Ian began his life with the Barbarian Group as an intern in the Boston office in early 2005, but he soon proved he was useful enough to be knighted as a full-fledged Barbarian. Before joining TBG, he found himself growing up in the adorable state of Rhode Island. It was in RI that Ian created his first site (“The Whack The Pud Contest”) at the tender age of 12. Later on in life he found work as a librarian for a group of archaeologists, who apparently rivaled the Barbarians in their drinking prowess. At some point he grew a beard.
Ian’s tasks at TBG include keeping tabs on a growing company’s ever-evolving server infrastructure, as well as helping care of the day-to-day IT problems that make some Barbarians yell technologically insensitive epithets at their computers. He’s also been known to write a few lines of code here and there. Ian has 1.5 degrees – an AS in Computer Science from Johnson & Wales and a BA in New Media from Emerson College. Aside from patience and street walkin’, he has skills in the realms of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and many other things not really worth mentioning here.
In 2007, Ian gave up the 2-car trolleys of Brookline in favor of the 8-car trains of Brooklyn and joined the ranks of the New York office. Rumors abound as to the reason for the move; Ian claims he was drawn to the vibrant cultural scene and world-class public transportation system, but his bosses seem to think it was because he “met a girl or something”.
Slashdot posted a story this morning about Apple’s ever-so-subtle recommendation that its customers install anti-virus software on their Macs—the obvious irony being that Apple has openly mocked its competitors in the past for their susceptibility to viruses (see above). Of course, it has long been widely accepted that the Mac OS (and really, just about everything the software world) is far from invincible. So why is this news? Because Apple is contradicting itself?
Hardly. While the ad above may be a little misleading, it only implies that the overwhelming majority of viruses in the wild simply don’t affect Macs, which is still mostly true.* By recommending virus protection, Apple is simply covering their bases, and it’s smart of them to do so. But it’s unlikely that we’ll see a Mac-targeted virus at the top of the threat list any time soon, nor will we see any anti-virus apps on the front page of Apple’s software store. Until that day comes, the debate about the usefulness of Mac anti-virus software will continue, tech note or no tech note.
Update: In response to all the hub-bub, Apple retracted their anti-virus recommenations on the 3rd and issued a rather headstrong statement that their products really are invincible. And thus, the debate continues!
*At least one notable exception being the macro viruses that prey on legacy versions of Microsoft Office in both Windows and Mac, with which The Barbarian Group has had plenty of first-hand experience in the past. Funny that it was Microsoft software that brought us our first virus. :)
Speaking of transparency: Being the nerd that I am, I was fascinated by Netflix’s recent blog post about the nitty-gritty of the encoding process for their “Watch Instantly” streaming service. Of particular interest to me as a Mac user was the amount of effort they’ve had to put into switching to Silverlight—basically re-encoding every item in their library, much like YouTube did when they began supporting RTSP streaming on mobile devices. Of course, this transition also opens the door for the new Xbox streaming service, so maybe I shouldn’t feel so special, but it’s still quite a feat.
I’ve been trying out Netflix’s new Silverlight player at home and I’ve been very pleased with the results so far. The automatic bandwidth adjustment isn’t entirely seamless on my slow home connection, but I have to say that the frustration of the occasional “buffering” progress bar is far outweighed by the joy of being able to watch old History Channel documentaries and episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (ad-free!) on my Mac Mini at home. That plus terrestrial high-def TV makes it that much easier not to be a cable subscriber. Yay!
(By the way, in case you haven’t heard: If you’re a Netflix member who’s interested in joining the Silverlight beta program, you can opt in here.)
How are you doing? I just wanted to congratulate you on not imploding into a giant black hole when the Large Hadron Collider was powered on last night! I’m sure you are as relieved as we are. Remind me to buy you a drink next time we are at the bar.
Oh, and thanks for all the air and water. It really does make all the difference.
Your pal,
Ian
P.S. – Maybe we can get some real snow this winter?
on August 29, 2008 at 06:00 PM
filed under: Fashion and New York
Recent New York transplant Hams and I kept Formal Friday alive today in the New York office, which was rather empty due to the impending holiday weekend.
Flickr groups are normally nothing to get too excited about (with one possible exception), but this is my first one, and I’m rather proud of the premise (and surprised that it didn’t already exist).
It’s called “Won’t Budge”, and it features immovable objects and the people who attempt to move them. So far there aren’t many contributions, but I know it’s a popular theme in the world of amateur photography, so I’m trying to get the word out about it. Feel free to contribute something if you have it. Below is a random sampling of what we’ve got so far.
on August 04, 2008 at 11:55 AM
filed under: New York
Some friends and I rode our bikes down to Coney Island on Sunday to bask in the sunshine and ogle the weirdos. I bought a Flip Ultra just for the occasion. It was totally worth it. See for yourself:
, but it had been almost 8 years since I’d left the country, so for me it was kind of a big deal. I even had to renew my passport.
Anyway, I took a lot of pictures (just over 1600), which, again, isn’t really that special, especially when you consider that more than 3 times that number of pictures gets uploaded to Flickr every minute, but I actually plan on going through my pictures and publishing the ones I like, so, again, it’s kind of a big deal, but this time in a rather cumbersome way rather than a really exciting way.
Though I guess it is still pretty exciting, being able to sort through all the pictures I took while I was tooling around the Bavarian countryside and relive all the memories, blah blah etc etc.
But it’s gonna take a while to go through over 1600 pictures and evaluate each one on its nostalgic and/or artistic merit, so in the meantime I decided to just stitch ‘em all together into one big index print using Ruby and ImageMagick and plop that onto the Internet instead:
I think it makes for an interesting study of how I go about taking pictures. Plus it’s the only way you’ll get to see just how many drunken pictures I took out the back window of the taxi-wagon I was lying in the trunk of after my great-uncle’s birthday party. Yeah.
