Rhonabwy

Today we saw Pride and Prejudice - the latest remake with Keira Knightley. They did a good job with it, but I’ve got to admit that I’ve was very spoiled by the BBC’s version of it. While I liked the acting a great deal, there was just so much more development of the characters in the 6-hour miniseries that a two hour engagement just couldn’t quite come to fulfill the depth that I’d come to look forward to from the movie.

The article is horrifically short for coming to a conclusion, and I haven’t read enough to make my own concrete judgement, but the first thing I thought when I read the comment about the $100 MIT laptop from Intel’s Barret was fear. Fear of getting gutshot and underpriced by something that is sufficient as opposed to all the twiddly gadgetry that gets embedded today.

I can’t help but guess that the vast majority of processing time in a modern CPU is used more for pretty graphics than anything else. So if you trimmed out the fashionable GUI stuff, there’s no real reason why a $100 laptop with wireless couldn’t be built and produced. (Now, mind you - I LIKE that fashionable GUI stuff)

Of course beyond all that AMD is on the laptop project - Intel isn’t. At best, Intel is sour graping the whole thing. Because AMD is getting in a little PR ass kicking on them.

It’s hard to find many concrete technical details on this baby, but it’s processor speed is actually right in the same realm as my iBook or my desktop - 500Mhz. (Yeah, I’ve got some out-of-date hardware, huh?). It’s running linux - or some variation of an open source OS - maybe it’s BSD. Like I said - finding the geek details is a little tricky.

I think is that this is really opening the door to a fairly large disruption in technology. If we can produce these laptops for even say - $200, then suddenly snagging one and doing any sort of wacky modding to it because easily in the realm of feasibility for hackers and makers. The linksys was a perfect example of this - $75 and hack away boys! It’s not much processor juice in there - WAY less than a 500Mhz x86 style processor - but it’s enough for some focused work.

You know, the one laptop, one child thing is just a darn cool project when it comes right down to it.

It was a very long day today, and I’m completely bushed. You know, one of those days that just leaves you completely drained…

Even still, I wanted to write briefly that Karen and I took in Narnia tonight, and we both thought it was really well done.

I’d been a little hesitant after the papers made such a big schpiel about it being a “christian movie”, but really the movie stuck to the book and wasn’t any more or less overtly “christian” than the text. Alegorically, yeah - but it was also just a good (classic) story with well played actors and actresses and some really nice special effects. I especially liked the griffons. As far as acting, James McAvoy (played the faun Tumnus) did a great job, and I thought his facial expressions were near priceless. Not hilarious or stupid or anything like that - just really right on for what I expected in the role.

Now I think I’ll go pass out. Tomorrow bodes decorations, and Karen has already extracted a promise of hanging and setting up of the various holiday decor thingies we have.

It’s always amusing, sometimes in that not-so-funny-way, to see the drama that can come out from reviews of API, technical projects, and the like. A classic case in point is Aaron Swartz’ rather nasty and overblow review of trying to use Django.

The very best part of the whole page are the comments - “Letters to the Editor” as he has them labelled. The first two comments are from two of the creators of Django - both incredibly well constrained and positive feedback for the attack they received. It’s the fourth that I found most amusing - Paul Graham called him out on his complete lack of followthrough in his writeup - that he never actually defined a “real reason” for switching.

Well, I have a rather positively biased fondness of Django, simply because I think what they’re doing is cool, and it was driven by need which is easy to see. It compares very closely (in my mind) to Ruby on Rails - except using python. Of course I haven’t used it on any projects yet (other than piddling things), but it’s clearly standing up to the pressure with the Washington Post and ChicagoCrime…

My favorite market ever has lost it’s lease. I’m so incredibly bummed about this. Apparently the owners of the land where Metropolitan Market has stood for 40 years have signed over the space to QFC and a big ole’ development, slated to be in place by the end of 2008. Metro Market’s lease ends December 31, 2006. One year and a few days from now.

Is that the SUCK or what?

The little filling station across the way is also in line to get demolished (albeit quite a bit earlier) - to make way for a 4 story apartment complex. Parking is about to get a WHOLE lot worse in Queen Anne. It’s not as bad as Capitol Hill - but its clear it’s going to be heading that way.

All this was really decided years ago - before we even moved here - when the city zoned a section of the top of Queen Anne as “Urban Village”. That cranked up the allowable heights and density, so you know it’s going to happen - it’s just a matter of when. In 2002, the owners of the land where Metropolitan Market sites tried to redo that space - and the backed down after neighborhood pressure “and market factors”. Lord knows what outcry will happen for the neighborhoods favorite store now.

I really, really hope they find a location to move to nearby. I hate to admit it, but I’ll probably shop at the QFC if it’s a reasonable grocery. Or maybe I’ll just continue to shop at Safeway. I’ll go out of my way to shop at Metropolitan Market if it is anywhere nearby. There’s stuff you just can’t find anywhere but Metropolitan Market - lord knows where we’ll go if it’s just “gone”. Maybe start driving over to Whole Foods…

suck.

Last night I went to dinner at Toyoda Sushi with a friend, the first time I’d been there. We sat at the Sushi bar, and Sen (I’m probably mispelling his name) started serving us up a wonderful meal. I couldn’t even tell you what all of it was (I don’t track that fast), but one part in particular stands out - a tempura spicy tuna roll. Wow, that was nice.

The environment was a bit tight, but that didn’t detract much from the experience. They served miso and a noodle dish as an appetizer, and it just went from there. Definitely a place to go again.

I think Gus has the perfect embodiment of “agile development”. Heh. I hate it when that happens too…

Karen loves doing them, and I view them as sort of a necessary chore. Something you just “gotta do” over the holidays. Even still, the hard truth is you’ve got a much better chance getting a card from us if your last name is near the beginning of the alphabet. I get annoyed after so many card writings at one sitting and just refused to do any more. As is the case at the moment.

But hey - I can write here, and that’s a LOT easier than the little notesy writing that typically makes it into a card. For one thing, I can type a LOT more than I can easily write. If Karen wouldn’t shoot me, I’d be tempted to write one of those “to everyone” little letters, print out a couple hundred, and fold those into cards. Cheap, easy, efficient. But I guess that’s not quite the name of the game with holiday cards. Ah well.

Since I was determined to spend the day not doing much of use, I headed over to the UVillage Apple Store to see all the toys. Although they’ve been out for a bit, I hadn’t actually played with an iPod Nano previously. Man, those things are small. That’s quite a bit of compute packed in there, and soooo light. I thought the mini’s were impressive. For just sheer technical shrink and packaging, the nano has it beat.

Then I went and played with the new iMac G5’s. Oh my lord, are those pretty. And those larger screens - oooh… it’s enough to make me think that this whole laptop thing is just silly, because that screen real estate was just beautiful. I’ve not given up on my trusty iBook, not yet…

But I’m beginning to really see the age. Since I used the iBook daily (it’s the 533Mhz G3 white iBook), firing up Safari and browsing to a page on that iMac was amazingly fast. Of course I had to play with the built-in camera thing too, which was amusing. And the remote for it. Wow - that’s really quite the punch towards moving into the living room. Add some built-in PVR software to that set - and you’ve got yourself one killer setup. And if you do it - go for the 20″ display. It’s so obviously worth it.

The only downside was the cable setup. Although it’s a really clean look, the cable setup is not conducive to a clean layout. I foresee cables spewing out from behind the right side of this critter in no time at my desk. I wish they’d done that a little better - and at least put one USB connect on the side - or the front. That would make using the camera or thumb drive SO much easier than having to twist all that crap around to get to the port.

Of course the G5’s with the 30″ monitor sort of took the cake. That amount of visual real estate in front of you is - just awesome. Wow.

Sooner or later, I know I’m going to need to upgrade my Mac. At least one of them. And I use the laptop FAR more than the desktop. But the powerbooks just don’t even seem to compare to the G5 iMacs, so its a darn hard choice. And I’m not at “that point” yet, so I’m waiting. Maybe the intel based macs will hit the streets in the near future and make the choices even more difficult.

I was piddling around today, it being a sunday and all, and I started digging into a project I put on the “backburner” just a little bit ago. Only I realized that “just a little bit ago” was around 20 months back - March of 2004. Hmmmm… so maybe more than just a little bit ago.

It was a little web application I was playing with, written in python. I had a baseline setup for it, some unit tests, and I’d even started using it. I’m not sure why I moved away from the project when I did - I can’t remember exactly what happened in March of 2004 that swung me so far away from it. I think maybe that’s when I joined CoCo Communications, and then I lost that summer and following fall pretty darn quickly to the chaos of the startup environment. Yeah, thinking back at it all - that’s just about exactly the timing, so that is undoubtably what pulled me off and away.

The most amusing part of this was going back in and reading all the python code and ideas that I’d scribbled down about it. It is just amazing how much the tools have transformed in the past 20 months. Most of what I’d written was the same thing that everyone wrote with a web application - the object mappings, some quick business logic, and a lot of view/layout stuff. Today I think I could replicate the whole thing in Django in just a couple of days, or try out the same concept with TurboGears or move it into Ruby with Ruby on Rails. So much of the work that I’d really done is now “dealt with” by a Django model, or a Ruby ActiveRecord.

Pretty interesting what 20 months distance puts on the original ideas as well. Definitely a different point of view.