's all these random tags all over it. Oh my.

Thanks to Sarah from the Six Apart forums for pointing me in the direction I needed to go in order to begin the warfare that is my experience with upgrading to MT4. Her direction got the theme working - my next trick is going to be figuring out how the heck I'm gonna get rid of all this extra tag crap. Argh, it's so frustrating. If you're on the fence at all about upgrading, I would say skip it. The fancy new interface isn't worth this pain.

After fighting (literally - my knuckles are bleeding) MT4 for almost a week, I finally stumbled upon the magic combination of setting that would allow the site to publish successfully to the right location, and produce the sweet sweet mental nectar you see before you now. I'm still not totally impressed (or especially happy) with MT4 - I think most people will want to wait on this update. Personally, I kind of wish I hadn't made the jump. But that's not how I roll. I actually like whippers. Woohoo.

MT4 is slow as hell. Okay, not totally fair - the front end of it seems fast enough. The back end is painfully, painfully slow. I've read all about people who are saying "MT4 is actually faster than 3.3". I call shenanigans on that monkey-business. The backend interface is slower'n molasses oozing uphill in the middle of winter. I've driven Hondas that were faster than this (ooooh, buuurn...). It looks nice, though - if they manage to figure out a way to speed it up, it's got definite potential. I see a lot of styling cues form Wordpress, so if you're riding the fence, you might consider giving WP a whirl first. In terms of performance, Wordpress has the definite advantage (as of this writing, that is.)

For my next trick, I'm going to try to figure out how to make MT4 actually look like its supposed to, rather than this ugly, unstyled grossness you're probably looking at now. Gah. Uncool.

So I migrated to Movable Type 4.

Ugh.

So yeah, the new interface is pretty sweet. Lots of good stuff going on there - a much-needed improvement (especially graphically) over the original. It's got lots of doo-dads. If you don't know what a doo-dad is, I recommend checking on Wikipedia.

The 'upgrade' is fairly painless - and I say fairly because the blog has only been down for two days. I'm a little frustrated with a lot of things, not the least of which is my 'mostly' working installation of Fedora, my inability to get LDAP working correctly, my inability to get Bongo working correctly, my inability to stop whining about my inability to do things. Last thing I really felt like dealing with is the MT4 upgrade process. I got it eventually, of course, but be warned - it sure ain't as smooth as all that. And worse: the new MT4 is slow. Eh.

Meanwhile, there's a Naruto marathon going on right now on Cartoon Network. Naruto is freakin' awesome. Go watch it.

Everyone knows I'm a big fan of the ICE:Link by Dension... I had one in my TT, and it worked pretty well. Integration was good, almost seamless, it charged, and it looked pretty nice. Monster Audio had its own version, and really, unless you were extra-super-ghetto and just connected AUX cables into the inputs on the back of your head unit, that was pretty much it.

Now there's a new player on the block. Integrated Mobile Electronics is promising to be the next generation of car audio docks for a variety of mp3 players (not just the iPod). The implementation looks slick enough - but it's not on the market yet, so we have yet to see what the real-world performance is going to be. Check it out, at least it looks superfly.

Wanna keep that iPod dry? Even underwater? Yeah, don't we all (especially if you drive a Jeep, right?) Well, check out the Drypod case. Apparently it's waterproof. Like, really waterproof. Not just mostly waterproof (like other cases we've tried...)

Ever want to fabricate your own parts to make, say... a watch? A gizmo or cool device you dreamed up? Pretty much anything? Well, now you can.

Check out the home fabrication system these guys came up with.

For a paltry $2300USD (and that really is paltry compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars fabrication equipment generally costs), you can put together all kinds of neato things. I'm duly impressed. I think everyone should have one. 3D printers are The Way Forward.

Anybody who knows me knows that I like to be at the forefront of the latest bleeding edge technology. Crapper technology. This is the sort of technology that makes me scratch my head and wonder out loud. A compost toilet...? I mean, is this for real?

Research on Wikipedia shows that it is, indeed, the real deal. Well, the concept is, anyway. Maybe it could work - personally I think the whole concept is a bit nasty. It's not the giant steaming pile of "humanure" (that's an industry term, by the way), but all the gross flies, gnats, and other winged fauna that make such a pile their home. That's just not right.

Somehow the proponents of this "green" technology/technique think that it's perfectly sanitary to do this. All I have to say is: Dark Ages and the Plague. They had shit-pits then, too, and look what it did for 'em. In fact, if I recall, it was the development of indoor plumbing that solved a whole lot of health issues (and I think it's also one of the basic tenets of civilization, along with literacy.)

This green thing is great, but don't ask me to live in humanure. I have enough to deal with cleaning up after our crazy skunk.

Still interested, huh? Well, here's more information.

Amazingly enough, this post isn't about flatulence, but it is about passing gas. Apparently, the Sierra Club has decided to judge oil companies and come up with a sort of 'rating system' to help you figure out which oil companies are the 'good' ones, and which are the horrible, mustache-wearing 'bad' ones. I understand that certain oil companies (i.e. Exxon) are exceptionally insensitive to the needs of the environment - but they are an enormous, enormous company, and they're not particularly well organized. They came about well before many of the newer companies, and their infrastructure doesn't seem well-designed to deal with the rigors of modern energy-conservation and environmental concerns. Companies like BP, on the other hand, have proven themselves to be agile and very market-driven. People want to feel less bad about driving 8 mpg Hummers, they buy BP gas.

But it's all hype, and it's all driven by their respective marketing departments. The BP logo is even a green/yellow sunburst flower thing. You feel greener just pulling into it. But if you read the Sierra Club's report, even though BP is the 'top of the barrel', they have plenty of black marks, including running the highest-polluting plant in the world. So really I just get the feeling that this report is less about empirical data, and more about 'how green is their marketing initiative?"

On the plus side, at least the oil companies at the top of the barrel are saying that they're gonna do something about it.

Read the Sierra Club article here.

In even more ecologically-enhanced news (I must be on some kind of green kick here...) check this out. I'm even thinking of submitting a design. Either way, take a look at the gallery, because there's some seriously neat designs there!