I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was working out of my father’s office. This is working well, but I have a minor issue with music. I had tried burning DVDs with MP3s to listen to, but I got tired of them by the third day and wanted access to my entire library as well as the latest, newest stuff I was getting.

I’m skipping a ton of details, but basically I needed a solution that would work over the Internet to stream my own music collection to myself. Normally I would have used iTunes streaming over Hamachi, but the firewall here blocks Hamachi’s native mode and SSL mode is not reliable enough for my tastes.

I found a couple choices so far:

1. TuneVine. I won’t bother finding the link because although this is the right idea, it is no where near ready for prime-time and that is coming from a die-hard bleeding edge kinda guy.
2. Izimi. I just found this the other day and I was optimistic based on the sign up experience, but as far as I can tell you can only “publish” one song at a time. I certainly am not going to do that 64,476 times.
3. Orb. My current choice.

Orb’s main features are around streaming video to yourself. A bit like SlingBox, but implemented in software. If you have a media center PC, you can watch your video from wherever you are, including mobile clients. I’m just using the Audio portion of it and so far I’m pretty happy.

You install a small client on the server, set the folders you want monitored, poke a hole in the firewall and you are ready to go. The Orb web client has most of the library tools you’d expect like playlist, search, browse, etc. Once you’ve selected what you want to play it will launch in either their built in flash player or externally (Windows Media, iTunes, Winamp, Real). Performance and audio quality have been great. I haven’t needed it, but I installed the mobile client on my BlackJack and it works great as well.

This isn’t Orb’s fault, but it appears that Last.fm’s audioscrobbler isn’t picking up my streamed tracks. I’ve got an email out to last.fm support on that.

The South by Southwest 2007 organizers released an official torrent showcasing bands featuring 739 mp3s, 3.1 Gb worth. Free!

I started at AA Sound System and I’m going to listen to it straight through to Zykos. As far as I can see there are zero repeated bands and I’ve only heard of maybe 10% them. What a perfect way to discover new music.

Here’s the SWSX page and the direct torrent link. (I use uTorrent)

[via Waxy]

First of all, this picture cracks me up. For those that missed it the first time, the tron guy page is here: TRONcostume

And I would love to dedicate three pages worth of text regarding my complex relationship to Linux, but I’m in the middle of focusing here, and will offer just a couple of generalizations for now.

I would really like to be into an open source operating system. I would use it, I would donate, I would evangelize, I would blog tips, hang out in forums, the whole nine yards. Except I don’t really like *this* open source operating system. I’m not a fan of unix styles including commands, syntax and configuration; I have a philosophical problem with a macrokernel architecture; I think splitting the UI camps into Gnome vs KDE is idiotic. It just isn’t me — I doesn’t fit right.

I always hoped another competitor would emerge that I could get behind like Haiku, which is modeled on BeOS or ReactOS which is a Windows clone.

The counter argument is that someone like Ubuntu will come along and make it irrelevant, hide the terminal, support drivers, etc. Except that is just not plausible in the next five years. Being a power user, I’ll always need to get under that hood, no matter how glossy it may be. The beauty of the computer industry is though is that I’d be a fool to predict more than five years out. Anything can happen and I hope that the universe shifts around me to reveal my preferences in all things OS related.

I created a feed for Notches (the startup I am building) announcements. Of course, you’ll probably find a majority of the content there is replicated or cross-posted here. 🙂

The idea is that this will be just for major announcement activity and separate from the company blog — which we are already drafting posts for btw.

The FeedBurner RSS/ATOM feed is here*:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NotchesAnnounce

If you prefer you can subscribe via Email with this link.

* I use FeedDemon (for Windows), but I hear very good things about Google Reader

When I bought my powerhouse Dell workstation laptop, I had to forgo my Tablet PC dreams.

Of course, doing development work and spending 12+ hours a day on it, I’m pretty happy with this beast. It is fast as heck, the screen is dense and gorgeous.

An opportunity to buy a well used/loved Toshiba M200 came up and after I was offered purchase terms that were extremely generous I went for it. Thank you Rajiv!

First thing I wanted to do was a clean Vista install. Except there’s no DVD drive. I tried a USB drive, but that didn’t work. I ended up following the absurdly involved steps outlined here InstallingVistaOnYourToshibaM200 to boot the computer over PXE (the LAN connection) and Windows PE 2.0. This was like a flashback to the old, hard days of computing when men were men and I had memorized the complete set of US Robotics modem INIT strings. AT & F B0X4 & A3 & C1 & D2 & M4 & H1 & K1 & B1 & R2.

But it worked and I have a clean Vista install.

LifeHacker quoted “A line in a William Blake poem inspired me to think differently about my day: ‘Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night.'” the other day. There’s something comforting about thinking about my time that way and I’ve been more or less doing that since. The tablet is perfect for the reading portion at the end of the day. I am able to sit on the couch and read my feeds in slate mode comfortably, not hunching over a keyboard. Technote: FeedDemon, my feed reader is set up backwards for tablet reading for right-handed people by default. Straight from the forums: “Well, apparently there is a fantastic, little-known, and well-hidden feature in FeedDemon that already allows you to do this!! * Go to Tools > Keyboard Shortcuts (stick with me here, I know this seems weird) * Look for an entry call Change Position of Subscriptions, and create a shortcut for it * Exit the shortcut screen and press the combination you just entered * PRESTO! The subscription tree changes sides! * You can’t get to this option through menu’s, but fortunately you probably will only have to do it once”

I decided that Emily is the 60% owner of it since she sold her G4 ibook a while back and has been sans-laptop since. We are setting it up to use as a photographer’s helper, checking exposure/color and whatnot during shoots.

Other technical notes about the M200 & Vista: There is a problem with the current crop of NVidia drivers. The 97 series driver has a bug that prevents the screen coming on after sleep mode. I googled for this and found that if you plug and unplug the machine the corresponding change of screen brightness is enough to wake it up. I can report this method works most of the time, but if it doesn’t you are stuck doing a cold shutdown and restart. Plus if you are rocking battery only you might be screwed. The 100 beta driver resulted in an unusable gray screen for me, and I had to roll back in safe mode.

Overall though, I’m thrilled with it.

I’ve been running Vista for a while now and I only have two significant outstanding issues.

1. A corrupted iPod thanks to Apple’s unforgivable lack of testing on Vista. Guys, the betas, release clients and RTM versions have been out for what, eighteen months? I’m in that “if they don’t release a fix for this that I can run, I’m not buying another iPod ever” territory. related link
2. We are using a self-signed cert to use on our source control setup. I install the certificate manually into the trusted root folder and it works for between thirty minutes and a day and a half, then it just, poof, forgets about it. Google turns up zilch on the topic, yet I am certain I am not the only person this is happening to.

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was dropping as many distracting things from my life as to better concentrate and focus on building this startup.

The good news is I’ve doing much better on that front. I’ve been writing code again which has been doubly challenging on the focus front.

The bad news is that this intensity means that I’m blogging less.

Just a few quick observations on the state of web development in 2007.

• Things have come a long way since the web 1.0 days
• We made the decision to go with SubSonic and haven’t looked back. It is a .NET framework modeled after Ruby on Rails. I can’t imagine doing website development without this anymore. There are plenty of scenarios where you might want to roll your own database management layer, but building a feature based website isn’t one of them.
• Visual Studio 2005 + Team Foundation Server = a really nice environment for doing this type of work.
• ASP.NET 2.0 + C# + AJAX.NET = powerful stuff.
• FireBug, the Firefox extension is handy for front end work.

I had forgotten the joys of coding. Seeing the site come alive under our typing fingers is an amazing feeling and one that reminds me daily of why I left my stable 9-5 job for this entrepreneurial life.

My last post on tethering the Blackjack as a modem needed a tangential update.

I’ve been working out of my father’s office in midtown the last couple weeks, using a spare desk and their DS3 Internet access. One small issue is their firewall blocks hamachi’s (the excellent vpn tool) direct VPN mode and the backup SSL mode isn’t working consistently enough.

A key thing I need to do with my hamachi setup is access our servers from Visual Studio. Fortunately I made the call to keep my development environment in a virtual machine. This makes it portable and easier for me to keep dev chocolate out of my everyday computing peanut butter.

Since I already have a wired, primary Internet connection, it doesn’t help to just connect the Blackjack and expect Windows to figure out how to route the traffic intelligently. I could, of course, alter my routing tables manually, but that is a hoop that I don’t really feel like jumping through. Fortunately all I have to do is connect the phone, turn on connection sharing and then go into Virtual PC’s networking settings and change the connection to “Remote NDIS based Internet Sharing…” and now my host PC can use the wired connection and my VPC uses the phone’s and connects through hamachi brilliantly.

Note, this is using Vista + Virtual PC 2007 + Samsung Blackjack, but you could use this same basic method with XP + VMWare + Verizon Q etcetera.

Side note: First use of Vista’s Snipping Tool — a screenshot tool that is built in and really well designed. I guess I knew about it already, but it took LifeHacker to remind me to use it. Reason enough to upgrade to Vista? 

I mentioned in my initial blackjack post that I knew I could hook up my phone to my laptop and use the data connection through it, but I wasn’t sure how well it would work and that I might need to go out and get a separate card and data plan.

Well, I’m happy to say it works really well and I have no plans for a dedicated card. I have to use USB because there is an issue with doing it over Bluetooth and Vista (I’ll post an update when I get that working). I used Speakeasy’s speed test tool and you can see the speeds in the image above, which says 1070kbps — over 1 mbit/sec!! — down and 91kbps up, which is you don’t notice in most laptop scenarios, including remote desktop. Granted this is in the middle of Manhattan, but I’ve actually been impressed by the 3G coverage I’m getting as I travel around. Reception is much much better overall than my old SMT5600 and it pays to remember that if your reception sucks it might not be your provider, but perhaps the device.

You can even receive and make phone calls when the connection is live. The only issue I can see is that it doesn’t seem to charge over USB while the sharing is happening and there’s only one connector for power. Fortunately they include a second battery with its own charger so you just swap that one out for all day use if need be.

I guess the point of this post is a) wow, it is really cool that it works. It feels a bit like magic when you have it going and b) iPhone schmyPhone

I’m going. You should too.

Upcoming.org link