I’ve been experimenting with Operator, a Firefox microformat extension for the last week. Conceptually, the idea of microformats (lightweight human-readable data standards for everyday things like business card info) is appealing but the proof is in the adoption. I haven’t found a compelling need for Operator yet but it works fine.
Author Archives: admin
KVM
Slashdot links to a good article on virtualization, this time the inclusion of KVM, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, in the 2.6.20 kernel. There are now, at least, four virtualization options for Linux: VMWare, KVM, Xen (our preferred approach), and QEMU. KVM is new to me; it’s backed by Qumranet which includes the former CTO of XenSource, Moshe Ben, as one of its founders.
Songbird
Out of necessity, just last week I hooked up a pair of cheap computer speakers to the computer on my desk. In the past, I’d gotten by using the crappy speakers on my laptop whenever I needed to listen to something. In the past couple of years, though, I’ve started to use headphones (I have a pair of Etymotics ER-6s that I love and highly recommend) more and more, as I’ve started listening to more podcasts and the like.
But especially with the emergence of video (hello, Daily Show!), it’s gotten to the point for me that I need to have always-available audio, so I scrounged up a pair of speakers. So, for me, this marked some kind of watershed; from using my main work computer principally as an office device to using it as a media device.
The addition of the speakers, this trivial watershed, has had the very desirable side effect of causing me to start listening to more music at my desk. But, in doing so, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with iTunes; in the past I’ve used it mainly as a way to get music onto my iPod, but as I use it more on a daily basis, I’m coming to realize how limiting it really is. I looked around a bit and the alternatives (Winamp?) don’t seem much better.
The iTunes interface is usable enough, although I don’t like the brushed metal look. And I really like how easy it is to *buy* music via iTunes and the ninety-nine cent per song flat pricing is simple and reasonable. In contrast, I went into a Tower Records in Union Square in Manhattan over the holidays to buy a CD for my brother and I was overwhelmed by the chaos of the place. Admittedly, it was a busy shopping day in a busy city, but I had a real nerd-moment when I yearned for a search box to type in, “Bob Dylan, Modern Times.”
But I don’t understand the way iTunes stores my music and I don’t understand the DRM that lets me have access to most, but not all, of my music. I don’t have five computers but iTunes thinks that it’s authorized music on five computers, which is its limit. And I don’t think that I want to bother figuring it out. So I’m blaming iTunes, which is otherwise a respectable enough piece of software.
So, I says to myself, there has got to be an alternative to iTunes out there. I searched around for a bit and the best I could come up with was Winamp, which works well enough but is clearly showing its age. Another option, Songbird, a XUL-based media player, looks like it will an interesting alternative. It’s still in development, but having an open source extensible iTunes would be great. (The Songbird developer team is awesomely named POTI: Pioneers of the Inevitable.) So for now I’m going to stick with iTunes the application, skip the music store because of the DRM (I’m experimenting with eMusic at the moment), and hope for Songbird.
Crackberry to the rescue
Energy Efficient Data Centers
Nicholas Carr has a characteristically insightful but caustic piece on “frugal computing,” arguing that the costs of data center computing are increasingly environmental: energy, heat and cooling, is what’s scarce, not processor power or bandwidth. It’s a long but worthwhile read.