Just some random thoughts

Winter has finally found its way to Michigan. We have snow. And ice. And salt all over the roadways. Fortunately I have a remote control snowmobile (1/8 scale) to play with. :-)

I finally got around to installing Parallels and Ubuntu Linux on the MacBook Pro. First off, kudos to Parallels for making the software dang easy to use and run. And Linux, my friends, if Ubuntu is any guide, will start to make headway on the desktop. When? Oh within the next year I think we could see a percentage tick up. Say from .5% (I’m just making this up) to 1.5%. Will this effect Apple? Only if Apple stops innovating – any effects will be minor – Ubuntu is good, but it’s not Apple crazy-easy-good. Will this effect Microsoft? Oh yes. Vista, from the anecdotal reports I’ve heard, is just a souped up update to XP. With some annoying twists. Ubuntu’s UI and ease of use is, right now, better then my XP experience. For example, at work, today, I hooked up my USB Memorystick reader to download some photos. On a Mac, just plug it in, add the Memorystick and you’re ready to go! Not on XP. No – I just got that “new hardware added” message/noise. And then a Wizard pops up (in Ubuntu they hilariously call them “druids”). So I work my way through the wizard, it searches, and then finally reports “No drivers found” or “could not install” message. So I head out to the USB reader manufacturers site (PNY for the record) and look for drivers – I couldn’t find any. So I head to Sony and find some drivers for my Camera. I install that, no problem. But I now need to reboot. Logging back in after that, nope, my card reader still is driverless. So I run through the wizard again. Nope. So I try it in advanced mode, select what I think might be good options. And it does something and asks me to restart. So again, I patiently restart and log back in. Still no sign of the memorystick reader. So I now go into the devices manager and delete the driver/device I just installed because obviously it’s not working! I check PNY’s site once more and discover there are drivers – but they are only for Windows 98. They further state that it’s not needed for XP because XP natively includes support for USB devices. Oh really? Then how come my XP isn’t supporting my USB device? Anyways, I decide that I might as well try the installer because who knows it might just work? So I do. A reboot later and no my PNY reader still is unsupported. So I use the device manager to remove what damage I may have done. I then fiddle with the install new hardware Wizard and not more then 10 minutes later it “magically” discovers the proper drivers and installs them. I mean what the crap? Why didn’t it do this the first time around? Now Ubuntu, they have this really easy to use Package manager. That’s how you install and remove things. And it works very well. So well that I prefer it already to Windows XP in the less than a week that I’ve installed and used it. Microsoft has lots to fear. No wonder Microsoft’s working the patents, law and lawsuit angles – they don’t have time to innovate and improve. Linux is here.

And finally I leave you with a wonderful image of a cluster of cardinals. These birds are amazingly hard to get photos of as they seem to have an innate hatred towards photography and can just sense when your finger is pressing down…

Cardinal cluster

Zune…or how to kill your product quietly

Microsoft introduced Zune today. But you wouldn’t really know it. The marketing has been strangely quiet.

Microsoft introduced Zune today. But you wouldn’t really know it. The marketing has been strangely quiet. So after hearing that it has been officially introduced, I go to Microsoft’s web site to learn more about this gadget. Hmm. Nothing on the front page. Well maybe it’s under the mobile section…no. Not there. By this point the marketing-knowledgeable part of me is thinking this really isn’t good marketing. Granted Microsoft has been burned in the past for over-hyping some of its technologies that later underperformed to the market’s expectations (Origami being the most recent example). But this is so low key as to practically not exist. The fact that I had to use Microsoft’s search form to find it does not bode well for the product. Of course people will probably blog about it and that will increase market awareness…but no front page entry? It doesn’t look good. It looks like Microsoft is trying to quickly shove the dead body under the carpet and hope no one notices. And you know what? No one will. (It looks like they have some dynamic feed on the first page now and it has a short blurb about the Zune intro…but that’s like 1% of the front page and I sure the heck didn’t notice it until just now). And it looks like the press/PR lines are going to tout it as well. So maybe it won’t die in silence…

I’ve purposely left out a direct link so you all can experience the underwhelming marketing experience of what is Microsoft’s Zune. Very zen-like I suppose. Ah…I crack myself up sometimes.

Some other notes: The design of the identity – interesting concept, I’m not sold on its execution – it just gets too confusing in my opinion, especially in black (it looks like a mess of lines).

Product colors: Normally I’m not a fan of brown. Probably something to do with my dislike of the 70’s. Oh, brown can be done tastefully. And here I think it works. Brown will be Zune’s version of the pink iPod mini. Otherwise I’m not terribly enthusiastic over the product design. I think I’d have to play with it to make up my mind. And the bar is pretty high because of my iPod experience.

Packaging: I think the packaging colors is the most exciting thing about Zune that I’ve seen. I mean mixing pink with brown! Get out of here! Those MS rebels! Okay not really. The colors are definitely interesting and do jump out. But the fact that I’m interested more in the colors then the product…that’s like a kid being more excited by the box then the toy. Perhaps that’s the angle Microsoft is looking for…

Anyway, that’s some of my thoughts on Zune and it’s marketing (or lack thereof).

Updated to correct some bad grammar. Proof that I’m not perfect.

Mother may I?

For about a good half-hour today I was very close to freaking out about possibility of loosing my blog. It started off when I took a look at what end users see when they go to comment on my site. I wasn’t very pleased as the comment “page” lost its sidebar for whatever inexplicable reason (I have yet to sort out why it acted the way it did). So a couple of productive CSS tweaking hours later I had something decent to update my blog with. So I thought to myself, “Well since I’m already updating the look for the blog, why don’t I also update to the latest WordPress build?” And thus began a half-hour of frustration of trying to track down why the blog wouldn’t work. The database was fortunately fine so I knew that in the absolute worst case scenario I could always recover the old data. I finally solved the problem via the trusty server error logs which effectively told me it was a permissions problem. An FTP session or two later, everything was sorted out. I was, once again, a happy WordPress user.

More CSS tweaks to come fairly soon as I’m still not fully satisfied (what designer ever is?) with how things look.