Author Archives: tlianza

Opie and Anthony returning to terrestrial radio?

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There are rumors that O&A are moving back to regular radio to take over for David Lee Roth, who replaced Stern.

The way such a deal would work would be for O&A to do a delayed simulcast with Free FM, to allow Free FM to edit portions of the show prior to broadcast. In addition, the O&A show would be expanded by 1 hour on XM, in order, to provide extra material for Free FM for those times when O&A’s XM content is unsuitable for general FM broadcast.

O&A have been hinting on the air that this rumor is true. If true, this would be awesome. O&A already, just by virtue of being on XM, have a larger audience than Stern. If they had a version of the show on FM, there would be no comparison. The fact that they’d be taking over Stern’s timeslot and former station would be especially sweet.

The chatter about Google buying Writely

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Google confirmed yesterday that it acquired Writely, a pretty cool online word processor that I use on occasion. There is more than enough speculation out there that people think Google is going to try and build an Office suite, and at 37signals they are guessing that Google is

“…building up half an office suite. Google knows that most people don’t need the full Microsoft Office collection. They don’t even need most of it. They don’t even need half of each product. They just need a few things (like creating a quick, simply formatted document and sharing it with someone).”

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I don't get the Oragami

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The mysterious Oragami was revealed by Microsoft a few days ago. I have to say, I don’t think I get it. I am a sucker for new gadgets, too. Tell me a story about how some hot-looking piece of electronics will change my life, and I’ll tell you my credit card number (case in point, I just got my ReadyNAS NV in the mail yesterday). And, this Oragami thing looks hot, so what’s it’s story?

The story seems to be it doesn’t have a story. Or rather, it has too many stories. It’s a computer that’s bigger than a Palm Pilot, and smaller than a laptop. It doesn’t fit in a pocket, but doesn’t require a full laptop-bag. It doesn’t serve as a phone (unless you’re using VOIP over WiFi… which you’re not). As a fan admits, it doesn’t kill any individual device.

So… it plays music like an iPod, but it’s way bigger and therefore is useless on runs or at the gym. You can do regular computer operations like a laptop, but the screen is smaller and it has no keyboard… which means no coding or serious typing, which means I’d still need a laptop. It seems like the best things you can do with it are surf the web and watch movies…. both of which my laptop can already do (and the video iPod can already play movies) and I can’t get rid of either the laptop or the iPod for reasons already mentioned. Plus you still need a cell phone, which to a growing extent already alows you to surf the web, or read e-mail (even without wifi), and do even more stuff that the Origami can’t – like answer phone calls and in some cases watch live TV.

So, this thing is really just one more “thing.” It’s in no position to replace any of my other things. So, if it’s not replacing something the question is, what problem does it solve that my current things don’t solve. From what I can tell, the answer to that is “nothing.” I don’t think my list of things (laptop, ipod, cell phone) are that unusual either. A lot of people have all 3. So why would anyone buy this?

Cool News Site

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I find myself continuing to visit newsvine.com – probably half because of the hype, and half because I really like the aesthetics. It’s kind of a cross between CNN and Digg. Like CNN because they are all news stories (a lot of AP articles) but like Digg in that the front page is determined by votes, and content can come from submissions. It seems to be a key component of the new crop of web sites that importance is determined collectively and democratically, rather than from a centralized body.

Very cool MythTV script

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Myth2Ipod lets you set your recorded TV programs to be transcoded for viewing on the iPod. The best part is that it also builds a php page which you can point iTunes at, and it treats your TV shows like a Video RSS feed. So, iTunes goes off, downloads new ones, keeps them labeled properly, etc. – just like a regular podcast. That way you can just drop your iPod in, download all of the shows you’ve recorded since you last sync’d, and go.

Right now it’s not making use of MythTV’s commercial flags, so your recordings still have commercials, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was in the works. Very cool. Also good if you’re about to get on a long plane ride (as I am) and have a bunch of recordings sitting on your PVR that you hadn’t gotten around to watching.

Ruby on Rails – What server to use?

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With Ruby on Rails there are a number of options on what server to use. Supposedly Lighttpd is “fast as lightning” but FastCGI on Apache is the “standard” method for production use.

Out of curiosity, I went to a site which I knew ran Ruby on Rails and gets a lot of traffic, and inspected the HTTP headers.

Unsurprisingly, the response when requesting the main page included this header:
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_deflate/1.0.21 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2

However, as the browser started requesting images, they came back with this header:
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/1.8.2/2004-12-25)

It seems like they’re using the so-called not-for-production webserver to serve up static content. That’s interesting, given that some have described the usage of that server to be reserved for cases when you have low concurrent users and mostly dynamic content. This qualifies as neither.