News from Great Castle Wilson

  • ChromeBooks

    So, my wonderful wife decided to get me something especially nice this Father’s Day. I had pointed out to her the Chromebooks that they have down at the local Future Shop, so she took me out Friday night and we went and got one. This one, to be exact:

    At $250, it’s clear that compromises were made, but it works surprisingly well given it’s specs — 2Gig RAM, 16Gig SSD, 1.7 GHz “Samsung Exynos 5” processor (ARM Cortex-A15). The benchmarks show it as faster than a base Atom machine, but only 30..50% of an i3. Anyway, plenty fast enough.

    To give you some idea what it’s capable of, as I type this, I’ve got a mouse and keyboard plugged into it, along with an external (HDMI) monitor. I have about 10 Chrome windows open (because, really that’s all you can do <g>) with one of them pointing at Rdio (and playing the latest Punch Brothers album over the HDMI speakers), one showing a remote desktop on my home server, one SSH’ed into my Raspberry Pi, a couple being used to write this blog post, and one connected to JazzHub where I’m keeping notes.

    It also has a builtin microphone and camera and will happily participate in a Google Hangout video chat. It will cold boot in about 10 seconds and wakes from sleep in about a second.

    As to the apps for it, in addition to the above, I managed to find solutions to almost all the things I normally need to do:

    • Files — DropBox, GoogleDrive, iCloud
    • Mail — iCloud Mail and GMail for home email; iNotes for work
    • Chat — Hangouts; no solution for Sametime yet
    • Twitter — Tweetdeck
    • RSS — Feedly
    • Reddit — Reditr
    • eBooks — Kindle Cloud Reader, Kobo Instant Reader, Google Play Books
    • Office — Google Docs, Sheets, Slides (and iWork once it comes out of beta)
    • image editing — Pixlr

    I even managed to get access to my password safe, albeit without the full browser integration.

    Of course, the reason I wanted one of these was to use it for testing the experience of working with Orion. I’m going to try to use it for my day to day development and testing for at least the next few weeks. So far, the experience has been good, but I’ll let you know if I discover anything particularly limiting.

    So what don’t I like about it?

    • Regardless of the offline support some apps provide, this really is a one trick pony: It’s for being on the internet, and if you don’t have a connection, you might as well save your battery life.
    • The external hardware support works, but just: I wasn’t able to get the acceleration rate high enough on the mouse I use; the max resolution on the HDMI port was lower than the native resolution on the monitor I use; I hung the entire machine twice while getting the display hooked up; etc.
    • The keyboard layout is pretty wonky — massive ctrl and alt keys, with a tiny shift key and hard to hit return key, and somebody must *really* like the backslash character since there is a key to enter it on both sides of the keyboard (in exactly the right places to have you accidentally hit them while going for the shift and return keys).
    • It really does have an incredibly small SSD drive, plus limited ability to expand that using the built in SD card slot since the memory card sticks out so far you have to remove it when you aren’t using it. *sigh*. The former I might understand given the low price, but it makes the latter unforgivable.

    Anyway, it’s not a replacement for the MacBook Pro, but it works pretty well. I could see taking just this device (and a USB HD to download pictures) if I was travelling. I believe the pricepoint is interesting too. It’s a nicer experience to work on than an iPad (even with a keyboard) at a significantly lower price. Now all they have to do is get the app ecosystem a bit bigger and it might start to make sense for the wider community.

  • First workout

    In an effort to finally get back in some kind of reasonable physical condition, I’ve started going to the gym again.

    Last week, my wonderful wife took care of getting me (and Dennis) signed up at Goodlife where she was already a member. Today I did my orientation and a first workout: all 9 machines of the “basic” set, twice, 12 reps on each, followed by 15 minutes on the stairmaster. Of course, all of that on settings so low that I suspect catatonics could keep up, but in any case, it’s done, in just under an hour of steady work.

    Now all I have to do is keep going regularly. I could imagine getting there twice a week, but I doubt I’ll be able to do more than that. I guess we’ll see.

  • Sleepy dog

  • All I need is a Portal

    No, not that kind of Portal.

    In this case, I’m talking about any device that can connect to the internet: desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, e-readers, smart TVs, and I’m sure many more that I have missed. I’m probably late to this party, but I have finally clued into that fact that I no longer do anything that doesn’t require a connection to the internet. “But wait!”, you say, “what about…”

    … Professional Life?

    I’m guessing most people get this already but, of course, there’s email. And then there’s the myriad of web forms that I process. And the scheduling that lives on a central server. And the 7 (!) instant messaging systems that I’m always connected to…

    Like most people in the high tech industry, the entire context for the work I do lives entirely on the internet (or at least the intranet). Heck, my team is split across half the world, so I couldn’t even communicate with them without Sametime (*sigh*) and IP phones.

    But then what about the actual software development tasks that I’m supposed to be doing? Well, you know desktop Eclipse is still my bread and butter, and aside from downloading it (and updating it) via eclipse.org, it really will run without an internet connection on your favorite desktop. But then all of the content that I work with actually lives on the eclipse.org servers, so I do need a connection to pull/push my work, even if I can get by without one in between.

    And that’s the important detail, actually. I now think of working locally as “working from the cached” data; it’s certainly useful to have a way to work without an internet connection, but I absolutely must have one when I’m doing something real. That progression is what’s at the heart of the Orion work.

    Orion actually seems like the most natural thing in the world to me now: I could run an Orion server on my local machine, which (together with a browser) gives you a story conceptually equivalent to Eclipse desktop: Local tools, running against a cached version of something that really lives on the internet. But why would I want that? If I need the internet to get the “real” data, why not serve the tools from there too? Obviously, they would need to still perform well and be fit for purpose, but beyond that there really isn’t anything special about having them local.

    Case in point: While waiting for a laptop upgrade at work I was stuck for a few days running on a 1Ghz netbook with 2Gig of RAM. (Long story, better left untold.) During that time, I used the netbook as just a portable web browser — think “Chromebook” [Aside: why are all the current Chromebooks slow?]. On it, I kept web pages open on Lotus iNotes (for work mail/calendar), iCloud (for home mail/calendar/address book), and GMail (to hold my bugzilla spam 😉 ). I also spent the time doing useful Orion work, again with multiple windows open. All in all, this worked perfectly well. It wasn’t speedy, but it wasn’t holding me back. On that machine, at least, there would have been no hope of getting Lotus Notes and Desktop Eclipse both running reasonably. No way.

    I can even get to all of those sites, and work with them, on my iPad. With an external keyboard, it’s actually almost good enough as a full time “portal”. Even without one, the first time you realize you can now do work anywhere there’s a cell signal is quite an eye opener.

    Regardless of the tool to get there, I really can’t do my work without access to the internet. Maybe I could have at one time, but now if the network goes down, it makes more sense to go home, or anywhere else that you can get a network connection. (I actually shared my phone hotspot with others the last time that happened, so they could keep working.)

    Ok, so what about…

    “… gaming?”

    Well, let’s see, what games do I currently play? Truthfully, all the games I play are PC based. It’s been years since I played a board game or card game, and I only occasionally play games on handhelds or consoles. For me, it’s all about PC gaming (and really that’s only reason why I still have a PC 😉 ).

    So, what am I playing? There are the MMOs, of course, which are internet only by definition:

    (and those are just the ones I’m currently playing).

    Then there are the blockbuster single-player titles that I still make time for — things like Diablo, Deus Ex, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and hopefully Watch Dogs (I’m expecting good things).

    The thing is, I never go to a brick and mortar store to buy PC games any more. I almost always download the games from one of the online providers like Steam or (if there is no other choice) Origin. When you use one of these services to buy your games, the systems requires you to check in with them (via an internet connection) when you go to play the game. Not ideal, but I’ve gotten used to it, and (at least in Steam’s case) they also provide the side-benefit of uploading your game saves, so you can just delete the entire game off your system, and if you ever decide to play again, pick up where you left off at the cost of a (free) re-download.

    Diablo 3, of course, is even more tied to the internet. It is effectively running an MMO backend, under the covers, even when you are playing in single-player mode. Your character can’t do anything without a connection. Wow! A couple of years ago, that idea would have been laughed at, but clearly that’s changed.

    In any case, for me, computer gaming really does need an internet connection.

    Ok, so what about…

    “… everything else?”

    You get the picture and this post is getting too long.

    I make music; it uses samples from (and gets saved back to) SoundCloud. I watch movies; they come from iTunes. My car dealer, dentist and family doctor all remind me of upcoming appointments via email, and almost all of my bills now come in the same way. I buy things from Amazon and pay by PayPal. When I travel my GPS app gets current traffic info from the web. When I buy coffee, I pay for it with my phone. I’m an avid reader of ebooks, but haven’t read a paper book in years…

    It would take 10 more articles this long to capture all the ways I depend on the internet.

    So, like I said, my entire life needs an internet connection. I’m actually ok with that. I’ve come to grips with the fact that we’ve crossed a boundary we can’t uncross. What about you?

  • Network trouble.

    Warning: mikew.ca and sheepsahoy.com are experiencing network issues right now.

    Access may be sporadic.

  • George and the christmas decorations.

    He was a bit confused when we started building a tree in the living room, and when we started bringing out the boxes of decorations, he figured it was best if he just stayed out of the way.

    He’s only tried to eat one of the Christmas balls so far, but I suspect he hasn’t quite learned that lesson yet.

  • A theme away, A theme away,…

    I upgraded to the latest wordpress and ended up with a completely trashed theme. This is just the standard “2011” theme. It will do until I can find something better. One of these days I’ll get around to doing my own.

    (note to self: Orion needs a project type for creating wordpress themes.)

  • Still growing.

  • *** Site stability warning *** (updated)

    Just letting you know that the various sites we host may be unstable for the next few days.

    We’ve just upgraded our network connection, which should significantly improve performance, but it’s going to take a while to get all the kinks worked out.

    Wish me luck :-),
    McQ.

    Update: The most important sites are all working again. If you have any problems, please let me know.

  • Size comparison with Lucky