Apr 03 2012

T&L Episode 9: OwnCloud + WebDAV

I’ve been on the hunt for a Dropbox killer application. I never really liked having my data stored in the “cloud,” but Dropbox was so incredibly convenient it was hard to see a way out. Over the past few months, I’ve heard a lot of interesting things about OwnCloud. It certainly seemed like the way forward: A place where I could keep all of my data on my own machines and make sure it wasn’t somebody else’s silver lining. But to be honest, OwnCloud didn’t seem that promising until I discovered it’s WebDAV abilities. When you put OwnCloud and WebDAV together, you get awesomeness. That is what this episode of the QSK Netcast is all about.

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Mar 28 2012

T&L Episode 8: Show Notes

Here is the link to the video of this talk from SELF 2011. The video is also embedded from YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmTdQco9VYg

Mar 28 2012

T&L Episode 8: The Zen of FreeNAS

This episode is a recording of my talk from SELF 2011. I discuss the BSD-based FreeNAS server, focusing on version 7, from install to functionality. I believe there is a place in every home for a FreeNAS server. Have a listen to this episode to see what it can do for you.

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Mar 21 2012

Less SOAP

I’ve recently had the displeasure of being introduced to SOAP. If you don’t know what it is, don’t go to find out. The germophobes in the world have turned me off to the necessity of hand washing over time. The introduction of hand sanitizer in every square inch of human existence makes me wonder how long it’s going to be before the superbug comes to wipe us all out. It’s understood that cleanliness can be a virtue, but there’s a point at which it does more harm than good. As a species, we’re making ourselves more susceptible every day to health concerns we could easily have dealt with not so many years ago.

Along those same lines is SOAP. It’s a flexible architecture for transferring data between applications. The S in SOAP stands for simple. On the flexible front, I have to agree. On the simple front, nothing could be further from the truth. The Wikipedia page on SOAP says that its XML-ness promotes human readability. If you then read the following example code snippet, I challenge you to consider it simple. Because SOAP is flexible, it has advantages. It can be used across many transports (HTTP, SMTP, etc). It’s based on a standard data structure: XML. But its aggressive use of namespaces, obfuscated schemas and the necessity of programming language SOAP-based object classes just to deal with the data structure of SOAP make it a nightmare to understand and overly slow in practice.

I suspect the problem with SOAP lies squarely in my own brain. Clearly I am an not intelligent enough to ferret out the reasons why such a method of data collaboration was created when much simpler and potentially transport agnostic methods already exist, like say the HTTP GET using, let’s say, PLAIN TEXT. My hope is that this post will encourage the SOAP advocates to come out of the woodwork and explain to me why it’s so much better than other things which accomplish the same tasks. I’ll let everyone know when my mind has been changed by waving my 99.9% germ-free hands in the air.

Dec 15 2011

Super 8 (2011)

Super 8 (2011){rating}

Before I saw Super 8, I heard many comments that it was just a rehash of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. After seeing the movie, I can see where that criticism fits. I actually found the movie to be a mash-up of E.T., Cloverfield and Stand By Me, containing only the worst parts of each. So what went wrong?

To say that this movie is a bit childish is an understatement, and that really has nothing to do with the children who are actors in it. Their performances actually seem quite good compared to the adults. Admittedly, I was sucked into the plot towards the beginning. The characters seemed engaging enough and the premise was humorous and interesting, punctured with a hint of dark and forboding. So far, so good. The train wreck begins with, aptly, the train wreck. First of all, it’s simply over the top. I’ve seen film accounts of actual train wrecks, and I’ve witnessed train wrecks in person. The resemblance of the train wreck in Super 8 to any real one is nonexistant. If Hollywood hasn’t figured it out yet, we know they can do special effects and incredible things with CGI. The real talent is in knowing when to use them.

From there, the story devolves from something interesting into a mindless action film. All the usual suspects show up, mostly badly acted. The dialog is awash in action-hero one liners. The story goes away and is replaced by a poorly blended melange of weak tension, Cheech & Chong humor, bad acting and special effects. The cherry on top of this sundae of disinterest is a very tart and overbearing nugget of preachiness and moral outrage at the human race. It seems J. J. Abrams is only outdone by James Cameron when it comes to distate for our innately human humanity.

After all that, I sat through the credits, too. As they scrolled by and the movie after the movie began, I honestly started to wonder if the whole point of Super 8 was to allow the director to go back to making a Junior High zombie film. With a $50 million budget. Unless you downloaded this movie for free or are watching it at a friend’s house, skip it.