Jamie Thingelstad

Looking at Z-Scale trains at Hub Hobby.

Just installed the Twidget Twitter Mac OS X Widget so I can Twitter without even launching the browser.

Noticing that CNN is using Twitter for breaking news!

Have you played with Twitter? If not, try it. Be a friend. Tell me what you think. It’s pretty crazy. You can even link Wordpress with Twitter.

Excuse me for a moment of self-promotion. 🙂 I was featured in an article published last Friday in the Twin Cities Business Journal about what Dow Jones is doing here in Minneapolis, specifically some of the R&D; work that we’ve been focused on.

While the article suffers from some inaccuracies, for example, the entire office is not about Dow Jones Online but is instead many different divisions of Dow Jones. It seems I can never get through an interview for an article without something like that happening.

I’m happy to get the word out. I’ve been trying to get more publicity for what we are doing in Minneapolis since far too few people understand what we are doing, and we need all the best talent we can get.

I’m not one of these folks that scours the internet for Firefox extensions only to make my web browser slower and crash more often. However, I’ve recently been really frustrated by some shortcomings in Thunderbird (email client) and thought I would share some findings.

I use Thunderbird on five different computers popping in and out all the time. My mail server is IMAP-based so that is fine, the same messages are there no matter what computer I use. However, not the address book! This has been driving me nuts. Addressbook Synchronizer has come to the rescue however! This great extension allows you to copy your address book to a network location (including an IMAP folder which is great!) and get the updated one on startup. I now have 5 different address books and they are completely in sync, including the two built-in to Thunderbird. If you use Thunderbird on multiple machines, you need this extension.

There are two other extensions that are immensely useful. Contacts Sidebar restores a feature that Outlook Express had but Thunderbird lacked. It shows your address book in a pane on the left side of your message window. Nice to drop notes to people in your address book. Also look into Duplicate Contact Manager, it does a great job of chugging through your address book and culling out “dups” for you.

Also, in case you are interested I did setup an LDAP server using OpenLDAP and try to just have all my mail clients use the LDAP repository. I got the LDAP server setup, but there were huge problems. A little hidden secret of most personal mail clients, including Thunderbird, is that it can read an LDAP repository but cannot modify or add to it. This is a non-starter.

My software needs to start doing more work for me. Really. Either that or I need to get a digital librarian. What for you ask? I feel like I’m dying under the weight of metadata, data about data.

The vast archive of 33,000 digital photos that I have, the 400GB of music I’ve ripped from my CD collection and the hours of digital video are all great. It’s awesome, and I wouldn’t go back for anything. However, all this digital data has metadata as well, and that metadata doesn’t just magically exist. It has to be placed there somehow.

For example, I’ve recently moved all of my photos into Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is awesome and is lightyears (no pun intended) ahead of the file-system approach I used to manage my photos with. One of the great things it can do is tag photos (bill, bob, cat, dog, house, etc) and put them in collections (Wedding Photos, France Vacation, etc). After tagging, finding those pictures of Bill, Bob and a cat is as easy as a simple query. No more digging through hundreds or thousands of files. Want a picture of a squirrel? One click will do.

The rub though is that those tags have to be created, and who’s going to do that? I want my software to get smarter and start doing this for me. Facial recognition isn’t easy but it is possible. My Mac Pro sits on for hours at night. Let’s burn some CPU cycles identifying faces in photos. I’m happy to train it.

Music has a similar problem. ID3 tags are a must for a large music collection. If you don’t have them, or if they are wrong, forget it. Luckily here software has done some work for me already and it’s pretty easy to tag things off of big central databases on the net. However, now I have the harsh reality that 70% of my music by volume is tagged as “Rock”. Why? Because a music catalog would call it all Rock, even though I think it’s totally different. And here there is a big problem, because no group of people will all agree what genre AC/DC is – Rock, Metal, Classic Rock, Garbage.

I want to leverage all this great power of the digital world, and the promise is amazing, but software needs to make it simple, easy and quick ways to allow people to start associating metadata. The photography example is obvious to me. I don’t care if it takes a year to do 30,000 pictures – just as long as it does it. And I’m fine sitting down for a few minutes and identifying people and things for it as it trains. This stuff exists, it just needs to be integrated in the right way.

Hopefully that will happen soon.

Alright, the weather is really starting to bother me. Today, December 30th it was 41 °F while we were driving around this afternoon and it was raining. This wasn’t a “normal” winter rain. This rain felt like April showers. Nice big drops with a regular patter on the street. It’s December! Where is the snow!? I realize talking about the weather is so very Minnesotan of me. The faithful readers of this website probably care about my weather as much as what I had for lunch. But I must comment anyway.

I read a great article in last issue of The Week about depression rates being high in Moscow because there was no snow! This is the warmest winter ever for Moscow and the days are so short that the lack of the snows reflective qualities results in their rarely being any light.

What in the world is going on here. Take a look at December with this graph.

For the whole month of December the weather has just hovered in these ridiculously high ranges, barely dipping below freezing at night.

Enough already, let’s get some snow!

I’ve been wanting to use that headline for a while now. ;-) The Wii made the trip to North Dakota for Christmas. I wasn’t planning on taking it but then some of my cousins got wind that I had one of these prized units and suggested I bring it. It was a huge hit. The little Wii served over 9 hours of playtime on December 25th – by far the longest workout it has ever gotten.

It’s really amazing to watch people that never have any interest in video games playing a Wii and liking it so much. Wii Sports, the free “in box” game was the biggest hit of the day. The fact that it requires no experience to play, you just pick it up and go, makes it a big winner with people that are just getting acquainted with the Wii and it’s free motion controls. We even made a number of Mii’s for some of my relatives and everyone had a blast making them look as close to the person as they could.

I also scored two new games for my Wii: Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Red Steel. I only played a few minutes of Super Monkey Ball myself hitting a few of the party games. The game has a lot of promise. i played Red Steel for about 20 minutes and it was pretty good. I’m not a fan of most first-person shooters, but this was actually controllable and again the free motion controls made it easy to work with.

In other Wii related news I grabbed the preview of the Internet Channel for it. I was really impressed with it. First off, Nintendo did the right thing by not making their own and getting Opera to build a Wii version. Secondly, the speed is much better than I expected. I’ve always felt the “Internet” features on the Wii were really slow, but it must be something on the Nintendo side since the browser itself was very usable. It even plays flash video, making it a great YouTube surfing station.

While reading TechCrunch about a week ago I saw a headline about a “web 2.0” community-centric fitness site called Traineo. This hit all my hot buttons since the “geekery” sounded cool and I’m looking for something to help me along my path to getting smaller again. A couple of days later I finally got to the site, signed on and I’ve been really impressed. I’ve decided to start using this to track my fitness progress instead of my decade-plus venerable Lifeform software. Lifeform is still the best food logging software I’ve ever seen, but the rest of it I can do it Traineo easier and it’s a service with community.

Traineo provides some buttons for you to put on your site and such, you will see one on my site showing my progress towards my weight goal. Of the features that I particularly like is the motivator system where you pick four people that will get weekly reports on your progress.

I’m gushing a bit, the service isn’t perfect and I hope to see it improve significantly, but so far I’m really enjoying it. Check out my profile on Traineo. If you’ve been looking for a site to help you with your fitness goals and connect with a community, this is the place to go.

The other night while catching up on my RSS feeds in Reader I stumbled upon a small software project for the Mac called Cha-Ching. Cha-Ching is a product from Midnight Apps that intends to take on the personal finance heavyweights like Quicken. It’s not open source, but it reminds me of Firefox finally providing real competition for the lagging Internet Explorer 6.0 and pushing innovation in the market, and this is a market that needs innovation.

Cha-Ching is far from being able to supplant Quicken, but it’s sleek and well done. It feels enjoyable to use, and at only version 0.4 there is much to hope for. My hopes are with the Midnight Apps crew to build a product that will have elegance and simplicity, with rich and powerful features.

I’ve decided enough is enough. Perhaps it’s just the holiday season, but our mailbox has been overloaded with mail order catalogs. Sometimes as many as ten a day. It’s insane! I’ve decided to declare a War on Catalogs!

I’ve had good success so far. I’m going to the website of every company that we get a catalog for and submitting a customer service request. So far most are responding promptly. I’m keeping a list of who I contact, when and any relevant tracking numbers so I can escalate if I need to.

Hopefully our recycling will go down, our mail carrier will be happier, and we’ll have less junk thrown in our face to buy.

My component cables arrived for the Wii today. I finally was able to move off the incredibly lame composite connection and 480i to a nice crisp component connection and 480p. I know that this is a much better setup, and I eagerly plugged it in and decided to get my camera out and do some before/after comparisons. While I can tell the difference, it’s not as striking as I expected. These shots are all taken from the Wii menu screen. I took photos of the “disc” channel and of the Mii channel. I also took a photo of the Wii settings button on the lower left corner of the screen. See what you think.

480i composite of Wii logo in the Disc Channel

480p component of Wii logo in the Disc Channel

You can tell that the progressive scan smooths out the fonts a bit.

480i composite of Mii Channel

480p component of Mii Channel

Great example that when you are not “super-zoomed” into the image, you can’t really tell much of a difference.

480i composite of lower-left Wii settings button

480p component of lower-left Wii settings button

This extreme zoom shows the best the differences between the two settings.

There are other write-ups about the component cables that show the differences.

At the end of August I picked up a new USB thumb drive that would perform at a pace capable of running applications. I got the OCZ Rally2 2G drive and was very happy with it. One of the only deficiencies of the drive was that there was no way to attach a strap to it, and that proved fatal. On a business trip a couple of weeks ago I lost it. Huge bummer. I also lost a bunch of data that wasn’t recently backed up. Bummer ^ 2.

I went on the hunt for a replacement and decided to try some non-traditional form factors. I was happy with OCZ, and they had some good rebate deals on NewEgg so I ordered up a variety. I got the OCZ Rally2 4G, Mini-Kart 2G and Roadster 1G.

The drives fit a bunch of different sizes and use cases (pictured here with a quarter for comparison).

OCZ Rally2 4G

OCZ has revised this drive from the one that I bought a couple of months ago. They added a lanyard strap to keep the drive from getting lost, however the cap still doesn’t have anything to attach it to the drive placing it at risk of getting lost. The drive is spacious and it turns out respectively faster than even the last one. The last version (2G) maxed out at 9.5M/sec write and 19.7M/sec read. This new version ramps it up to 12.8M/sec write and 22.5M/sec read!

The traditional form factor makes this drive still not great for constant road warrior use, but the size is great for moving ISO images around and it’s got the speed to keep up.** **

OCZ Mini-Kart 2G

The Mini-Kart is a trip. It is slightly thicker than a credit card, and has a non-traditional USB plug that sits in the USB slot. It could be placed in your wallet pretty easily, and doesn’t require any protection on the plug. It’s big enough for most applications, and sports a nice blue LED on the end to indicate activity. I did a speed test and was pretty impressed with the performance for a compact unit. It topped out at 7.3M/sec write and 13.2M/sec read.

This drive should be great for road warrior usage, but I worry about the exposed connector and I think it could be snapped if it’s flexed too much. However, it is very solid and I’m sure would take a big beating.

OCZ Roadster 1G

The Roadster is the drive made for the road warrior. It is a clam shell design, collapsing the USB plug in on itself making it both small and exceptionally tough. I love the design, and love the size. It can be attached to your key chain and forget about it. However, the drive performs miserably. This is a big let down as this is the perfect drive for ultra-mobility, but it’s speed limits its viability for mobile applications. The drive posts a pretty sad 2.3M/sec write and 9.8M/sec write. Very sad since the average “give-away” free USB drive performs about this well.

Great form factor, but the performance is very limiting.

Conclusion

I love the Roadster’s design, but it’s speed is a problem. I’ll likely use the Mini-Kart for my mobile applications since it has the speed and a reasonable form factor. I’m very pleased with the Rally2 for moving large data around, and am going to give it a try using it for Vista’s speed boost feature as well.