Fnord.

For a while now, we’ve been using our iMac as a television, video chat box, movie screen and bittorrent server. (If you are hooked on a Canadian sitcom, bittorent is your best solution). Netflix streaming is especially good, and even the Vancouver Olympics worked reasonably well.

(As an aside, I hope it’s ok to be jealous of Anna. She’s growing up with free video chats with grandparents, and iPhones. Add flying cars, and the Jetsons will be old news to this generation.)

Last night I was reading the Ars Technica iPad review; another device I plan to get when I can convince Chris. Smack dab on page ten was news of iPad/iPhone software that, for $5, lets you view live or recorded TV on your handheld!

Damn!

What’s more, the hardware required (Elgato eyeTV One) is under a hundred bucks!

You also need an HDTV antenna, under $40, and the iPhone software. Voila, free-ish TV!

I had a gift certificate for $100 for Amazon, so this’ll be a present for Chris the PBS addict.

Caveats:

• Free channels are limited, and I don’t know if the tuner will work with cable or satellite.
• I suspect that we’ll watch most of the shows on the iMac; the iPhone screen is too small to really enjoy it.
• This may induce you to purchase an iPad as a better viewing device. This is My Evil Plan ™.
• Video files burn serious disk space. Might need a cheap USB drive to store them.
• Unlike bittorrent, these recordings have the advertisements, sigh. Worth a google to see if I can find a solution for that.

On the plus side, one more reason to not bother buying a television.

PS I had some images to spice up this post, but WordPress is being problematic at the moment, will revise and add them later once I solve the problem.

PPS Sorted. Missing php libraries.

A lot of people criticize Apple for its prices, but I have to say in response that taking the time to polish all the edges and simplify really helps. Consider this: I have had a few Bluetooth mice over the years, from Microsoft, Logitech and Apple. The latest Apple mouse is the only one where today it warned me that the batteries are low:

It’s a little thing, but for once I know to go get batteries, before the mouse just stops working.

It’s a nice mouse even without that feature, but taking a little bit of time to add software and hardware for voltage monitoring, it’s just easier to have and use.

In really high-end watches, the inner bits are polished and finished by hand to astounding degrees, even the parts that will only ever be seen by a watchmaker doing the service. Perfection is it’s own reward sometimes.

So I got a new laptop at work, and based on some good data I wrangled the solid state drive instead of a conventional hard drive. I had to go on a file jihad to make space (down to 250GB, ug) but the results are astounding:

Writing a 10G file

Y’know, for a laptop that’s nothing short of astonishing! Easily 3x the old drive. The read is even faster:

Note the 122.49MB/sec and almost zero CPU while doing so!

Wow. This is easily the most noticeable speedup since the days of the Celeron 300A. The 256GB drives are currently a $585 premium on the Apple store, and even at that I cannot recommend them strongly enough. Programs and data just snap now, even sluggish stuff like the Komodo IDE, ipython, Firefox and Photoshop.

Don’t wait for your next laptop, just buy an SSD for your current one and enjoy the ride.

I met a couple of old friends from out of town this week, and was amazed to learn that they still actually use my Macintosh page. So I’ve just finished and edit and update pass on it to bring it up to date. Enjoy!

If you’re like me, you spend significant amounts of time digesting PDFs. Papers, articles, documentation and the like. On OSX, the default Preview application does a good job of displaying files, but several things from the dead-tree experience are lacking:

• I like to, if I’m really diving into a paper, mark it up: highlighter, underline, questions in the margin and scribbles galore.
• Like a printout, how would I convey notes and such to someone else? If I’ve printed it and scribbled, I can just give it to them, but if I use another program to take notes (e.g. Voodoo pad) then it’s a pain to share.

A while ago I found (via Cool OSX Apps) the solution, a free program called Skim. Here’s an example screenshot, where I’ve used most all of the annotation tools on a single page to show the possibilities:

(Click for fullsize)

As you can see, you have highlighter, box, yellow post-it, side notes, freehand doodles, elliptical mark, and lines. I’m pretty sure there’s even more I haven’t found yet.

What’s more, any annotations are saved as part of the file, (see below, I was wrong on this) so they can be shared, saved and reopened later when you’ve forgotten that key insight. S’wonderful.

Highly recommended. Consider setting it to be the default program for PDF files as I have, and spend 30 minutes learning how to use it. For me, this was one of the last real reasons to print stuff out, now vanquished. Bravo.

Update 3/28: Commenter JRF points out that I hadn’t read the Skim FAQ, which explains that the annotations are stored in extended attributes and not the file itself. This makes them more fragile and hard to send via email, svn or the like. Skim is still useful, but read the FAQ if you want to share the results.

As previously noted, I’ve been wanting to try OSX server to solve some calendar/addressbook questions. Yesterday, I got my eval copy from Apple, and here ’tis, ticking away happily in VMware, 64 bit no less:

Lovely! (It’s downloading all the updates since it was shipped). Here’s the problem, though – the serial number Apple gives you? It expires 2/29/09. As in, I have all of four days before it drops dead. Four work days at that, sigh. If I didn’t have responsibilities I’d be tempted to stay up as long as possible and hack away. Few things are more enticing than an operating system long anticipated, and running it safely enclosed in a VM is even nicer.

Ahh well. Maybe this means that the next version, 10.6 aka ‘Snow Leopard,’ will ship soon and I can eval that.

As previously noted, the Apple adapter from the new Mini DisplayPort to dual-link DVI (whew, long name) is a ninety nine dollar POS. Here’s some pictures of the failure mode, curable only via unplugging or sleep/wake:

This is unacceptable. Even when its working, now and then the screen flickers, so I’d guess they have a clocking problem. C’mon, Apple! Fix this damn thing.

Inspired by the recent news that Google now has free sync of calendars and address books, I set off to try and get the following working:

1. I want to share a group called ’shared’ from my address book to Chris and her iPod touch. (There’s a bunch of other entries she doesn’t want.)
2. We really need a family calendar that we can both easily view and edit, for stuff like daycare outages, pediatrician visits, house guests and the like. If at all possible, push sync to iPhone/iPod would rock.

I was fiddling around with the CUDA code on the new Macbook and got some interesting-to-me benchmarks. Keep in mind that this is the cheaper of the Mac laptop lineup, using the slower Nvidia chip:

Yeesh!  1.6GB/sec to the device, and 5.8GB/sec once there!

Not sure how to interpret all of these yet; clearly each core has a fixed allocation of memory to play with. 800MHz seems slow, not sure if that’s correct or not.

16 cores on a laptop! Wow.

This seems to be a benchmark based on the Black-Scholes option pricing PDE. Again over 5GB/sec of usable device bandwidth. Damned impressive.

I’ve yet to try writing code, just running the sample code from the download, but it’s still amazing. Laptops are now portable supercomputers, particularly if you get the Macbook Pro – 24 vs 16 cores, even faster. This is really looking good for tightly-coupled code, it’ll be a challenge to port the lock-free ABC code to this model and make it run well.

One of the reasons to upgrade to the new MacBook is the new motherboard/chipset combo. It went from an Intel system to an Nvidia one, with the consequent addition of the NV9400M GPU. If you’ve not looked recently, this is a mobile part, which usually means slower and older than desktop chips. This one, however,

With 16 parallel processing cores and a 128-bit memory interface, the GeForce 9400M is able to deliver up to 54 Gigaflops of processor power

(That’s from this article)

54 gigaflops is fifty four billion floating point operations per second. That’s really, really fast. Nvidia has a programming system called CUDA that allows you to tap all of that goodness, and it’s available for OSX too. Version 2.0 works for me, but I had the following two problems that I wanted to mention:

1. The initial ‘make’ from /Developer/CUDA fails with a library error. Running

    ranlib *
   

   in /Developer/CUDA/lib solves this and then the build succeeds.

2. The programs then all fail to run with this error

   dyld: Library not loaded: @rpath/libcudart.dylib

   The fix for that, found here, is to define DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. My zshrc looks like this, also showing the modified path:

   typeset CUDA_HOME=/usr/local/cuda
   
   typeset DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$CUDA_HOME/lib
   
   typeset PATH=${HOME}/bin:${ANT_HOME}/bin:/usr/local/bin:$CUDA_HOME/bin:/Library/
   OpenSC/bin:${PATH}

I’m now experimenting to see how fast it runs the examples, so more later. I wonder how well this’d run the alphabet code? Hmm.