MBoffin.com

How do you say Halloween? Does the "hallow" part of the word rhyme with "shallow" or with "hollow". This is an important issue in the Bennett household. (And I don't care what the dictionary says. What do you say?)

Today I saw some previews of Windows 7. I definitely liked what I saw, but I didn't like that I saw the preview.

Of course, Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place in the arena of releasing their next OS. If they don't do early releases of Windows 7 for others to see, they'll get backlash from developers and businesses who can't prep for its launch. If they do early releases, people are going to nitpick over the little details that are incrementally revealed over time until launch. By the time the launch happens, there's nothing new and astounding about it except that now you can shell out money for it. And I don't know about you, but that's not very new or very astounding.

Reading the comments on the articles about Windows 7 is actually more interesting than the articles themselves. There are scores of comments from people who denounce Vista as trash and nothing really new over XP and just a lot of bloat and that Windows 7 will be more of the same. I think these people are just being obtuse. However, Microsoft themselves are to blame for the attitudes of these people. Microsoft's method of releasing an OS is so anti-climatic that it's no wonder there are hordes of people who swear they will never upgrade and that their abysmally outdated operating system is good enough for them.

Windows 7 isn't due out until 2010. That's a long time in the computer industry. And that's if Microsoft releases it on time. Meanwhile, here it is in 2008 and people are already getting a taste of what's to come in Windows 7. Starting now, and the for the next two years, people are going to be nit-picking apart every little "new" feature they see in Windows 7. There will be a hundred variations of "lame", "program X already does this", "not even an upgrade over [insert other OS]'s feature", and so on.

If Microsoft kept everything about Windows 7 quiet until it was done (or quite close), the landscape of user acceptance would be entirely different from what they have to deal with now. Frankly, though, I don't think they have any choice. The position they are backed into in the market forces them to release their OS this way if they want to continue their dominance.

Last weekend Quinn watched The Dark Crystal. She really like it. It's funny, because she and Rowan both like a lot of movies that I really liked when I was a kid. Some of their favorite movies include The Princess Bride, The Goonies, The Karate Kid, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars (the first three of course—Rowan's favorite is Episode 5). And that's not even mentioning the umpteen Disney movies they love that I used to love (Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, etc.).

Oh man, just wait until they're old enough to watch Monty Python.

As I do more development on Earth Bridge, I've been needing a more portable laptop. (I also need a functional laptop that's not my work laptop.) I was very excited when Asus came out with their Eee PC line of micro laptops. They are a great size, yet still quite functional as a laptop. Seeing them in action, though, I was not impressed with the 7" screen size, and decided that I would wait until they came out with larger screen sizes. Since the original 7" screens weren't even filling up the available space on these laptops, I knew they would be coming out with a new line that had a larger screen.

Asus finally came out with a line of Eee PC's with a larger screen. However, around the same time, Dell announced their Dell Mini line of laptops. The Dell Mini line was basically their answer to the Eee PC, so many of the specs were very similar.

One thing that was decided for me from the start was that the OS would have to be Windows XP. While I really would have been up to the switch to Ubuntu as the OS, at the same time I wanted to be able to test Earth Bridge, which is a .Net app. Also, I want to be able to run Google Chrome, which is currently a Windows-only app. (I know that will change, but I was looking at what was doable right then.)

I put together a Google Docs spreadsheet to compare the different models I was looking at. You can check it out if you'd like.

Basically when it came down to it, the Dell Mini won. Why? For one, it just looks really nice. Two, price. It was definitely cheaper than the Asus models at relatively the same specs. I did not want the 80GB HDD because I don't actually want this laptop to have a lot of space. The idea of this is to be a portable machine that is not my primary machine. I don't want this laptop filling up with files that I then have to keep synced to other computers. While the 7.5 hour battery life would have been nice, it wasn't a deal-breaking feature. The price of the 1000H certainly kept the battery life from being a deal-breaker.

So I ended up ordering the Dell Mini. Dell says it will ship next Monday. I will definitely be posting a review once I have it. I can't wait for this thing.

Reading the political news these days is getting tiresome. Journalists seem to think they have free license to tag the suffix "-gate" to any random scandal that has even the most tenuous thread to the office of the President of The United States. Some of the ones I've been hearing recently are "troopergate", "passportgate", "whitewatergate", and "lipstickgate".

It's just lazy.

As I develop Earth Bridge, and once it starts alpha and beta testing, I need a way to keep track of bugs, feedback, and so forth. I'm taking a cue from Stack Overflow and using a service called UserVoice. It's a really excellent feedback/bug/feature tracking site. Here is Earth Bridge's site:

http://EarthBridge.UserVoice.com - Earth Bridge Feedback Forum

I've seeded the page with an example feature request. Well, it's a real feature, but just so you can see how it works. There are a lot of new, planned features so I'm sure many of the ones that get posted right off are already being worked on, but the site will give me a good idea of what people think about those features, and how popular those features might be.

Today's Woot is a two-pack of RC helicopters. If you happen to be reading this before they are sold out, go get a pack!! These are amazing amounts of fun if you can find a good place to fly them. Armen bought me one for Christmas and it's really fun to fly. Rowan loves flying it too, so one of the one's I bought from Woot today will go to him (after an appropriate number of jobs done, of course).

Being a guy and a geek, I love all things RC. I think the coolest thing I've seen in years is the guy who mounted a head tracking video camera onto the cockpit area of an RC place and had the video feed going into a VR goggle setup that was tracking his head movements. He essentially had a live, free-looking view from the cockpit of his RC place. Seriously, folks, it's hard to imagine anything cooler. I tried to find the video on Google Video, but it seems to be gone.

What I want to do is something like that, but I don't have the cajones (or budget) to do it with an RC plane. Instead I'm going to try to do it with an RC car instead. It will still be fun to be racing around with my view being from the car itself, but with the ability to free-look around me while driving.

I've been coding away on version 2.0 of Earth Bridge. I've gotten some really great (and fast) help over at Stack Overflow.

Having been subscribed to many usability blogs for the past several years is definitely paying off. I will reserve judgment on whether the interface I'm creating is "good" or not until other people have seen it, but I definitely like it much better than the old interface.

Regarding the interface, this is an especially tough application to create. First off, I'm not a UI designer. I'm a developer. (If you don't know why that's a problem, go read this.) What is trying to get out of my head is something like this. It's taking all my effort to prevent that kind of atrocity from happening. Unfortunately, the nature of this application is such that it only actually does one thing. However, there are about 200 ways of configuring how it does that one thing. So when it comes down to it, the whole UI of the application is just a glorified interface to a config file. So I really mean it when I say it's tough to create the interface. I'm doing my darnedest to keep from unleashing a UI atrocity on the users.

While I haven't been updating this site very often (read: at all), it doesn't mean I haven't been updating other sites. Here are a few other places where you can see what I'm up to:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google Reader Shared Items
• FriendFeed
• Flickr

I posted quite a while back about keeping my data on a USB key for easy access and portability. I later posted about using TrueCrypt for securing a section of that USB key for sensitive files.

Well, time went on and things changed a bit. First of all, I noticed that having a USB stick in my laptop all the time was draining my battery quite a bit faster than I could live with. This was to be expected, but it wasn't something I was happy with. Second of all, I found that when it came down to it, I really hardly ever used another computer where I needed to bring all my docs and apps over with me. Usually the only time I needed to bring all those files and apps over to another system was when I was either moving to a new laptop entirely, or I was formatting my system and needed to get back up and running again.

Due to the second reason, I changed the size of my TrueCrypt volume to just barely bigger than a standard CD could hold (see Peter's Evil Overlord List item #99) and kept all my sensitive files and all my portable apps in that one TrueCrypt volume. I then just kept that volume on my hard drive and mounted it as needed. (Which, truthfully, was all the time, since it had my browser in that volume.)

Then it came time to format my system and install Windows Vista Ultimate. Vista Ultimate (and the Business version as well) comes with a feature called BitLocker, which is basically whole-disk encryption. Your entire hard drive is encrypted, which means that if your laptop is stolen, you are safe. They can take the hard drive out of your laptop and hook it up to another computer and they still won't be able to get to your files. Well, alas, my laptop does not have the "Trusted Platform Module" chip inside that makes BitLocker work.

But then I remembered that TrueCrypt also has whole-disk encryption built in. So I figured I might as well try it, since everything was being wiped anyway. If it didn't work, I could just re-wipe and go back to what I was doing before.

Long story short, it works amazingly well. The process is extremely easy to encrypt your entire hard drive. TrueCrypt will not even perform the encryption unless it can read in your CD drive a correctly burned recovery disk. This means that you really have to screw up to lock yourself out of your own computer.

It's a very comforting thing to know that my entire hard drive is encrypted. If you own a laptop, I wholeheartedly recommend you do some sort of whole-disk encryption, either through BitLocker (Vista), FileVault (OS X), PGP, or TrueCrypt. (I personally would recommend TrueCrypt because aside from being free, it's also open source. This means that its algorithms and code are subject to peer review.)