Josh’s Blog

Heather had a doctor’s appointment yesterday and was able to get a recording of the baby’s heartbeat on her cell phone. WordPress apparently won’t let me add script code, but if you head over to our family blog, you can hear it too!

You may (or may not) have noticed that my blog has changed addresses! You can now get to it by going to http://josh.erquiaga.net. I’ve had the erquiaga.net domain for a while now, and I’m just getting around to actually using it. So, welcome to the (slightly) improved blog!

My guess is no. I really want to like Linux, and use it all the time. It appeals to the computer geek in me.  Unfortunately, I’ve also found that I don’t have the time or the energy to deal with Linux, especially when it takes hours or days just to get my wireless network connection up and running (and let’s face it, a computer isn’t very useful nowadays if you don’t have an internet connection).

This is why Linux in it’s current form will never be a mainstream operating system, no matter how many computer makers pre-install it on their machines. Despite whatever perceived flaws Windows has (including Vista), for the vast majority of machines you can just install it and go, and all your hardware will work out of the box. Apple makes it even easier on you, because they only have a limited amount of hardware that their operating system has to run.

The moral of the story is that until you can install Linux on anything and just have it work, it won’t be a mainstream OS. People don’t want to spend days on a forum and running obscure terminal commands to get their computer working.

So, today I finally uninstalled Chrome. I had thought that perhaps I would use it solely for the "turn-a-webpage-into-a-desktop-app” functionality, but even that is problematic, mainly because of the fact that Chrome is not a full-featured browser (is that too much to ask from a browser that has been in development for two years?). It works fine for Google Apps (though there are some weird rendering issues with Google Calendar that I don’t get with Firefox), but if I click on a link to anything (say, an article from Google Reader) the link is opened in Chrome (of course) and is generally mangled by Chrome’s rendering engine. Maybe one day I’ll use it (though I doubt it, unless it can somehow match the functionality of Firefox – or day I say even IE).

Microsoft labs just released a really cool concept called Photosynth, which basically stitches a bunch of photos together into a 3D type image. You can check out the reference ones they’ve done at their site (here). I went ahead and stitched together some of my Macchu Picchu pictures (here). The synth wasn’t great (apparently only 24% synthy, or 24% matchability), but it’s pretty cool none-the-less. Now that I know how Photosynth works (they have a video guide here if you want to try your own), I can take pictures of the cool places we go that will be “synthable.”

Josh had a really fun day today. It started out in Perris, CA, at the Perris Valley Skydiving School. They have a shark plane there. It looks like this:

Josh went with his friend Dustin.

They rode in the plane up to 12,500 feet, and then, they jumped out! They had a whole lot of fun!

Once they were back on the ground, they realized they had taken the whole day off, and Dustin had a brand new (from Craig’s List) road bike, so they came home and went for a ride. It was a really fun day! There are a few more pictures here, if you want to see them.

You may have read recently that a couple of Black Hat presenters found a way to totally circumvent Windows Vista security. Most of the initial reports didn’t have any sort of details, and many reasonable people decided to wait until the paper was finally presented to pass judgement. Many other people immediately jumped on the “Vista is the worst thing ever released to the public (at least that’s what the Mac switcher ads told me)” bandwagon. Ars Technica has a good article up on why the research these two presented isn’t actually that big a deal. Check it out.

It’s things like this which leave me undecided as to whom I will vote for. I’m going to let the politicians do their little flip flop dance for a little while longer and decide on what exactly they want their platform to be before I decide on which of the candidates I will vote for.

Don Reisinger is busy crying about Apple signing another year of an exclusivity agreement with AT&T for the iPhone, and I think he’s wrong. Here’s the comment I left him:

Don,
Although Apple COULD build a CDMA iPhone, it doesn’t seem like there is actually a compelling reason too, as they could only sell it in the US. Would the costs of R&D to build a CDMA iPhone be justified to really only gain Verizon subscribers? Sprint’s a pretty dead end service from what I hear. And, factor in that Apple hasn’t even hit their 10 million mark with the current iPhone.

The big news the other day was that Apple sold something like 1.3 million 3G iPhones on launch. To contrast, Nokia sells a million a day. Not a single one is a CDMA phone. There’s no worldwide demand for CDMA phones. Last November Verizon said they would be moving to GSM for high speed. A CDMA iPhone would be a poor investment.

And T-Mobile? Really? I’m pretty sure they have no 3G coverage to speak of. Let’s face facts. Apple really did do the smart thing accepting AT&T’s subsidy, because Apple then gets the money they want, and the subsidy makes it cheap enough that people will buy the iPhone in larger volumes.

The iPhone on any carrier other than AT&T in the US is a pipe dream. Don’t hold your breath people.