Feeling guilty about leaving your computer on at night? Why not donate some CPU time to a good cause? I’m kind of amazed I never came across BOINC before, but it’s a neat idea. Rather than throwing a lot of money at a ton of clustered hardware, you can ask for volunteers all over the world to run a background application. This was apparently developed for SETI, but has lately been applied to AIDS and climate change research. The BBC is even on board with the program(me).

Boot Camp now makes a powerful Intel Mac desktop a possibility for my main machine at home, once such a device exists. After dealing with computer problems all day at work, I want my home life to be simple and painless. Who wants to come home to constant soft/hard building up and tearing down of Windows boxes? Apple provides a functional unit in a pretty box, and a new machine doesn’t nag you with 10 different messages until you take the hour to uninstall all the useless garbage. Now I have the option of using Windows 15-30% of the time when I am forced by circumstances (Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.) to use it. Aside from the work and school stuff (UMUC’s online content only works on IE on Windows) I have no intriguing attachment to Windows at home. My gut feeling is that a lot of other people have similar circumstances. My prediction? 10% Mac marketshare by 2012.

EDIT: After looking things up and realizing that Dell only has something like 17%, even half that would be a huge deal - so 8.5% by 2012.

Delicious Library coupled with the $10 modified CueCat barcode scanner from eBay. 500 or so books in so far, many, many to go. Tip: Don’t forget that the real ISBN barcode on mass-markets is inside the front cover.

The Hipster PDA templates from D*I*Y Planner. Much pondering about the perfect analog information management system. There is no doubting that index cards are cheap (less than a penny each).

The best guesses at an Intel iBook release seem to be June. This is just as well, because the budget is tight at the moment.

If compiling takes even 15 seconds, programmers will get bored while the compiler runs and switch over to reading The Onion, which will suck them in and kill hours of productivity.

I am also totally on board with:

Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down.

12 Steps to Better Code

I have seen all kinds of interesting hacks done with original Mini, including cramming it into the console of your car. So now we have 4x more power for the same price as the old model upgraded to 802.11g and Bluetooth. This was the first time I was following along on MacRumors.com closely and was really looking forward to see what Steve Jobs was up to. I finally learned my lesson that the way to go with Apple hardware is to find out when the releases are and get things right after.

All this anticipation reminded me of circa 1995, when I was still making fun of Macs as useless toys. A friend of mine in Newark invited me to his parents house for dinner, where he showed me his NeXt workstation (NeXt was the company Steve Jobs left Apple to start, and then was purchased by Apple, bringing Steve Jobs into the role he is now). This was just months after the release of Windows 95 and there I was poking around this gorgeous, colorful interface with giant icons. When Apple bought NeXt I was really happy, thinking now the Macs will be really competitive because they will run NeXtSTEP (the NeXt OS), but it still took me until 2003 to join the Mac cult.

In a rare occasion where I accidentally stumbled onto exactly what I had been looking for months earlier, I found a great little free utility to check on the life of my iBook’s battery. Apparently we are 500+ cycles in and down to 74% of the original 4400 mAh capacity. It only works on Tiger, so I’m glad I upgraded last week (to get the Java 5 runtime). Another utility on the same site showed my iBook was built in Taiwan between October 13 and 19, 2003.

In other Mac rumors (see the Linx0rs section), we may be getting the 13.3 inch widescreen Intel iBook next month. The cost is expected to be lower than the current PowerPC offering (I have even heard as low as 700, but even higher than that it’s a bargain). I considered the 2003 price a bargain once I saw how much I was using the iBook. The HP Omnibook that nearly bankrupted me in 1999 was hardly used enough to justify its $2000+ pricetag.

Also, hooray for AirTunes new ability to stream to multiple Airport Expresses.

EDIT (3/1/06): I’ve since discovered that the battery information is available in the System Profiler, but I still think the Coconut utility is neat.

American Public Media’s Marketplace program recently wrapped up two weeks in China. Since they were broadcast about the time I pick Jen up at the metro, I got to listen to a good number of them. They were thoroughly fascinating, but mostly affirmed what I already know. It’s a country that is very poor, very polluted, and in the human rights arena leaves much to be desired. But China is so populous and so vast that even a relatively small segment of educated and well-trained people are going to kick our collective asses in this century (when queried about poverty, these young, English-speaking professionals making about 10k a year just shrug). And even the blue-collar folk can have a decent, condo-owning, car-owning, consumerist living for $500 a month. (An auto-parts factory worker guesses that her Detroit counterparts make $12/hour - it’s closer to 27). The poor folks will pay about a penny to see a movie on a TV in a booth in a marketplace. When the Americans come along, they are charged 12x as much, which is really rather insane, but to us, that’s just 12 cents.

A couple of years ago, my two best friends from growing up on Long Island traveled through most of Asia, and these two email snippets do a decent job of painting a generic picture of China:

Yichang was a boring provincial town, but we saw lots of people doing aerobics, taichi, tsiun and ballroom dancing in a park along the waterfront in the morning. We were also both sick, so we went to the pharmacy and found out that you can by anything that you want without a prescription really cheap. Jeremy got Cipro for about 10 cents a box.

Datong is the last place we planned to be before hopping onto a train for Mongolia, since our visas expire in 3 days. Outside the city are the Cloud Ridge caves with 500 Buddahs carved 1500 years ago. They were an amazing sight. The city itself is hell. The smog is so thick it is difficult to walk down the street, everyone wears masks to help them breath, and spits everywhere (as I do now). It is really gross, our clothes are black, and it is difficult to see down the street. It looks like heavy smog, but the sun is shining dark red.

Apple today announced their Intel line. Once again, very difficult to not just hand Steve Jobs my money. Also, once again, one has to wonder how long Apple can keep this pace up. They’ve been the darlings far longer than anyone could reasonably have expected. With Windows Vista coming out soon(ish), I look forward to a clash between Wintel and Apple that will most likely not really happen. Even though iPod has a huge share of the portable music player market, the share of the PC market hasn’t changed all that much. Windows Vista should, in theory, represent a major improvement over the 2000/XP platform, and not just because it looks like OS X, but also because the .NET framework supposedly underlies it all. But I have heard MS’s project managers admit as much that if code didn’t need to be written, it wasn’t re-written. What was that old thing? “A 32 bit extension and graphical shell, for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system, originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor.”

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