Lots of people are trolling Microsoft lately, after their announcement and demo of their new Surface platform. I don’t get it, really. It’s pretty darn slick. But people are saying it’s a rip-off of this, a rip-off of that, and naming Michael Bay’s film, “The Island” as one of the precursors. Turns out, this actually was the “Surface” device, in a very early state!

There’s a follow-up post at the same IStartedSomething blog with a video clip of the scene in question. Worth checking out if you’ve never seen The Island. Yes, I know, they obviously jazzed up the interface and did some art work to it, but you have to admit it’s pretty cool that they used an actual prototype for the film, and we’ve been oblivious this whole time.

I was actually thinking about him the other day, wondering whatever happened to him. Turns out, he kept doing what he loved until the very end.

Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) was probably the main driving force behind me getting interested in science and technology. I’m sure he also touched countless others. He will be greatly missed.

Found a flickr account with this photo from inside Microsoft’s Zune department, of an “Amnesty” bucket with some iPods in it. Reading the comments is hilarious.

I love how Apple supporters are so defensive. God forbid there should be competition in the marketplace! Or that the Zune team should poke fun at Apple. Because Apple never does that.

<sarcasm>Yes, we should all own an iPod and do the exact same thing. Clearly iTunes is the best software out there.</sarcasm>

Ugh. This is the sort of fanboy-ism that I hate. It’s the same thing that drives Mac vs. PC debates. Look, use whatever OS/platform you want. I don’t care. What’s ironic is that Apple totally advertises that you can run Windows on your Mac, yet makes fun of Windows/PCs constantly. Which is it, Apple?

If you follow my blog, you know I sold my iPod a while back and bought a Zune. I did this because I was fed up with iTunes being a complete performance joke. Argue with me all you want, but plenty of other people are running into similiar problems with iTunes on Windows. I really like my Zune, but it isn’t without its faults. I wish the Zune team was a little more “open” to communication about their software, as there are some fairly simple tweaks they could make that would help immensely (see my post for some examples.) I have even more bulletpoint items that I don’t like about the Zune, but overall, I’m more happy with it than I was with my iPod.

And one thing I noticed when I first listened to my Zune was how crisp/fuller songs sounded. These were the same format (AAC) being played on my iPod and my Zune.. and the Zune would almost always sound better. According to this YouTube video and this forum post, maybe I’m not crazy. It appears the Zune does have better sound quality in general than the iPod. Yay Zune.

I am looking forward to what the future holds for both Zune and iPod… competition can only be a good thing in this area. Do you really only want Apple-based digital audio players out there on the market? (And before someone mentions Creative and the other companies with DAPs… yeah, right, like they’re even in the same league as iPod/Zune.)

Now playing: Tom Petty - Yer So Bad

Some of you may know that I recently purchased a 2007 Nissan Altima 3.5SL, fully loaded, including a navigation system. In general I like the navigation system, but there is definitely some spots that are lacking. Here’s my likes/dislikes so far:

• Con, I’ll start with the biggest con of all, and the one thing that has frustrated me the most with this unit. You can’t use most of the buttons on the screen while the vehicle is moving! Forget the fact that a passenger may be sitting next to you, perfectly capable of programming the unit while you drive. No way. Can’t do it. You must stop the car to enter a new address, etc. 98% of the functionality is just disabled when your car starts moving. My previous navigation system, a Magellan Roadmate 700, did not have this behavior, nor does my mother’s TomTom navigation unit. I asked the dealership if this “feature” could be disabled, but they firmly said no, it’s for my own safety. Gee, thanks. Luckily there are people (such as a fellow named gtcompscientist) who have figured out what wire leading to the back of the unit provides this functionality, and have shown simple switch-workarounds for it. I’m tempted to do it on my own car..
• Pro, The screen is large, and bright enough during the daytime to easily see. The car has an “auto” light setting, for my headlamps, and it ties into the navigation system to dim my display when it’s night time.
• Pro, I really dig the “3D” view that the system offers. It also can switch to the traditional 2D view if necessary, but I hardly find myself doing that.
• Con, The screen updates “slowly”. I’d say once every second or so. In 3D mode, this feels like an eternity, where I’m spoiled by redraw rates on other devices, such as my computer. There also is considerable jaggie-ness going on. Some antialiasing wouldn’t have hurt…
• Pro, The system comes with quite a few points of interest pre-loaded. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s found nearly 90% of the random places I’ve thrown at it. There are some newer developments (built in the past 2 years) that it doesn’t know about yet, but I’m sure a newer DVD will come out.
• Con, The system doesn’t do text-to-speech at all. Just provides the turn signals.
• Pro, The turn signals are excellent, and the screen even shows a preview of what the upcoming off-ramp, intersection, turn, etc. will look like. Pretty darn accurate, too. Helpful for those times where you need to get off the freeway, but stay in the left lane on the off-ramp, etc.
• Pro, XM traffic integration. If you drive through traffic every day, you owe it to yourself to get a system that has traffic integration. I’ve routed around slow traffic at least four times so far, and avoided an accident scene because of it. Whew.

And that’s just what I thought of right now. More to come as time progresses…

This is targeted mainly towards server administrators running IIS, but if you’re just an internet user, you may find it of some value too.

Jeff Atwood, over at his Coding Horror blog, briefly touched on HTTP compression a while back, following it up with a post involving IIS 6.0 and compression, and later a post regarding using a .NET HttpModule to handle compression in ASP.Net sites. You should definitely read these posts if you have no idea what HTTP compression is. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Back? Good.

I had been using the HttpModule approach for a while, with the well-made (and free) blowery HttpCompressionModule. I have run into some problems, though. There are some redirect actions that can cause the module to fail, as well as other documented problems. Plus, the module does nothing to compress non ASP.Net content, such as ASP pages, style sheets and javascript files.

In doing more researching, I came across IISXpress, another free (for personal use only, not on a server) HTTP compression program. This one hooks into ISAPI, which means that any content that IIS serves wil be passed through this program for compression. IISXpress allows you to define content types you wish to include/exclude, as well as directories.

I really liked how IISXpress showed a history of every file it compressed, and what the savings were. There’s no guessing on my side if it’s working or not. I know it is from the history’s output. I liked the program so much that I decided to buy it almost immediately. $50 well spent!

If you run a web server, you owe it to yourself to research HTTP compression. It will allow you to serve the same content, but using less bandwidth in the process. And your end-users won’t need to do anything special!