I thought this was true, but it’s good to see that other people agree: Dubya is the worst president in modern history.

Bush is so bad that
even the military questions his strategic thinking.

After reading about ESR abandon Fedora for Ubuntu, it occurred to me that someone needs to make a new kind of linux distro which has the optimized speed of Gentoo, but the simplicity of Ubuntu.

The few Gentoo advocates there are these days always like to go about how fast their system is because they recompile everything from scratch so its optimized. That’s great, but how long does it take them to get to that state? Hours, days, weeks? Why don’t we do something smarter like what Java does? Why don’t we recompile and optimize only the things we actually use?

Someone should build a distro that has a near touchless install process like Ubuntu. But then in the background it profiles what you are doing and the hardware you are running on. Then while idle, it will download source, recompile everything that you’re actually using with all the optimizations for your fancy hardware.

We can call it Gentubu. It’ll be like the opposite of Windows, instead of inevitably slowing down over time, your OS will actually get faster over time.

After playing some Warhammer, I had a thought about warfare in the not too distant future. As remote command and control technology advances, enemies will increasingly be engaged in information warfare. We won’t need massive battalions of infantry and tanks, rather just a few kinds of high precision strike weapons. More importantly the weakest links in the chain of command will be information leaks. The most sensitive military information is the authentication and authorization information for controlling weaponry.

The next logical step in this is that the most valuable personnel in information warfare are identity thieves. Identity verification seems to be a weak point in security schemes, so someone skilled at taking control of information systems and identities will be able hold countries for ransom. I think someone could write an interesting book about it.

I bought a copy of Warhammer 40k Dawn of War. I’m quite enjoying it, not because it’s that amazing a game, it’s better than average. But I like it a lot more because it reminds me of my favorite game ever Starcraft. Warhammer is better than Starcraft, but given how long its been since Starcraft first came out it needs to be a lot better. 3D graphics are nice, but the gameplay could use a few tweaks and some keyboard shortcuts. I just started playing so I can’t criticize too much yet.

Look over on the right, there’s a new feature. Google Reader allows me to easily share interesting articles that I’ve read via RSS. You’ll find an odd variety of computer science, general science, gaming, poker, current events, politics and pretty much anything I read.

I don’t expect you’ll find them all interesting, but you’ll get to know be by knowing what I’m reading if nothing else. I’ll also occasionally share good deals on gear that I’ve read about on slickdeals.net or techbargains.com(mostly on Dells because that’s what I like).

Features like this make me think that Google will one day rule the world by providing access to all content to all the time.

The new DVR arrived last night and thankfully it’s an identical HD Tivo unit. It was labeled as refurbished which is fine. I would’ve been a bit frightened about the new non-Tivo DirecTV DVR. They sent a complete unit with all the accessories, so the best thing to come from all of this is that we now have two remote controls. We’ll have to reprogram the Tivo, but that won’t be too bad because setting up Season Passes is easy and we probably only have 15-20 shows that we watch. Though that does seem like a lot now that I mention it.

Our HDTivo has been dying for a while. For about a year and a half it was fine. A couple months ago it started having some issues. Now it reboots a couple times and night and it’ll drop video and sound for minutes at a time. I had called DirecTV a couple month ago and they did a standard reboot and clean install. That fixed it once, but the problems came back and are a lot worse now.

So I called them up tonight and within 15 minutes I had explained the problem and they said they’d Fedex me a new one, no hassle at all. Once again DirecTV gets very high marks for customer service. The new DVR is free because I am on their warranty program. Normally I would never buy a warranty, but I had some issues with my dish last year and they said they could give me the service call and new Dish for free(a $70 value) if I signed up for the warranty for $6/mo for a year.

I’m not entirely sure if they are going to send me another HD Tivo or they are going to send a DirecTV HD DVR. I’m not too unhappy either way. The DirecTV unit will allow me to get true local HD channels, but the software still kind of sucks I hear. I’m sure it will get better, but I’ve heard some pretty bad things about it. The HD Tivo unit has is being killed off and can’t get me the local HD channels.

Yahoo Pipes is kind of an interesting tool. I’m not sure I’m that enthused about it yet, but I can see the potential. If I wanted finer control over my RSS feeds, then I could see using it, but that seems like a pretty small target market. Most users don’t even know what RSS is.

I can’t tell who exactly is the target market, is it programmers? Because reading the documentation, it sure looks like it. But do programmers want a tool like this? Yes it’s pretty cool, but I’m still not entirely sold on it. I think programmers could publish their own designed pipes and that’s worth something, but the concepts in Pipes make it seem pretty far out of reach of the average user.

Not too much going on.

Congrats to Peyton Manning and the Colts for a great season. I’ve always liked him. He’s the most professional player in the league. You never know have to worry what he’ll say on TV(although that kind of makes him boring), you never worry what he’ll do something stupid off the field.

Shutterfly had our first earnings call where we announced results from a Q4. Because of the number of calendars and greeting cards we sell in Q4, the business is very seasonal and Q4 is very important to the business. So having good results was very important. The stock looks like it’s up in after hours trading so that’s good. It’s not much above the IPO price, but it’s progress at least.