Scripting News

866-OUR-VOTE

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:24:32 GMT

Macs to HDTV via HDMI?

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:45:33 GMT

Getting ready for election night when I'm going to have a few friends over to watch the returns, and either celebrate or...

I have two Macs hooked up to HDTVs, one a Samsung the other a Sony Bravia, and until recently they had been connected via VGA. I was barely aware you could do it any other way. I thought the picture was great until I hooked up a Toshiba HDTV to the second video display on my G5 tower and the picture so much better! Much more color. The Toshiba is a smaller, cheaper and older TV than the Sony that's connected into the other video output, but it looks much better. So, of course, I wanted to do the same with the Sony.

I tried connecting the HDMI output to the Sony, but the picture looked terrible. I don't know how to describe it, but the colors were all washed out, text was blurry. I might try to take a picture so y'all can see what the deal is.

I tried hooking up a Mac Mini in the living room to the Samsung TV via HDMI, and got the same lousy picture.

I unhooked the Mac Mini and connected my MacBook Pro to the Samsung, and got the same lousy picture.

I've fiddled with the Displays section of the Preferences in every way I could and it makes no difference. I've turned everything off and on, still no difference.

I can get more data. I might try to take a picture of the crummy image to post.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

PS: I'm using Belkin DVI to HDMI adapters.

Oliver Stone's Nixon

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:23:51 GMT

At the end of Oliver Stone's biopic, just before Nixon resigns in disgrace, he delivers a powerful line.

Standing in front of the White House portrait of John Kennedy, he says: "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are."

We're at that summing up moment of the 2008 Presidential election, before we know the outcome, but probably most of it has already happened, and that seems to be the choice we have made in the last two elections, and the choice facing us in the next one. Vote for who we are or who we want to be?

I probably would enjoy having a coffee with either of the two candidates, but the conversation with Obama would be more interesting. I got an idea of what that would be like last night when he sat down for an extensive interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. She's singularly intelligent and thoughtful and earnest, and it was clear that Obama knew that and spoke to her intelligence, saying more than candidates usually say in interviews, I thought.

And the things he said were true, they weren't pandering. About deficits, he said the terrible thing about the Bush deficit is that we're not getting anything in return. No new industries, no updated roads, it hasn't been used to retrain the workforce for the 21st century, or convert our gasoline-based economy, or pay for health care.

There's no doubt we're going to be running a big deficit during the next four years, either way, but it's good to know that if Obama is elected, the money we borrow will be spent to upgrade the US economy and workforce. He's focused on the right things for the coming years. Whether it will work or not is another thing, but with Obama at least we have a chance.

During the Bush years the American traveler in Europe would hear that they don't understand why we elected and then re-elected Bush. I think it's because very few Europeans when they visit the US, go to the countryside of say Missouri or Ohio or Pennsylvania or rural Florida. The people who live here, as you now know, often choose our Presidents. To these people, we in the American cities seem foreign and its easy for Republican politicians to get them to blame us for their difficulties. I think this has happened in Europe too, btw. It's not a new thing or an American thing.

That's also why Obama, if he's elected, deserves a chance to try to heal the wounds between these two Americas.

Of course we're seeing more and more how interdependent our economies and societies are. The biggest problems facing each country actually face all countries equally. And like it or not, the American economy is still very important to the rest of the world. This is the saving grace for our country, and it's why it's in everyone's interest, I think, to see us get back on track. One way or another, that must happen.

Going back to the Nixon soliloquy -- when the people in rural America see Obama, they see who scares them, they see the future that one way or another, is coming. In that way Obama is like Nixon; when they look at him they see who they really are. When they look at McCain they see who they want to be. In urban America, it's exactly the opposite. We look at Obama and see who we want to be and look at McCain and worry that's who we really are.

Today's piece cross-posted at Huffington.

The 2008 moment

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:57:26 GMT

It would be the funniest moment of the 2008 campaign if it weren't the saddest.

Apple's web

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:16:46 GMT

Yesterday I read that Apple rejected the Opera browser for the iPhone. This is so wrong in so many ways. I think this is the end for me and my iPhone. I've been using it only as a phone since July when I got the Eee PC 901. When I need to bring a computer with me somewhere that's what I bring. The iPhone as a computer has become too unreliable, too many components just don't work, and the biggest bug in the whole thing is the company that makes it.

Apple keeps doing this, trying to take ownership of things they didn't invent. It doesn't work, they don't end up owning it, they just keep their users from getting the benefits of Apple having competition. It happened before when they rejected the iPhone podcatcher that worked the way podcatchers were always supposed to work, and now they want exclusivity on the web on iPhones.

The web was designed as an open system. That means the user has a choice of software he or she wants to use to browse the web. Even when it was at its peak of monopolism, Microsoft never went so far as to prohibit the installation of the competitive browser on Windows, they just bundled one with the OS.

Whatever. I'll vote with my dollars. I'm in the market for a new cell phone. I liked my old Blackberry. I want one with a camera. Voicemail that works. Not made by Apple.

Back to work on EC2

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:35:40 GMT

I have a couple of hours this afternoon to push forward with Amazon EC2. I'm going to go ahead and commit to one EC2 instance to run the apps that are associated with various projects at Scripting News.

I've reserved an Elastic IP address, which is just a fancy name for an IP address.

The first app I ported is one of the easiest.

http://age.scripting.com/

Heh.

Barack Obama's infomercial

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:23:37 GMT

Today's song is by Willie Nelson

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:23:34 GMT

John McCain vs Barack Obama dance-off

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:46:11 GMT

I voted for Obama!

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:20:16 GMT

I don't imagine this is much of a surprise?

Early voting in California

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:20:27 GMT

My task for the morning is to vote!

It's kind of hard to find the instructions on the web, so I hope to provide a trail others can follow through Google.

Here's a list of county elections offices in California. I'm in the very first county on the list, Alameda and the guy you gotta find is Dave Macdonald the registrar of voters. Right there on the calendar on the front page is today's event, Early Voting.

I need to go to the same place I did jury duty earlier this year, 1225 Fallon St. Easy to get to via BART, just get out at the Lake Merritt station.

I'm going to walk to the station, bringing an iPod, some podcasts, a bottle of water and an energy bar. As a reward I'm going to treat myself to lunch at Oakland City Center before heading home on the BART. So I get my daily exercise, do my civic duty (like paying taxes an act of patriotism imho, Gov Palin) and have a tasty lunch as a reward.

goodvote.org

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:16:43 GMT

We needed an easy-to-remember address for people whose vote is being challenged. Here's what we came up with.

http://goodvote.org/

If you believe the will of the voters should be reflected in the result of the 2008 election, please pass on the address. It's totally non-commercial, with a single purpose, to help assure a fair election.

PS: 28 million hits for "good vote" -- goodvote.org is not on the first page -- yet!

Microsoft's cloud strategy?

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:11:36 GMT

No one seems to hit the sweet spot, the no-brainer cloud platform that could take our software as-is, and just run it -- and run by a company that stands a chance of surviving the coming recession (which everyone really thinks may be a depression).

Of all the offerings Amazon comes the closest. With a number of turns of the key you get a Unix or Windows platform in the sky. I wish the number of turns was 1, but it seems to be more like 10 or 20. But it's still pretty good.

There are a number of VPS companies, but... none of them are really big enough to make a convincing case they won't go the way of Exodus or Conxion, two colo companies I bet on in the past whose pain became my pain when their businesses got in trouble.

I was hoping Microsoft would hit the home run, but it seems not. Why wouldn't the Windows company just offer Windows in the cloud -- nothing more and nothing less? The marketing people seem to have figured it out, they call the new offering Windows Azure, but what does it have to do with Windows other than sharing a brand? I don't know.

Wouldn't it have been great if they bought VMWare, or another virtualization vendor, and used their deep financial pockets to create server farms all around the globe that just ran the operating system they made famous?

Looks like I'm going to bet on Amazon.

As Rachel Maddow says -- talk me down!

I can't watch this election unravel

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:35:53 GMT

"I can't watch this election unravel over corruption, not this time."

Early vote New Mexico

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:38:48 GMT

CNN on voter suppression

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:35:20 GMT

On this day in...

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:21:24 GMT

Part of my daily routine used to be going back through the archive of Scripting News to see what happened on this day in fill in the year. But when the number of years passed ten for some reason I stopped doing it.

I thought it would be interesting to see what happened on this day four and eight years ago, to see where we were in the elections of those years.

http://scripting.com/2004/10/27.html

http://scripting.com/2000/10/27.html

Nothing really earth shaking happening election-wise in either year, but the Red Sox had just won the World Series four years ago, snapping a losing streak that had been going for 86 years. They called it The Curse of the Bambino. That's why there's a picture of Babe Ruth on the 2004 entry, with a big R.I.P. on it.

You have the right to vote

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:54:08 GMT

Checking out VPSes

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:40:10 GMT

I've been waiting for Amazon or some other large tech company to provide stability for hosting services. So I tried out EC2 this week, and I more or less understand what it does and how it works, and I'm confident that if I decided to go that way, I could make my public web presence work in their environment. But I'm not sure if I should do it.

If it were anyone but Amazon I wouldn't go for it. Buying a service like this isn't like buying a laptop or groceries. You're wholly dependent on the company you're contracting with. If they go out of business at the wrong time it could cost you a lot. Or how they deal with outages could matter a lot. I had an ISP flake out on me in 2000 in the middle of a big onsite meeting followed by a user conference. We lost a few months of forward motion, at least, in the week that our Internet access and hosting (all in the same basket) was down. A couple of years later, Exodus went out of business, and that's where we moved to after the Y2K outage. I always seek reliability and stability, but given the state of the economy you gotta wonder if any of these service providers are going to be around much longer.

If a company like Amazon did VPSes, Virtual Private Servers, I'd go for that right away. It's much more like what I'm using now, two co-located servers, but I hadn't been watching the prices, they're much much cheaper. I'm wasting a fair amount of money going the colo route. But I don't know any of the companies. This is where I could use some help from readers of this blog. If you use a VPS, which one, is there a consensus, one that's considered a no-brainer, that some larger entities depend on? No one wants to be the largest customer of an ISP.

PS: I need Windows VPS, not Linux.

Windows on Amazon, Day 3

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:27:38 GMT

I might be ~~Now I'm~~ getting somewhere.

I mostly paused yesterday, read docs, thought, tried to understand how the various pieces fit together, and I think I've got some of the basics down.

1. You don't do a lot of customization of your AMIs, you might tweak up some of the settings for the OS, but don't install too much software in there, because all changes have to be bundled and saved and that's a slow process, and you don't want to do that too often.

2. The work is done in Amazon EBS Volumes. Install your software there, it can be attached to any instance. They're analogous to a hard disk drive in cloud space.

3. Now I'm wondering about costs. I've got the minimal system. It costs 12.5 cents per hour. That means in a 31 day month it will cost: $93 and that's without any storage costs. I'm having trouble estimating how much storage this instance will use. I have a bundle saved in my S3 space, and it's huge. Obviously I'm paying for that. I'll pay something for at least one IP address. Another question for oldbies -- how much should I expect to pay on a monthly basis for the most modest possible server?

4. All the docs say you can't depend on an instance staying up, but how does it relaunch if it goes down? I can't believe that's done manually. How can you build a reliable web service if it goes down unpredictably? (Not that my servers currently don't crash from time time, they do.)

5. I'm guessing you need to access the SOAP interfaces from inside your running instance. I'm going to have to find a concise overview of the interface. I find WSDL to be really hard to parse, would much prefer the equiv of Unix man pages. Have to go looking for that.

6. Wondering if all this is worth it. It must be, it seems, cause so many developers are deploying systems in EC2. How will it compare to what Microsoft announces next week? That'll be interesting to see. I can't get away to go to their conference in LA, but I'll be watching the news as closely as I can.