Evan Primakow Online

If you are privy to the major experiments going on within the scientific community, or if you’ve listened to any of the main stream media over the last few days, you’re probably aware that today was the day that the Large Hadron Collider was turned on. This is the largest, most powerful, and most energy consuming particle accelerator ever. So powerful, in fact, that conspiracy theorists everywhere and even some scientists were convinced that when it would be turned on, tons of microscopic black holes would be created, expand, and consume the universe as we know it. Well, guess what nut jobs: We’re still here. It was powered up this morning and is so far working better than expected without any issues. It will likely take several months before the scientists operating it can really get it up to its full potential, so I suppose the universe could still end when they do that, but I’m feeling confident that we’ll be just fine.

Growing up, I always had macs. From my first MacSE sporting the lightning-fast 8mhz 68000 processor to college when I had a Power Mac running a 200mhz PowerPC 603e processor, I was always a Mac person. Even after that last Power Mac died, when I was exclusively running PCs, I still considered myself a Mac addict while I secretly longed for the day that I would once again have a nice shiny new Mac. Well, several months ago I got a nice new iMac and I love it. Although not new to Mac OS X, I had never owned a computer that ran it, so its taken me a while to feel out what software I like and I have some recommendations. So, without further ado, here’s my top 5 list of freeware applications every Mac user should have:

1. Adium
   This is easily the absolute best chat client for Mac OS X. I’m way more fond of it than I was Trillian on my XP machines and I swore by Trillian. Adium supprts just about every chat platform ever right out of the “box”, with the exception of IRC and video chat (supposedly coming soon). I’m pretty sure some of the platforms it supports went extinct along with the dinosaurs, but it still would work with Adium. The dock notifications are awesome, it integrates extremely well with Growl, and the styling, sounds, icon, and just about anything else are extremely customizable, which is fun. Sure, Mac OS X comes with iChat, but this just embarrasses it.
2. ClamXav
   Sure, there aren’t many viruses out there for the Mac, but you can never be too safe. ClamAV is an open source anti-virus solution for *nix-based operating systems. ClamXav is the Mac OS X front end for it. Its easy to install, easy to configure, works well, and is well supported. What more can you ask for in virus protection?
3. VLC
   I was debating whether or not to list this, because it is available on just about any operating system, but its just too good pass up. It’s a video player that can be both extremely basic to use and extremely advanced to configure, depending on your needs. It plays just about anything and that’s what makes it great.
4. Transmission
   Hands-down the best torrent client for Mac OS X. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s easy to configure. If that’s not enough, it also has an extremely small footprint. I’ve tried at least a dozen different torrent clients over multiple platforms over the last few years and this is certainly my favorite thus far, no matter what the operating system.
5. MagiCal
   This innocent little application does two incredible things that should by all means just be built in to the next version of Mac OS X. It displays a small icon with the month and date next to the clock on the menu bar and when clicked, it displays a small calendar that even allows you to flip through the months. Why this is not just a part of the OS is beyond me, but thankfully MagiCal is available to help.

Honorable Mentions: Firefox, Thunderbird, Stuffit Expander, and Fetch.

All of the buzz on the Internet today is zeroing in on a new potential Google-killer called Cuil. Sure, there have been plenty legitimate attempts to dethrone the search king in the past, but none of the start-ups have been run by Google alumni. I’ve had a chance to play around with it and see what it is offering, so here’s the breakdown.

The Good

• It looks great. The main page of the site is extremely simple, just like it’s big brother Google, but its dark design really helps it stand out in a crowd of other wannabe Google competitors.
• Right on the front page they are brutally honest about the number of sites that they currently have indexed (121,617,892,992 at the time of this post), which is refreshing to see.
• Finally, someone rethought how search results are displayed. No more generic-looking list of websites from one to infinity. Pages are listed in columns almost looking like a news paper or magazine. You can adjust it to display 2 or 3 columns and next to many of the listings and image related to the site appears along side the description of the site.
• Search suggestions are in-place to help you find what you’re looking for, but I haven’t yet noticed much difference between what Cuil offers and Google’s parallel feature.
• Unlike the Big Brother search engines we’re all used to, Cuil supposedly tracks absolutely none of what you do. This is great to hear for those that love their Internet anonymity.

The Bad

• Where are the key features that keep me coming back to Google? If they want to become my primary search engine, they’re going to have to integrate image and product search features.
• I mentioned earlier that along side most of the search results appears what is supposed to be a relevant image. Problem is, most of the images are in no way relevant or even taken from the site listed.
• Allow more columns! I really like how the search is displayed, but for those of us with a wide screen and high resolution, three columns still leaves a huge chunk of white on the right hand side of the screen when I’m searching. I can probably fit 4-5 columns of search results on my 20″ iMac.
• Speed. This one’s a throw-away complaint. It’s a bit sluggish thus far, but it’s also presumably getting completely pounded with traffic, so that’s to be expected. To be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed, so I guess this belongs somewhere inbetween the good and the bad. We’ll see how they hold up once the initial rush dies down.

The Ugly

• The algorithm needs desperately to be tweaked. Earlier today if I did a search for “Primakow” a few pages of this site would show up, but not the main page, whereas a search for “Evan Primakow” yielded no results. Already a few hours later “Evan Primakow” brings up a few pages of this site, but mostly random posts and not the main page.

Ultimately, it has a ton of potential. In my opinion the only thing really holding it back is the algorithm. New features will presumably be added and I’m sure even now they’re tweaking the algorithm as traffic flows through. This is the first new search engine in a very long time that really has the potential to compete with the big boys - and I hope it does just that. The industry needs a fresh look and fresh ideas, so hopefully Cuil can live up to the Internet’s expectations.

That’s right, the long awaited Firefox 3, which I have previously encouraged you to download and install, comes out tomorrow. I’ll be sure to write up a formal review of it once I’ve really had the chance to use it. Can’t wait to play around with the new interface, new features, and enjoy the performance increases.

If you haven’t heard yet, the awesome folks over at Mozilla are attempting to set a Guinness world record for the number of software downloads in a single day. That day being the release of the highly anticipated Firefox 3.0. The absolute only thing you have to do is download Firefox 3.0 on the day of its release. The official release date has not yet been announced, but it will be soon. To find out more or get on the “Download Day” mailing list, swing by Spread Firefox and sign up!

If you don’t know anything about SEO, you can probably just skip this post because you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about. For those that do know a little something about SEO, you should already know the difference between nofollow links and dofollow links. The latter of those two is obviously the preferred type of backlink to help with your SERPs and PageRank. Wordpress, by default, makes commentors’ links nofollow. That, however, is long longer the case here. I have changed it so your name in comments is now dofollow. Let the link juice flow!

I decided that I needed to geek out a bit this weekend and called Time Warner Cable to upgrade our standard 7 Mbps (512 Mbps upload) cable Internet access to Road Runner Turbo, which is instead capped at 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Sure, there’s plenty of stuff that this will have absolutely no impact on, but I noticed an immediate difference in online gaming as well as certain mainstream websites which I frequent. Uploading to the ftp servers for the websites I run has also doubled in speed, which is great. On top of those reasons there is, of course, always the geek bragging rights associated with having the fastest available Internet access available in Wisconsin and among the fastest in the country.

At first it was all over the news that some company in Miami named “Psystar” is selling Mac clones. Compatible PC hardware hacked to run Mac OS X. The term Hackintosh made its way in to mainstream media for the first time since the mid-90s when Mac clones were actually licensed. The Mac community has been in an uproar wondering about legal actions, EULAs, and all sorts of other boring things. Then, looking past the initial buzz, The Guardian’s Charles Arthur dug a little deeper and discovers that the company itself may just be a fraud. No one seems to be talking, there’s no actual support or sales team, they aren’t responding to emails, they company never seemed to exist prior to last week (even though they domain name has been around since 2000), and best of all, the address that was supplied on their website up until a day or so ago showed a generic suburban house in Miami.

The only name that has ever even been given to the media is Robert. No last name given, just Robert. No one really knows who “Robert” is, but with the new information of how new and unestablished the company is, he’s probably the owner and only employee. Well, I’ve got a last name for you. It you dig a little bit on Archive.org, you’ll see that the snapshot of the site that was taken in September, 2001 shows a different domain name: razorfx.com. The site is currently just a placeholder (although it shares a favicon with psystar.com and is hosted on the same host). So visiting razorfx.com didn’t help in it’s current state, but what if you use the Wayback Machine again and see how razorfx.com looked in November, 2002. Now we’re getting somewhere! Razofx.com was the online portfolio of Robert Pedraza.

Wanna make a bet as to if that’s the same Robert running things at Psystar?

Firefox is easily the best web browser available today, but part of what makes it great is the expandability that it offers its users in the form of add-on extensions. So, without further ado, here are some of my favorite add-ons in no particular order.

• Adblock Plus - I’ve not no issues with a few random text or graphical ads on the websites I visit, but the recent trend of flashing, page-covering, music playing and over all annoying ads is getting out of control. In comes Adblock Plus. Install it and you will rarely ever see another ad as long as you surf the web.
• Forecastfox - How’s the weather outside? Install this and you’ll always know. It’s extremely customizable: You can change where in the browser it appears, what information it tells you, how many days ahead it’ll list, and of course, which city to report the weather on. You can even easily pull up a radar to see the weather coming your way.
• StumbleUpon - Quite possibly the absolute best time waster ever invented. You create and account, choose what categories you like, and click the stumble button that will appear on Firefox. Every time you click that little “SU” button, a random new website will load up. Like the site? Click the thumbs up and you’ll see more like it. Don’t like it? Click the thumbs down. Just like prescription drug commercials, side effects include insomnia and dry eyes.
• Flagfox - It’s extremely simple and straightforward: A little icon will display for every site you visit showing you the flag of the country in which the site is hosted. If you right click the flag icon, it’ll give you a few more options including pulling up the wikipedia article on that country, copying the site’s ip address, and more.
• FireFTP - It’s not the most advanced FTP client ever, but for quick FTP uploads or downloads it has a nice clean interface, is easy to use, and can bookmark the sites you access so you don’t have to type in the account info each time.

As you probably know if you’ve listened to, watched, or read any kind of respectable news source in the last day or so, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cold War Space Race. Sputnik was launched in to orbit and began a race between the US and the former USSR to conquer the real final frontier. Within 12 years of the USSR launching a little basket ball sized ball of metal in to orbit for first time ever, the US landed a manned mission on the moon. The innovation in orbital missions and beyond during that time was truly amazing, but it seems to have slowed down since then. At the pace things were moving, one would have expected manned space stations on the moon by now, not a barely manned orbiting station that is falling apart faster than it is being built. The general consensus as to why space exploration has slowed down is that the fall of the USSR got rid of the competition that kept it going.

Here’s my proposal: We need a new space race. This time, however, the competition is coming from more than just one country. China is developing space technology, Russia is still in space, several other countries have put men in to space, and more importantly in today’s capitalist world, companies are starting to develop that are interested in the prospect of space tourism and mining. Why, then, is the US acting as if there is no longer any motivation to compete in this newfound space race? We should be leading the pack, or, even better, cooperating even more than we might now with other countries and companies to take space exploration to the next level. With the way technology advanced in the 20th century and has continued to do so thus far in the 21st century, I see no reason that I shouldn’t be able to see a moon based and a manned mission to mars - or beyond - by the end of my life. To that end, my future grandchildren should be colonizing the moon and mars.

I see no reason that anything I just said is unreasonable, we just need someone in power to give NASA the one thing they really need to begin truly innovating again: Money. Sadly, however, our current government prefers to endlessly pump cash into a quagmire, while lining its own pockets and those of its friends with taxpayer’s dollars.