I recently was sitting in a 2011 Chevy … excuse me … Chevrolet Avalanche, and their display system was horrible. The graphic elements in it where ugly, the UI was horrible, and the navigation pretty much sucked. It was pretty much a bad experience all together.

Why do people try and re-invent the wheel? Well, they think they can do it better. And if people didn’t try we would be stuck with Windows ME all over again, competition drives innovation. So the better question is why do car makers go off and try to dapple in software development, and if it is outsourced, why not go with something people are familiar with. Imagine the iOS for your in car navigation and audio needs. The Google Android OS lends itself to this situation so much better. It’s open source and free. Car manufacturers could work with Google or work with outside companies to get the applications they need that are specific to their cars, but you would have Google Maps for your navigation system, you would have all the capabilities and audio features you have in your phone, in your car.

Are the two really that different. Do you do that anything that is that much different in your car than on your phone, not really. You listen to music, type in directions, and customize the settings of the phone. The only thing that immediately crosses my mind would be the A/C system … coming from a computer background, with the proper interfaces that is an easy addition to write.

It almost makes seems like a no-brainer .. which makes my wonder why that haven’t done it yet, or what I am missing.

Think about it, there where 1.7 Million sales within 3 days of the launch. 1.7 Million. Think about it for a minute … Yeah, that’s a lot of devices. Of course there are going to be problems with anything new, especially electronic devices, and the people you are going to hear from most are the ones that have problems. What people fail to realize are there are many many many more people, such as my wife and myself, who have Zero (0, nill, none, nada, no) problems what-so-ever with their phone. We have no new software problems, no hardware problems. And neither of us are affected by the antenna issue.

I think some , if not most of it, are bloggers trying to ‘ride the wave’. They are playing on the ‘fears’ of consumers to drive people to their blog’s and follow them on twitter. WAKE UP. Follow someone who can write something relevant and original. I’m not saying I’m that person, I’m far from it. But stop spreading the FUD.

The iPhone4, in my eyes, is revolutionary. The build quality of the phone is outstanding. It feels solid when holding it. Performance is amazing, both with software and web access. And, most importantly, it works as a phone. If you haven’t seen the display on this thing, you are doing yourself a dis-service. The ‘retina’ display is simply amazing. Apple wasn’t first to market with a 320 pixel-per-inch display. But they where the first to put it in a quality phone, with a quality os, and market the hell out of it.

Stop crying, stop complaining. The iPhone 4 wasn’t a failure, it isn’t going to cripple Apple, and it wasn’t a bundle of mistakes.

Got to love it when new software works as advertised.

I went through and purchase screen, then the server stopped, upgraded and restarted. In less then 3 minutes I had my VPS back up, now with two nodes worth of resources. While this really isn’t anything too earth shattering, it sure is nice when things “Just Work”. Too often people don’t mention when this happens, but was happy things worked as expected.

In three days the server will go through and upgrade it’s storage, so that wil be another test, but I am sure it will work without any problems (though I am using their snapshot backups just in case)

I’ve been able to create a custom page for putting in management bio’s for a small site I’m building. Using the feature image and a custom meta box for the title and name, I’ve got a fully customizable page for just the attorney’s. You can take this a few steps further by defining out a custom page to display those pages by themselves and then I also created a template page that will format and display the listing of them they way I want. Pulling out the feature image, their name and title.

Another great use of this is for callouts. On the current project I am working on, we are listing out 3 callouts on the main page. In the past I’ve seen this pull in content from articles, or hard-coded into the template. I’ve now been able, to use the register post type to be able to create callouts. It will grab the first three and throw them into the div’s I have defined in the template. Using the feature Image and a meta box field for the link I can now put in text or an image for the callouts and have it link to any page in the CMS.

I look forward to exploring WordPress as time goes, I think it might finally become the standard CMS for small sites.

I’ve done my own hosting thing since 2004. I’ve purchased and managed my own servers at CI Host, and I’ve been fairly happy with the whole set up. But As time goes on, I just don’t have the time to keep up with the hardware side of things. And I’m not really pursing the hosting thing anymore, so I’m barely breaking even year to year with my half-rack setup.

I’ve been eye-balling the services at VPS.net. Taking all the hardware off my hands, and letting me control the software. I would love to manage the hardware, but I just can’t afford to the setups that these places with RAID-10 Sans and quad cpu machines.

I’ve finally pulled the trigger and moved over the first site, my blog. The setup has been pretty cool, very simple and easy to use interface. So far I like it, we will see how it goes from there.

A bonus to all of this, it comes with a few free license to some nice hosting apps. ISPManager and HostBill. I am looking forward to moving to these and getting things setup on these services.

1. Small TV – just for some noise besides the radio. I love my texas country, but having the news on or the discovery channel would just kick ass. (Plus a nice break when I want to play some Call of Duty)
2. Microwave / Convection oven – I’m not sure I need the convection part. But being able to heat up my cold cup of coffee without having to go downstairs would be nice.
3. Sofa / Futon – A place to get away without really getting away. Plus getting one that converts to a bed is a plus when we have guest over
4. Mini Fridge – Just because i am too lazy to walk downstairs
5. Bookshelf – I didn’t realize how many books I had until I got my desk set up and had them stacked up on there … I really need a place to put these.

In a perfect world, I would already have those 5 things. Instead I have to prioritize, which means the bookshelf will be coming in first. After that I could see the TV or the Fridge, maybe the sofa. But with everything else going on in my world, I doubt I will see more then one of those by the end of the year.

Since then there have been several different spin offs and IMHO, better ones out there. For the last several years I’ve been running DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT54G (The same one that I originally put OpenWRT on, fried, and then fixed). I found myself need to extend my wireless network, but not in the normal since of wireless. I need to turn a switch into a wireless client so I could have a hard wired connection on the other end.

I started searching for a new router, one that would last me a while, and more importantly. One I could hack. The short of a very long process for me, I settled on a ASUS RT-N16. This thing is loaded, 32MB of storage, 128MB of ram, and480 Mhz processor. It supports B, G and N. Pretty nifty. I got it, fired it up. And spent just enough time in the Asus firmware to load up DD-WRT.

I took my old Linksys and converted it into a wireless client. So no, it is just one huge switch. What I have is the wireless portion of it is just like the wireless in a laptop, and it connects to my router. Then all the ports on the back are just like a normal switch. I can now plug my desktop computers in my office up to it, and they are all on my network. It’s a pretty slick setup.

The connection between the Linksys router (now switch) and the Asus router is a bit flaky at times. And this is because of a multitude of reasons. The biggest being the number of walls the signal has to travel through. But I am working on fixing that one (moving the Asus router out of the bedroom one day). The other problem is the DD-WRT firmware on the Asus router. The router requires a beta release of DD-WRT running the 2.6 kernel. Older versions used the 2.4 kernel. But to support a wider ranger or routers (including this Asus) they had to use the 2.6 Kernel. There are still some bugs, and some things are quite working like they are suppose to, but that is why it is a beta release.

Overall, I am very happy with everything. As long as I can resist the temptation of tinkering with them. The connection remains really stable.

This one is much brighter and welcoming then the other one. Which was had a grunge look and feel to it, with muted colors.

This one was provided by Woo Themes

First, Pin Tabs, while this isn’t anything new, a switch allows you to pin the first number of x tabs. This is beneifical. I have my blog, e-mail’s and Google Reader open in tabs and use this to make them all pinned on startup

--pinned-tab-count=5

Now this next one is for a specific extension SpeedTracer, a lot like yslow for firebug. Well, to make this one work you need

--enable-extension-timeline-api

So that’s it, nothing ground shattering. But definitely useful.