I will find my way from your lost wheel....

I know the weather has been way to good when I've been spending more time out doors then I have indoors. I'm move just as much when I'm outdoors (little to none) but the bright side is that I'm way more motivated to write.

And I can hear the clicks of like 3 maybe 4 mice right now as they all close their web browsers and go do something constructive rather then sit there and read this drivel.

Cool now that everyone has left lets turn the geek up to 11 here.

-- OSIRIX a DICOM VIEWER

OK chances are 99% of you have never dealt with this application before. It's a Open Source application for the Mac OS that is capable of advanced diagnostic image manipulation and reading. Translation, it's a program for looking at X-rays in digital format.

Nothing special in my world.

It's actually a pretty nifty program and I do have it loaded on my Mac and it works as advertised. Now normally something being either;

A. Open Source
B. DICOM Capable

Would not warrant mention on their own. Heck even together they barely merit mentioning. Then why talk about them? There are two versions of Osirix one being 32bit and the other being 64bit. The main difference other then the processing bits that the program utilizes is that you have to pay $149 for the 64bit extensions on a Open Source program.

I gotta say I'm having mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand they are doing nothing different from Redhat/Suse/Mandriva and the other big Open Source vendors if you want their "product" you can pay for it. Here's the rub though, every one of those products is available to freely download and use if you choose to. When you buy a license you are in effect buying support for the product. Which has been common practice for years and will continue to be. With Osirix this does not appear to be the case. You download the product and their is no support option if you would like the same product with 64bit extensions then you get the privelage of paying for it. Which when your spending $8k on a Mac Pro processing station $149 doesn't seem like much. To me though it seems dishonest from the Osirix group and flies in the face of everything that Open Source stands for.

Point is this, I don't care if a company/group/gang makes a product under Open Source and then tries to make a buck off of it. They have that right so long as the source code and all of it's pieces parts are available to whomever would like it. My biggest thing with this project is that Osirix is distributing under a GNU license yet I can't find anything on their site about the status of their 64bit offering.

Most frustrating.

Of course these are things that only I would worry about.

-- Blackberries

I'm talking about the cell phone email machines that run on celluar networks and not the fruit.

Though the fruit is most delicious.

A while back I traded my Treo 700P for a Blackberry Pearl on the Verizon network. It was a good trade. The Treo was/is a good phone, but the best way to describe smartphones is one of two ways. Those that are PDA's with phone functionality (Treo, Most Windows Mobile devices) and those that are phones with PDA functionality (Blackberry, iPhone, Sidekick, Symbian). For a while I figured I was after a PDA with phone functionality so I picked up a Treo. And while it was a good phone the speed and parts of the interface left alot to be desired in my book. Also the fact that it could be used as a defense weapon was not helping it's cause either.

The Pearl defiantly falls into the phone first category. The interface moves much more smoothly then the Treo did and sound quality is excellent (it was on the treo as well). For me the best part has been the size of the device which is very small and can be fit into most any pocket. Unlike the Treo which while it could go into a pocket it really felt much more comfortable on the outside in a holster like device. But why is this worth writing about? Simple the Blackberry works flawlessly with my 64bit Windows Vista. The Treo never as able to pull that trick off.

I flirt with the idea of letting the contract expire and then buying a iPhone, but I have a couple of qualms with this. First it's the AT&T network in Phoenix which has never inspired much faith in me (and reading reviews on the gadget blogs it seems like Phoenix isn't the only place where the AT&T wireless network would appear to be having issues). Second paying full price for a phone and still having to sign a two year contract? Bullshit I will do that!

So as I sit here waiting for a stable unlock of the iPhone from AT&T's network in the States so I can take it over to T-Mobile where their network may suck just as bad but at least they have great customer service!

OH and I won't have to sign one of those pesky contracts either. Of course a CDMA iPhone would be even sweeter, and I'm sure that will come with the flying pigs.

And with out of the ashes rose a "Pegasus"

So when I got home from hunting I came home to a desktop rig that would not turn on, after 3 hours of dicking with it I still couldn't get it to post. This is the 5th time this year it's done something like this to me and 3rd time since August.

So I did what any sane normal person would do, I ordered the parts for a new PC.

So 3 days and a bit of money later I now have a desktop rig and laptop rig that are truly on par with each other in almost all aspects except for one.

After screwing with Vista for 3 days to finally get it where I want it I am no longer of the opinion that those Mac vs PC commercials were were advertisments... THEY WERE WARNINGS!

Vista vs MAC OS X, hands down no contest MAC OS wins and I'm not saying that just because I have special place in my heart for Unix based operating systems either. It truly is the better OS, except for that whole playing games thing... Steve Jobs, hell Fake Steve Jobs even, if your reading this GAMES ARE NOT BAD THEY ARE GOOD!

So yeah I'm on Vista but it is nice to have a desktop rig that can play all of my games again. I guess that is why I bought a MAC so I could do work on it and not be bothered with all of the games.

Two final thoughts...

1. I know a few of you (Clint) are probally kind of curios as to what I got for a rig, The general specs are a.... Intel E6850, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD (main system drive), 8800 GTS 320MB Video Card.

2. I also upgraded from Tiger to Lepoard on the Mac over the weekend... I found the icon for a PC file share server to be how you say... Intersting : )

Heaven Beside You...

Whoo Hoo!!

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/09/11/free-iphone-unlock-supposedly-pending

Now the only thing standing between me and a iPhone is a lack of storage and a pesky contract on a cell carrier that actually works well for me.

Pegasus revisited....

3 months of MAC Book Pro bliss and I have to say I'm not regretting my purchase one bit. Dual booting with Win XP and the MAC OS is nothing short of the best of both worlds. Granted I think my total time in Windows is something like 6 hours while not playing "Supreme Commander" other then that it is all Mac all the time. I would even go so far as to call the Mac my primary computer.

However to every "Ying" there is a "Yang" and the "Yang" in this case is my desktop. All 75 pounds of it. I've been mulling over the next iteration of "Yang" for a while and I know it won't be a iMac... I love my Mac Book but honestly I do use my desktop primarily for one thing.

Gaming.

While I can game on the Mac Book under Windows I do like that I have a desktop with a full size keyboard. And after a couple of hours you really begin to apperciate that full size keyboard.

And the fact that I have come home to a computer that says "failed cpu test" on boot twice in the last month tells me it's time to start really thinking about a new rig.

I have the case picked out... it's my usual ungodly huge case.

I'm having pain and consternation with other pieces parts and I now am formally soliciting input. Please note that this input will be throughly hashed through and then hashed through again with another party (you know who you are) before landing on a final configuration.

Here are some talking points...

- Dual Core 6750 vs Quad Core 6600.... the dual core has a faster front side bus and is more over-clockable then the quad core. The quad core is a quad core. Price diffrence is ~$75

- SLI.... It seems like a good idea if you actually do it. The kicker is when you strap together two mid range cards you still don't equal the current high end. And for the over all cost of the two mid range cards you can get a kick ass high end card. Also which platform Nvidia 650 or 680?

- Hybrid drives will be out soon if they aren't already. I'm not one to pick up on new technology very often but this one does seem like a winner.

Other considerations, the new chips from Intel and AMD will be out in the next couple of months. Is there enough reason to wait for those chips or utilize what is out there currently? (Personal thought, most of the new chips will be of the quad core and 1300mhz fsb variety and may very well warrant sitting tight).

I'm defiantly in hurry to build this rig as I'm happy with the MAC Book and my Wii (and since Metroid 3 comes out next week I know that is going to keep me busy).

Go Go iShit!

Ok the iPhone has been out for a week now and every technology pundit with a computer and internet connection has given their $.02.

Time for me to give my $1.25 about their $.02.

There is no way to make a technology pundit happy... they always find some flaw with the item in question that will then be repeated by every half twit out there (I would have used more colorful language but this particular half twit has used technology pundititry in more then one or five cases...) So the biggest complaint about the iPhone has been the lack of inclusion of 3g data for it's data service (HSDPA for the GSM folks or EVDO Rev 0 or Rev A for the CDMA folks). The official line from Apple is something to the effect of...

"Current 3G chips suck power and we have included WiFi to use instead of 3G data" And they are absolutely correct. I will take a shitty WiFi connection over a good EVDO connection any day of the week.

Now for the counter point to the iPhone when Palm released the Treoo 700P it included EVDO data for CDMA (The Treo 750 on GSM has HSDPA) and what did the technology pundits roundly criticize?

"But it doesn't have WiFi"

Mary MOTHER OF FUCKING.......

And now I remember why I stopped watching TV news... because at least with technology pundits I know they are idiots... With political talking heads they could be feeding me a steaming pile of shit and I wouldn't know the difference... though that probably has more to do with the fact that I tend to skim over the politics sections of CNN and the BBC.

So where does this leave us? Well the iPhone is a interesting piece of technology that will be unlocked shortly (I give it 3 weeks from this posting and 6 weeks after that before it's so easy that my brother and mom could both do it) I'm still out in the cold since there will not be a CDMA version of the device unless Apple launches the iPhone in Japan and just happens to leave the door open for the device to work with CDMA carriers in the states.

Me? I'm going to pass on the iPhone in it's current revision and wait for the iPod with touch screen and upgrade. Of course I need it to be at least 40 Gigs before it's worth the money to me. I don't feel this great need to condense my gadetry down to one device between my Treo and iPod I'm good and for those long hauls I always take my laptop with me.

So there you have it kids the iShit from the iTwit's brain.

Chuck waits... You wait...

A week into the whole Mac transition and it's been way more painless then I thought. I've had more consternation about what to do with my music and photo's more then anything else. (two copies at the moment). It has not been all smooth sailing I have run into issues getting some web apps work. Don't worry it's all related to my work and that is why Steve Jobs gave us BootCamp.

Of course what Steve giveth Bill really fouls up....

I of course loaded boot camp and windows on to the Mac. And Windows runs great, I just have to boot into the Windows side to use it. I'm going to be honest I've never been big on booting between operating systems. So I've been checking out virtualization for OS X. The good news is there are some really excellent options out there. The bad news is that Microsoft has some really fucked up licensing.

This one has me a little ticked off so if you don't want to read about Microsoft and Apple for the rest of this post I would just go some place else if I were you.

I decided to load XP, you know since it's stable been out for forever and a day, and way cheaper then Vista. See now you can get two versions of XP full... OEM and Retail. The difference is OEM instantly gets tied to your hardware set. Meanwhile retail has some flexibility built in to help with those pesky hardware upgrades. Turns out that you can virtualize a retail version of XP but not a OEM copy unless you install the OEM copy directly into the VM. (This is really good info for anyone thinking about doing this).

So where does this leave me? Well for the time being I don't know I haven't landed on a virtualization setup that I really like. I would like to just do it and move on. At the same time though I still have my work laptop that I bring home and my desktop that isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Honestly for me the best solution would be a VM type appliance that contained I.E. and access to Java in the VM. After that I could really care less about Windows.

So other then the whole I need I.E. to do some legacy web stuff for work that I can do on another computer just as easily I think I could recommend a Mac as your next computer.

Unless you Curtis or Clint... there is just no talking any sense into those two.

Reflections in F.U.D. and you

Being a I.T. guy from time to time I get asked by certain indviduals for help for things that fall outside of my normal day to day duties.

I like to call these individuals Doctors.

So I get a call today from a doctor who wants to use his shiny new MAC to work from home with... I feel his pain. I agree to help him.

So as I'm talking to him I ask if he has made a boot camp partion for his MAC. You know since running windows in a virtulized environment is the least painful way to get 99.9% of windows only apps (read as active X or require IE) to work in MAC.

"I don't want to load windows on to the MAC and have to deal with anti-virus"

Wait, you don't want to deal with Anti virus in Windows on your MAC?

Ok on one side I can see the point... I mean that is why you bought a MAC isn't it? So you didn't have to deal with all of those stupid Windows viruses... On the other hand...

What on earth are you bitching about? Antivirus programs are so dirt simple that they should be the first or second thing you load up on your computer! And you don't want to deal with them?

My god man...

For the record I do have Anti virus on all of my boxes (Norton and AVG mainly) Windows/Linux/Mac

Just because Lord Steve says it's secure doesn't mean it's true kids...