First, Matt Santos was a character on the West Wing played by Jimmy Smits. Santos was a Democratic senator from Texas who ascended to the presidency on the show. Writers on the West Wing noted that Santos’ character was based on upstart Illinois senator and President-elect Barack Obama.

Jimmy Smits has a recurring role as Miguel Prado on the Showtime drama Dexter. He plays a District Attorney who has become quite fond of Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only kills those who kill others. Next, Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, stated in the final weeks of the election that “[Obama] pals around with terrorists”.

Therefore, “Matt Santos pals around with serial killers” is funny.

For the first time in a long while, I’m excited and hopeful for the future of this nation. Join me in fulfilling our civic duty.

I want to take a bit of time to really nail down the problems that Windows has with usability and UI design that seem to never be addressed, or just seem to get worse with each revision. This is not meant to be the usual Windows v. Mac argument that happens so often — rather, it’s a summation of the fundamental interface issues that plague Windows and prevent it from being a truly usable operating system.

One thing that OS X, and iPhone in particular, have demonstrated is a full understanding of the spatial relationships that must exist in computing. While the animations and visual effects present in Mac OS make for a great in-store demo, they serve a greater purpose - they’re visual cues that show where windows emerge from and move away to, as well as establish relationships between the windows themselves. Perhaps the quintessential example of this is Exposé. When using Exposé, you can easily view the desktop, all application windows, or just the windows related to the foremost application. It’s a useful feature that is implemented perfectly. When invoking the ‘view desktop’ key, all windows visually slide to the corners of the screen and the corners dim to reflect the temporary view scenario.

Viewing all windows or a single application’s windows dims the background, bringing focus to the windows you called upon. Each window slides into view so you know where it came from and where each will return once you’ve completed the interaction. Exposé takes a difficult UI design issue and offers an elegant and simple solution that works better than in any other OS I’ve seen to date. Minimizing and maximizing windows to and from the dock illustrate the same concept of spatial relationships and managing lots of individual windows in a graceful manner.

In the same vein, Windows suffers from one key UI design flaw - it is incapable of hiding applications. Windows offers no way to simply “hide” an application and its windows, nor does it offer a simple way to minimize a single window. This is crucial to being able to use more than a handful of applications at once and maintaining an uncluttered workflow. For example, say I’m using three Microsoft Office programs, Firefox, iTunes and Skype. In this scenario, each application has two windows open, so we have twelve windows in total. I want all of these applications open, but not all of them are relevant to the task at hand, so I’d generally have to minimize everything in Windows and rely on Alt+Tab to let me work. The taskbar would be full of individual windows squished together and navigating around is just plain cumbersome. Vista made this slightly easier by adding window previews into the application switcher, but the UI problem remains. Mac OS and other desktop environments have solved this long ago by allowing one to simply hide an application and all related windows, via menu item or keyboard shortcut, such that they aren’t visible until called upon from the dock and won’t show up in Exposé. It’s a simple idea that makes using ten to fifteen applications at a time extremely easy. Without this, Windows remains particularly unwieldy when the information you need is scattered in different programs and you have five or more Explorer windows open.

Which leads us to the culmination of the problem: Windows wasn’t originally designed to multitask effectively. As it stands, Windows retains the antiquated taskbar that lives at the bottom of the screen which becomes nearly unusable once you amass more then six windows open at a time. Some developers have tried to get around this problem by offering the option to minimize to the system tray, but it still reflects a generally poor and ill-conceived interface design. The answer to this is not increasing screen real estate as many suggest - this only encourages continuing a poor design paradigm from Microsoft. Windows has never had a great way to organize and present multiple windows. When Windows 95 came out, the taskbar and Start menu were revolutionary as a way to keep different processes in check and accessible quickly, but the flaw in the ultimate utility of this was exposed when protected memory and powerful computers made multitasking possible and painless. In its current form, the threshold of how many applications one can use at a time quickly is rather low. Some may argue it’s that there isn’t a need to keep programs open, but that is an idea borne of the usability limitations inherent in Windows.

And this speaks to the general problem that Microsoft faces today - they’re unwilling to innovate. Microsoft has such a large install base worldwide that breaking compatibility and instituting a more functional UI would draw ire from business customers and users that are set in their ways. Apple faced this same issue with the transition from OS 9 to OS X but they solved it in the most logical way they could which was allowing users to continue to boot the older OS for legacy applications. The reason that I feel this isn’t such a big problem for Microsoft is their success in the virtualization market. With Windows Server 2008, they included Hyper-V which is their superb virtualization environment where you can create virtual machines and run any x86 or x64 OS you wish. If Microsoft truly wanted to fix Windows and create a 21st century OS, they would redesign Windows and offer virtualization of Windows XP and Vista environments for older applications that haven’t been updated. This is the way enterprise has dealt with the interfacing with older database systems that don’t fit in their current infrastructure and it’s why Citrix is company with yearly revenue measured in the billions of dollars. Microsoft has demonstrated that they try to keep backwards compatibility when they can, but programs still break between revisions of Windows yet and there is little payoff in terms of security and usability. To put it plainly, Microsoft needs to quit ‘half-assing’ change and pull an Apple.

Well, after three weeks, I’m back in Santa Barbara and have returned to UCSB just in time for two back-to-back midterms and a paper due on Thursday. The time in San Francisco was fun, but I’m glad to be home. While there, I registered as a communist, bought a Prius and was forced to marry Clay Aiken - I guess there’s some new law? In all seriousness, I saw more people wearing Barack Obama shirts in five minutes downtown than I have in Santa Barbara in the past twenty months. I’ll add a few photos to Flickr when I have a spare moment and sort out all the things I’m behind on.

Posting should return with some semblance of regularity later on this week.

Through resources on the Drupal developer site and code posted by user “foxtrotcharlie”, I’ve created a module you can place in /modules that works with Drupal 5 and can be modified to work with Drupal 4 and 6.

To start out, you’ll need to gain access to phpmyadmin or your tool of choice to alter your site’s SQL database. Edit the string length of “title” to 255 characters in DB table “node” and “node_revision” or any value you wish, but might as well go for the biggest you can.

Once you do this, add the module I supply at the bottom of this post which is all set to go for Drupal 5 installations and should survive new updates of Drupal.

Download: Drupal Maxlength Module

I’m disappointed with Apple. I’ve been using their machines since I was four years old and have been buying them personally for the past seven. It has been my preferred platform of choice and I’ve never been unhappy with the hardware choices available to me until now. I see a glaring hole in their portable line-up, a small prosumer notebook. This void had been previously filled with the 12″ PowerBook but has never been replaced since its discontinuation in early 2006. One might suggest the MacBook Air as it’s successor, but that’s not paying attention to what the 12″ PowerBook was - a small, lightweight notebook that made almost no compromises in performance and connectivity to achieve it’s minuscule footprint. I do not mean to suggest that there is not a spot in the marketplace for a thin and light MacBook Air, however it’s clear that Apple is leaving money on the table from consumers like myself searching for that elusive perfect computer in a perfect size.

But I have a dream. A dream where there is a speedy and capable notebook running Mac OS X that fulfills these wants and needs. All Apple needs to do is build it. I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up spec. sheet of what this computer should be. I give you, the perfect laptop…

MacBook Pro (13″) - Coming Soon from Apple

• 13″ 1440×900 LCD (LED-backlight)
• Discreet Graphics (Dual-Link DVI)
• Intel Core 2 Duo (Montevina)
• 2-4GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM
• 64-128GB Solid-State Disk
• Gigabit Ethernet Networking
• 802.11N Wireless Networking
• Integrated Sprint/AT&T WWAN
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• iSight Webcamera
• Backlit Keyboard
• 9-Cell Battery*
• SDHC Reader

This would not require a feat of engineering, although I’m certain that Apple could work their usual magic and include some tremendously innovative features in this notebook. These features exist in many notebooks available today (such as the Sony VAIO SZ, ThinkPad X200/300) but prove to be flawed choices as they do not run OS X and lack the polish I expect from a laptop, which is why I’m an Apple buyer in the first place. An optical drive? Who cares about an optical drive? The world’s thinnest notebook? I don’t need it. Simply put, I want a small and powerful laptop that can handle a long day of on-the-go use and be backed by the operating system I can’t live without.

* To keep with the svelte and clean design of Apple notebooks, a smaller battery can be included and the larger 9-cell high-capacity battery would be left as a CTO option.

In some basic testing with the HDTune benchmarking utility, the Samsung drive performed admirably. With an average read speed of 67MB/s and a peak speed of 88MB/s, the drive offers about twice the performance of a standard 5400RPM SATA laptop hard disk. Where the drive really shines is the almost non-existent access times on your data. In this test, the average seek time was 0.3ms where a traditional notebook is comes in at 15-20ms (or about 50-60x slower). Read/write performance also does not suffer from the pitfall that platter-based drives do, which is that information reads at the same speed regardless of where the data is physically on the drive.

The file read/write benchmarks told the same story as the standard read test. When using the 64MB file size, the drive offered consistent performance peaking at about 100MB/s reading data and 90MB/s writing. Comparing this to the tests of the reference Seagate hard-disk drive, it was consistently more than twice as fast as the traditional drive peaked at 40MB/s (HDD benchmark charts are provided at the end of the article). Boot times are not a terribly relevant or accurate way to gauge a computer’s performance, but since gamers/nerds are always clamoring for them, I’ll include them anyways. With the SSD, a the laptop booted to the Windows login screen in 34 seconds and at the desktop with all startup items loaded in a total of 39 seconds. With the HDD, those same tasks were completed in 46 seconds and 58 seconds respectively. Both of these tests were with the same drive image running Windows Vista on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz notebook computer.

As for the SLC vs. MLC debate referenced earlier, it’s all a matter of cost. The best performing SSDs on the market are SLC drives. SLC drives offer better performance, lower power consumption and a longer-lifespan (100,000 write/erase cycles per sector as compared to 10,000 cycles on an MLC drive). MLC (multi-level cell) drives are cheaper to manufacture and are quickly becoming popular because of the lower price point. The lifespan argument loses its utility when one takes into account that 10,000 write/erase cycles is averaged/leveled out through the drive’s own firmware so the same cells aren’t constantly being rewritten (and since SSDs have a near-instant access time, there is no ill-effect on performance). Also, the useful life of a consumer notebook computer is surely less than that of the drive. In either case, a solid-state disk can greatly enhance the performance and battery life of a notebook, but it does come at a hefty cost.

Seagate HDD Benchmarks

What do you need? A 4GB or larger USB flash drive or hard-drive and a computer with a BIOS that supports booting from a USB device. Almost every computer made in the past three years or so supports this feature. Also, you’ll need your Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 install disc or ISO (for this, I used a licensed copy from my MSDN subscription).

• Open the Disk Management console (run “diskmgmt.msc”)
• Format your flash drive as FAT32 and set the partition as active/primary.
• Copy the entire Windows disc to the USB storage device - the easiest way is by running “xcopy D:\*.* /s/e/f E:\” at the command prompt (where D: is your optical drive/mounted ISO and E: is the USB flash drive.).

Note: If you are using a large external hard-drive, you’ll want to create a partition smaller than the drive itself since FAT32 has certain size limitations. In my case, I chose to make a 6GB active partition and left the rest unpartitioned.

Remember, this is not only useful for computers with defunct or non-existant optical drives - you can also use this for installing Windows on multiple machines quickly as you’ll find it significantly quicker than reading off a DVD.

I have not tested this with Windows XP, however I see no reason why it would not work. If you encounter issues where you cannot boot successfully from the USB drive after the copy, you might need to run the “bootsect.exe” from the command line. Check MS Knowledgebase for more detailed information on this.

While OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have built-in support for ExpressCard and USB 3G networking devices, it does not give you all the features of the card nor the ability to complete the initial service activation. Earlier this year, Sprint began to offer companion software and drivers for their EV-DO equipment for OS X users called “Sprint SmartView”. The software gives you access to more detail about your usage, what network you’re connected to, and GPS services (which we’ll get into later). With this software, you can now complete data card firmware updates and activate service obviating the use of virtualization of Windows or borrowing a friend’s computer for that. My only real issue with it is that doesn’t act like a Mac application, as you can tell immediately when it installing a desktop shortcut (not a dock shortcut, a desktop shortcut) and by the various interface inconsistencies. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good step by Sprint - you can download the SmartView software here - Sprint Downloads.

However, GPS is the main point of this post. With the new connection manager comes the ability to use the A-GPS functionality of all Sprint EV-DO cards to locate yourself. To use the basic location function, launch the SmartView software and click on the “GPS” drop-down and it will acquire a signal and locate you. You can click the shortcuts there to find yourself on Google Maps and each icon will take you to a different search such as restaurants and Sprint locations near you. Neato. But the most useful function of this would be to get directions and track yourself. Since the software will create a NMEA port on your device that will pipe the location data into another program that can use it. For this tutorial, we’ll use Google Earth since everyone loves Google Earth. The only sticking point here is that to use GPS, you’ll have to subscribe to “Google Earth Plus” which is $20 a year - $1.67 a month, don’t be cheap, pay for it.

To enable NMEA output, click the icon that resembles a ‘play button’. Now, launch Google Earth Plus and wait for it to load completely and log-in. Now go to the “Tools” menu and  and select “GPS”. This will bring up a settings window like the one pictured on the right. Click on the “Realtime” tab and select “NMEA”. From here, you will want to check the “Automatically follow the path” radio box and choose how often you want to poll the card for new location coordinates (six to ten seconds works well). Click “Start” and you’ll see Google Earth pan to your current location and follow you as you move in your car and of course this works on the go as your EV-DO service is more than sufficient to pull down the maps/satellite imagery on the fly.

Google Earth Plus with Realtime GPS

Now you’re ready to use this to get directions and find businesses around you based on your current location anywhere you go with your Mac laptop. Don’t forget that you can also track a trip by saving your path in the “Places” menu. The GPS function does not eat much of your battery, however, Google Earth can be CPU intensive at times, so it might be advantageous to bring a charger or second battery along with you.

Have questions? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try update the post.

When using the visualizer on a current Intel-based machine, the visualizer operates fine (ignoring the fact that it hasn’t changed since 3.0) and is mesmerizing as always. However, could somebody give me a reason why a task that was a cake-walk for a 500Mhz G3 from seven years ago is consuming 126% of the available CPU cycles from a Core 2 Duo portable?

(click to view full-size)

Are they running the old visualization code from the PowerPC version in emulation? What on earth can make this so taxing on the CPU? For reference, I’ve embedded the thirty-second spot Apple ran in 2001 for the iMac G3 - great ad by the way.

The screenshot shown to the right illustrates the issue. The initial section showing 38-42% network utilization is the network file transfer being conducted without Window Media Player playing back audio. The immediate drop-off in speed to about 9% network utilization is what occurs after playing an MP3 file located locally on the machine in Windows Vista. Closing WMP allows the transfer to resume at full speed and as said before, this issue is not present in other multimedia applications like iTunes.

There is a workaround that has been discovered by geek Courtney Malone. It involves a simple registry edit which can be done by following these steps…

• Open Registry Editor by using keystroke “Windows+R” and typing “regedit”
• Navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AudioSrv
• Edit the value of “DependOnService” by double-clicking the item
• Remove the line referencing “MMCSS”

What you’re accomplishing here is disabling the “Multimedia Class Scheduler Service” which is designed to give multimedia and mission critical tasks priority on the network. This is a standard Windows service, but we can’t simply disable it by opening the Management Console Snap-in because it is linked to Windows Audio (which of course controls all sound on the machine). This workaround will solve the issue, although Microsoft has added a bit of control for the end-user over how aggressive MCSS will be if you’d like to keep it around. You can read about that here.

About five weeks ago, my Xbox 360 stopped retrieving an IP address from my router. I waited until the weekend to start troubleshooting it. I powercycled all the devices involved (Xbox, cable modem, AirPort Extreme) and tried again. Nothing. I then proceeded to to reset the firmware of the router, tried plugging the Xbox 360 directly into the modem, hard reset the modem, cloned the MAC address of a different device onto the 360, manually assigned the 360 an IP address rather than using DHCP, and many more. Nothing worked. So, I reluctantly called Microsoft Xbox support on Sunday (20 July) to see what could be done about this. I was walked through extensive troubleshooting steps provided to me by the Xbox Live representative, and even though I had already been through all of them, I ran through them once more. After an hour and a half on that call, being placed on hold repeatedly and embarking on remedies that made no sense, I was told to call back after I had contacted my ISP to check with them why the issue was occurring. Rather than do this, I elected to borrow another Xbox 360 console from a friend and try that. After plugging it into my normal network configuration and tossing my hard drive onto it, everything connected just fine which shows there is absolutely nothing wrong with my home network or internet connection.

I called back about an hour after the previous support call had ended. After more holding and futile support remedies, I was told the issue would need to be escalated to Microsoft for “investigation” since they were hung up on the fact that I was using an Apple AirPort Extreme (oh noes, an Apple product!). They informed me that it would take about seven business days to completely this, and while this seemed like an extraordinarily long time for such a simple issue, I said I’d wait for a call.

Two weeks had passed without a call, so I called Xbox customer support a third time on the 3rd of August. The support representative looked into my case, placed me on hold, and came back after ten minutes to tell me that a supervisor would call me in three to five business days after they had looked at the case because it was still “pending” with Microsoft. I had other things to do that day, so rather than argue it, I said fine and waited. Another week passes without a call. A week after (10th of August), I phone once more to check on what the status was and again, I was told that I would receive yet another fictitious phone call within two to three business days. Yet another week passes without any action.

Frustrated and frankly, quite angry, I called customer support once more last Sunday. I was calm and polite throughout but became increasingly unnerved at the fact that I was receiving the same story yet again. I asked vehemently why I should expect a different outcome with the “wait for a call” routine than what I had seen over the past month, and I was simply told that it would be taken care of in two days by a manager. I ended the call and stewed for a while - thankfully I have the loaner Xbox from a friend so I could take out the frustration with some Call of Duty 4.

Welp, it’s Thursday now, four days after the last call and I have (surprise, surprise) have not received a callback. I’ll be calling back tomorrow and will not accept a callback or brush-off as an acceptable solution. I’m floored that such a simple issue can be taking this long and that the investigation of said issue is being treated as though it involves a completely different company. I’ll post again with the outcome, which will hopefully, be more positive than what I’ve experienced thus far. Astonishingly, this has not soured my opinion of the Xbox brand and I’d still recommend it to anyone as I truly think it is the best gaming experience. I just hope my case is an anomaly amongst tens of thousands they work through.

In order to watch a few events of the 2008 Olympics that I wanted to see from nbcolympics.com, I was forced to install Microsoft Silverlight on OS X. I had resisted for quite a while, but I guess the Beijing Olympics are the huge foot in the door that Microsoft has been looking for. After installing, I was pleased to see that there is a whole freaking tab just for digital rights management. I’m glad that the competitor to Adobe Flash makes it clear out of the gate what it’s about - keeping the content provided in control and a user experience second. Kudos.

Dell Latitude E6400 14.1″ Notebook (19-hours)

• 9-Cell Primary Battery ($99 CTO)
• 12-Cell Secondary “Slice” Battery - 84Whr ($399 CTO)
• High-capacity 9-cell adds 0.4lbs over the standard 6-cell battery
• Slice battery adds 1.78lbs to the overall weight of the laptop and 0.6″ in thickness

Overall, it’s quite a bit of asterisks checking to see how this battery life claim comes to fruition. It requires the addition of $500 in power accessories and adds some serious heft to the notebook but this isn’t too large a compromise for the serious business traveller or power user that needs all-day battery life when they don’t have the luxury of power-outlets for a top-up at every turn. Again, the claim from Dell needs to put into perspective - when I first read about the feature, I questioned my recent order of a Lenovo X200 (which offers 9 hour battery life off a single nine-cell). The X200 manages this with a still svelte form-factor and still weighs in at just a bit over 3 1/2 pounds. Dell does claim however, that the nineteen hour figure is based off realistic everyday mobile user, which we’ll see once the reviews and benchmarks begin to trickle out.

Hi Carlos,

Thought you’d want to know – we just got word of a slight delay with your shipment. We hate waiting for new gear too, but it’s always better to know what’s up than be in the dark.

So here’s the deal: your package is on its way with a modified delivery date. The report from UPS says that since you were not available for delivery, UPS will make a 2nd attempt very soon.. To get the full details on your shipment’s progress, call UPS at 800-742-5877. We appreciate your patience, and can’t wait to get that brown box full of gear into your hands.

When you touch base with UPS, have your tracking number and order number handy to make your call quick and effective. We already did the legwork – check it out:

UPS Tracking Number: 1ZR7V93XXXX655XXXX
Backcountry.com Order Number: 44XXX62

I’ve never received a notice from a retailer after the order has shipped before. They went one extra step to make sure that the customer is aware of the status of their package rather than leaving it to them to dig up the tracking number had UPS not left a note. Good on Backcountry, and I anxiously await my new laptop messenger bag.

This morning, I was looking for a Quicksilver-inspired Windows application to use in my coming experiment (details to come soon - I have to check with Amnesty International to verify whether or not it falls in the realm of torture), and I found a new one that tries in their own special way to do the same. Dash is one that really caught my attention as it seems to best capture the basic nature of Quicksilver’s search, but it led me to another facet of the Windows developer problem which is how they market their software. Take a look at the seven reasons they suggest I use Dash at their product page. Item two on that list (because everyone loves reading lists) is “Reduce Repetitive Stress Injury”. Seriously, go look, I’ll wait… Rather than the pithy “act without doing” tagline adopted by Alcor, the developer of Quicksilver, Dash takes it in the opposite direction and is positioning this as a marvel of modern medicine. I say this in jest, but the problem is that it’s not addressing a problem they can solve or the strength of their product - it strikes me as something they pulled out of their butt to fill the empty space on the site.

And then there’s price. Dash is set at $50.00 except if you purchase now, you can get their “pre-release offering price” of $19.95 saving you $30.05. Let’s skip right past how this is on par with infomercial level “buy in the next thirty minutes and get a second free!” silliness and look at how it’s they’re establishing value. Software isn’t designed to be inexpensive and offering excessive discounts can make it seem as though you’re diminishing the worth of a product; a great example of this is Transmit from Panic Software for the Mac - it’s an FTP client, but it’s billed as the FTP client. As such, Panic doesn’t discount the software to entice those who undervalue what they offer, which is a fantastic user experience and just well-designed software. Cyberduck and Fugu are free, but I saw the value in the product that made $29 palatable. What the makers of Dash are doing is, in my opinion, either mispricing their product or using used car salesman tactics to win over customers. Ignoring the fact that Quicksilver, a vastly superior product to this knock-off, is completely free - Dash is selling an application at their ‘regular price’ that pushes it into the range of what full-fledged productivity apps cost. Launchbar, a product similar to Quicksilver for Mac is priced without the gimmicks, at $19. Fair.

I could continue, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll end this here. Windows developers and software vendors have so much to learn from the Mac developer community about creating better applications, but even more importantly, about marketing. If it can be summed up in a sentence or two, it would be this - stop selling simple consumer apps the same way Microsoft and Oracle sell enterprise CRM software. Home users don’t want to see how many different ways you can say the same thing on your “features” page, they want to see you solve a problem they have and do it elegantly.

They can try to transition to the domain they most likely paid a metric buttload for, but the social bookmarking service del.icio.us is going to continue be named as such in my bookmarks. Stubborn indignation brings change, right?

Early last week, the same problem occurred again - however I do not have the luxury of a recent backup to revert to. My most recent was from the beginning of June and I had made significant changes to the entries in the database since then. I emailed customer support from the Wallet developers and ten days later, I’ve heard absolutely nothing. As such, I’ve spent the better part of a day resetting various passwords via e-mail and reentering data into my new password/data management application of choice, 1Password.

1Password takes a much more logical approach to storing this data. It uses the existing secure keychain feature of OS X and repurposes that in a powerful interface. In my week of toying with it, it has worked quite well and is looks like it will be far more flexible a solution than Wallet for organizing and securing data. To migrate the old backup over, I exported the database as a tab-defined text file and imported it into 1Password. A cursory amount of reformatting of the data fields and notes and I’m good to go. My only concern is the GUI isn’t as pleasing to the eye as most other applications for OS X, but it could look like Lotus Notes on OS 9 for all I care as long as it works reliably.

My advice is that other Wallet users out there either keep ridiculously frequent backups of their database or to switch over the 1Password. I have no regrets at all about purchasing 1Password which is more than I can say about Wallet.