Technology

The other day I demoted my Netflix account from the pricey 3 discs-at-a-time with Blu-Ray option to the lowly one DVD but unlimited streaming plan -- to beat the impending Netflix price bump.

I did this not so much because of the additional three bucks a month Netflix wants, but due to the realization that the Netflix product has a really bad flaw that makes it a poor value. Thinking about it some more I realize there are so many ways our video options could be better. If we are going to see that "cord cutting" future, where more people switch their video viewing to options such as online streaming, I think some of these issues need to be addressed.

1. Yay on Netflix for offering a streaming-only option. Boo on Netflix for failing to adjust their physical artifact media programs to work the way people want them to. How many of you have a Netflix disc at home that's over a week old? A month? Three months? Yeah, I thought so.

This weekend I will be building a new workstation. I ordered most of the parts back in September but haven't been able to string together sufficient time to do the final build.

The name of this system will be chinacat. My main workstation is always called chinacat. This is probably my sixth chinacat, going back over 20 years.

I remember my first chinacat. It was an 80486DX-33. The "33" is the clock speed, and back then we measured speed in MHz, not GHz. I remember it had one amazing component: one of the fancy new Seagate ST-251 hard drives. It had a whopping 40MB of space and -- here is the incredible part -- it fit in a half-height 5.25" bay. (That's the size of a typical DVD drive these days. In those days most hard drives were twice that size.) It ran SCO Xenix.

A couple months ago I started gathering components to build myself a new workstation. One of the components I got to try is an Intel X25-V 40GB solid-state disk (SSD). That particular part has since been discontinued, but at that time it was $100. That's pretty pricey as compared to a conventional hard disk of the same size, but would be completely worth it if it provided the performance benefit I expected.

It performed as well as I hoped. I set it up with Kubuntu Linux 10.10, and was completely blown away by the speed-up in boot time.

As great as it was on the workstation, this device was just screaming to be put in a laptop. After all, my workstation gets booted once a season. I can cycle a laptop a dozen times in an afternoon.

The workstation project has been stuck on idle, but I've become increasingly enamored with the laptop idea.

On Friday afternoon, Austin submitted its response to the Google "Fiber for Communities" Request for Information. We joined over 1,100 (!!) communities around the nation, who asked Google to build an open, super-high-speed, fiber broadband network in their towns.

Google created a two-pronged process, one for municipalities to submit their response, and another for individuals and community groups to nominate their hometown. The community support aspect snowballed, and we ended up with towns doing stunts such as mayors jumping into lakes and swimming with sharks.

One of the most frequently asked questions I received was, "What stunt is Austin going to do?" The answer, as my friend Chad Williams said, is, "We're going to be Austin."

Here is a message I just sent to members of the Big Gig Austin group on Facebook.

Hello Big Gig broadband supporters.

The Google deadline for nominations is this Friday (3/26).

1. Now is the time to submit your personal nomination to bring the Google gigabit fiber to Austin, if you haven't already. It's quick and easy and only takes a minute. Directions here:

http://www.biggigaustin.org/index.php/biggig/nominate/

2. I'll be doing the final count of supporters on Friday, and obviously the more the better. We're currently at 3,300 and I know there are a lot more -- thousands more -- broadband supporters here in Austin. Can you help? Please make one final pass through your friends list, and invite interested friends to our group.

To invite your friends just go to:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=337158056344

and click the "Invite people to join" link in the left sidebar.

3. Finally, come celebrate at the "How Can Google Not Love Us?" Happy Hour this Tuesday. Event info here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10150148563425582

Hope to see you there.

Chip Rosenthal
chip [at] unicom [dot] com
info [at] BigGigAustin [dot] org

We'd also appreciate your support on Twitter. Please follow @BigGigAustin.

Hope to see you at the Big Gig "How Can Google Not Love Us?" Happy Hour and Tweetup on Tuesday, Mar. 23..

The Big Gig Austin effort continues tonight, with a public forum to discuss the Austin response to the Google "Fiber for Communities" initiative. The forum is sponsored by the Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission.

Public Forum
Wed, Mar 10, 7:00 PM
Austin City Hall
Room 1101, Boards & Commissions Room
301 W. Second St.
Austin, TX
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/cityhall/visit.htm

The public is invited to attend and participate.

The forum is tentatively scheduled to be cablecast live on City of Austin cable channel 6, and streamed live online at: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/channel6

Statement by Chip Rosenthal
"Big Gig Austin" Press Conference
March 9, 2010

I'm Chip Rosenthal. I'm the chair of the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission. One of our jobs is to advise the City on what the people of Austin want for technology services. I'm here today to say that the people of Austin want Google to select Austin for their gigabit trial network project.

Within hours of the Google announcement, there were flurries of emails and tweets all across Austin. People were asking our city leaders to respond to the Google proposal – and they have. The Mayor and City Council have unanimously passed a resolution to submit a response to Google. City Manager Marc Ott and city staff have been working aggressively to produce a response that documents why Austin is the best place in the nation for Google to build their gigabit network.

That's what the people of Austin have asked for. And that's what the City is doing. That's great – but it's not enough.

This is not a standard company recruitment effort. The City isn't offering any economic incentives to Google. The City can't – and Google doesn't want them anyways.

A Facebook friend posted a comment about his local Tiger Direct store becoming CompUSA. That prompted me to post the following reminiscence as a comment.

So, around 1986, I'm working at this semiconductor company in far North Dallas. The area was really just one big industrial park. In the same area was this hole-in-the-wall computer place called "Soft Warehouse".

This was in the day of beige-box PCs, where you typically either bought from IBM or built from parts. The Belt Line Road area of Dallas was full of cheap storefront computer places. They'd build and sell their own lines of computers, along with parts for do-it-yourselfers. Soft Warehouse was a store in our neighborhood/industrial park, walking distance from the plant, that primarily sold software and components -- at the cheapest prices around.

Purchasing departments loved them, because they were corp account friendly, and you could buy your Hayes modem there and it would be $3 cheaper than any other place in town. The service was so horrible, however, that we'd have to spend 45 minutes at the will call window to get our parts. Somehow purchasing departments thought that was a good trade-off. But we hated them. We'd call them "Soft Whorehouse."

The formula of crappy service with a huge inventory at a great price was a win for them. Their business boomed, along with the entire PC business. Eventually they moved out of the industrial park to a big box storefront, and rebranded themselves CompUSA.

But they'll still always be "Soft Whorehouse" to me.

I want to buy some technical books before the end of the year. Before I did, I thought I'd investigate the current state of e-reader products.

My primary interest is portability of my technical books library. There are always a couple of books I want to keep beside my desk when I'm working. Unfortunately, the books I want beside me varies, depending on the current context and project.

Further, "my desk" is not a fixed location. It's wherever I happen to be working that day: at home, at a client site, or at a Starbucks. This means I'm often caught without my desired reference material at hand. Or, when I have the books I want, I'm lugging around an extra 10 pounds. An e-reader loaded up with my technical books would be a great solution.

I'll give you an easy out: you can write off this rant as a case of iPhone envy. You can do that, but you'll be wrong.

Phone apps are, for the most part, a bad idea. Once upon a time, a long time ago, online services lived in little walled gardens, with names such as Compuserve and AOL. Then it was discovered that open, common standards, namely the Internet and the Web, were far superior. The walls crumbled and openness prevailed.

Phone apps are an attempt to recreate the walled garden. That's bad and wrong. When developing for a phone, a platform specific app should be the last choice. The first choice should be a standard web application, optimized for mobile use (which means smaller screen and limited input capability).

There are four reasons to develop a phone app instead of a mobile web app. Two of them are good. Two of them are bad -- but are the predominant reason why phone apps proliferate.