I have to admit that this is the coolest toy that I bought in a
while.  I saw it talked about on the BYU Unix User Group mail
list, and today I stopped by Costco with my friend Doug Knight and
picked one up.

The Virtual Reality Sounds Labs VR-3 MP3 FM Modulator
is an amazing little product for only $25.   Although it is
advertised as being an FM Modulator – to allow you to play your MP3
player through your car FM radio – it is even more … a complete MP3
Player!  It has a USB slot on it, and will accept any USB Flash
Drive that contains MP3s and play them.  So it actually will do
both!  When we went into Costco, they had a huge pile of these
things … and they are in some pretty basic packaging.  The
packaging has a small picture that indicates that this is more than
just a FM Modulator.

I bought one and immediately took it back to the office to grab my USB
Drive.  I put some ITConversations on it, along with a couple of
good tunes.  I was still a little skeptical as I got to my truck,
but it really worked well.  I plugged it in, tuned the FM radio to
87.7, and got clear audio.  After work I listened to it the whole
way home.  It really worked well.  Mark Calkins brought out
his iPod and we plugged that in … again, it worked well with good
sound quality.

There are a couple of limitations, like the way that you navigate your
songs.  When powered up, it starts to play from the first song
that you copied to the USB Drive.  You can skip forward and back,
but if you power down it starts at the beginning.  There is no
display to let you know what song it is on.  In my truck, the
cigarette power jacks stay on, even after the truck is shut off. 
I found that I can just hit the “stop” button and resume playing when I
get back to the truck.  If I loose power in the middle of a long
ITConversation there is no way that I can find to fast forward back
into the MP3.

Overall … it’s a good buy for $24.95 at Costco!

I’m bummed.  We have lost another computer pioneer.  I had
this blog post to read from January … I am way behind on my reading
again … and when I went to check out the web site tonight I
discovered that Jeff Raskin passed away on February 26th.  What a
bummer.  This is some amazing work … on top of what he already
contributed to the world through his work on the Macintosh and GUI in
general.  He will be sorely missed … I am in awe of his work and
contributions.

Raskin’s Humane Interface Receives Corporate Funding.

This article on Slashdot reports that the Humane Interface designed by Jeff Raskin
has received USD 2 million in funding from an unnamed “multi-national
corporation”, and the first implementation, which has been named
“Archy”, will ship in 18 months. The design of the interface is
described in detail in Raskin’s popular book (see this summary of his design philosophy).
The Humane Interface is designed to be as easy to learn as a GUI (or
easier) yet as fast to use (or faster) than command-line systems. It is
supposed to drastically cut down on the number of keystrokes and mouse
moves required to do editing tasks compared with traditional GUI
editors. For example, mouse moves are used only when doing graphic
operations such as resizing a window or working on a drawing or photo.
It also apparently includes elements of a zooming user interface (ZUI), as shown by this Flash-based demo.

[Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface]

I have been using VNC for a long time. It is an awesome solution
for many different purposes. I was just experimenting again with
it last night. VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a very cool
program for cross-platform “remote control” of computers. It is
now available with most Linux distributions, and can also be downloaded
directly from the RealVNC web site.

There are a number of reasons that I thought about posting tonight
about VNC. First was my experience last night … two cool
things. First, I ran into an issue where I had to run a GUI
application on my remote server … I was able to SSH into my server,
start the Linux VNCServer, and then connect and run the GUI
application. Yeah, I know … no big deal, but it saved me.

The second cool thing was when I was looking for a way to remote
control a Windows machine running VNC that was behind NAT on a Linux
box. I was able to use SSH to connect to my Linux box, and then
start VNCServer on the Linux box. I could then connect to it with
the VNCViewer. I got my Gnome desktop, and immediately ran the
Linux VNCViewer … via VNC. When it came up, I was able to
connect to the Windows box. I was using VNC to run a VNCViewer on
a remote machine to get across a NAT. Was was even more fun was
that I was running VNCViewer on my Windows XP laptop, to remote control
a Linux Gnome desktop … where I ran the Linux VNCViewer to remote
control a Windows 2000 box!

One fo the next things that I found for VNC is the vnc2swf
application.  Now this is cool … a way to record the screen
actions of VNC.  Yet another new discovery for me.  I’m
downloading this now to experiment with it.

My next adventure? While at Lunch today with Bruce Grant, he
indicated that he can now use PuTTY to create an SSH tunnel for VNC to
his server … this is the next thing that I have to figure out …
this would be very cool! I just went an updated my copy of PuTTY
…

Well … it’s one way to solve it.  Anyone following my blog knows
that I posted about trying to get a Tomcat application working with
Microsoft IIS.  I didn’t get it working, and will have to revisit
this one day.

One of my friends, Ken Novak,
commented with a great idea … install a Virtual Machine (like Virtual
PC, Virtual Server, or vmWare) on the Windows box, and then run the
Apache solution in a VM!  That *is* a good solution.  I still
wish that it would be easier to get Tomcat working with IIS.

I sat through a pretty cool presentation on using Samba on Linux.  It was being given by the Utah Valley Linux Users Group, and was a good overview of getting things going.  There were a number of key points to consider in this situation.

One of the conversations was about security.  They talked about
accessing Windows shares over SSH and that it’s not easy.  I did a
quick on Google and found that there was a good How-To page called using SSH Tunneling to access Windows share that even referenced a free non-commercial SSH client that enables this.

I’m going to take a look at this and see what I can do to enable SSH on
the Samba server that I am configuring.  This would make things
much better.

It’s not just that they are here in Utah, we just had one in our back yard!

While I was sitting here writing the last post, my wife jumped up and
pointed out the eagle that just landed in our backyard.  We
watched it while it fed on something it had caught … it spent some
time eating and sitting, and then took off and flew back towards the
lake.

In the last year, we’ve had a quite a list of animals visit us … a
bear, dear, fox, and eagles.  All of this makes it nice to live in
Utah!

I am working on a Windows Server 2003 box … it’s been a long
time.  I have to admit that I love and hate the whole graphical
UI.  Once I have spent a couple of days, I start to understand
where all of the options are at, which tabs to use for what, and which
buttons hide what functionality.

I got IIS working with three “virtual servers” for different services
that I was installing.  I’m adding IP addresses to the box so that
I can use SSL on each of these.  Then I ran into problems. 
I’m installing a Open Source project that was built around “JAM” –
Java, Apache, MySQL.

The installation on Windows went well, however I have run into problems
when trying to get IIS and Apache to work well together.  The core
hitch seems to be that when Apache is running, although I tell it to
“Listen 10.0.0.5:80”, it wants to open 80 on *all* of the IP addresses on the box.  Or at least it produces errors that it can’t open 10.0.0.5:80.

Now if I stop IIS, then I can start Apache.  Apache *says* that it
is only listening on 10.0.0.5:80 … however when I then start IIS it
complains that 10.0.0.1:80 through 10.0.0.4:80 are in use!

I’m going to continue to dig, and see if I can get these two technologies working.

My friend Dave Cline just sent me a link to a new tool for Windows … the ISO Recorder Power Toy. It’s a quick way to create CDs from .iso files, and .iso files from CDs.

I was surprised to see this article.  Well … not too surprised … but still surprised.  First we get the Segway … now we have walking robots. 
All of this is the product of the continuing acceleration of computing
power.  With all of this compute power, we can now design these
types of devices, and allow them to operate.

Amazing stuff.

I have heard about this service from several friends and they indicate
that it is a really good deal.  They like it a lot better than
Vonage, and say that the web interface for managing your account and
phone number is well done.  I like the fact that it has many of
the features of the older “500” phone service that AT&T used to
offer.

Staples to sell AT&T’s Net phone starter kit. The office supply chain is selling a kit that includes a Linksys router and instructions on how to sign up for CallVantage. [CNET News.com]