About a year ago I ditched Ubuntu and MythTV on my media center box for Windows 7 Ultimate. To be honest one of the main reasons I did this was for NetFlix, but also because I got tired of having to tweak my media center all the time and Windows 7 Media Center just works. Also Windows 7 is smart enough to know how to sleep and wake up from sleep, saving my lots of money over the course of a year.
Posts
I’m 32, married, a professional scientist, and I have a confession to make. I play video games. Worse, I feel guilty about playing games. I often feel so guilty that it saps much of the guy from the game, turning it into some perverse drudgery where I feel obligated to keep on playing so I can say I actually beat the game. In other words, the guilt that I get from playing video games is so great that it turns every game into an obligation game like Farmville.
I hate the concept of New Year’s Resolutions with an utter passion. It’s arbitrary for people to pick a single day and decide to change everything. Some people might call these resolutions, I call these personal development goals. None of these are dramatic changes from things that I already do, or should be doing. Rather, this set of goals will help keep me on track for 2011.
Academic Submit papers to FSE, CSCW, and ICSE Submit at least one journal paper Physical These and a few more are covered in a post about 2011 goals on my marathon blog.
Following on the heels of my somewhat successful predictions regarding Open Source for 2010, I now my present my 10 predictions for Open Source in 2011.
On the PC front Netflix will continue to require Silverlight for streaming, although they’ll finally get their act together and make it work well with GPU acceleration. Interfaces for Netflix will all move the route of the PS3 and adopt an HTML based interface.
As 2009 came to a close and 2010 started I decided to put all of my schooling and research to good use and attempt some short term prognostication. I entered the realm of people making predictions for 2010. Here’s a recap of my predictions for 2010 and how everything shook out:
The Eclipse Foundation will undergo a major upheaval related to community/corporate structure and governance. Wrong - As near as I can tell there was no upheaval in the Eclipse Foundation.
Important This report and analysis is still in the draft stage. I’m open to new data, criticisms about my model, grammatical/writing fixes, and suggestions about how to make it better. There are three ways to leave me feedback. You can leave a comment at the end of this post, post a comment on this thread on Reddit, or email me directly.
Pending Improvements Thanks to everyone on Reddit, Facebook, and folks in the comments who provided useful feedback.
Academics live and die based on references. A variety of tools exist to manage references, from the sadly ubiquitous EndNote, to manually curated BibTeX files, to some people who just type their entries by hand with each paper. A variety of web aware citation management tools are also available, for example Mendeley and Zotero.
For the past few years I’ve been using Zotero and have found it to be wonderful (with a few slight exceptions).
Around work and with friends I’ve obtained a reputation as the go-to-guy for computer hardware, particular home theater and media center computers. I was really excited about the new Dell Inspiron Zino HD, a tiny little box that can pack a dual core Athlon processor, a couple of gigs of ram, and a decent enough video card to play some games. Starts around $299, and you can get a nicely loaded one for $500.
I spent the last few days at the FOSS2010 Workshop in Irvine, CA. It’s an interesting little workshop that brought together some of the best minds in Open Source research from academia, industry, and practice. The goal was to develop a roadmap for the future of Open Source research.
One issue that constantly comes up is how many Open Source projects exist. People most often point to SourceForge as an indicator of success, with it’s claim on 230,000 projects and more than 2 million users.
About eighteen months ago I migrated my academic web pages away from a self hosted solution on a Linux box in my living room to Google Sites. Mainly this was done because I was applying for jobs and wanted to make sure that the site would be reliable. But although I came for the reliability, I stayed for the features.
It’s true that Google Sites is somewhat limiting in what you can do.