Chad Things

I’ve always loved maps, and when google maps came out they raised the bar.  After they released their maps API and the mashups began.  The first cool one I remember was a craigslist mashup that listed all apartments for rent on a map - that’s huge when you’re new to a city, and invaluable in renting-competitive cities like NY and SF.  Now there are tons of mashups out there, and here’s a few that I’ve found recently.

Random mashups (coolest ones first)

• Craigslist Housing/Rentals Maps - awesome new padmapper.com (iphone) plus mapskreig.com and original housingmaps.com (stale data) (compete)
• Wikimapia.org (10+ Million entries) like wikipedia, but for maps. See My Seward St Slides entry.
• Fastfoodmaps.com shows fast food joints, updates map when you zoom in/out,
• Walkjogrun.net shows good search bar, nice overlays when looking at a route.
• Taxiwiz.com calculates taxi fares between points in major cities. I like how they add points in google maps
• tmeet.me auto-fill a tweet with current time & coordinates
• SeeClickFix identify local issues (pot hole, sign broken), submit, and watch for fix ..
• Dualmaps combines bird’s eye view with street view and maps
• Pizzashare maps meets pizza meets crowdsourcing (seems buggy, but cool idea)
• Beerhunter.ca find places to get beer in Toronto - right now!
• Diaroogle.com find a clean toilet in NYC
• chicago crimes. lots of interesting data from everyblock, including homegrown maps.
• findbyclick - change maps, results not updated, data is 2007, blog seems current
• Performance/Scaling - spacial databox - great if you have millions of data points

Build your own map: (sorted by compete monthly usage 2/2008-2/2009 more)

• Weddingmapper.com - (130K) great UI for novice (ex)
• Platial.com (120k) slick UI, tons of features, not all work (ex, ex2) (faq) iphone (blog)
• Frappr.com (100k) similar to platial.com, more like myspace for maps
• Communitywalk.com (100k) lots of users/examples, issues on firefox 3 (comments at bottom)
• Zeemaps.com (40k) pretty cool (chicago, sf parks)
• YourGmap.com (20k) easiest setup, good for people who’ve never used google maps (ex)
• Mapbuilder.net (20k) easy setup, can control html for each marker (img, links) (ex)
• Tagzania.com (20k) too much non-map stuff on the page
• Wayfaring.com (15k) clean and slick UI, little data (copyright 2007) (ex)
• My Atlas - clean, but not easy for novices (ex)

Find more maps (reference)

• programmableweb.com
• googlemapsmania blog lists many cool maps
• keirclarke.googlepages.com s

What’s your favorite map?

Yay. Today I finally got it working the way I want - use my iPhone as a remote control when watching movies. If you’re not a uber geek, you might want to stop reading now. Move along.

I use VLC on my mac as my media player. Why? Cuz it plays everything - all types of .avi, .movs. mp3s mpgs, dvds - and lets you program hotkeys to do what you want. For example, I use spacebar for play/pause, and “.” and “,” for jumping forward or backward 15 secs at a time (tivo has trained me well). What else do you need? Volume is done thru my stereo - laptop audio out goes there, and laptop DVI goes into HDMI on my 40″ Bravia. But it sux to have to get up to pause or rewind 10 seconds to see that scene again. So I had to get a remote.

I found it hard to find a good remote control app on the iPhone - Apple’s “Remote” app only controls iTunes, which is good only for playing music (I’m not gonna import GB’s worth of .avi’s into iTunes, Hello..). I really liked the Telekinesis Uniremote app, it has slick remote interface, but I could only get VLC to play/pause (no rewind/ff). XBMC and Movist options seem more complicated.

In the end, the free “mocha vnc lite” iPhone app worked adequately. First, you turn on Apple’s default VNC server - on Leopard, goto System Prefs, Sharing, check the box for “Screen Sharing”, then click on ‘Computer Settings’ button to the right, and on the popup check the box for “VNC .. password” and give it a password - you don’t want anybody in your neighborhood to start controlling your mac. (Tiger instructions). Make sure you remember your password and the IP address. Second, launch VLC on your mac and full screen that baby. Third, install and launch the “mocha vnc lite” app, enter the IP and password and it should connect just fine. Now, you only get a small section of your screen, but thats cool. Click on little keyboard icon to get keyboard, now you can spacebar pause/play your VLC player all night long.

Ending Geek transmission.

If you use Firefox and Google (which should be everybody reading this), then here’s your chance to geek up yo google search.  Install greasemonkey and my “Google Search: Keep Date Dropdown” script.   If you’ve used advanced search on google, you know you can search for stuff based on date - like show healthcare results only from the last week/month/year.  It takes several steps to get to that advanced page, but then you get a nice date dropdown box. However, if you pick “anytime” on that date dropdown box, the box disappears.  Then you gotta go do a bunch of steps to bring it back. That’s where my script comes in - that date dropdown box is always there. Here’s a picture of the dropdown box followed by my official description.

On Google Search, you can search the last week/month/year from advanced search, which creates a date dropdown box on the search results page. Once you search “anytime”, the dropdown box goes away. This script keeps that dropdown from disappearing (when as_qdr=all)

I know, I’m a geek.  I save so much time with little shortcuts like this.  Enough time to write a blog about it. Weeee!!!  Here’s more cool greasemonkey scripts.

I recently moved to Chicago from San Francisco and, of course, had to figure out how I was going to get me some internets from my new pad.  In SF we found free wifi from the neighbors, but in Chicago we had no such luck - all the neighbor wifi signals were secure (encrypted).  That was fine by me, I was ready to have my own fat pipe at home - both shayna and I would get annoyed in SF when our free wifi wasn’t working or forcing us to sit by the windows.

I was also interested in getting HD cable or HD satellite TV. I haven’t had anything besides over-the-air since 2003, but i bought a nice HDTV from a friend that needed some HD content.  Plus Shayna wanted to get a landline so she could do some work over the phone without eating too many minutes on her cell.  So off i went to find internet, cable/satellite, and phone.

I first looked at comcast, the most popular around here, and they offer all 3 - internet, HD cable, and phone.  But I wanted quality HDTV, and I know comcast HD is not as good as others (comcast quality march 2008).  Also, I was pleased with Dish Network when i had it in 2003.  Some sports nuts like Direct TV better, but that ain’t me.  So now i just need to find me some internets.

Finding a Internet service provider was a bit more challenging.  According to dslreports, there were many offerings in my zip.  However, many said they did not offer service at my address - including RCN, verizon, etc.  Covad was available, but starting at like $100/month. Ouch.  Speakeasy was a good choice, one of the most reliable and best customer service, for about $55/month for 1.5/384 or $95/month for 3.0/768.  Ok, also high but more doable, but i figured i should also consider comcast.

Comcast had many options, but here’s a quick summary of the triple play i considered.  All these have the same cable options, about 200 or so cable channels, including 40 or so HD channels, a HD DVR (like tivo), which was $4/month more than normal DVR, and internet.  Total was $132 for 6.0/384 internet plus cable and HD DVR, or $140 for 8.0/384 internet, or $159/month for 16/768 Internet.  I also read many horor stories about comcast changing the price on their customers .. one guy got a $30 increase on his monthly bill.  Comcast?  I don’t think so.

In the end I went with AT&T.  At first their website said they did not offer service at my address, but some blogger said that you should call to double-check.  I did, and they did have ‘manual’ service at my apt.  The nice lady at ATT had many deals, including combos not on their website, so i’ll just list what i ended up getting - cheaper than comcast and they even partner with DISH for my area (U-Verse, their new TV over internet option, was not available for my location).

Notes: $5/month off DISH cuz AT&T deal, $10/month off internet cuz i got a phone line.

Initial costs were .. -$110.  Yep, I walk away with $110.  Breaks down like this: $40 for phone (would be free if i got $30/month free long-distance phone), plus $50 for internet modem.  Dish equipment and installation are free.  Thats $90 in costs, but i also get $200 cash back - $100 for internet/phone, and $100 for DISH.  So $90 costs - $200 cashback = -110.

My contract is for 24 months, but only DISH charges anything if i cancel early - $10/month.  So if i cancel at 14 months, 10 months before contract, i pay $100 to Dish.  If i want to move at 12 months, DISH will install my same setup at new spot for free (DISH offers one free installation per 12 months).  Pretty sweeeeet !!!

UPDATE - 6 November 2008:

I got .. misled on initial costs.  I only got $100 cash back, not $200 ($50, not $100 for each check), and costs were $70 for internet ($50 modem, $13 shipping, $7 tax), $47 for phone ($64 first bill minus $17 monthly), putting my initial costs at about $17 (still not bad, but $127 less than I was told.).

But what i’m really pissed at is the billing chaos.  More important than the errors and confusion, was the amount of time it takes to sort this out.  I spent about 4 hours total on 4 different occassions dealing with AT&T customer service.  Their managers seem competent, but do not trust anyone else.

The first billing confusion was based on the fact that I was told that I get free outgoing calls within 15 miles.  A manager at AT&T Customer Service assures me there is no such thing, and tried to sell me an outgoing call package deal.  No Thank You, Ma’am. Secondly, DISH is all sorts of messed up .. took 3 calls to sort of straighten it out.  See this picture with details on DISH Bill.  Basically they give you lots of credit on first bill to cover first and second bill, and the third bill should look normal. Did you look at that Bill?  what’s so hard about saying “TOP 200″, “Local HD”, “HD Silver” ???  One thing nobody mentioned is that they charge you $5/month if you don’t connect your DISH receiver to phone or wifi - “ADDL RECEIVER ACCESS FEE”.  What?   .

Overall the monthly is not far off - hopefully it will stay that way:

Related - I found a nice comparison of HD channels available nationwide.

Couple months after I replaced a drive in my terastation, another drive died. Sigh. Time to upgrade. Took many many hours, but I upgraded my 1TB Buffalo Terastation (4 x 250GB) to 2TB (4 x 500GB). Of course its less than 2TB - once RAID 5 is setup, it comes out to about 1.4TB of usable space. And you definitely want RAID 5 - that means if any one of the 4 drives dies, you don’t lose any data, just replace it before a second drive fails.

Here’s the deets:

1. Bought four 500GB drives for about $100 each,
2. Copy data from Terastation to one of the 500GB drives - mounted via USB on windows xp, could also work with IDE inside PC (4-6 hours)
3. Disassemble Terastation, pull out 250GB drives (<1 hour)
4. Copy data from 500GB to 2 of the 250GB drives on windows xp PC (6-8 hours)
5. Partial Reassemble Terrastation with 4 new drives (10 mins)
6. Upgrade Terastation firmware to 2.16 (had trouble with disk format till I did this)
7. Format each disk (5 mins) (had to reboot a couple times to get it to work)
8. Create Raid array 1 (RAID 5) using all 4 disks (2 mins), raid “checking” took 13 hours
9. Create shared folder
10. Copy data from the 2 250GB drives back to terastation.

More on http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Terastation_FAQ

Back in 2005, i bought a Buffalo Terastation 1TB NAS (Network Attached Storage). Basically its a backup device - a mini-computer box with 4 harddrives, each 250GB, or 1TB total. Last week one of the drives died after a power outage (we get a lot of outages on san jose ave), and today i fixed it. However, it wasn’t that easy - I spent over 3 hours on it - when it should have taken less than one. So i’m just gonna note a few things so the next guy might have it easier. Now here’s where i’m gonna geek out, so all non-geeks .. move along.

When i first setup the terastion, i did a RAID5 + RAID1 - that means i got a 750GB partition out of my 4 250GB drives. So if any one of the four drives dies, i don’t lose my data. I just pop in a new drive and rebuild. Easy. This worked great for 3 years, never had to replace a drive. Every now and then we’d lose power and when i powered on my terastation, it would take 1-2 days to check the disks before we were good to go.

Last week Terastation would not recover - it would boot up for a minute, do disk check, then turn off (power light was off). However, each of the four drive status lights would stay red, with disk 3 blinking red. After reading the manual, I decided to replace disk 3. I also read the wiki FAQ, so i knew i could replace with any same-size or bigger drive. I did this, spending almost 45 mins opening the terstation up, switching the drive, and putting it back together. Turned it on, and it stayed on. Yay!

So now all i had to do is connect to the web manager interface and “rebuild the raid array”. Once i logged in, it said Raid array 1 error - i clicked it, and I’d get to array 1, and it listed disk 1, 2, 3, 4 .. but the checkbox to disk 3 was greyed out. I spent a while looking through the web pages and decided something might be wrong with my new disk. I turned it off, took the thing apart (only took 15mins this time), pulled out my new disk, and basically connected it to my PC in a external USB drive box. It worked fine. Ugh. Was terastation broken? I tried the old drive, that terastation thought was dead. It also seemed OK by PC standards. Ugh.

After going back in forth and trying different things, it turned out that the new drive had to have the jumper in Cable Select to work. The older 3 western digital drives were not in Cable Select mode. Whatever.

Also, the LED lights on the front don’t always do exactly what the manual or FAQ says. Specifically, i loved this blog on replacing terastation drive, but at the what he says is different than what i saw. Once I clicked ‘Restructure RAID Array’ , the lights were all going nuts and within a minute it went to a page that said “Restructuring has completed successfully” “Checking RAID Array”. At this point my 8 drive lights are blinking red and green - the 3 old ones have solid red status, new one is not lit, and all 4 have blinking green activitiy. Power light is on, diag light is blinking green. On web interface, i clicked on Raid Array 1 and it says it is “Rearing (x.x % Complete)”. I waited a few mins and refreshed page .. percent complete is increasing. It’s working !!! 4 hours later it finished - my setup is as good as it ever was.

Social Networking is hot right now. Myspace is huge, facebook is growing super-mega fast, and even Google is backing open standards with OpenSocial (tho, not perfect).

Tagging is also a somewhat new (few years old). You can tag photos (flickr), tag websites/blogs (digg, del.icio.us, technorati, furl, etc) .. why not tag friends? Specifically, I have different circles of friends, some friends overlap, and would love to be able to group them more effectively than i can today. Examples

• babysitters
• coworkers
• work project A
• work project B
• lunch friends
• church friends
• hiking friends
• drinking buddies
• college friends
• star trek fans
• DJ/dancing crews

One thing to point out is how this compares to the existing concept of groups on social networking sites. Tagging people with “hiking” is promoting MY view of the world - I get to control who i want to talk to when i want to go hiking. In contrast, a hiking group I join is not my view - I don’t have control on that case. It’s more random, usually controlled by the loudest people (loudest meaning more volume of info and higher frequency), and most likely less personal, therefore a different usage paradigm. But the most important difference is that friends tagged with “hiking” are friends first, hiking people second. Social networking groups are groups first, and may or may not contain friends.

Everybody likes to spend time with friends, so why not change the paradigm to make friends come first?

How would it work? Simple - while looking at profiles on a given social network site, there’s always a section that has “add friend” or “marked as friend”. Around there you could add a tag to that person. Then, on your home page, you could have a friend tag cloud or list of friend tags. You pick a tag and it jumps to a dynamicly created page containing summaries of each person you tagged, with the following options:

• email - easier to manage than creating new email lists all the time
• calendar or event planning - requires them all to use the same calendar system so it can find time when all are free .. not easy
• person summaries, including existing tags (with ability to add/delete here, too), latest posts, pictures, status, …. optionally filtering posts/pics by the current tag (oooo.. advanced)

I’m looking at you, google.

Today my beautiful new 24″ monitor arrived. Thanks, Mr. Fedex!! I ordered the Samsung 245T after doing a bunch of research (xbitlabs, trusted reviews, cnet). Specifically, its the best 1920×1200 24″ flat-screen out there under $1000. Besides awesome screen quality (my, what a wide color gamut you have), it has tons of inputs (DVI, HDMI, VGA, S-Video, RCA, Component), USB Hub, and PIP (picture-in-picture). Its also quite popular - constantly out of stock everywhere as soon as stock arrives (pricegrabber). I ended up paying about $700 for it. Yeah, i’m a geek.

I have several domains hosted out of my apt, meaning the computer that controls samo.org (among others) sits in my apartment. Now that i’m moving, i decided to look into hosting these domains somewhere else a bit more reliable (although it was fun to walk fritz and shayna thru a reboot from Thailand).

Here’s what i’m looking for

• cheap monthly (less than $10/month)
• virtual hosting (2+ domains)
• linux/BSD/Unix
• PHP access
• ssh access (csh, cron, .htaccess, php.ini, etc)
• web stats (access to apache log files)
• decent disk space and bandwidth (?)

I’m happy to see that shared hosting (one machine serving many domains and many customers) is pretty cheap ($5-$10/month). This is in comparison to dedicated hosting, where a customer gets their own machine - for high bandwidth and/or highly customizable stuff. I used to think i needed that, but now i don’t. First I tried to find current reviews of web hosting, starting with GoDaddy, since that’s where i have some domains registered. Basically they are one of the cheapest around, but there are many on the net that complain about their customer support. After a bit of digging, i found some decent review sites and decided to do it right.

Webhostingsitesreviews does a good job evaluating the company and their offerings - their top linux sites were BlueHost 95%, StartLogic 95%, IX Web Hosting 92%, HostMonster 92%, HostGator 87%, Yahoo 87%, and last place GoDaddy 83%. I also liked Hosting Review’s top 10 table with links to their verbose reviews. YourWebHosting also lists a top 10 with BlueHost at the top, followed by IX, GoDaddy, Dot5, StartLogic. Top 5 Hosts picked Hostmonster, Lunarpages, Bluehost, Startlogic, and Hostgator. Ahh, those names sound familiar - I think i see some patterns. Good.

I also found a few sites that seem… off. Perhaps paid placements? Hostsearch allows people to review sites, which is nice to get user issues, but they are not as thorough as webhostingsitereviews. Hostsearch’s top picks are (in order) Webstrike (402 reviews), WebHostingBuzz (258 reviews), eBoundHost (43 reviews), Galaxyvisions (22 reviews), HostForWeb (259 reviews). Web Hosting picked these as their tops: Globat, Poweb, HostRocket, GoDaddy .. and none of them seemed like a good deal.

Anyway, on with the Round-Up - My Summary below. Most of the top ones were about the same, altho I noticed a few things i wanted that not everyone has, like SSH access and access to log files (i like to ssh and tail logs while troubleshooting).

And the winner is … Hostmonster, everything i need for $6/month.

Notes - doteasy.com only had 1GB storage and 20GB/month xfer for $7/month plan. Yahoo was equally lame.

Don’t ever ever get a gift card for Tigerdirect.com - trust me. I worked for yahoo, got a free gift certificate at giftcertificates.com, which i used to buy $250 gift cards at Tiger direct. Bad move. All i wanted to do was buy stuff from their site using the gift cards -

1. I ended up having to call them 5 times, totaling about 3 hours, longest call was over an hour (this really sucked)
2. I got passed around from customer service to credit card payment and back and on hold and talked to supervisors and on hold and … dropped entirely, 3 of 5 times. Each time they liked to tell me how their internal operations work (hello, do i care?), and it varied depending on who i talk to.
3. Web site is great, but does not work with gift card system. During checkout, It incorrectly reports the amount available on gift cards
4. If you use less than the full amount of a gift card, they have to mail you another gift card for the difference (why not email? or better yet, just change the amount on the gift card to whats left? not rocket science)
5. They have at least 2 different types of gift card numbers, and one of the problems i had was that both could not be applied to one
   order - at least the supervisor acknowledged this as not great and made it work for me.  well, i hope he made it work - not shipped yet.

Seriously, guys, how much money do you waste on customer service? Perhaps gift cards are not that popular, and its not worth the time to make the system functional, relying on supervisors to fix it? I thought about calling Carl Fiorentino, TigerDirect’s president, at home in Miami, like Fred Wise did, but haven’t. I think i got it sorted - we’ll see if my package arrives after burningman.