Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

My bright and shiny new Apple TV arrived today.  I’ve been looking at them ever since they came out, and decided I wanted one after the Take 2 software was released.  Finally the day came to actually purchase one.  I have to say that initially pairing it with a computer can get a bit wonky.  Right off the bat it wanted to suddenly synch all my media files via iTunes.  I had to cancel that and dig throuhg a few menus to eventually figure out what I wanted.  The synching is quite like it is for my iPod Touch.  After clicking through a few menus I was able to synch only what I wanted, and keep it from displaying the items that I didn’t synch (it does this in case you want to stream files from your computer directly from your computer).  If you’re going to be syncing via a laptop I suggest you have both the laptop and the Apple TV plugged directly in to your router rather than using wifi as the wireless connection can be slow if sync’ing an entire media library.

Once I had some shows on it, it ran like a champ.  Denise and I watched National Treasure 2 which I purchased through the iTunes store on my laptop while we were in Maui.  It ran smoothly and both the picture and audio were great.  I didn’t get the lagginess some people say they experienced during action scenes in movies.  There was no pixelization either, just clear DVD-looking quality video.  Now we’re watching an episode of Torchwood that I converted with a great program called VisualHub.

My initial reaction to it are pretty positive.  The biggest cons I’ve found is the limited selection of video formats that it can play (this can be fixed by hacking the machine.. something I’ll be looking in to), and the fact that you can’t simply plug in a big external hard drive for additional storage (again, something that can be accomplished with a little hacking).  I’ll follow up more after I’ve played with it more.

All right, it’s finally here.  The best team in the East taking on the best team in the West in what should be a wild shoot ‘em up.

Pittsburgh Penguins v. Detroit Red Wings

Detroit comes in to this game eager to return to the glory days where they dominated the NHL.  They finished with a spectacular regular season record, and have been matching that record with an equally impressive post-season tally.  They have a very experienced and determined crew.  It’s almost a whos who of hockey glory these days.  I had wondered if age would be catching up with them, however after how they man-handled Dallas I’m not sure age is an issue with this team.  Chris Osgood continues to be a dominate netminder - not that he’s been called on very often to win the game for them with a powerful defensive core in front of him keeping the traffic in front to a minimum.  Chris Chelios has continued to do what he does best by pounding the offensive talent of opposing teams.  Add to this mix Zetterberg who has been a scoring machine (tied for playoff point lead with Sidney Crosby) and you have one hell of a tough team.

On the opposite side of the ice is an equally impressive cast of characters.  A lot is said in the media about Sidney Crosby, and certainly he’s been putting up the numbers.  He’s a valuable asset to this team, but his media pressence overshadows other members of this team.  At the trade deadline Pittsburgh brought in a couple of experienced players in Hal Gill and Marian Hossa to provide some stability to the brashness of youth that fills the Pens locker room.  Hossa is one of the most underrated defensive players in the game.  He closes up the passing lines and forces low percentage points from the outside with he is amazing postional play.  He’s a living text book of to transition from the offensive forecheck to defensive prowess.  Then there’s Evgeni Malkin, in my opinion Pittsburgh’s most promising player for the future.  He’s quick, he sees all the ice, and when that puck is on the end of his stick he’s like a magician, weaving through defenders.  Cap all this off with Marc Andre-Fluery who has developed in to a future Hall of Fame goaltender.  The Penguins patience with him paid off, and he has been rewarding that patience with absolute brilliant play in net.  They’ll need him to be at the top of his game.

This is going to be a high scoring series with a lot of end to end action.  This is a tough one to call.  In the end I’m going to go with not only my gut feeling, but my desire to see the Eastern Conference come out on top.  Penguins skate away with the cup in game six in Pittsburgh.

While skimming through my list of RSS feeds (god, how I love RSS aggregators) I stumbled upon something that peaked my interest. In the latest update to Ubuntu (8.04, Hard Heron) they added a new feature called ufw which stands for ‘Uncomplicated Firewall’. If anyone has worked with a firewall before, especially via the command line, they know what kind of hair pulling experience it can be. Even setting up something fairly simple would take a lot of poking, prodding, and most importantly forethought and planning in to how you were going to set it up. ipfw, or ipchains certainly aren’t known for their usability. I’ve applauded both Microsoft’s and Apple’s forays in to making firewalling an easier experience even if both of them fall short in several areas. At least they’ve given it more effort than the entire linux community. However Ubuntu seems interested in creating a firewall that can be setup quickly and with a few simple commands have it up and running. In fact it took me under 60 seconds to enable it, allow access to a couple of ports that I wanted to use, and deny access to anything else. Because it uses the /etc/services file instead of trying to remember the port number for a specific service you can simply use the services name. Adding a new rule is as simple as “sudo ufw allow ssh”. As one might guess that command tells the firewall to add a rule that will allow ssh. You can, as with any other firewall, limit access further by only allowing a narrow band of IP addresses to access the machine. You can deny individual IP’s or entire blocks of them as well.

For a good primer on using ‘ufw’ check out this website.

The Dallas Stars are playing like a team lucky to even be in the post season. Detroit is dominating them in every sense of the word, both mentally and physically. Not that I didn’t see this coming, but it really is embarrassing to watch the Stars completely collapse. I guess I should have predicted a sweep on this one, but I really thought Dallas could pull one win off - that some of the contests would be a little more, well, contested than they’ve been. Hey, the Stars still have a chance - not to win the series, but they might eek out that one win before the Red Wings finish them off.

Generally for posting to this blog (and for that matter, LiveJournal) I simply use the web interface. For awhile I’ve been considering working with some offline editors - so this morning seemed like a good time to do some research and narrow down my options. The two editors I’m going to be giving a shot to are Ecto (the beta version as development on the 2.x seems to have dried up last year), and MarsEdit. Neither of which are free, sadly. I did a quick test of a couple free options and they were wholly unusable - in the case of when it kept posting the same LiveJournal entry multiple time which was pretty damn annoying. Fortunately both of the editors I’m trying out have a full featured evaluation period so I can see if either are worth giving my hard earned money to, or if it’s back to the web interface I go. I figure in a week or so I’ll do a nice little head to head write up with my experiences on each of them.