A Cajun-Asian View

Yes, I am now watching NHL hockey action on Joost! Most of the games from the last series of the playoffs are available for viewing on Joost, skipping most the commercials1 and all of intermission breaks. Outside of stoppages of plays during play and the occasional replay, it's pretty much nothing but constant playoff hockey action. Nice stuff! If I need a break, it's just a matter of hitting the spacebar or pressing the pause button on the on-screen display pause the hockey action until I can get back to it. This is much closer to the concept of on-demand TV programming that I have envisioned.

1. 1. Joost will show a 30-second commercial at a few stopping points during the games. I only remember seeing 2-3 such commercials on an entire game, though.

Yeah, I'm a few days late on this. Heck, Dell had launched the systems on Thursday. Actually, this hasn't been too new, as Dell have been selling Red Hat equipped servers for some time (And they even have their own customized Yum repositories for hardware-specific drivers). But this is a very good sign for Linux (and other open source systems) when Dell is willing to sell systems with Ubuntu 7.04 preinstalled!

Got this wallpaper from xkcd.

I'll have to scour this discussion on how I can improve the workflow for developers at my company.

John on the Lafayette Pro Fiber Blog, while talking about Joost, also mentioned an open-source alternative called Democracy. Though Joost definitely has the commercial edge, Democracy does have a leg-up on Joost in that they already have a Linux client (Joost has it in the work) and that it's open sourced. I'll have to check into it. There's a Democracy package already in the Ubuntu repositories, too, so it shouldn't be hard to get installed on my Linux laptop.

(via Slashdot)

Somewhat related to my previous post, I've always been interested in the Optimus Keyboards, even if the $1564 price tag is way too steep for me. It looks like they have to make these by hand right now, though. Maybe if things pick up, they will be able to start mass-producing them by machine and the price will go drastically down. I would think $200-$300 would be the right price point for me, depending on the tactile quality and durability of the keyboard.

As a much cheaper alternative, this Slashdot comment points out the Deck Backlit Keyboards. The backlight wouldn't do me much good, though, as I rarely look at my keyboard as I'm typing.

Description on Youtube:

Presentation by Jeff Han of a futuristic multi-touch interface during the Adobe sponsored TED2006. Jeff Han is a research scientist for NYU's Media Research Lab, and the inventor of an "interface-free" touch-driven computer screen. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 09:32)

(Found this via a Slashdot comment)

I though I would not think that this could immediately replace a keyboard completely, especially in terms of speed (tactile feedback isn't something that can easily be replicated off of a screen, yet), this will definitely aid in replacing the mouse. And if it can also add in tablet-type functionality (like a physical pen, brush, and air-brush tool), it could be a boon for visual artists. Also, interactions by different users on the same screen would be possible with this.

There's some really nice images of space to use as wallpaper here.

A coworker was installing Windows 2003 R2 Server OEM 64-bit onto a server. According to Microsoft, you are allowed 4 Windows virtual servers. He needed to have Windows 2003 R2 Server OEM 32-bit (probably for some software that doesn't work in a 64-bit environment), so he was going to install it in a virtual server. Surprise, the license key for the 64-bit version does not work for the 32-bit version, so he calls up Microsoft support to ask how to setup his, according to them, allowed 4 virtual servers with a different version of windows.

Their answer (paraphrased): Find any key to install the OEM 32-bit version in the virtual system, then call the activation center to tell them that he's doing this.

That is kind of amazing... They're basically telling him to pirate a key and tell them.

Well, I got an invite to the Joost Beta earlier this morning, and got to watch the pilot for Stella while getting ready for work! Unfortunately, that was this morning, before the onslaught of new users wanting content came in. Right now, no programs are working, and the Joost team has admitted that their central servers have stumbled off the blocks. Oops!