Spent the last week in Hawaii – while on the beach:

* “Amnesia Moon”:amazon by Lethem. In the philip dick vein. Intersting core thesis about fracturing of reality as a response to an external threat. And I am sure that this is the only book I’ve ever read with a blurb by “mc 900 foot jesus”:amazon. How many people on the planet own cds by mc 900 foot jesus and have read this book? * “Snowfall”:amazon, “Kingdom River”:amazon by Mitchell Smith. Decent post apocalyptic yarn. In this case, set in north america sometime after a new ice age, and society has become much more primitive. In the first book, the action is paced well, and the unhappy endings for many of the ?good? protagonists creates a level of reality and pathos that tales of this sort normally don’t attain. The second book falls off quite a bit – pacing not as good and the hero is a bit too invincible. * “A frolic of his own”:amazon by Gaddis. Ok I hate to give up on a book part way thru. I feel like I am wasting the time I’ve already invested in the book, and I feel like I am letting the author defeat me in some strange intellectual contest. But I have to put this down after about 75 pages. I have no idea where the author is headed, I am not intrigued by the characters. The writing style is particularly annoying – we have perfectly good ways to punctuate conversation, why invent new ones which obscure meaning? I assume the author is making a point with this style, perhaps it ties back to the theme (a critique of our litigious culture per one of the jacket blurbs) but it is tiring. One of the jacket blurbs, from richard lacayo of Time magazine, says ?Practically rebuilds the Tower of Babel from the sounds and furies of the late 20th century.?. I have no idea what this means, I can’t make any sense of it, and so I guess it is a very fitting description of this book. * “Icarus”:amazon by Russell Andrews. Like mary higgins clark, only longer. And a bit dull at times. Length kind of beat some of the suspense out. * “Democracy in America”:amazon. I can see why this remains on so many recommended reading lists after 150 years; it is still a very relevant discussion of American politics and history. I am only partway thru but finding this very readable. When you’ve grown up in a particular system, you take so much of it for granted, it is fascinating to see it through someone else’s eyes. A great rehash of inheritance and estates early on that reminds me why estate taxes are not such a bad thing. * “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”:amazon. A trendy choice that I expected to dislike, but thia is a very good tale. Thematicallly like “tim powers”:amazon but with very deep characters. Like all stories of this ilk, the metaphysical windup is a bit mushy and nonsensical, but this is no worse than most. I found norrell’s transformation at the end a bit unbelievable, I’d like to have seen deeper development throughout the book of his guilt around introducing the main antagonist into the world, as I think this guilt was the motivator for him to eventually transform himself. Without this development, his transformation seemed a little pat. I’d give it an a- lots of loose ends, but I hope the author avoids doing a sequel as I don’t think wrapping up the loose ends will improve the story.

Rich is looking at solutions to go all voip at home.

Rich some things to look at:

* Mega list of sip products up at pulver.com * Another at Sipcenter * open source pbx – asterisk

The problem I struggle with is this – I have a lot of cheap handsets around the house connected by cat5 back to my wiring closet to my existing pbx. If i replace this pbx – what hardware bridges out to all these analog handsets? Or do I replace them (at great cost) with sip handsets – are there any really cheap sip handsets?

Some great posts I’ve found on the disaggregation of the PC in the home – we aren’t moving to bigger and bigger PCs in the home, but to elements of the computing environment spread all around:

* Furrygoat summary and his external storage box. His main point is all about pulling storage out of individual PCs and making it a household-wide resource. * From decafbad, these gumstix are very cool concepts, it would be nice if assembling computing at home was as easy as throwing a couple of these together. * A more general post from decafbad about single purpose devices in the home.

All the most aggressive users of technology I talk to are moving to disaggregation of storage in the home, despite the current designs of pcs which generally don’t encourage this disaggregation.

* Olivier notes the problems you face when building a new SATA-based PC. Over the next 6 months this stupid problem is going to cause more floppy drives to sell out of Fry’s than any other reason. And many of them will be returned after one use. I’ve had to deal with this 3 times now, pain in the a&$. * Crap I’ve had my ATI x800 installed for like a month now, and I am obsolete, I need the 850. * The Falcon NW fragbox 2 looks like the perform form factor – a lot smaller than your standard mini-tower, but enough space to force in the latest video cards and some storage alternatives. * $19 for 7.1 audio. Basically the soundcard market is almost dead, it is so cheap to get an amazing card now, and soon the processing will just get sucked back onto the main processor. Unlike video cards, we just don’t seem to have an inexhaustible need for ever better audio * Miniprojectors. Certainly the projector market would benefit from technology introduction and price competition. * ok getting odder and odder – this little rf adapter for wireless remotes seems cool – fits in where a battery normally goes – does it work?? * Interesting phone for outdoorsy types – walkie talkie and gps functionality

So, with Yahoo’s inevitable announcement of Yahoo desktop search – just how many freakin’ indexers are we all going to have to run on our machines? I am going to need a multicore proc and dedicate one of the cores to running the google indexer, the yahoo indexer, the lookout/msn indexer, the winxp indexing service. and then of course all the media player and photo indexers that come built into all these apps.

Longhorn was purportedly going to solve this but now winfs may not even be in the release after longhorn, at least that is how I read this article.

So the market for fs value-add utilities will be strong for the rest of the decade – not just indexers, but replicators and synchers like unison, software raid and other lower level solutions, etc. We all have way too much free disk space at our disposal, software will spring up to use it for reliability, performance, ease of use.

From this slashdot entry, lots of great board game sites:

* The Morning News game guide * Funagain Games for all your buying * Boardgamegeek for enthusiasts * SeattleSpiel for Seattle board gamers

It is kind of a holiday tradition of ours to spend a few nights playing some board games…lots of good ideas for this year in the above links.

For some reason, about two weeks ago, my IIS server (that this site resides on) quit being able to resolve DNS names. I’ve tried changing my DNS servers, no avail. I’ve tried turning off and turning on the DNS Client Resolver, no avail. The only config change I have made recently is to turn on the WebDAV extension in IIS, I turned that off, no avail.

This happened to me when I first installed XP Server 2003 and it was due to a 3rd-party socket filter that i had to remove. Going to investigate that next. Also going to look at ways to log the traffic at the IP level as i try to hit a named site to see what is happening.

Static pages on the site work fine obviously, but any kind of dynamic page tends to fall over.

Maybe it is time to move to a hosted solution. Not really having fun chasing this crap down.

UPDATE: used the Network Monitor utility in XP to see that, for whatever reason, the DNS servers I had been using were returning “name not found” to all my requests. Further dug in and found that our ISP had provided us new DNS servers to use for our DMZ boxes a couple weeks ago. All fixed up now. Don’t really understand why the old DNS servers were still operational and still responding to DNS requests at all, but onward and upward.

First, an interesting article about profitability in the hard drive industry – classic commodity economics are at play, and as consumers we are all benefiting.

At the same time, enterprise storage functionality is transitioning down to consumers – external sata connectors allowing really high speed detached storage, lightweight nas solutions, a bunch of software raid solutions – but it is all way too hard to use for most people.

Seems to me like there is a path out of commodity pricing for the hard drive guys. The first player to bring enterprise storage functionality – replication, auto-backup, hot swapping, pooling, etc – to consumers and small businesses in a brainlessly easy to use package could be a big winner.

Per Kevin, Google News is now incorporating Fanblogs as of today. Congrats guys!

Places we’ve hit recently…

* Supreme in Madrona. Loved it! Great neighborhood place, super service, great food, a calm and relaxing place. * Serafina. The food was good, we’d go back, but it was very crowded and a little frantic. Good if you are in the mood for that. * Firenze. One of our consistent favorites. Not in a very promising space, but great food e.very time. * Queen City Grill. Another consistently good place. Not as trendy as some of the places in Belltown, but always good. * Flying Fish. Did the chef just change? We were very disappointed there recently. Every dish was bland and poorly cooked. It will take some dramatic change for us to ever go back.

* Adrian finds a great wireless blog, and Rich points to a lot of interesting wireless sites and companies. Ignition’s original investing focus was wireless data, and while we have broadened a bit, it is obviously still near and dear to our heart. * Cloudmark gets good reviews as the best anti-spam solution – and they’ve extended the product to deal with phish as well. * Martin continues his dive into all things biodiesel… * People talking about cellphones as the real competitor to the ipod – hence our investment in Melodeo * Rich discusses the import of the browser share shift to Firefox – the movement of influentials is very important…and Rich is playing around with headphone amps

Reardon reminded me recently that I read a lot of books. I looked over the list this year and was a little suprised myself. And what a lot of dreck in there, I wonder why I plow thru some of this.

But to save others from plowing thru the dreck, here is my short list of good reads this year. Some new, some quite old.

Fiction:

* The Glass Bead Game by Hesse. 3/4s of a year later and I can still recollect vast swathes of the book as well as particular scenes. Well worth the time. * The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Totally expected to hate it, thought it was just trendy, but this was a solid and memorable story. * A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole. Great great characters, dying to be a movie. * Musashi from which I picked up my favorite quote of the year.

Non-fiction:

* The 9/11 Commission Report. Again, every US citizen should read this. * And while you are at it, read Imperial Hubris. At the very least, thought-provoking and internally consistent. * And lest these two depress you too much, read At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig for a view on a country and culture that is really screwed up.

* Via lockergnome, XrayPC – another useful tool for isolating spyware and other malware. Also note this review of spyware fighters. You probably should be running a couple tools on all your machines. The free tool as part of the yahoo toolbar is a great value. * Drivesitter. I’m not sure why but I love these tools that watch your harddisk and attempt to predict failures. I have backups of everything important and so a HD failure is not catastrophic for me but it is a time waster and I’d like to know if a failure is imminent. * MT Posting plugin for Newsgator. Promises to combine two of my favorite pieces of software – alas it doesn’t work for me yet due to my security config, I’m in contact with Newsgator support. * Mike points in here to PDF speedup – man everyone needs to run this, the adobe reader is jammed so full of crap that most of us don’t need. * Now that I have finished Halflife 2 missions (though am still vastly entertained by the online deathmatch – gravity guns rule!), here’s a whole trove of free games * Chris points to a bunch of nice editors, one of these will probably find its way onto my machines. * PortQueryUI from MSFT. Haven’t had time to play with this yet but will soon. * Another from MSFT – a tool to see if have a good MPEG decoder. Why does the Windows Media Player make your codec config such a mystery? It is hard to tell what you have installed, unless you grovel the registry.

Lastly a nice post from LarryO about hiding complexity. This sure feels like the reason a lot of software goes wrong…

I picked this up based on Rich’s reco. So the first 90% of Imperial Hubris just pissed me off, I thought the author was just being an apologist for Osama, explaining again and again the rationale for his actions and the support he enjoys.

But the close of the books was great. Two messages. One, we are at war, let’s quit pussyfooting around, let’s apply the full weight of our force on a focused effort to win. Two, let’s at least have a discussion about the policies that have forced us into war – our energy policies, our support for autocratic regimes, our unflagging support for Israel. Maybe these are the right policies, maybe not, but let’s at least have a discussion and agree that they are worth a war.

I feel a little shamed that I am not sacrificing much personally in this war. Here’s a pointer again to a great post about how we can support the troops.

Things I’d like to add to the blog…

* From Windley, the blogboxes look cool. * from the javascript weblog, Feedsplitter looks like a nice way to integrate RSS content. mt-rssfeed is another interesting tool… * this filemanager thingee seems cool…always looking for something better than ftp…at the extreme end of the spectrum i could host a personal wiki for my files, twiki seems interesting * lots of pointers and recos for log analysis tools in the comments here * Converting to fluid styles in mt templates – good overview. * Yet another color scheme generator – I’m a sucker for these. This one is pretty good. * Fixing the sidebar to go all the way to the bottom * A javascript image gallery – cool and simple.