• moved to WordPress 3.0.1
• removed unused plugins
• removed unused themes
• updated remaining plugins to recent version
• removed old pictures page
• updated about page

And after over a year, synced up the developer version of rajatarya.com with the production version.  Much more painful than I expected and definitely a good reminder to follow the ‘right’ process – work on the developer site and then publish to the production site.

Please let me know if you see anything that doesn’t appear to work (rajat).

I am planning a site overhaul and some new blog posts, so more to come in the next few weeks!

(This is even more technical than my other technical posts. Consider yourself warned.)

I wanted a dual-boot system between Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit.  I wanted both systems to be fully functional as 64-bit operating systems and have full access to the computer’s hardware.  Accomplishing this has been well documented and I won’t bother discussing it.  I simply repartitioned the hard drive into two partitions, and then let Windows 7 install on one of them and then installed Ubuntu 9.10 on the other.  Grub gives me a choice when the machine boots and defaults to Linux, which is what I wanted.  Then I decided I want to run Windows 7 in a VM on the Linux machine, and that I really wanted the VM to run from the Windows 7 partition already created.  I had heard this was possible with earlier versions of Windows, so I figured Windows 7 should be no exception (at least if Vista can support such a scenario then Windows 7 should be the same).

I started by reading this, which gave me good guidance, but was the other configuration – Windows as the host and Ubuntu as the guest – I wanted the opposite – Ubuntu as the host and Windows as the guest.  That led me to the VirtualBox User’s Guide, which does a great job of describing the process of using Raw Disk access.  And finally, I did some perusing of the VirtualBox forums to find a couple specific answers to getting the setup working.

In an effort to help document this scenario, here are the things I did to get it working:

1. Read the VirtualBox User’s Guide on Raw Disk Access (here)
2. user@computer:$ VBoxManage internalcommands listpartitions -rawdisk /dev/sda
   VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.8
   (C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
   All rights reserved.
   
   Number Type StartCHS EndCHS Size (MiB) Start (Sect)
   1 0x07 0 /32 /33 12 /223/19 100 2048
   2 0x07 12 /223/20 1023/254/63 99900 206848
   3 0x07 1023/254/63 1023/254/63 70000 204802048
   5 0x83 1023/254/63 1023/254/63 65624 348176808
   6 0x82 1023/254/63 1023/254/63 2839 482576598
   
3. Notice how there is a 100MB partition (partition 1) – that is the boot partition for Windows 7. This, along with partition 2 are the Windows 7 partitions. Partition 3 is my ‘data’ partition, which is shared between both OSes. All of these partitions need to be enabled for read/write access by me in order for VirtualBox to load them up. I did this by:
   user@computer:$ chmod 666 /dev/sda1
   
   user@computer:$ chmod 666 /dev/sda2
   
   user@computer:$ chmod 666 /dev/sda3
   

   I know this is not the most secure way of doing things, but it works for me.

4. Now it is also important that there is a place for Master-Boot Record (MBR) to get loaded from VirtualBox. This is necessary so that when the VM starts up it has an MBR to use – otherwise it will try to use Grub and will fail miserably. To get a ‘dummy’ MBR created I read a couple forum posts (here), and then did the following:
   user@computer:$ sudo apt-get install mbr
   
   user@computer:$ install-mbr -e12 --force ~/vm.mbr
   

   The -e12 argument means I want the first and second partition enabled in the MBR. This is critical to getting it all to work – otherwise the VM won’t know which partition to enable.

5. Now we are ready to actually create the raw disk for VirtualBox to handle, I typed in the following:
   user@computer:$ VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /home/rajat/win7.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1,2 -mbr /home/rajat/vm.mbr -relative -register
   
6. Go through VirtualBox, create a new VM, mark it Windows 7 (in my case 64-bit) and save. The VM is ready to be started, but it won’t work entirely yet.
7. Set the VM to mount the DVD drive and put in your Vista DVD. Start the VM. Press F12 and select the DVD drive to start (c). Let Win7 setup start, pick a language, and then click the ‘Repair installation’ option. Go through automatic repair, and then let the VM restart. This time it should go into Win7 running off the raw disk.

Let me know if you have any trouble with these instructions, or would like to add to them. Drop me a line to know if these worked for you as well. I can’t wait to use these steps on my other boxes and put Windows in a box while I’m using it.

Update: There is a regression in VirtualBox 3.10 regarding raw disk access. Any machine that boots with raw disk access stops booting using VirtualBox 3.10. Read more about it in the documented bug report. As a workaround simply downgrade to VirtuablBox 3.08 or install the OSE edition. I got hit with this the day after this post went live, downgrading solved the problem for me.

Most teams in business today rely on email.  Though imperfect it is ubiquitous for electronic communication.  It has proven the lowest-common denominator for communication between team members.

The question of how to organize email is often left to each team member.  I think this approach is lacking – it leaves folks with good organization skills at an advantage to keeping up with information.  As a team we should all be committed to keeping everyone in the loop.  A little effort up front can pay big dividends in team productivity.

Mailing lists allow team members to easily filter email and keep track of emails as appropriate to their role on the team.  In larger teams they also allow for managers in the team to manage the email lists appropriate for their team members.

From my experience (which is assisted by my last team at Microsoft – the former Max team) the following list of mailing lists should be created for a product team.  Assume each one is started with a short description of the product/team (for example: gizmo-dev is the developer mailing list).

-dev: developer mailing list.  Only developers on this list.
-test: test mailing list.  Only testers on this list.
-bus: business analyst, program manager mailing list.
-team (aggregate of -dev, -test, -bus): entire team, sometimes includes upper management
-commit (aggregates team): all checkin emails related to software development
-deploy (aggregate of team): deployment announcements for software deployments
-chat (aggregate of team): non-work related chatter – like new joke site, xkcd comic, etc
-oof (aggregate of team): out of facility announcements – like at the dentist for the next two hours, out for a week next week etc

First off, notice how more than half of the lists above just have the -team mailing list as its member.  This means you don’t have to manage all the lists individually, just the -dev, -test, and -bus ones.

Folks uninterested in the checkin emails can simply filter those out quickly into a folder that is kept unread, or archived.

The -oof list always is a controversial one.  There isn’t a good solution for knowing folks absences.  Blocking out your own calendar has the problem that people won’t notice unless they are scheduling something and you aren’t there.  The problem with sending invitations for your absence to the team is that most of the time the team doesn’t care and you are just adding more work for them to manage their calendars to make the time look “free” for them.  An Out-Of-Facility list is the simplest solution.  Email it when you will be away from work and then folks you are trying to find you will either know about it ahead of time or can check that list for up to the minute info.  And it has archival, filtering etc functionality.

If you work in a small team that has folks wearing multiple hats, no big deal, just add them to multiple lists.  The lists also serve a critical function of providing archival support in case someone leaves or is out for an extended period of time.  These lists also allow external teams to listen into conversations without having to know team members directly.

Image via CrunchBase

For direct communication each team should have an instant messaging solution as well.  If you are using a free service just make sure to check the Terms of Service – you don’t want to be spreading corporate secrets on the publicly searchable archives of a Google Talk conversation, for example.  I recommend setting up a Jabber server in the intranet of the organization and using it for communication.  Most likely it can integrate with the email server and prevent duplicate user generation.  In the end instant communication is great for real-time conversations without talking, but poor for documentation or business communication.  For that type of communication email is still the best option.

How does your team organize its communication?  Does it employ mailing lists?  What other tools help?  Let me know below or shoot me an email.

Image via Wikipedia

Going to college during the dot-com boom meant that we had lots of opportunities to play buzzword bingo.  This post talks about one of the buzzwords I remember hearing repeatedly from that time – synergy.  This word was used to talk about business models (B2B to provide synergy between companies) and organization culture (we look for synergies between team members when hiring).  As far as I remember, most of the presentations were full of rhetoric and little substance.  Much like the word’s connotation in its time. To truly create synergy between team members, meaning, to get the team to produce more than they could individually, the team must have high-bandwidth communication.

You already know this type of communication, just maybe without a name before.  It’s the type of communication you have with your best friend, your oldest friend, or your closest confidant.  It doesn’t matter how much time has elapsed since you both last spoke, within minutes of talking you are fully engaged in conversation. Simply put, high- bandwidth communication is when both parties are fully engaged in the discussion, adding valuable contributions, while not struggling to keep up.  It is relatively common in personal lives – I would argue that it is probably how you have chosen your closest friends.  They are the people you can trust that understand you implicitly.  Now transfer this to a work environment or a team project.

First, you don’t need to be best friends with your team members.  But you do need a way to collaborate efficiently.  High bandwidth communication means you are sharing ideas and collaborating without expending extraneous energy.  It means you say it once and everyone gets it.  It means you draw it once on the white board and nobody needs to pick up a pen and elaborate/extend your ideas. It means you are finishing each other’s thoughts and ideas together.  How often does that happen for you at work?

I have seen many teams try to “process” their way into high-bandwidth communication.  These are in the form of additional status emails, meetings, TPS reports and the like (we should all agree on a template for sending our status emails to keep them consistent and easy to read).  As much as I have seen this tried, it never gets close to high-bandwidth communication.  This just frustrates some folks on the team and burdens those that aren’t frustrated with additional minutia to manage throughout their day.  What my team recently did which resulted in much higher bandwidth communication is far simpler – we got to know each of our working styles.

A ‘work style’ is simply a way to talk about the personality you have at work.  Not that you aren’t yourself at work, but you aren’t.  Nobody is.  And if you are, then I probably wouldn’t want to work with you.  At work the decorum of professionalism should be adhered to.  This is for everyone’s comfort and to keep people from feeling uncomfortable.  My work style is devoid of the vulgarity that is a big part of my personality.  My work style also limits profanity, which unfortunately, is a pretty big part of how I speak outside of work.

Image via Wikipedia

How did we get to know each other’s working styles? We took personality tests.  The Myer’s Briggs Part II to be exact – with answers geared to how we behave at work.  And then we had a facilitator help visualize and present our results.  We did a great exercise to demonstrate how much time we would each spend based on our personalities in the four stages of approaching a new problem.  Team building exercises have never made much sense to me, until this one.  By getting to know each of our work styles we learned how to communicate more effectively with everyone.  Extroverted people dominate meetings and spoken communication – and by realizing that more than half the team is introverted by nature – we realized we needed to create a meeting atmosphere more conducive to introverts (we do this better now by doing lots of sticky note exercises when getting team feedback).

Does this mean my team has really high-bandwidth communication overnight?  No.  But we are much better off than we were before the exercise.  We keep a printout of our results in a common place for the entire team to see on a daily basis – a little reminder of how hard it is on some folks to talk in groups and to others to quiet down to let others in.  We aren’t the greatest team yet, but we are committed to improving as a group and are actively working towards it.  Moving towards high-bandwidth communication at work will improve your team’s ability to deliver on its goals in a more timely manner with less overhead – sounds like synergy to me.

Do you have high-bandwidth communication at work?  What techniques has your team used to bring about better communication?  Leave a comment or shoot me an email to let me know.

If you are on a team or in an organization that has not heard of model-view controller, hopefully you can use this presentation to bring your team on-board with the simplicity and power of the pattern.  There is lots of information on Model-View controller all over the web but I couldn’t find a presentation that tied it all together like I wanted.  Feel free to let me know about other such presentations in the comments.

Model View Controller

The second presentation is an introduction to ASP.NET MVC – the new Microsoft web framework that substitutes Web Forms for web development. Luckily this framework released very recently and we have been using it at work. It is a pleasure to use instead of Web Forms.

Introduction to ASP .NET MVC

MVC is everywhere, let me know your thoughts on these slides and on good online resources for design patterns in general.

Download them here, or check them out on Scribd:

• Model View Controller
• Introduction to ASP.NET MVC

Though it is past April 15th and I missed my “taxes” deadline for this post, I still wanted a chance to share some of the events from 2008.  It was another big year, so I’m sticking to the ordered/chronological list like last year.

1. Continue working for Clearspring
   The job had me working day and night, with frenetic pace that only a startup can impose.  Back then I thought I was thriving in it – somehow having convinced myself that the “world” would end if I didn’t crank out whatever feature I was working on.  Unfortunately it was wreaking my health.  My weight has skyrocketed and I was eating badly.  I also developed a lesion on my face, around my chin.  More on that later.
2. Shaily arrives on March 20th
   We waited for four long months after our marriage for Shaily’s visa to come through (it was 11 months after we filed for it).  In many ways our marriage didn’t really start until Shaily got here and we were living under one roof for the first time.
3. Clearspring gets more funding (read more here and here)
   My life and my work are inextricably connected.  I somehow feel like “I” got more funding when Clearspring did.  Again, only the koolaid a startup can offer. My health is still in decline but I’m gung-ho about the company, my future, and our lives in Arlington VA.  When I am at work I am feeling guilty about not being at home with Shaily; when I am at home I feel guilty I am not working harder at work.  This is a recipe for disaster, I just didn’t know it then.
4. Wedding Reception in Portland OR
   My parents throw us a wedding reception in Portland.  It was a great ceremony and we were so happy so many family members could attend. Took one week off from work (the maximum allowed at one time – yay startups) for the reception and for a really fun road trip down the west coast from Portland to LA with my cousins.  I had to leave from LA to get back to work, but Shaily got to enjoy LA, Las Vegas, and more.
5. The Bit Flipped
   If you know me then you’ve probably heard of me talk about this moment before – it has happened to me before in other teams, at other jobs, in relationships.  It is the moment of clarity that has been brewing in your subconscious for weeks or months that finally comes to the conscious. The picture becomes clear. I no longer want to work for Clearspring.The new funding had raised my hopes for a chance at more equity in the company – especially considering what it was taking out of me.  For twelve Tuesdays in a row during the summer I was at work at 4am to deploy software.  For example, on my birthday, I worked from 4am to 9pm. It had become increasingly clear that more stock options were not being issued to anyone in light of the new funding.

   The work environment that once seemed electric seemed strained and unnecessary.  The constant “fire drill” of chasing after immature web 2.0 APIs with hopefully slightly less immature technology seemed like a cruel joke.  Though in my first professional leadership role I was struggling to find vision/direction/focus in the engineering organization.  I felt strongly that the executive engineering management was not providing  leadership to the organization and was not nurturing the growth of the team.

   Before finalizing my desire to leave I asked to be moved to a different team in engineering – to work on the advertising platform work Clearspring was doing.  I have a lot of respect for the lead of the advertising team and felt I could learn a lot by being on his team – both technically and from him.  My request was not granted with an explanation from my boss (the VP of engineering – not the one that hired me – Clearspring was on its 3rd VP of engineering during my tenure at this point) that my knowledge in my current team was too valuable to be lost.  I was done learning new things on the current team, tired of the work environment and the lack of leadership, and disappointed that no more stock options were going to be available. I decided it was time to leave.

6. Clearspring Acquires AddThis (read more here and here)
   Another opportunity for Hooman and the Board to issue options comes and goes.  No options are issued.  My mind is already made up about leaving.  I ask to no longer lead a team and am quietly being a developer that works much closer to 50 hours a week instead of what I was doing earlier in the year.  This gives me the time I need to begin the job search and do phone interviews.  Shaily and I decide to relocate back to Seattle WA.  My parents had decided at the same time to spend more time in Portland OR so Shaily and I moving back to Seattle seems natural (moving back for me, moving for the first time for Shaily).
7. Accepted a position at University of Washington
   To my pleasant surprise the university worked very quickly from cover letter to phone screen to phone interview.  I had already scheduled a trip to interview with other companies in the area and my team was able to work me into a spare day I had on that trip to interview me in person.  I accepted the day the offer was presented.  Since we had an open workspace in Clearspring where very few of us had office phones I had to walk out to my car to negotiate my offer. I wanted to make sure Shaily and I got a break between jobs (something I didn’t do between Microsoft and Clearspring) so I asked for a start date of December 1.  This gave Shaily and me the month of November to drive cross country.
8. Road Trip Cross Country in November 2008
   I will write separately about the road trip – here I’ll just mention that it was memorable, enjoyable, and worth doing. We got to see: Philadelphia, New York, relatives in Zanesville OH, Kent State, UMich Ann Arbor, Chicago, Minneapolis (well really Mall of America), Bend SD, Mt Rushmore, got stuck in a snow storm and spent the night at a rest area in Chugwater WY, Park City UT, and finally Salt Lake City UT.
9. Started work at University of Washington
   I’m a senior software systems engineer working on migrating a paper certification process to an electronic one (read more here and here).  This means retiring the mainframe that has been used since 1970s and building a new enterprise system.  The team is just finishing the first major milestone of the project – migrating folks off of the mainframe.  Part of an excited team that is nothing like the stereotypical professional staff team at a university.  Ramp up in ASP .NET development and designing the next major milestone of the project. Lots of learning, and 40 hour weeks. I am visibly more relaxed every day – Shaily notices immediately.

   As a note, Cleaspring had their first major layoffs in December (see here).  I was sad to hear this happened because many of the guys I worked with there were underutilized and overall I felt the team could have produced so much more under the right leadership.  I was glad to find out that many of the team members I knew who were laid off landed okay, some in situations far better for them than Clearspring.

10. Relocated to Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle
    Shaily and I rented an apartment below our friends Brian and Miriam (and Cam) in Capitol Hill.  Brian and Miriam were scheduled to move to Hawaii in January so being right next door meant we got to hang out every day in December and until they left.  The snow storms in Seattle around Christmas were fun – everyone’s travel plans changed and we all spent Christmas together.  Brian and Cam made a turkey. (Shaily and I made ginger cookies from scratch.)  We all partied on New Years together, ringing in 2009 with fake confetti while watching fireworks and dancing till 3am on tunes spun by Cam.

The year brought several significant changes to my life. I changed jobs and moved cross country – AGAIN.  I started living with my wife.  I learned first hand what it was like to work at a startup.  The year ended with me in a very different mental place than when it started.  Maybe it’s maturing, maybe it’s living a married life, whatever it is I am glad it happened.

This website, my website, is finally rebuilt and I’m happy with how it is built now and for the most part with how it looks.  There are always improvements to be made, but I am most happy with how I put this site together – like a software product – which should enable me to make a lot more changes rapidly in the future.  Please let me know what you think about the redesign in the comments.

In this post I will talk about what changes specifically have been made to the site, how it is reborn, and what plans I envision for it in the future.

What Changed?

dreamhost hosting

Hosted on Dreamhost now, no more Site5

This was a long time coming, my contract with Site5 will end at the end of this year.  It took me a while to realize that though Site5 offers great prices (and Dreamhost has become highly competitive in the last two years) Dreamhost has a much better written Panel and features that I want are better implemented.  For example:

• Ease at setting up Google for Email – modifying the DNS is a snap using Dreamhost (even when Dreamhost wasn’t the registrar yet).
• SVN – this was literally two clicks on Dreamhost – it involved reading a wiki page on Site5 and even then it wasn’t configured for anything but svn+ssh connectivity (where is the support for http://svn.domainname.com?).
• MySQL management – easy to understand the configuration for databases with web servers.
• Domain management overall – clearly defined what the subdomains are, what the fully hosted domains are, and everything in between.
• Much much better shell support.  Obvious that Dreamhost is a Debian system with a much better shell than anything Site5 offers.
• Ruby on Rails support for mod_passenger.  Though I haven’t tried it yet I have heard good things – Site5 is still living with FastCGI, sort of (or maybe I just can’t read the Site5 documentation).

I know that Dreamhost has problems as well – as will all cheap-first-reliable-second tier of hosting solutions.  I don’t expect anything better when I’m paying for the cheapest hosting around with significant features and support.  I am willing to give up on reliability and availability for now (though it hasn’t been a problem yet with Dreamhost on my particular box and it was a problem a few times with Site5 over my tenure with them) as long as the features I use everyday are well documented, easy to follow, and well written.  It is a joy to use the Panel on Dreamhost.

gallery

wordpress

WordPress upgraded to 2.7.1, Gallery upgraded to 2.3

These were minor updates but I installed both by hand on Dreamhost – far easier to maintain in the long run vs the one-click installers I had used at Site5 (Fantastico seems great but blows once you start modifying the apps).  Migrated my posts and my photos from Site5 to Dreamhost – was really easy to get all of that working together – far easier than I expected.

Updated Look and Feel using Modified K2 WordPress Theme

The previous version used WordPress with a custom DXX theme that I had hacked together and modified in more ways than I could remember.  The biggest thing missing from it was support for WordPress widgets.  This made adding new plugins mean PHP code modification.  I was anxious to be done with that.  Sunil suggested K2 and off I went.

Read more about K2 here to find out more about it – but from my research – it is exactly what I wanted – a highly modular and beautiful WordPress theme that took care of the ‘hard’ stuff for me using AJAX with jQuery and left the ‘easy’ stuff easy for me to modify.

Once K2 was plugged in I took a couple quick swabs at configuring a more integrated Gallery 2.3 (using WPG2 still) and got WordPress sidebars working correctly with the WPG2 plugin for WordPress and Gallery.

What is it Made Of?

Overall the site is still WordPress and Gallery driven, however WebSVN has been added for repository viewing.  There are many new WordPress plugins being used now.  A sampling include:

• reCAPTCHA
• Deko Boko
• Netflix X2
• Last.fm
• WPG2
• …

Where can I find out More?

I’ve set up a project page for this site in which the details of how it is built, modified, and coded are described.  In redoing the site I spent a lot of time turning it into a ‘semi-serious’ software project – with a development environment and deployment procedure.  Using this improved process I should be able to add features to the site much more rapidly.

Follow along or drill in deeper at the project page.

Send me what you would like to see different on the site, or an application you’d like to see on the site.  Drop me a line at rajat or from one of the methods listed here.

I heart the discussion between Mark Cuban and Avner Ronen regarding the future of television content (see boxee blog » a lively debate with mark cuban).

As far as I can tell, they both are saying similar things, with Mark’s main distinction being that the cable/telcos are smart enough to realize that the ala carte television business will continue to grow – where Avner believes that TV on a schedule is a dying concept.

I’ve thought about this myself over and over again.  Having used a DVR since 2002 on my own media center, to using both Comcast and Verizon DVRs, to using nothing and no TV, to boxee and downloaded content, to OTA HD, and back to nothing.  And one thing has rung true for me the entire time – there are times when I want something specific – and for those times I will do whatever is necessary to see it (“The Wire”, “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”, “Dexter”).  Outside of those times, I have always hated having to choose what to watch.

Now, I agree with Mark and Avner that the infrastructure is the cable companies responsibility (and where I think they should focus their energy).  I don’t care how the pipe gets fatter to my house, I want it to get fatter – and let me decide how it is split up.  I think that is the essence of Avner’s argument put another way, and I totally agree with it.  Give me enough bandwidth to have five HD streams going while “surfing” the Internet.

Once I have the bandwidth – then let the marketplace be open – let me choose if I want bundled content provided in channels or let me choose individual shows I think I’ll enjoy (anything by David Simon, btw) and let software be smart enough to keep those things coming for me.

Those are my thoughts on this, I want a fatter pipe to my house, and I want to have choices on what I watch using it.  I want more Bollywood options, more NBA and tennis options.  Just like I can’t run my microwave, dishwasher, and toaster oven on the same outlet without blowing a circuit breaker (or run all three showers at the same time and expect hot water) – I’m okay with rationing the Internet pipe between TV and Internet (and phone as well).

Personally I enjoy Boxee’s alpha product as a clever 10′ UI to arranging content on my TV.  The telcos and cable providers should learn how to design and build 10′ UI from folks like Avner’s team.

The debate between Mark and Avner is a reminder of one of the greatest achievements of the Internet – discussion between smart people that others can benefit from.  Nerds battling online – something that was akin to the Internet’s roots from the early years which, at least to me, seems to have been lost a bit in the consumer version of the Internet we spend our time on today.

In the end I want both Mark and Avner to succeed – I want Mark’s HDNet to create great content and deliver it in multiple ways – I want the cable/telcos to build world-class networks and infrastructure, partnering with Avner and his team to provide a UI and experience that is compelling and enjoyable.

Problem Description: Crappy interface for playing .avi files with .srt files for subtitles on Media Center PC.  This interface is what I predominantly use My Media Center PC for these days – simply to play movies sitting on my home network, with subtitles.  Since Windows Media Player itself can’t handle .srt files for subtitles, I am using a VLC Player plugin on Media Center to play these movies.

Proposed Solution: Install boxee on my Apple TV and have it discover my networked movies/music.

I got boxee Alpha installed on my Apple TV this morning and the little Apple TV has been reborn.  After getting onto the Alpha earlier this week I followed the instructions on the Google Code project for atvusb-creator and got a USB pen drive formatted and installed with the additional XMBC and boxee applications.  After watching “how-to video: boxee on Apple TV” I realized that the installation process wouldn’t be too tough, and put it on my list for the weekend. 

Sunday morning: I dug up an old 512Mb USB Flash drive and, after reading the Google Code project notes, got started on my Mac Book Pro.  The patchstick created I rebooted my Apple TV with the patchstick and watched the Linux boot kick up.  Then it hung.  After groaning I went to the bug list for the Google Code project and found out that SanDisk 512Mb USB Flash drives have been reported not to work.  Found another USB Flash drive (1Gb Verbatim one this time).  Went through the process again, and this time the patchstick loaded completely and installed boxee and XMBC.

First I needed to tune boxee to display correctly on my DLP television (which was painless and obvious with a great settings interface for manipulating the display properties) and then the full interface was accessible to me.  The interface is beautiful.  In no time I had it discover by shared movies on my local network and my shared music.  My .avi movie files with .srt subtitles played without a hitch, and the interface is perfect for watching movies.  Later I’ll walk my wife through it and see if it passes the wife test.

Solution Analysis: boxee is clearly in alpha, but I’m already hooked to it (crashes and all).  Hopefully once it becomes more stable I can officially retire my Media Center PC (which is on its last legs) and just use boxee for my movie / music playback.  Kudos to the boxee team and thanks for creating such a polished alpha.  I can’t wait to see what the team puts into this product next.

Though I haven’t made it all the way through my reading from 2007, I will finish it off soon enough.  In 2008 I haven’t been reading as much so there is less to write about.  The backlog of posts published today are:

1. "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" by Jim Gray
2. "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston
3. "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun
4. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini
5. "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri

It feels good to be blogging again, even if it is mostly for my own archival purposes.  Lots of pictures to upload, there are a handful of draft posts that I really want to get back to and finish off – some actual content from inside my head.  I realized recently that the reason for my lack of blogging was the lack of free offline blogging tools on Mac OS X.  This sounds strange, but I feel most compelled to write new content when I am not online.  Once I’m online there is always other stuff to do.  Introspection time is often reserved to offline time.  Now that I have a new Windows box I use everyday again (Lenovo ThinkCentre M-Series) I installed Windows Live Writer and have been using it more and more.

The look and feel of the site is totally stale, no rounded edges and fixed width are annoying me.  One of these weekends I’ll revamp the theme for the site.

Thanks to everyone for putting up with my daily Twitter posts in RSS etc – won’t have to worry about that anymore.