Microsoft, you're the best!

So I received a document over the weekend that had been created with Microsoft Word. "What a boring blog post," you must be thinking, but wait, I'm not finished. This particular document was created with Microsoft Office Word 2007. "This isn't helping!" you exclaim.

Would it improve the situation if I told you the file extension was ".docm" and my version of Microsoft Office Word 2003 was unable to open it?

I believe you stand corrected.

Before I could open this Microsoft application-created document with my Microsoft application I actually had to download a Compatibility Pack. A 27.5 MB compatibility pack, in fact. Apparently this pack allows pre-2007 versions of Office applications to work with Microsoft's new Open XML (Wikipedia's Open XML entry) formats.

This was a time-consuming annoyance when all I wanted was to read some text. I realize a ".docm" extension means the document is macro-enabled, but just a plain Office Word 2007 document with its ".docx" extension would require the same update, and there was nothing extraordinary about the document I was trying to open.

I suppose if this is the beginning of a Microsoft policy of greater interoperability going forward that is a good thing. However, going forward by alienating all that has come before is rarely the best way to proceed. After being forced to use Internet Explorer to use Microsoft Update and confirm that I had all the latest updates (recommended before proceeding -- yes, I RTFM), it took only about five minutes to download, unpack and install this compatibility pack. The best part about the installation was that Word was open the whole time and I didn't have to close down or restart it for the pack to work.

But what about the millions of Office users worldwide? Is this going to encourage current users to upgrade? What if someone doesn't have a broadband Internet connection? What about those in developing countries to whom Microsoft has practically given away its Office suite (2007) and other software products? Is this "free milk" with a past-due expiration date?

In short, thanks, Microsoft. Way to implement interoperability.

Online storage solution that's easy and inexpensive

Quick quiz -- would you rather pay $200+ for an external hard drive and backup software or $0.15 per GB-month of storage used and $20 for a front-end backup application?

Hmmm... not quite as snappy as I'd initially envisioned, but it should get the point across that online file backup can now be a reasonable solution, particularly because that external hard drive is just as vulnerable to wear-and-tear, floods, fire and destruction as the PC you are backing up with it. Same goes for CD and DVD ROMs.

Sometimes I stray from my gaming-related newsfeeds and find something applicable to the realm of work. I've been meaning to find a way to backup my work documents and ran across a recent post (hit ctrl-f and search for "Amazon S3" to skip to the heading) on 43folders that spurred me to try an online solution.

The front-end application is called JungleDisk. It costs $20 after the free 30-day trial and provides an easy-to-use interface for Amazon's S3 web service, which is what actually stores the data. JungleDisk makes an otherwise consumer-unfriendly service meant for developers accessible and useful for everyday backup.

JungleDisk provides secure SSL connections to S3 as well as the option to separately encrypt documents before they are sent. Windows, Mac and Linux versions are available, as well as the source code. Since JungleDisk is merely the front-end to your S3 account, you can also run JungleDisk on any computer with Internet access and you'll have your files.

The S3 service provides off-site, decentralized, redundant and unlimited data storage.

Setting up JungleDisk was pretty easy. No configuration was required beyond the default settings other than telling it which directory I wanted to backup. The "disk" it creates shows up in your "My Network Places" folder on Windows. If you use Windows XP or Vista you can map the "disk" to a local drive letter. For the S3 account, you can either add it as a web service to your existing Amazon account or create a separate Amazon and corresponding S3 account.

As a test I backed up one of my entire directories of work docs, which was 17.3 MB of various Word, WordPerfect, Adobe and OpenDocument files. It took 2 to 3 minutes to upload everything and there were no problems. I was able to check my S3 account activity immediately and it showed I would be billed a whopping $0.04 on December 1 for the storage and transfer.

JungleDisk can automatically backup particular files or directories about as frequently as anyone could want. I'm going to give this a try for awhile and see how it goes. I certainly feel better now that important documents are safely backed up.

Blogger's word verification for comments appears to be down

[UPDATE 10/6 -- word verification appears to be working again. Comment moderation is now off.]

The word verification aspect ("captchas" which require human intervention to recognize and then type distorted words from an image) of posting comments appears to be down at the moment, which makes it impossible for visitors to post comments. For this reason I turned that feature off but enabled comment moderation, which means I'll need to approve any comments before they are posted.

Hopefully this will be short-term and if anyone has wanted to comment lately but couldn't, please try again.

Do we have a Wii visitor?

Alright, who's using Opera?


For that matter, what's up Camino-using Mac person?

Gotta support the little guys.

Most may ignore you, but I see.

I see and I appreciate.

GPLv3 release - LIVE VIDEO FEED!

[UPDATE-2: failure watching *streaming* Theora content on Windows]
[UPDATE: success watching Theora content on Windows]

Hi nerds! Everyone going to log on for the release announcement by Richard Stallman?

Live video feed at 12p Eastern Standard Time on Friday, June 29 at fsf.org.

Video requirements here. They will be using the Theora open video codec (interestingly, released under a BSD license). Compatible media players are here. It is possible to use Theora on Windows, though I haven't tried to set it up yet.

[UPDATE]
As much as I have an aversion to RealPlayer because of its system-resources hogging nature and sometimes overbearing self-promotion while using its player, I did get it to play Theora-encoded files with no problem after downloading the appropriate plugins.

I first tried the Directshow filters which were supposed to work with Windows Media Player, but I could only hear audio and encountered an error when I pressed "stop." Maybe WMP wasn't appropriate for tomorrow's event anyway.

Some fun and short Theora-encoded videos to test your installation are here.

[UPDATE-2]
I can't explain it other than to say the obvious, which is that decoding and viewing streaming content is a different animal than decoding and viewing a fully complete movie from a hard drive. The short of it is, it didn't work. However, I don't think I missed anything earth-shattering. This should be fairly straightforward, however, and this type of failure is one reason open source, or as Stallman would prefer, "free" software is not quite ready for prime time mass consumption.

Stat summary of visitors: the first 21 months

General curiosity and a desire to use Google Docs' chart feature have led me to this point. I created the Google Docs charts by downloading the raw data from StatCounter and then plotting from a spreadsheet. Google Docs saves these charts in .png format and they are less than 6kb apiece.

I signed up for a Blogger account in August 2005 in order to comment with an identity on my friend Eric's blog before he migrated to using TypePad. The first thing I felt a desire to blog about was my trip to Seattle, WA with some friends to attend Penny Arcade's Penny Arcade Expo 2005.

So, a brief summary of some numbers as of May 2007:

Total pageloads: 5,327
Average # of
pageloads per month: 242

Total unique visitors: 4,080
Average # of
unique visitors per month: 185

The first big spike is January 2006, which was Howard Stern's debut on SIRIUS satellite radio, garnering 326 unique visitors that month. The middle spike is July 2006 with 321 uniques. I'm not sure what happened then, but I posted about having not posted for almost a month and also about Carson Daly, so obviously something else was going on.

The last spike is December 2006 with 325 uniques. Howard Stern went on a Christmas TV media promotional blitz for SIRIUS and I posted his appearances. Other than huge events that I specifically wrote about and others specifically searched for, it is difficult to make many correlations with this data, but I still love seeing the numbers in vibrant color form. I can see the search terms that visitors used to reach my site, but only for the 100 most recent visitors. This is only because I use the free version of StatCounter and not due to any deficiency in the stat code or its featureset.

Just for fun, here is the data broken down by quarter. This chart and the one above are from Google Docs:
For comparison, here is a graph of the same data from StatCounter:


Related post: Using Google Docs

On using Google Docs

Over the last few weeks I've been using Google Docs & Spreadsheets to great effect. Having documents-in-progress at a centralized network location is simply convenient, especially for those like me who haven't jumped on the USB thumb drive bandwagon. I still carry around 3.5" discs. It's nice not to have to worry about which version of a document I am carrying with me or which version I emailed yesterday. GDocs also appears to keep a complete archive of revisions which can be reverted to at any time.

The sharing is cool too. Right now I'm collaborating with two different people on separate documents that I want each of them to be able to see and/or modify at their convenience. GDocs tracks who you have shared with, what privileges they have with that document, and ties that collaborator's contributions or modifications to an identity so you can see who contributed what, where and when. Collaborators do not need to have a Google Account to have access, you just "invite" them to share your document using their email address. There's also a real-time chat window next to the document for instant discussion.

Also, current documents you're working on offline can be uploaded, modified and then exported (yes, you can export as a PDF) at any time, all major formats (including OpenOffice's ODF) accepted. As far as I can tell all formatting and formulas come through ok. There are publishing options I haven't explored yet, including adding documents to your blog. Maybe this calls for a chart.

Microsoft set to lock down Office docs; enforced with encryption and DMCA

Ok, this is too much. Via Linux Journal I found an article in InformationWeek about MS's new Vista OS and how it will enable MS to criminalize open document readers and consequently kill open standards computing.

The gist of it is that Vista will enable Information Rights Management (IRM), a feature available since Office 2003, to control the hardware (yes, you read right -- see "trusted computing" below) and software required to open a document created with Office running on Vista while also allowing control over whether that document can be printed, edited, copied, forwarded or any number of other possibilities. These rights can even be "managed" remotely, though I imagine that would require being on a common MS network using Outlook or the network to obtain the document.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is invoked by the use of encryption to enforce the IRM. In short, bypass the encrypted formatting and break the law. The IRM features can be incorporated with "trusted computing" principles to completely lock down the documents at the hardware level of your PC.

The InformationWeek article talks of losing open document standards, but the Linux Journal article predicts much more dire consequences: the possible forced obsolescence of Linux and other open standards-based OSes. If most of the computing world is standardized on Microsoft platforms and products and it is illegal to even duplicate MS functionality for common document use, how useful will Linux be?

If Microsoft successfully implements these "features" then it has truly missed the boat of the Internet with a capital "I." The value of the Internet is that it does not matter what client you use as long as it supports the common and public standards the network (i.e., "Internet") uses to move data around. Once documents created with Microsoft products can only be opened or manipulated using Microsoft-approved systems, we've reverted to the earliest Apple/IBM incompatibility headaches and corresponding lack of sharing, communication and creativity among users.

Successful implementation may also create a pseudo net neutrality advantage to Microsoft users. Imagine corporations, who are by the way huge users of MS products, which will not accept documents unless they are submitted in a protected MS Office format or will only make press releases or other company information available in that same protected format. Who cares if your Linux box has as much bandwidth as some other guy's Windows machine -- your Linux-created document simply isn't getting through.

Such a corporate lockdown is not unrealistic given the fact that corporations' IT departments like the consistent, easy-to-manage, standardized (ironic, no?) infrastructure that a MS network provides, plus Microsoft sells IRM as a "company asset" in its description of the feature. What corporation or IT manager does not want "Information privacy, control, and integrity" incorporated into network management?

Please read both of the articles mentioned in the first paragraph and become informed about what software and computing companies are doing. Even if you are only a Microsoft user you should be concerned about your shrinking choices and limits on your free use of your own property.

Feedburner initiated

Thanks to an entry on the McWilliams' World blog I am trying feedburner to manage my RSS feed. I'm not sure whether those of you who subscribe and use feed aggregators will have to resubscribe, but I think Blogger still sends out the standard RSS and Atom feeds. I'll be experimenting with the feedburner syndication "chicklets" as it calls them (the little graphics one clicks on to subscribe to a feed) so some things in the right margin may be reordered or changed, but that's it.

Feedburner allows its members to monitor how many people are subscribers to their feeds, among other things. I love tracking my visitor stats, so these additional numbers will feed my hunger for more data.

Linux distro suggestions request

I know a number of you out there use some distribution of Linux, so I need some advice and information. I'm a big fan of open source software and the general idea and ethic behind it, so I am finally going to make the jump and do an installation to see if I can accomodate all of my computing needs with a fully open source Microsoft-independent PC. Just using Firefox isn't cutting it anymore, and my hard drive with Win2000 is nearing death, so I figure now is a good time for a new hard drive and new OS.

My question is which Linux distribution would you recommend for a first-time Linux user? I know there are legion, but based on your experience what do you think?

There are a myriad of questions you will want to know about my PC hardware and computing preferences before advising me, so I'll try to list below all of the relevant information.

Computing preferences:
Software: Fairly basic needs including word processing, spreadsheet, web browsing, email, mp3, video, pdf, photo editing. Ability to interoperate with MS Office may be a necessity for work.

Hardware: Wireless, wireless, wireless.

Me: I'm an intermediate computer user, able to build a PC and troubleshoot most hardware and software problems. I'm not a coder, but I am familiar with programming structure and logic and take technical issues as a fun challenge.

PC hardware:

• MSI motherboard, K7T Turbo Limited Edition w/RAID (using onboard sound)
• AMD Athlon 1133 MHz
• 512 MB RAM
• ATI Radeon 7500 AGP, 64 MB, AGP
• Intel Pro/100S PCI network adapter
• D-Link AirPlus G DWL-G510 wireless PCI network adapter
• EIDE hard drives
• Philips PCRW404 CD-RW400
• Generic EIDE CD drive, 48x
• Generic 3.5" floppy drive

I also may try to make an older PC more useful with Linux:

• ASUS motherboard, VX97
• Intel 200 MHz MMX
• 48 MB RAM (non-matching SIMM modules)
• SoundBlaster AWE 32 (?) sound card
• ELSA Victory Erazor, 4MB, PCI (thanks, Mish! that was a killer upgrade.)
• Hauppauge! WinTV card (not a deal-killer if this is not Linux-compatible -- does the "Win" in the name automatically disqualify it? :-P)
• Kingston PCI network adapter
• EIDE hard drive
• Generic EIDE CD drive, 4x (?)
• Generic 3.5" floppy drive

If I can resurrect my laptop with a new hard drive I will also convert it to Linux:

• IBM i1452; (Lenovo link)
• Celeron 366 MHz
• 64 MB RAM
• 56K Lucent onboard winmodem, but two PCMCIA slots available for a network card
• CD/DVD drive, 2x
  

What I have found so far:
Reading up on the subject, I have found Eric S. Raymond's web page to be inspiring generally about the open source movement, and he made the suggestion of finding a local Linux user group to help with a first-time installation by a Linux newbie. The nearest active one to me is the Linux User Group of Davis and wouldn't you know it, they have Linux installfests.

On distros in particular, SUSE was recommended to me long ago (pre-Novell) by a techie whose opinion I respect, but things may have changed since SUSE was bought out. I've also thought about Fedora Core since it was developed by the ubiquitous Red Hat which I assume makes it more likely to have wide hardware support and consistent technical support. Lastly I've considered Ubuntu, mainly because one of my friends has installed it, it seems to have a small footprint and is pretty much the hot new thing right now.

I haven't decided on a desktop environment yet. The general consensus seems to be "try them and use whatever you like best," so based on what I've read I'll start with KDE.

Ok, go!

Microsoft's Live Drive for Vista -- how about supporting the Xbox Live service?

Free online storage is a good idea -- it's convenient and, well, free.

With readily available upgrade options, free online storage is also less of a concern for PC users than for console gamers. I haven't heard yet whether Microsoft plans to integrate its Xbox Live service into Live Drive, but I bet it would be much appreciated by gamers.

Think of the ability to store game saves, trailers or demos online. This frees up local hard drive space on the console, plus would allow for a place to save these things for transfer back to the console in the event the console hard drive needs replacement or is at some future point upgraded with a larger capacity.

Sounds good to me.

Another move, another wireless network to administer...

So as of Tuesday morning, 8/1/2006, at 12:30a I am now a resident of Elk Grove. The move was fairly painless, at least in the physical sense, as far as moves go. One large 15-foot truckload of "the big stuff" and three smaller trips in my pickup took care of it. No matter what I intend there is always the rush of the last day. Believe it or not, on July 31, the day I had to be out of my apartment, I returned the 15-foot truck, made one trip to the new place in my pickup, returned the utility dolly and moving blankets I had rented, had two fillings done at the dentist and returned my high-speed internet modem and cables to the main Comcast office, all before cleaning the entire apartment and making one final trip to the new place. I spent a lot of time driving and listened to most of that day's Howard Stern show three times as it replayed throughout the day on Howard 100.

One of the first tasks I like to accomplish once moved into a new place is to establish my connection to The Great Intertron. In this case, broadband access was already in place, so I merely had to set up my PC and Xbox.

Or so I thought.

I am sharing a condo with two other people I have lived with before, and when I moved to Fair Oaks almost two years ago I left my wireless router with them because it was time for a new one for me. So now I'm back and need to utilize this router once again. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just that 802.11b is so 2003.

You understand.

The only problem with connecting to this router was that it was encrypted and...

wait for it...



here it comes...



they had lost the admin password and no longer had the WEP key written down.

Oh, joy.

Being determined as I am, I set up my Xbox first and tried to connect just to see what would happen, and was presented with the discouraging message Not connected. No surprise.

Once my PC was set up I tried logging in with "admin | password" and then "admin | 1234," but to no avail. Using my roommate's laptop which contained the mysterious WEP key I brought up the router's support page on the web and proceeded to do the "restore to factory default" procedure. All went fairly smoothly, although I had to tell the laptop not to power down the network card (wired) when running on battery power and set up a new network connection and then reboot the cable modem and router several times before everything started working.

I did the usual practical precautions of changing all of the router's defaults and also generated a new WEP key. Perfect.

Xbox (no, not a 360 yet!) connects painlessly despite entering a 128-bit WEP key with a gamepad, with a signal strength varying from "Good" to "Very good." The network bridge sits on top of my TV at a decent height and the signal only has to go through a couple of walls.

PC connects, but at only a 40 - 50% signal strength. I could establish a connection with the router but for some reason it would not assign an IP address to my PC, so I could not even login to the router itself. The PC, and correspondingly the wireless NIC antenna, sits near the floor and the signal goes through the same two walls as the route to the Xbox, but there is another computer (the laptop in the next room), many books and a closet full of stuff also in the way. For whatever reason, the signal sucked. Elevating the router two rooms away helped quite a bit with a boost to about 70% signal strength, but I had the router on top of a tall box right next to one roommate's laptop which wasn't really practical.

So today I bought a high-gain antenna for my PC's wireless NIC. This is an extremely simple solution to weak or distant wireless signals. It also turns out that regular consumer stores like Best Buy and Circuit City don't carry this type of item. I could have ordered online but dammit I needed this today, and ended up at the all-powerful Fry's Electronics and they had everything I had found online and more. I ended up buying an AirLink ASB-10MA, primarily because it had the best price-to-gain ratio. I also considered the D-Link ANT24-0700 and also just a remote antenna stand from Linksys to give my regular antenna more height. The AirLink was $18 while the D-Link unit was $34 and the Linksys stand by itself without a high-gain antenna was $25 (high-gain antenna sold separately at another $35!).

I don't pretend to understand the concept of antenna gain, but the AirLink model provides +10dBi of gain while the Linksys antenna provides +7dBi and D-Link offers two varieties at +4dBi and +7dBi, so when in doubt more is better, right? After scanning that article on antenna gain it is apparent that these manufacturers are fudging the true and actual gain a bit by using a theoretical baseline (really, don't ask -- I just look these things up as I need them. I can't explain them), but what am I really going to do about it?

The antenna boosts my reception to almost 75% (varies), but the speed is also noticeably improved and the signal is definitely more consistent. With my original antenna and the router elevated the throughput was only about 1 Mbps and the router connection would drop regularly. Now it appears to jump up to the full 11 Mbps potential of 802.11b and has remained connected since I plugged it in this afternoon. The only complaint I have about this antenna is the short length of the connecting cable -- it's only 100 cm. 1 meter, or about 3 feet. Online reviews at newegg.com revealed this is a common complaint about these high-gain antennas. The D-Link and Linksys items have 1.5 m cables. I have a rather large shelf that sits on my desktop, so I had to place several empty keyboard and modem boxes under my PC to raise it to a height that would allow the antenna to sit on the top shelf.

So all is well now with a consistent, albeit wireless, umbilical cord to this electronic wonderland. It remains to be seen how my Xbox Live connection will perform. I haven't played in months and I'm truly itching to see how it does.

[Additional info]: I just removed a decorative metal tin (duh!) from in front of the new antenna and the signal strength jumped to 85%.

Google calendar beta

Just released yesterday: gcal

That's what I've named it, anyway. A C|net article is here.

Cool stuff. It's supposed to integrate with gmail, but the implementation seems incomplete at this point. From within gmail there is no visible connection to gcal, but from within gcal I can send invites to events using my contacts list from my gmail account. I guess it's a beta release, but so is gmail itself, so I don't know what the deal is.

The calendar itself is clean, simple and easy to use. Very much like google maps, you can simply click on a day, type a few details and the engine parses your phrase and makes an appointment. It gives you a lot of control over appearance and functionality, plus your calendar data can be shared with others and output in Apple's iCal format or the more universal XML. It can even import events from other calendaring software such as Outlook.

The calendar supports event scheduling and invites and will send you reminders via email or text message on your cell phone. Your calendar data is searchable and you can manage the sharing privileges of your calendar globally or by event. If made public, your data will show up in the results of anyone's gcal search.

You can add other people's calendars to yours so you can see their appointments or events. Lots of potential here if particular venues or retail stores set up gcals. It'd be cool to be able to overlay particular movie times, concert dates or release schedules for new games or music right on your personal schedule. Looking forward to some cool applications and hacks using the gcal API.


UPDATE, 4/17: Ah, yes, now the mini-menu above the Gmail logo in the top left corner has appeared and opening an email with scheduled events prompts a clickable link in the right margin to add the event to my calendar. Clicking on the "Add to Calendar" link opens up a new small window with the event details prepopulated. You can then add any additional info and save.

ASSIMILATION COMPLETE.

General Public License v3 draft is available for comment

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has made public the first Discussion Draft of Version 3 of its General Public License (GPL). The draft and corresponding rationale for changes is available at the site as well as a very slick interface to leave comments on specific text in the draft.

The GPL was last revised (v2) in 1991 and has been an important part of the growing success of the Linux OS as well as the independent development of countless open source projects. Adaptation to technological and legal changes since 1991 will help this license continue to be relevant, so if you are a developer, user, attorney or are just curious it will be well worth your time to become familiar with these draft changes and comment on how you think it can be better.

Thanks to Dennis Kennedy over at the Between Lawyers blog for this notice.

Firefox use gaining on Internet Explorer

Congratulations! Today, for the first time, visits to my blog with IE 6.0 have dropped to 48% of all visits. Firefox 1.5 is next at 28%. The remaining visits have been using Safari, Mozilla and earlier versions of both IE and Firefox. I've even had two visits via Blackberry -- using a Canadian IP no less!

All non-IE visits add up to 45% of the total visits. We're making progress.

Keep up the good work -- Get Firefox!

More online identity info

Fascinating. This is an area of study that may help truly break the web open to the masses. Just think how many more people would do things like shop, browse, update and maintain if they had complete control over how much of their identity was revealed to sites they visit.

As a starting point, here are The Laws of Identity as compiled and stated by Kim Cameron, Identity and Access Architect at Microsoft Corporation.

Identity 2.0 shown using Presentation 3.0 skillz

A link to this keynote presentation by Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity at the 2005 O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) was forwarded to me by Guy Kawasaki's mailing list. I know Guy's name from the "old Mac" days when I used a Mac SE and read his columns in MacUser magazine. Now Guy is involved in a VC company he founded called Garage Technology Ventures and he is apparently quite a champion of entrepreneurial ventures.

This keynote presentation is great for two reasons:

1. It reveals a useful "why didn't I think of that?" epiphanic thought process for analyzing society's shift of information and resources from the "real" to the "virtual;" and
2. If that's not enough, the revelation is done in a compelling presentation style that you can't stop watching.

The main topic is "Identity 2.0" for our interactions on the Internet, or Intertron, as some have called it. The gist is that current interactions on the web with various web sites is fairly stilted and awkward because we have to authenticate ourselves individually with each site and few sites share individual identity authentication information at all, let alone in a way that users would be comfortable with. In short, our online identities are not user-centric the way they are in the physical world. Mr. Hardt proposes a solution (not wholly original, but he is actually implementing it and moving forward) and does a terrific job of explaining it in the video, as his company very well may have invented the Identity 2.0 moniker.

The epiphanic thought process I referred to above is quite simple. One merely looks at a real-world process and maps it on top of a virtual process to see what lines up and what doesn't. This can greatly simplify the discussion of Intertron processes by removing all of the "high tech" flibberty-floo to reveal real-world analogues that we already understand. It also helps to reveal "high tech" solutions in the virtual world that would be obvious in the more familiar "real" world.

"Presentation 3.0" is my creation arrived at thus:

• Presentation 1.0 - speaking in front of a group, as people have done throughout history;
• Presentation 2.0 - speaking in front of a group using an overhead projector and markers;
• Presentation 2.1 - speaking in front of a group using PowerPoint, generic clipart, bullet lists and frightening/annoying sound effects;
• Presentation 3.0 - speaking in front of a group using presentation software to incorporate text and graphics that convey an idea intuitively in an interesting and humorous way.

Sometimes bullet lists aren't so bad.

Sometimes.

BeOS equals obscure geek

Yes, if you hadn't already intuited from the links and stories to be found here, not to mention my profile, I am a geek. However, the addition of two new ".gif badges" at the bottom of the right margin will now reveal to you, gentle readers, that I am not just any geek. I am of that special subset known ironically yet somehow intuitively as the obscure geek.

BeOS was and is a great operating system (OS). I say "was" because the company that created it, Be, Inc., no longer exists (be.com is now a search portal). I also say "is" because I still have a BeOS bootable partition on an old computer that I occasionally use and because there is still a user base for this OS with an online presence, however small. Be, Inc. was founded by an ex-Apple executive named Jean-Louis Gassée.

I jumped on the BeOS bandwagon back in 1995-96 using R3, the latest incarnation at the time. I updated and kept using the OS for about 3 more years and now have R5 installed on a partition in an old intel box that also has Windows 98 on it. BeOS was fun and functional, but it sure helped to have a hobbyist mentality and a sense of adventure because many applications and compatibility conveniences that Windows users take for granted simply weren't available. This meant downloading user-created applications and implementing workarounds to make some things work. I'm not a programmer, so I wasn't involved in creating functionality, but I can generally figure out what needs to happen to enable that functionality and then find, download, install and configure an application someone else wrote.

Since I was not capable of making improvements to the OS myself I had to rely on the engineers at Be to keep releasing updates that would support newer hardware and software and increase functionality. Unfortunately Be was not able to survive as a company and Be's intellectual property was sold to Palm, Inc. in 2001. That was the end of official development and improvements to the OS. It was too bad because BeOS is truly elegant and efficient, but without updates its functionality stagnated and I reverted back to Windows.

I used BeOS today to retrieve something I had done years ago and decided to explore a bit with the OS, pining for the good old days when it looked as if BeOS could survive as an alternate "media OS" to Windows. Days of idealism, practicality and for me, a hint of guerrilla-computing whereby one could achieve the goals of email, web browsing and document creation without engaging the corporate powers-that-be.

I was delighted to see some of the old Be-oriented sites were still up and people continuing to work on the OS. Several groups have tried to develop an open source version or other variation, and many individuals continue to develop applications. Their spirit is inspiring.

The .gif badges I added to my site are for:

-BeOS Radio: a still active Internet radio site. It plays a truly eclectic and refreshing variety of artists and music, interspersed with a few ads and news. The site's radio feeds are hosted on a server running a version of BeOS.

-BeBits: a software portal for developers and users. It's actually quite amazing how much is available here. The last official release of BeOS is still available here, for free download.

So there's a window into my soul.