janos erdelyi

well i finally did it. after being a member since 2000, i finally canceled my Netflix account.

i’ve pretty much stopped watching DVD’s and i have zero interest in buying Blu-ray especially after the format wars of HD-DVD and Blu-ray. additionally, i just don’t see sticking with disc-based media, the DRM baked in, and the hardware to play it – be it a dedicated player, or a computer to play it plus the fact that not all operating systems will do so.

also, i just don’t see buying a dedicated set top box for Netflix. things like the Roku are somewhat tempting, but i already have enough devices hanging out around my TV. it’s starting to look like a set top box trailer park.

i thought i’d share :

i have a clean Fedora 12 install (x86_64) and PulseAudio is completely behaving as advertised! this is great!

now to find the time to update my wife’s system…

wow i haven’t looked at the Banshee music player in a year and half, if not two years. i decided to give it a run on my Fedora 12 workstation again.

damn! i’m impressed. good job, team Banshee

this is less a tutorial on how to migrate IIS 6 settings to another host and more a small aid in helping you maintain sanity.

here’s the nugget of joy : when you go to Action… All Tasks… Backup/Restore Configuration on the source machine and you hit Create Backup… be sure you check “Encrypt backup using password“!

what? why – you might ask? i thought this was about migrating to a new machine? funny you should say that! i had the same thought!

recently i configured a Vista media machine to go into sleep on a schedule to save on some power, as i’m currently evaluating my overly large electric bills and commensurate computer and device collection. the machine is a media machine hooked up to the TV that i use largely for watching movies and playing games, which means it’s not actually in use all that much.

why do i bring up Vista? by default Vista can go into a type of sleep called S3 sleep and Windows XP will only go into what is called S1 sleep. the differences in savings are vast. and if you‘re like me and you still use and maintain XP machines, this article may be for you.

in layman’s terms, S1 is the sleep mode where you wonder “Why am I still hearing all those fans?” in S3 mode, your current state is saved to RAM and then your system turns off the processor, the fans, etc – it looks dead. The differences are measurably and dramatically different.

Netflix, i’ve been with you since 2000. when it comes to DVD delivery, you are the only game in town, in my opinion.

for online delivery? BAH. it’s atrocious. and no, i will NOT get an xbox 360 or a Roku in order to get HD content. please cut it out with the utterly crappy SD low bit-rate pixelated garbage on the PC-based Silverlight player.

i’ve played with the adaptive Silverlight demos. i know what it can do. i have a 25/15 FiOS connection, so i know i can expect some decent video from it. i also know that you‘re expecting to eventually transition your business model to full-time online delivery. so please stop holding out on me.

i’m going to keep this short and sweet.

i keep hearing (and using, so that i’m not a complete ignoramus) about twitter, facebook, etc and the power of the social web, but i can’t help but notice in my day-to-day programming efforts, that all the real work is done through IRC and mailing lists. and by “real work“, i mean programmers talking to programmers to actually make all the things that end-users consume. heck, it’s even for things that programmers consume.

i realize this is a very developer-centric perspective, but i can’t help but think that the social web has an outrageously high noise ratio and doesn’t really have as much power as people think.

scenario: when booting up my wife’s computer, i kept seeing a notice that the Cool‘n‘Quiet hooks just weren’t there. so i decided it was time to update her BIOS. this is not something i do alot. mostly because once you screw the pooch on it, it’s really not good.

so i got everything downloaded and copied to disc, and got things rolling. ok, fine, here we are with the option to flash the BIOS. it’s what i was here for, so i got it started. everything was going – the blocks were filling up… then RED BLOCK RED BLOCK RED BLOCK, etc. CRAP. it’s not like shutting down will help. it’s a bad flash. the computer is dead, the wife is not happy, etc.

i replaced her system that day and had her back up and running (anything important is backed up daily), so that was resolved, but i had a dead computer here. not a beast of a system, but a respectable socket 939 with an Athlon 64 3500+ – it’s a decent system. It’s also a bummer – especially when it’s just sitting around like a lump with only one bad BIOS chip in it.

for those who care, it appears that you can now have a seamless Adobe AIR experience on linux now.

i installed the framework on my Fedora 10×86_64 machine without any problem, and then proceeded to use badges to install a few things, like the ebay desktop and the HCA Career Desktop – all flawless. good work, Adobe.

i did try things like the Adobe Media Player, but that was not supported – likely due to media protection (DRM) which is expected.

i’m going to keep this short and sweet. i don’t use IE7 for any sort of surfing, but i do use it for testing when i’m building out sites or web-based applications. some of my testing is on non-standard ports, but it’s still web development.

so here’s my gripe: if i do not enter in the protocol explicitly (“http://” in this case) for some url using a nonstandard port – for example “dev.someplace.com:7890“, IE7 will tell me “The webpage cannot be displayed“. So it’s admitting that it might think it’s a webpage, or at least that in some sense that it should make some default assumption that it’s a webpage. and i think we can all agree that the origins of Internet Explorer and any common parlance would reasonably say that IE is a “web browser” and that the common protocol of web pages is HTTP… so why doesn’t IE7 assume or at least TRY the url with “http://” in front? gah!