Jay McGavren’s Journal

Just grabbed Portable Thunderbird and installed it on the beat-up USB flash drive in my pocket. It looks like it will finally see some use now. I can walk up to any Windows PC with a USB port, plug in the drive, and run Thunderbird with no installation whatsoever. It even saves my articles back to flash, without ever touching the hard drive. I don’t trust the drive enough to handle my actual e-mail, but it’s perfect for reading RSS news.

On a related note, this Gizmodo article discusses a flash drive sold with Portable Firefox and Thunderbird pre-loaded. Now THAT’s simple enough for Aunt Tillie to use.

Hmmm, wonder if I could make a Portable Perl?

mr_mooph sent us this article on film directors like George Lucas wanting to go back and remaster their films in 3D. I’m betting a 3D image based on 2D film looks ridiculous.

But this gets me thinking about a good point… Why aren’t new films being shot in 3D? Sure, we don’t have the means to display them right now, but we will someday. You could just publish in 2D for now, and then when 3D projection technology is ready, the footage will be too. There wouldn’t be much additional cost - you’d just need cameras with two lenses, and CG models could be used as-is.

It would be like having a chance to film in color during the black-and-white era. We’re missing a cheap opportunity to future-proof our movies here, and we should be taking it.

Well, after a Herculean effort, Windows 2000 is once again my primary OS. Linux greatly appeals to the programmer in me, but not to the user. There are just too many inconsistencies and obstacles in the GUI. There’s also no Picasa, iTunes, or Photoshop (and I’m not about to mess around with Wine to get them working).

That doesn’t mean I’m giving it up, though. Since I had to wipe my hard drive anyway, I did as much experimentation as it took to get Linux working on dual-boot. That way, when I’m dying to try a Perl package that won’t work with Windows, I’ll be able to. And someday, when I can afford another machine (long after the wedding), I’ll keep a dedicated Linux box for file serving, backup, and version control.

Now it’s time to repeat the loathsome task of customizing all my apps…

Well, TivoSlideshow is up and running on the Tivo itself finally, and it’s handling both images and MP3s. I’ve just turned it loose on my massive collections to see if any of my files will crash it.

A sampling of the lessons I learned this evening:

• A shell script won’t run if it contains DOS-style line separators.
• “dos2unix” isn’t installed by default; you have to install the “sysutils” package (a 30-second operation once you know you need it).
• The JAVA_HOME and CLASSPATH environment variables need to be set before anything will compile on Java, and the Linux installer doesn’t seem to do it for you.
• Using getScaledInstance() on an image with Image.SCALE_DEFAULT looks really crappy.

Troubling and random problems, but I conquered them all with Google’s help.

It’s remembering to call it “Carl’s Jr.” instead of “Hardee’s”.

I currently have not one, but two projects running on SourceForge.

TivoSlideshow
HME Robots

I made the foolish mistake of looking for wedding venues first, figuring we’d get a loan “somehow”. After a week of running all over town on her vacation, Diana chose a beautiful but still somewhat reasonably-priced hotel, but she was reduced to tears tonight when I actually looked at loan options and determined we could only get half what we needed.

Tomorrow she’ll start her venue search again, while I look for more financing options, both of us with lowered expectations and a more somber mood.

I had set up a Technorati blog search for “raskin”, to keep me alerted to posts on the exploits of Jef Raskin, user interface guru and my personal idol. It was through this search that I learned suddenly on Sunday that he had died of cancer. This initial post was followed by a flood of later ones, as interface pundits learned of their peer’s untimely demise.

The interesting part, though, is that only a fraction of these posts appear to be in English. So far I’ve seen German, some Norse language I don’t know, Japanese, and Chinese, among others. Guess Raskin’s work really was widely known.

The Raskin Center Humane Interface (an open-source project to bring a Canon Cat-like interface to the masses) takes on new importance now - it may be the last chance this century for the world to experience a truly usable interface. Hopefully it will take off, and Raskin, like so many other geniuses, will come to be truly appreciated after his death.