Rants on Evan Hoffman

One reason I hate iTunes.

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:04:43 +0000

I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.

I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) - it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).

A less insidious way to use Facebook?

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:58:19 +0000

I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of months ago. I just kind of got tired of seeing silly updates from friends and “friends” - people I’d friended but wasn’t really friends with. I was also frustrated by the privacy implications of using such a service: you tell it about yourself, you tell it about who you know and how you know them, you keep adding more information about you and your friends to its huge brain that it’s free to use or abuse however it wants.

Oh, Compellent... again with the disk prices.

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:57:04 +0000

Time to expand the SAN again.

I planned and budgeted for this this year but it still pisses me off. Look, I realize these guys have to make money, but the bottom line is they’re charging over $1.40/GB for SATA storage. There are 7200 RPM 2TB SATA drives on Amazon and Newegg ranging in price from $130 to $220. That’s as low as $0.065/GB. There was even a 2TB WD “Green” drive (sub-7200 RPM, I think 5900 RPM) on Slickdeals today for $99. That’s 5 cents per gig.

Vonage iPhone App Calls Facebook Friends Free, So What?

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:58 +0000

Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:

AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?

This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.

Linksys WAP54G died after 10 months.

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:09:51 +0000

I bought my first wireless access point a few years ago - a Linksys WAP54G (v 1.0). It lasted 2-3 years. When it died I bought another WAP54G - version 3.1. This one just died tonight. I was sitting here and I noticed that the wireless was down. I moved the plug to another outlet and it came back up for about 20 minutes. It’s now completely dead. I bought this one on 12/3/08 from Amazon and it died on 9/28/09. What a piece of crap. Guess I’m done with Linksys now. For $65 it should last longer than 10 months.

Evan's Semi-complete Aimster Saga

Sun, 02 Sep 2001 05:33:37 +0000

The following was written by me in my Slashdot journal on September 02, 2001. I have not edited it since then except for formatting. This is long and rambling and will likely have parts that make no sense. I just finished writing it at 5:33 am right now Sunday morning, so that is my excuse. What’s yours?

In September 2000 I was gearing up to return to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to begin my senior year. To say I wasn’t looking forward to it would be an understatement. I had two courses left in my Computer Science major: Theory of Computation and the “culminating experience,” a course that I guess takes the place of a senior thesis. The most theoretical aspects of Computer Science have never interested me, and since I know that I will never have a use for the vast majority of them. To graduate I still needed to take 8 more classes and none of the offerings were terribly appealing. For the fall term I enrolled in Theory of computation, an econ class, and a government class (the standard courseload is 3 classes). I wasn’t terribly thrilled with any of my classes.