Starting off… the IBM Aptiva.  One of the first Windows-based home computers my family owned was an IBM Aptiva.  We bought it around Christmas 1996, and though it wasn’t the most powerful machine we could have purchased, it had a TON of features and software, and back then, the IBM brand name still had a lot of clout in the industry.  Running Windows 95, our family machine had a 1.2GB hard drive, 16MB of RAM (we may have upgraded that), a CD-ROM drive, floppy drive, IBM Mwave modem & audio card, integrated 4MB video, a 120MHz Pentium processor, a 15″ monitor, IBM speakers, keyboard and mouse.  There was a single USB port (USB was not at all popular back then…. in fact, there wasn’t even operating system support for the port that came with the machine), and a ton of IBM software and extra features.  IBM’s software was really intuitive, and it added a lot of great graphical enhancements to Windows 95 without significantly impacting the user experience.  There was software to control all of the security systems, lights, garage doors, etc. in your house, Lotus SmartSuite (a Microsoft Office equivalent that was actually a great piece of software that I miss), Aptiva Guide that was an interactive tutorial for the machine, and much more. A lot of the internal hardware was extremely proprietary, and finding drivers would be total hell, but IBM included two CDs with the machine:  1 was a Product Recovery CD that was bootable, and would restore the machine to its original configuration (it was blue in color) and 1 was a CD that included drivers, application software, and documentation that could be used to re-install a specific piece of software, or use to install the drivers if you did your own operating system install instead of relying on the Product Recovery CD (it was marroon in color).

This machine was really fast.  We had dial-up internet access through America Online / AOL, and this machine performed pretty well with its 28.8Kbps modem (I think… it could have been 33.6 for all I know).  It was our primary family machine, so everyone in the family used the shit out of this computer, typing things for school or work, browsing the internet, playing games, etc.  Surprisingly, the hardware held up.  A few years ago, I ended up throwing the machine away after I had slowly stripped out the parts over a period of years, but if I had any interest in rebuilding a 120MHz Pentium machine, this machine would have been perfect for the task.

Over the years, we upgraded the RAM to 32MB.  We upgraded to Windows 98 (it was damn near impossible to do a clean-install, due to the Mwave drivers being extremely hard to find, so every time we re-installed the OS we had to use the Product Recovery CD to lay down the original Windows 95 install and then upgrade Windows 98 over top of it.  Fortunately, back then, it wasn’t an all-day task to backup data and re-install the OS, since storing major amounts of data on your machine (like multiple 2GB videos, or thousands of MP3 files) was unheard of), added a PCI ethernet card when we finally got Road Runner broadband, and probably tweaked a few more things.  Never did we have to send the machine back to IBM, none of the original hardware (even keyboard and mouse) ever failed, and the operating system remained very stable for a very long period of time, meaning we didn’t have to re-install Windows every few months like most other machines.

I remember playing LAN games of Age of Empires with my friend Dave.  I’d be up in my bedroom on my laptop, and he’d be downstairs in the blue room on the IBM Aptiva computer.  We played a lot of Age of Empires (especially the Rise of Rome expansion pack) and Age of Empires II back then, and the Aptiva was a good computer for these type of games.  It also held its own when playing over the internet on MSN Gaming Zone.

I think I still have the 15″ monitor that came with the machine, somewhere in my house or garage.  IBM hardware was reliable and lived forever.  Lenovo doesn’t come close to the quality that IBM put into their hardware back in the 80s and 90s.  If IBM had continued to make the Aptiva line, I probably would have never switched my loyaly to HP or Gateway.  I miss this old machine, and it was a significant of my childhood.

That’s my IBM Aptiva story.

Picture of complete IBM Aptiva system, from MacTronics Computers.

Picture of recovery media, from Vintage Computer and Gaming Marketplace.

I read the WordPress blog post where Matt Mullenweg talks about how he can’t believe WordPress has reached version 3 and that it seems like just yesterday they launched.  I actually can relate.  It seems that just yesterday I was feeling ballsy and installed the beta for WordPress 2 on my server.  I’ve been using WordPress for much longer than I thought I have, since the 1.5 days actually, and before that things were even more interesting.

Like most geeks, I first started playing around with websites in the late 90s when there were billions of free web hosts, such as Xoom, Geocities, Tripod, etc.  I used all three of those.  Then, I moved to Homestead.  I stayed with Homestead for a very long time, actually paying for the service.  I stopped using it when they stopped supporting the Macintosh, and then I really didn’t know what to do.  I tried designing my own pages in HTML.  I built various websites in Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, even Microsoft FrontPage (which developers hate to admit, even though everyone secretly used it at one point).

It seemed like after a while, the really easy-to-use web design software disappeared.  Software that hacked the web completely, and followed absolutely no standards whatsoever, but was so fucking easy to use that my grandma could have built her own version of Amazon.com, just vanished…. and web development went from something everyone in the world did, to something really experienced (and expensive) developers that took the time to write their own code and follow standards did.  After the early 2000s, software started to be more standards compliant, and it was once again easier to build a website, but in the meantime, I, along with a lot of other people, switched to web-based CMS software, like WordPress.

The first software I tried was Movable Type.  I was using Active Web Hosting at the time, and their web servers and CGI/PHP servers were separate.  MovableType was in its infancy, and it was REALLY hard to use.  I played around with it for a few days, and then decided to try out TypePad, which was the company’s hosted and paid version of the software.  It just didn’t do what I wanted it to do.  It wasn’t as easy to use as Homestead, so I gave up having a website for a while.

After a few years (or months… who knows in the tech world), I stumbled across WordPress and gave it a try.  It still wasn’t like Homestead, but I still used it.  I learned to live with the limitations of the new web.  No longer could websites look exactly like a document created in a page-layout program, or a single graphic, if you were an amateur.  You had to know a lot of code to do stuff like that.  It had to be standards compliant, or it’d look like ass in all the new browsers that people were using, like Mozilla Firefox, and Opera…. because Internet Explorer was going away as well.  My new websites weren’t as clever, creative, and full of content as my old Homestead site… but that’s because WordPress didn’t do all that.  What it did do is make content easy to publish, and easy to navigate, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Today, most people use CMS software to publish their sites.  I’ve built sites for clients using WordPress, MovableType, ExpressionEngine, Joomla, and more.  I’ve also built sites from scratch the hard way.  And I’ve changed a lot as a designer.  Now, I’m more minimalist.  Less is more.  A few fonts that are consistent on every page, because they’re defined that way in CSS code, is better than trying out every single font you have installed on your computer every time you write a new sentence.  Graphics are used to supplement text, not instead of text.  Things are easy to navigate, and most sites function the same way.

Without this change…. without content management systems that didn’t let people do whatever they wanted like the old web software did, the web became more consistent.  Content became the primary goal.  If this would not have happened, its doubtful that we’d have the complex web apps we have today.  We wouldn’t have a generation of elderly people that still can access information the way the youth of today do.  My grandma wouldn’t be on Facebook, and my website would look like shit…. along with every other free website out there.

The web grew up.  For a while, it became a premium place, and then, once everything was in the right place, it was opened up to everyone again.  We had to reset things, because it was out of control.  I can only imagine how much chaos there would be if domain names were free, instead of just storage space.  It’s likely that companies would never be able to register their names, and we’d have an entirely different way of accessing individual destinations on the web.

The old web was a disaster, and WordPress was one of the ways that things were fixed.  It simplified the web, and it made it consistent.  It made it possible for the average person to create a professional looking site without exposing their awful design taste (if they had awful design taste) to the public.  It forced us to be a little bit boring, but at the same time, it made all of the stuff that makes the web so great, the content, the information, the text that describes facts or fiction or memories, easy to find and read.  It helped turn the web from an amateur art gallery into a huge library.

WordPress is important, and it will continue to be.  Thanks, WP.

In addition to endless Team Spearfish meetings, I’ve contracted every airborne flu/cold possible, and have spent all of my down time laying in bed feeling like shit.  Fun, fun times.

I also screwed up the last post, which I intended to link with Amazon links, pretty damn badly. I’m going to spend some time this morning getting this blog properly configured, including getting Amazon links to render properly, as well as possibly add some of the sections like the GALLERY, PHOTO ALBUM, and PORTFOLIO like I mentioned earlier.  A few plugins I downloaded the other night should help me get this all working correctly.

Anyway, this blog is important to me, and I have no plans to neglect/replace/relocate it anytime soon, so if you don’t feel like checking back daily, at least subscribe to the RSS feed. That way, you’ll instantly know when I update (if you don’t already follow my Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/smkudelko)

I got the RSS working again. For a while, it was only showing the first 2 posts I ever entered, but that’s because I changed the address to the blog to a subdomain (blog.stevekudelko.com) and never updated FeedBurner of the changes.

That’s it for now. I hope everyone has a great Monday. So far, I am. coffee, Xanax, and Methadone (all prescribed, except the coffee, btw.) tend to make anyone in a good mood.

My ICQ number, if anyone wants to add me, is 611435190

Here are some other ways to get in touch with me or follow me:

AOL Instant Messenger:  my screen name is theshirorhapsody

Yahoo Messenger:  my user name is deviantshiro

MSN/Windows Live:  my e-mail address is smkudelko@mac.com

Google Talk/Chat/whatever:  my e-mail address is kudelkosm@gmail.com

Under my MSN/Windows Live account I have a Zune Account and a Windows Live Spaces account, though I ignore both of them pretty regularly.

My Twitter account is:  http://twitter.com/smkudelko so my user name is smkudelko

My Facebook e-mail address is: smkudelko@me.com and my Facebook URL is http://facebook.com/darkling.i.listen

My home office phone number is (724) 901-4090.

The phone number for the Team Spearfish office is (724) 308-1453.

The toll-free number for Team Spearfish is (877) 240-5571.

The fax number for the Team Spearfish office is (724) 734-2729.

• The trackpad on my laptop (HP Pavilion dm3-1030us) is really fucking pissing me off.  First, the slightest bump fucks with the zoom level of text in my browser, or the size of the icons on my desktop.  I’m not kidding you…. this is a serious, serious problem.
• Also, for some reason, at random the pointer on my laptop will turn into a magnifying glass, and even though clicking won’t magnify, the pointer won’t change back to a regular arrow.  I have to go into the Mouse preferences in the control panel, change the pointer style, and then change it back to Windows Aero in order to fix it.  This is making me really, really angry.
• I’ve started downloading old copies of operating systems that I used to own, use regularly, and love.  Right now in my download queue are copies of BeOS, NextStep, OPENSTEP, and Apple Rhapsody DP (the pre-cursor to Mac OS X) as well as old versions of Windows, DOS, OS/2 and Solaris.  I’m pretty excited.  I’ll be putting together a gallery of these operating systems, and will mention more in my next post.  Old technology excites me, and I love learning the history and reminiscing with friends about the old tech we used.
• To tide you over until I get that gallery put together (I have a TON of stuff going on, 3 non-profits I’m working on/with, 1 startup company that isn’t my own, getting Team Spearfish off the ground, serving 72 clients, and starting 18 different web projects… all with a team of less than 5 people…. plus meeting ALL this week to iron out all the details of the Team Spearfish partnership and strategic plan), check out this website called GUIdebook.  It’s one of my favorite sites for looking at old tech, and the posters are really cool. – http://guidebookgallery.org
• I have new computer syndrome really badly, and I really want to buy a new Mac.  I don’t know if I want a desktop or a laptop.  I could justify both, but really, I need it for business more than I need it for personal reasons (I keep separate computers for business and personal… or at least try to), and should therefore get the most powerful Mac I can afford.  I made the mistake last time of buying an inexpensive iMac just to have a new computer, and the video card was too weak to do Multiclips in HDV using Final Cut Pro, which was something I did a lot during that period of time.
• I also really want either an iPad, iPod Touch, or a Zune HD.  The startup I’m working on requires me to have both an Intel Mac and some kind of iTouch device, but I also have a Zune Pass and am unsure of whether or not that’ll work with my Droid.  I want to listen to music in my car, although for right now, Pandora playing on the Droid thanks to Verizon Wireless‘ flawless coverage in my area, is satisfying enough.

The questions I have so far:

- Does anyone know if there is an option in Outlook 2010 to set your signature to appear after your reply to a message, before the original text?

- Does anyone know if iPad WiFi version can be tethered to a computer or a Verizon modem, or if I’d HAVE to get a 3G AT&T version and have not 3G.

- Does 3G iPad only work with 3G, or does it work, (although slowly) on EDGE.  If so, how bad is it?

Simple, one-line questions like that, that really should just be responded to with simple answers and maybe a link.   Maybe I”ll try to build this interface with the WordPress Twitter-like system.  Or maybe someone can steal my fucking idea, launch it tomorrow, and make a killing and get popular.  Either way, I’d get my questions answered.  But, I think this might be a pretty decent idea that might make some money (not a killing).  If anyone is interested in working with me on this, e-mail steve@stevekudelko.com, or steve.kudelko@teamspearfish.com.  Or call me (724) 906-3473.

This is the first tutorial I’ve written in a while, so it might be a bit hard to understand, as I may have left out some steps I assumed were common sense. I will say that the version of Microsoft Paint that comes with Windows 7 is phenomenal and is what I used to edit the images, including cropping, screen capture (using the Print Screen key on my keyboard), drawing, and saving (Paint defaults to PNG format now…. finally…. because PNG is the shit)

As you can see, with a default install of Office 2010, the comma character is not configured to indicate a separate e-mail address.

When you use a comma to separate addresses, upon sending the message, Outlook will throw an error letting you know that it doesn’t understand what kind of address you typed.

In order to correct this, you need to enable the option in Outlook 2010 that allows commas to be used to separate multiple e-mail addresses.

The first step to do this is to click on the File menu, and choose Options

(You might notice that Outlook 2010′s interface is completely whacked and unlike any of the other Office 2010 apps when it comes to changing settings, the File menu, etc.  This is because Microsoft is the stupidest company in the world, and their enterprise e-mail clients like Entourage and Outlook live in a world of their own where there are no user interface rules, or common sense decisions like DO NOT STORE EVERY PIECE OF DATA IN ONE FLAT FILE THAT HAS BEEN KNOWN TO CORRUPT EASILY SINCE FUCKING 1996!!!!!).  Anyway, carry on.

When the Options dialog is open, choose the Mail “tab” from the list of not-really-tabs on the right of the window.

When the Mail not-tab is open, scroll down to the Send messages section and make sure that the option Commas can be used to separate multiple message recipients is selected.

Once it it checked, click OK at the bottom-right of the dialog box to enable and save the setting.

And now, my friends, when you send a message to multiple recipients in the same field, you can use a comma to separate multiple e-mail addresses, much like the same way you would do so if you had any common sense whatsoever, and much like the way you probably did until it didn’t work because Microsoft’s default settings are for brain-dead ex-engineers that get an erection every time the phrases Visicalc, MS-DOS, or ISA card are mentioned.  It will work.

There you go.  I hope this tutorial was easy to understand, and helped anyone who was having this issue.

Keep checking back on my website for more tutorials.  In the future, they’ll be more informative, and less sarcastic and sinister, and I’ll save my vulgar off-topic rants for different posts.

These same instructions should work for Outlook 2007, as well as Microsoft Office Outlook for Devices that are Powered by Electricity and have a Mixture of Solid State and Moving Parts RC2 Live Edition.

So… basically, it’s the same thing you can get on your computer, mobile phone, or a web server hosting Microsoft Office Web Apps…. only, just in case during the 3 out of the 4 things you do on a daily basis, you forget to create an Excel document, you can do it while you’re harvesting your crops on Farmville.   Excellent move, Microsoft.

This seems unnecessary.  Facebook should be a social entertainment platform, in my opinion.  I don’t use it for any serious communication… except when I send long detailed apologies to girls who I like and routinely embarrass myself in front of when I send drunk text messages letting them know how I have it all figured out… they just need to break up with their boyfriend of 4 years, and we’ll be happy forever.

Office Web Apps seems great… and like what Sharepoint should have been… but I honestly haven’t had enough time to play with it.  However, in my very limited review of Office Docs for Facebook, I really did like the interface, and it seemed simple and uncluttered.  And, the really good part… it’s called “Docs.”  That’s the product name.  It’s not called “Microsoft Docs 2010 for Facebook Premium Social Networking Edition with Excel, Powerpoint, Word, OneNote, and more…. for web based computers.”  Just Docs.  Nice, and simple.

If this is just a cool way to post an Office document to my wall, and have other Facebook users read it, maybe make comments, and share it with their friends…. I like it.  If it tries to bring Google Docs-like collaboration and function into a website that primarily exists for college students to post pictures of the drunk girls they had their dicks in the night before, it seems to me to be a product that has no reason to exist and Microsoft should just pull the plug before they waste more money on one more stupid idea *cough*Windows Live*cough*.

Anyway, check it out for yourself:  http://docs.com.

You can add yourself to a waiting list, as the service is still in Beta, and they’ll add it to your Facebook account when it’s your turn.

I’m really interested to see what this develops into, especially since this is the first I’ve heard of this, and it’s allegedly already close to launching.

In order for any type of iChat-like video conferencing to happen, and for people to use their devices as pocket cameras, there need to be two cameras on the iPhone.  Have you ever tried to take a picture of yourself and a friend on your iPhone?  It’s fucking impossible to get a good shot, because you can’t see what you’re taking a picture of.  Sure, if you had a camera facing frontward, you’d get a great shot…. but then it’d be a pain in the ass to take pictures of anything you’re looking at, for the same reason.

Update:  I investigated further, and yes, there are two cameras on the new iPhone.  One on the front of the device, one on the back.  Good call, Apple.

Further, the iPad needs a front-facing camera.  Not a back facing one.  No one is going to carry a 9″ device around to take a picture of anything.  They just won’t, okay.  But they might want to take pictures of themselves, similar to Photo Booth.  Or hell, even video chat.  The iPad should have had a camera in the first release.  But I promise the day after I buy an iPad, Apple will announce the next-generation iPad with a camera in it.  Trust me, that’s how this works.  I buy an Apple product, and the next day they improve it.  Anyone out there who wants an iPad with a camera, just give me enough money to buy the first version of the iPad.

Other than that, I like the iPad.  I think it’s got the right features for the right purpose.  It’s not supposed to be a netbook.  It’s not supposed to be a cellular phone.  It’s supposed to be a larger, Kindle-style device for people that wouldn’t buy a Kindle because it’s not made by Apple.  It’s for people who love their iPod Touch and iPhone so much, that they want an even bigger device to spend a few extra hours on, then topping their day off with an iMac or MacBook Pro.  It’s supposed to be expensive, and just Apple putting their toes in the water and making a fucking killing on it, so they can release the next version and it’ll spank the shit out of all the companies who did the minimum amount of innovation required to release an “iPad killer” by reading the comments on websites like Ars Technica and Gizmodo, and implementing the features that only losers who think they know tech came up with…. features that people with the least amount of imagination possible came up with.

The new iPhone has evolutionary features.  Nothing really “revolutionary” except for the front-facing camera.  Even that was pretty much evolutionary.  It’s square and looks more industrial, which is the trend in Apple’s products.  No more rounded edges and dalmatian-print devices… now it’s all silver and square and professional looking.

Oh, and look at the teardowns…. you know what wasn’t there?  A CHIPSET THAT WORKS WITH VERIZON’S NETWORK.  HAHAHAHA…. I fucking told you so.  It’s never going to happen, okay.  We’re stuck with AT&T for life.

When I switched, I was coming out of a very heavy relationship with Apple Mac OS X, iPhone and MobileMe.  I used an Intel-powered iMac as my primary computer, had an iPhone 3GS with AT&T, and used MobileMe for my personal e-mail, and also to synchronize all of my personal and business contacts and calendars.  I also used MobileMe to synchronize data between my multiple Macs and Windows machines.  I had a company Exchange server, for Team Spearfish, but I only used the e-mail part of Exchange.  Everything else, both business and personal, was handled by MobileMe.  In my mind, there was nothing better.  MobileMe was the most elegant synchronization platform, iCal was the best calendar application (still is), and the iPhone was the world’s greatest phone (still is).

Then, things changed.  My day-to-day work changed directions and I needed Windows as my primary platform.  I ended up buying two new Windows machines, and replacing my parents’ aging iMac G5 with my Intel-powered iMac as a Christmas gift.  Suddenly, I had two Exchange server accounts, one for the other company I work for.  That company had Verizon, and I was given a company phone.  When I heard about the Droid, I was pretty into it, and told my boss, who I am very close friends with, and he bought two Droids… one for him, one for me.  We had the same phone so if he had any issues, I would know how to resolve them since I had the same computing platform, same mobile network, and same mobile phone.

The Droid doesn’t link to MobileMe, so I ended up relying on Exchange and Google for all of my synchronization.  Honestly, I don’t know what resides where.  I have two Exchange accounts and one Google account, and all three of them have to be on the phone in order for me to have all of my information.  Should something happen, I’d be fucked because I honestly don’t know where all of my data is.  This is my fault, 100%, and hopefully I’ll have time soon to sit down and really organize my stuff and make backups.  But, just the junkiness of the situation makes me really miss MobileMe.

The Droid is an incredible phone.  Even when I had my iPhone, I wanted a Droid.  Before switching to an original iPhone in 2008, every phone I had from the time I was in seventh grade was a Motorola phone.  I swore by them.  I loved my RAZR, ROKR, and whatever the other one was.  People ask me, because they know I was such an Apple fan (and still am, even though at the moment I don’t really have any Apple products that I use daily), what I think about the Droid vs. the iPhone.  My answer is this:  the Droid is a better internet phone.  Google knows the internet inside and out, and the Android platform is optimized for the internet.  Verizon’s network is insanely fast even in redneck Amish areas like where I live, and I’ve not come across anything that I can’t do with this phone.  The GPS is amazing, Exchange support is totally integrated, and push notifications/background downloads work perfectly.  Battery life is great, too.  The iPhone is a better platform and better phone for most average users.  It’s brain dead simple and elegant, but it’s heavily dependent on your client computer.  Where Droid doesn’t even have an app to sync to your computer, the iPhone requires iTunes just to activate it.  Droid gets software updates over the air only, where iPhone gets software updates only through iTunes.  iPhone is limited by AT&T’s horribly slow network, so unless you have 3G or WiFi, your internet experience is probably a limited one, and you’re probably just doing very trivial tasks and taking notes on what you want to look up or download once you’re back at a computer.  Gaming hands down is better on the iPhone, and the iPhone has better applications, better developer support, and is basically the better platform.  If iPhone had Verizon’s network, there would be no reason for anyone to not own an iPhone.  I seriously believe that.  It’s the best platform, based on what’s good vs. what’s bad.

iPhone OS 4 brings a lot of great things:  multitasking, tools to organize your apps, better Mail application (more like the Android one, actually), and enterprise support.  There are ZERO enterprise tools for the Droid, or even the Android platform.  Android doesn’t support group policy, mass updating from an administrator, etc.  iPhone does.  iPhone OS 4 is going to set the iPhone farther apart from all of its competitors again… and we’ll have to wait 6 months or a year for everyone to catch up, at which time, Apple will release iPhone OS 5.  iPod Touch and iPad will be running the same software.  It’s a really exciting time to be an Apple customer, or a developer.  It really is.

This all makes me miss my iPhone.  I miss being excited and constantly hitting “Check for Updates” in iTunes to get the latest software.  I really do.  I miss following Apple Insider every day because I just HAD to know what was coming next on my phone or computer.  I miss the elegance and beauty of the iPhone experience.  I just don’t miss AT&T’s EDGE.  Honestly, as far as mobile providers go, I didn’t really have a problem with AT&T.  I always had great experiences with their phone support and in-store support.  They had gone out of their way and made exceptions to their policies a number of times for me, and I appreciated that.  I’ve had T-Mobile, Cingular (before AT&T acquired it), the original AT&T Wireless, 360 Communications, ALLTEL, and Verizon (before my company phone).  AT&T was the provider I was most satisfied with.  Now, being a Verizon customer, I’m very very happy.  My ex-girlfriend’s mother works at our local Verizon store, and she always helps me out and makes exceptions so I get what I want, but also, Verizon’s online support is great.  The My Verizon app on my Droid is useful too.  Verizon’s network is so fucking fast it’s unreal.

Honestly, though, even if 3G came to my area, I’d probably stick with Verizon.  It’s a safety precaution.  It’s being a smart consumer.  There are just too many areas where AT&T doesn’t work, or won’t have 3G.  My area is important, but it’s not the only place I’m ever going to go.  And honestly, the further away from home I am, and the further away I am from big cities with a lot to see and do, and people to give you directions, the more I use my phone.  I can’t afford to risk having AT&T and using EDGE, or not having AT&T signal at all.  Verizon is a safe, wise choice.  Verizon is everywhere.  As much as I love the novelty and beauty of Apple’s platform, having access consistently, everywhere, without delay, is more important to me.

Unless some miracle happens, and the rumors are true, and the iPhone does come to Verizon (seriously so doubtful… completely different technology, and zero financial incentive for Apple to make a separate product just for the extreme minority of people who would be able to use it, let alone would actually buy it), I’ll be an Android user for life.  Or, until something better comes along, that isn’t a Blackberry, or Symbian, or Palm.  I don’t like those platforms.  I like the Apple platform.  It’s the better platform, but network trumps platform, and Verizon is the better network.

The computer I’m writing this on is an iMac G5.  It’s old, and slow, and a lot of programs are rapidly dropping support for it… both because it’s a Motorola processor, and because it’s running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.  I use the Adobe Creative Suite CS4 on both this machine and my Windows based machines.  I was very happy with the CS4 release, because it finally brought feature parity (at least, as much as possible by stubborn Adobe) between the two platforms.  If this was an Intel Macintosh, I’d have the complete set of Adobe applications, but since it’s not, I only have the design and web applications.  That’s fine, because I’d rather get an enema than try to edit video on this machine (or in Adobe Premiere, for that matter).

What pisses me off is that CS4 wasn’t launched too long ago.  In fact, I remember paying for CS3 very vividly.  CS4 is buggy, bloated, and slow, on Windows and on the Mac.  64-bit Photoshop is a fucking joke, and it’s the only 64-bit app in the CS4 suite.  I really could care less about 64-bit, to be honest, because the applications I use wouldn’t really benefit from it.  Most of the applications I use (like Final Cut Pro and Microsoft Office) haven’t even been ported to 64-bit, although Microsoft Office 2010 on Windows will be.  I’m not sure about Office 2011 on the Mac.

Speaking of which… I doubt I’ll be upgrading to Office 2011.  Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac was an absolutely horrible product.  Office 2004 opened fast, and was stable and reliable, except for a few issues with older PowerBooks that were fixed in a later software update.  Office 2008 is incredibly slow, bloated, and just terrible.  Entourage is an awful program.  Really, aside from the new version of Outlook that’s supposed to come out, there is really nothing that even interests me in Office 2011.  I use Pages and Keynote from Apple (part of the iWork suite) for most of my document creation on the Mac anyway.  The only Office apps I really use on the Mac are Entourage (because Exchange support in 10.5 sucks, and I use Exchange) and Excel (because Numbers just isn’t good enough for me, yet).  If I can just buy Outlook, I won’t buy anything else… and I’ll just learn to like Numbers, or use Excel 2008.

I have the same issue with CS4.  It’s buggy, bloated, and was slower than its predecessor.  It’s really slow on fast, new hardware, like the Intel iMac I have at home, that I just bought this past summer.  CS4 sucks, but Adobe has a near-monopoly on the design market, and really, what can I do?  I have to use Photoshop, have to use Flash, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator.  There just aren’t good enough alternatives yet.  I’m sure some will come around, but I’m not going to put my projects on hold until alternative software exists.  I’ll just get another prescription for Xanax.

CS5 is just bug fixes for CS4.  That’s all it is.  In an era where the most hated software company in the world, Microsoft, is STILL releasing bug fixes and patches, and supporting, a 10 year old piece of software (Windows XP), Adobe ditches their $1,500 software product less than 2 years after they released it, drop support for a lot of good machines that are still in use today, and charge $1,500 more (maybe… maybe more… idk) for CS5, which is essentially what “Adobe Updater” should be doing for free.  Fuck you, Adobe.  I’m not paying for you to be stubborn and not support Apple’s APIs that you’ve had 10 years to do, and even longer to prepare for, and I’m not paying for an product that runs like shit on the platform I love and that gave birth to you, and runs “decent” on Windows which has nowhere near the amount of tools that would help you write a great app as Apple’s OS X and Xcode do.  I’m not paying for bug fixes.  I’m not paying for slick new icons, 140 new fucking folders all over my machine that I can’t rename or delete, and product activation that submits my social security number and the address of the last 5 people I’ve e-mailed to your servers every 30 seconds in the background.  You can suck my dick if you think I’m upgrading to CS5.  Stealing, torrenting… maybe, just to see what the fuss is about, but PAYING… no way.  There is NO WAY I will pay for CS5 unless there is some amazingly killer feature that will just increase my productivity by 100% and provide me with a really hot girl that blows me while I’m waiting 5 minutes for Photoshop to start up.

The only reason I was going to upgrade to CS5 was the Adobe Flash to iPhone development tool… but Apple isn’t going to accept apps that are developed with Adobe Flash or any development software other than Xcode (they said so… iPhone 4 will block it), so now there is absolutely nothing I want in CS5, except THE FUCKING BUG FIXES THAT SHOULD BE RELEASED FOR THE PRODUCT I BOUGHT LESS THAN TWO YEARS AGO FOR FREE.

I wanted to share the difficult experiences I have had so far, and give an update on what I’ve still been unable to accomplish yet.

In my last post, I mentioned how after I installed Fedora 12 with the GNOME environment, I couldn’t get the built-in software update tool to actually download any updates.  It turns out, there is a bug in the version of Fedora that made it to publication.  Basically, the version of software update that ships with Fedora is out-of-date and can’t read the list of updates that Fedora’s servers provide, which is a newer version of that list.  Here is the first fix I had to research:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=240072

Then, I mentioned how I was not able to install Adobe AIR without consulting instructions.  This is because by default, Adobe AIR is installed through a Flash applet on a website.  That Flash applet, however, does not have root access, which is what you need to install an application on a Linux machine (the same principal applies when you are not an Administrator on a Windows machine…. there are certain applications you can’t install without being logged in as an Administrator or user with Administrator privileges, because the software makes changes to the low-level parts of the operating system that need to be protected from simple people that have no idea what they’re doing).

These are instructions that I followed to install Adobe AIR on my Fedora 12 machine.  Note that “sudo” should be replaced with “su”, if you should see “sudo” in the instructions, if you’re running Fedora 12.  Fedora uses su, where as other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu use sudo.

Anyway, enough technical rambling.  Here are the instructions to install Adobe AIR on a Fedora machine:

http://www.techerator.com/2009/06/how-to-installing-adobe-air-on-fedora-11/

Once Adobe AIR was installed, I tried to install TweetDeck, which is an Adobe AIR application. I had issues installing that program, so using the instructions in Step 7 of the link above, plus help from the link below, I was able to get it installed successfully.

http://galder.zamarreno.com/?p=692

After all of those issues, I was successfully using Linux.  I have been using my Linux machine for several weeks, reading all of my RSS feeds, sending e-mails, talking with friends, and more.  However, last night I ran into another issue.  I was trying to watch a video I had downloaded, and Linux didn’t have the necessary codecs installed for me to view it.  Users of Ubuntu and some other popular versions of Linux may not encounter this issue, as their distributions are popular enough to leverage support from codec publishers and the necessary codecs get integrated into the final release of the product.  Fedora… not so lucky.  So, after some research, I came across this link, which should help you get the necessary codecs to watch videos in Fedora 12 Desktop:

http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

Basically, that’s it.  My experience in using Fedora is still successful and growing strong.  If you have any tips, questions, or suggestions on things I should try to figure out next, leave them in the comments.

Years later, a friend of mine bought a copy of Red Hat Linux at our local Staples store, complete with CDs and manuals and a nice cardboard box, and he attempted to learn Linux.  A few weeks later, when I visited him, he appeared to get pretty far, flying through terminal commands and using buzzwords I had never heard of.  Apparently he just was copy-pasting commands from a friend he had on instant messenger…. I saw him a few days ago and he knew nothing about the problems I was facing that day.

My job provides me with access to a lot of old computers… whether they’re broken and need parts, just aren’t being used and need to be removed to save space, or are given to me so I can find use for them and potentially put them to work, in my office of course, for the person who gave them to me.  That being said, I have an old Toshiba Satellite laptop that has a small (12.1″) screen (which I like), a fingerprint reader, decent Intel Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, 100GB of hard disk space, a DVD burner and wireless 802.11a/b/g networking.  The only thing that didn’t work was the battery.  And since the owner had no use for it, and the last thing I needed was another Windows machine cluttering up my already small and packed office, I decided that this would be the machine that I would use to finally learn Linux.

I installed Fedora 12 Desktop Edition (32-bit) and the GNOME environment on it a few weeks ago.  All the necessary hardware drivers were installed from the start, and the machine worked really well.  I was having a problem with downloading any software updates, however, and thought to myself that maybe the installation was screwed up and I needed to re-install.  This turned out to not be the case, but I’ll get to that later.  Anyway, I used the machine as my “right beside the bed just in case I want to look something up on Wikipedia in the middle of the night” computer for a few weeks.  Then, since I didn’t have to work Friday, I decided that I would finally re-install Linux and get this computer working “for real.”

I decided to see what other versions of Linux were out there.  I didn’t want to use Ubuntu for several reasons:  1) the name Ubuntu is just annoying.  2) it’s the “flavor” or distribution that EVERYONE uses and I wanted to be somewhat different.  3)  their cute little “Krusty Koala” and “Ruby Red Rapist” version names aren’t cute to me… they’re just obnoxious.  4) from my past experiences installing Ubuntu just to see what it looked like, it came with no less than 4,600 different programs to achieve every single task, and while I’d love to be able to spend 4 days evaluating which is the best way to crop a picture, I wanted a simple installation that wouldn’t be cluttered with shit.

I decided that I’d need a Linux version that was popular (I used how many times the distribution was mentioned on websites that had Linux-versions of their software to gauge popularity), have the GNOME environment since I’m not a fan of KDE, and, even if I would never use them, have some sort of enterprise or commercial offering for either support or software updates.  This would eliminate the little distributions created by fags in their garage that simply wanted to replace all of the Red Hat default icons with Family Guy characters.

As much as I wanted to download Moblin, since it, at least on paper, serves the needs of exactly what I’d be using my Linux computer for, the machine I had wouldn’t support it.  Chrome OS wasn’t available to download, and I really don’t use enough Google products to even really benefit from it (as I type this in Google Chrome, with my Google Voice and Google Reader notification icons popping up in the background), so I tried SUSE Enterprise Linux first.  I installed it without a problem, hated the GUI, and decided to go right back to Fedora.

I installed the 32-bit version of Fedora 12 Desktop again.  After the installation, I tried to run Software Update.  FAIL.  Apparently, and this is my very basic understanding of the situation, the updater that is included in the downloadable Fedora 12 build is out of date to the point where it is incompatible with the list of software updates that the server provides.  So, even from a fresh installation, you have to do nasty Terminal procedures to get things working properly.

Here is a link to the issue discussed on Fedora’s forums.  I came across this, and the solution in the first post worked, only after trying about 35 other things first.  Please, trust me, just follow the instructions in this link.  Do it TWICE (I don’t know if that matters, but I did it twice because it didn’t appear to work the first time).  You’ll need to have the root password that you specified during installation in order to do this procedure.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=240072

After that, smooth sailing.  I had the latest updates and would continue to be able to download them.  Next, I decided to install a few of the applications that I used.  I downloaded FileZilla from Fedora’s “Add/Remove Programs” utility, and installed Skype, Adobe Flash Player, Google Chrome, Google Gears, Picasa, Dropbox, and Adobe AIR from their websites.  I had a hard time and needed to look up instructions for Adobe AIR, but everything else installed with no problem.

Then, I tried to install TweetDeck, which is an Adobe AIR application.  This shouldn’t have been a problem since Adobe AIR was already installed, but Linux is a secure operating system with rules (very serious, hard to break, think Alcatraz of operating environment, rules) and you can’t install things unless you have permission.  Even though Adobe AIR was installed, I needed to have root (think Administrator on Windows or Mac OS X) access to install an Adobe AIR application.  The solution was to run the Adobe AIR Application Installer from the command line using “su” (a command-line utility that allows you to run a single command at a time as the root user… similar to “sudo” on other distributions of Linux like Ubuntu) instead of just clicking on it from the Fedora-equivalent of the Start menu.  I followed the instructions on the page that I’m linking below.

http://galder.zamarreno.com/?p=692

Once the installation drama was done, it was time to start using Linux.  I configured Google Chrome to synchronize my bookmarks and integrate with my Google account so I could read RSS feeds via Google Reader, signed in to Dropbox to download all of the files I had on my previous Linux-installation, and added all of my accounts to the built-in IM client, e-mail client (Evolution), and TweetDeck.  The only issue I had was getting Linux to talk to my Microsoft Exchange server that has all of my company e-mail, contacts, and calendars.  Basically, I never did get that to work, but don’t care because I very rarely use this computer without my phone beside me, which does have all of that information, and I can also access Exchange through a website.

All in all, Fedora is working out nicely.  For a spare computer, there isn’t anything that I can’t do on this machine that I can do on any of my other computers, aside from run specific Mac or Windows applications.  But, there are equivalents of those applications available for Fedora, and I also can just go and use the computers that have Windows or Mac OS X.  I would not be able to use Linux as my only operating system, and I wouldn’t be able to use this tiny laptop as my only computer, but that’s not what I’m trying to do…. I’m trying to give Linux a shot and learn by basically installing it on a computer I plan to use every day and giving myself no choice but to problem-solve myself when things go wrong.

This isn’t the way that everyone should do things, and there were a lot of stumbling blocks that I ran into that even experienced computer users wouldn’t be able to figure out without seriously having even a background knowledge of Linux just to begin knowing where to research the problem.  That’s the issue with Linux:  knowing how to fix what’s wrong, and knowing what exactly is wrong.  Linux isn’t built the way Windows and Mac OS X are. (well… it’s similar to Mac OS X, but Apple has done so much tweaking that you’d never really have access to any of the similarities.  They’re similar in the way that a Honda Accord and a BMW 325ic are similar… they’re both cars with the same parts, but those parts are branded very differently, and the quality is much greater in the parts in the latter.)  The basic concept of the way that individual users work, and software is installed, is greatly different than what the majority of the world’s computer users are used to.

Really, I think that anyone seriously considering installing Linux, who has never used it before, should have access to some sort of “primer” or literacy course that goes over the terminology and basic concepts.  I’m not talking about “the X in the right corner closes a window” concepts, but more like “there is a higher power, equivalent to God, called root, and all users are below him.  You must have privileges, given to you by root, to do specific tasks, or else you have to pretend that you’re “root” one task at a time” concepts.  Windows and Macintosh users are spoiled by having their user accounts granted all privileges by default, and most go unchanged, and are able to install software, rename files, and cause all kinds of shitstorms without anything except an “are you sure you want to do this?” dialog box.

I deployed this blog today using Linux.  I didn’t need anything more than a web browser, text editor, and FTP client.  I’ll probably do all of my image editing on a Windows machine, to be honest, if only because the files are already on that machine.  But I’m going to continue using Linux for a long time, now that I have a machine that can run it without interrupting my usual flow.  If I have any experiences, face any problems, or have any Rapture-like revelations of awesomeness, I’ll write about them in this blog.  If not, assume that Fedora is good enough for what I do, but nothing worth writing about.

To start things out, I installed the WordPress 3.0 beta.  I have to say, I like it a lot.  So far, it hasn’t crashed on me like previous WordPress beta releases have.  Also, I like the default theme.  Finally WordPress decided to change their default theme from the awful one that everyone knew was the default WordPress theme (in fact, if you saw that theme, you most likely said “it’s a spam blog that has links to penis enlargement pills, or it’s an elderly woman who thinks her original poems on nature and Jesus are interesting”) to a much more modern, and pretty, theme.  I’m stoked that there is a header image and an easy way to change it, because I’m terrible with graphics, and can’t use Photoshop to save my life.

I’m going to do my best to make this blog unique.  I’ll probably experiment with the layout, installed plugins, and the sidebar, often.  Further, I’ll try to post blogs and articles that aren’t what everyone is blogging, Tweeting, talking about.  What really prompted me to stay home from Church on Easter Sunday and deploy this blog was a desire to get all of the technology-related ideas and opinions that are swimming in my brain out in a form for the world to see.  Whether this will lead to a better career, more clients of my own, or a pseudo-celebrity status, I don’t know.  What I do know is that I will do my best to entertain and educate everyone who comes here.

The post is titled “new blog, new experiment” because I’m typing this post on a laptop running Linux.  I’ve avoided Linux like an AIDS test my entire life, part because I was a Mac guy at heart, part because the name Ubuntu annoys the shit out of me, and part because, even though I consider myself very well educated on technology, I couldn’t really understand or afford the time to understand Linux.  That’s changed, and I decided, on a spare computer, to install Linux and just dive in head first.  I originally intended to talk about my experience so far in this initial post, but things have become too lengthy and it wouldn’t fit properly, so I’ll discuss it in my next post.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to do so.