Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here’s some band/album recommendations:

Niacin, Time Crunch
These guys have just become one of my favorite bands. Jazz/rock (not really fusion) featuring Billy Sheehan on bass, John Novello on keyboards, and Dennis Chambers on drums. I remember seeing Billy play with Talas quite a few times when I was a teenager in Buffalo, NY. He really is the world’s best rock bass player, and the Guitar Player magazine reader’s poll has agreed with that statement no less that 5 times (tying him with Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, Geddy Lee and Eddie Van Halen). Novello is a session player that co-owns LunaTek studios with Alan Howarth (the great movie soundtrack composer of “Escapefrom New York” fame). Chambers is ex-Parliament, which leads us to…

Parliament, The Best of Parliament
Excellent compilation of Parliament’s music. Truly the funkiest band ever (this coming from the whitest man alive. 😉

Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Broadcasting from Home
Very eclectic Celtic/folk/New Age/whatever music. I find it very hard to categorize their music. Check out their web site for samples.

Tony Levin, Pieces of the Sun
King Crimson and Peter Gabriel’s bass/Chapman Stick player reunites with Larry “Synergy” Fast and Jerry Marotta of Gabriel’s orginal band. Excellent prog and jazzy rock. Features an unreleased Gabriel song, “Dog One” and a remake of the Synergy song “Phobos” (and I’m still not sure how they pulled that one off so well).

Heather and I actually got the chance to slip out of the house today to see Star Wars Episode II with my bro-in-law Bill (thanks to my parents for babysitting). Wow, I was actually very happy with the movie!

I went expecting the worst – Lucas really royally f’d up Episode I, and Return of the Jedi wasn’t much better. This latest film is MUCH better than the last and I’d rank it as the third best of the series behind The Empire Strikes Back and A New Hope.

Good Points:

• The plot: the story was much more in line with the original trilogy and Lucas obviously had a lot of help on the screenplay from Jonathan Hales.
• Visuals: ILM has outdone themselves once again. These are most certainly the most amazing visuals I’ve ever seen. The climactic battle is a sight to behold. The completely CGI Yoda is almost perfect – especially when he has his action scene.
• Production design and costumes:

Once again, a sight to behold.

Bad Points:

• Dialogue: OK, so I said the plot was better, but much of the dialogue was – well – silly, contrived, overly simple, etc. Bill’s favorite line: “I hate sand.” (spoken by Anakin).
• Acting:

Stilted, dry, monotonous, you name it. Lucas has lost his (limited) skill at directing actors and is too involved with directing digital effects. Hayden Christensen, while a definite (infinite) improvement over Jake Lloyd, was not very good as Anakin. Natalie Portman was much better than I thought she would be, but still a bit weak. Ewan McGregor, Samuel L. Jackson, Ian McDiarmid and Christopher Lee were all excellent, but the best actor in the movie (IMHO) was Temuera Morrison as Jango Fett. He was just plain cool…

The post BD-X unemployment period has thankfully come to an end. Yours truly is now the Managing Director of Technology for The Debt Exchange.

DebtX is a “business-to-business marketplace for the auction of commercial real estate and business loans. It is an open, market-driven exchange that reduces transaction costs, compresses transaction cycles, and enables buyer and seller participation in the secondary commercial debt market.”

Notice any patterns here?

• Time0 focused on B2B, as does DebtX.
• Business Data eXchange to Debt Exchange.

Coincidence? Synchronicity? Government plot? All of the above?

I used to love my Intellivision. Now you can love it too.

CPU: 16-bit GI 1600 running at 10-bit data transfer
MEMORY: 7K internal ROM, RAM, and I/O, 64K for programs
RESOLUTION: 160 x 92 pixels
COLOR OUTPUT: 16
SPRITES: 8, each at 16×16 pixels in size
SOUND: 3 channel mono provided by an AY-3-8914 chip

16 colors. That’s enough for anyone, eh?

Success! BD-X was acquired by CCBN today.

Press release.

Our letter to BD-X subscribers.

Mass High Tech article.

Boston.Internet.Com article.

Now I need to find a new job.

David Walend and myself have started a new Open Source project named Presentation Builder for Java (PBJ for short).

To quote Dave:
PBJ is a presentation tool. First, it’s a knock-off of PowerPoint and the like. It lets a user create slide presentations by assembling JavaBeans. Using JavaBeans lets the user create a compelling, interactive presentation that can pull information and media from beyond a static document. Additional tools let a user show the presentation (along with an outline on a multihead system), and record audio and video for playback later.

We’re still in the planning stage, but code is being hacked and the project’s web site is up if you want to check it out.

I’ve been having a few problems with my Linux development box lately. First, networking is messed up, probably due to poor support for my Netgear Ethernet card. Second, the fan has stopped working on the box’s GeForce2 vdeo card. So I decided to try doing some programming on my brand new Windows XP box.

Well, needless to say the DOS (err…sorry, CMD) window is terrible and Microsoft’s command-line utilities have never progressed beyond the terrible stage. Time for Plan B – UNIX in Windows.

I used to be a big fan of the MKS toolkit back in the days when I was a PC device driver programmer (wow – 11 years ago). The toolkit gave you just about every UNIX tool you’d need. It was slow, incomplete, but for the most part did its job. It was also expensive. And still is. I just checked and it’s almost $500. Yikes.

Microsoft, believe it or not, also sells a product called Windows Services for UNIX that gives you many UNIX tools. At $150, it’s better priced, but not half as good as MKS.

So, on to the freebies.

RedHat had purchased a company named Cygnus awhile back. Cygnus started off as one of the first companies to provide technical support for free software. So, for example, if you were an IT shop that used GNU gcc for your C compiler, you could pay Cygnus to provide support.

Cygnus also sponsored a software project where they were writing a DLL for Windows that would provide many of the standard UNIX library calls. They also created a set of UNIX tools that used this DLL. RedHat bought them out, and spun off the Cygwin project. For a cost of – well, nothing – you get a very complete UNIX-like environment for Windows. This includes the Bash shell, compilers, X11, CVS, grep, sort, ssh, rsync, and the list goes on and on.

I installed Cygwin the other day and have been blown away by it. Very complete, very solid, and I don’t have to type “DIR”.

Grab it from http://www.cygwin.com/ and see for yourself.

[Added 4/12/2002]
Tim Daneliuk has reminded me about djgpp, which has been around for quite some time. Its web site states:

DJGPP is a complete 32-bit C/C++ development system for Intel 80386 (and higher) PCs running DOS. It includes ports of many GNU development utilities. The development tools require a 80386 or newer computer to run, as do the programs they produce. In most cases, the programs it produces can be sold commercially without license or royalties.

Check it out at http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/

If you really want to hear the conference call, you can listen to the replay at (800) 642-1687 – conf id #3495683.

I was the guest speaker on Prudential Securities’ “What Do They Do?” conference call, hosted by analyst John McPeake. The topic was “Open Source Technology”, so I had the opportunity to talk about the joys of Open Source while trying not to bash Microsoft too much…

I’ll make an MP3 file of the conference replay and post it here ASAP (with John’s permission, of course).

Let’s hope I didn’t ramble.

Something Awful has outdone themselves – Fun with Children’s Books and Photoshop.