It took some searching around, but it seems you can re-download the installer from the app store. What you do is the following:

1. Open the App Store
2. Click on “Purchases”
3. Now Option+Click on “Purchases” again

The grayed out “Installed” button should change back to “Install” you can then click it and re-download Lion to your hard drive. After that you can cancel the install and follow one of the online guides to creating a bootable USB drive.

Hope this helps.

WordPress 3.2 is now working on my server thanks to the techs running the server, it seems there was a problem with their version of APC (Alternative PHP Cache) and WordPress 3.2. Hopefully that will all get sorted out later, but for now they disabled it so I can get WP 3.2 up and running for now.

Hopefully when I get everything back up and running I will actually start to post some useful stuff again (or for the first time even).

Today I got the latest update to Flash automatically installed. After reading the changelog I was hopeful that Adobe had finally started to address some of the glaring performance problems of their Flash platform. They touted increased HD video performance and finally allowed Flash video to stay full-screened when on multiple monitors. But within five minutes of use I saw again why I have slowly started to hate Flash.

The first thing I did was start watching live.twit.tv, made the video full screen and opened up a new browser window as I always do. Then I started playing Zuma Blitz and the game was unplayable slowing to one or two frames per second. So much for increased performance of video.

My system has processing power to spare to handle simple things like full screen video and simple games. It is an over-clocked Core i7 running at 2.9Ghz with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon HD5750. But to be honest any modern system can handle this sort of work. A Pentium 4 system from a few years ago is plenty for video playback and some multi-tasking.

For me though the biggest indicator that Flash is the problem is that I can watch h.264, Windows Media Player, WebM or even Silverlight Video at 1080p full screen and do pretty much whatever I want on the other screen at the same time. Where as Flash can not even handle a low definition 480p stream from live.twit.tv.

Back to the original point though is that I actually un-installed Flash from my Android device two days after I installed it. It ran like a dog on my phone just like it does on my desktop. Lowered battery life and really does not provide any additional functionality that can not be reproduced in a better way using other technologies.

When companies are touting their Flash support so heavily in their advertising eventually it will start to hurt them. What does Flash provide Android that gives it an advantage over Apples iOS? Video? no, games? no, interactive apps? no. All it seems to do is fracture the Android platform a little more and lowers performance of the devices.

Most end users do not care about Flash or Java or Objective-C, all they will notice is when their Phone seems slow, and when it dies after a few hours of use. Pushing Flash so heavily as a main feature on all these new Android devices will start to hurt Android as users start to realize that Apple products run faster and have longer battery life even when they are running similar hardware.

What struck me the most today though was the realization that I really can not un-install Flash from my system without crippling a lot of my internet experience. I recently installed a Flash blocker plug-in for Chrome and it really is amazing to me that nearly every site I visit has several flash elements on the page. For simple things like file up-loaders, animations but mostly Ads.

In short I think that Apple’s stance against Flash has really helped open up the web, which is a very strange thing to say about Apple. But just image in Apple had supported Flash or even allowed it on their platform from day one. Would h.264 or even WebM video streaming be developed so heavily to the point where they are now maturing to hopefully become the norm. I think h.264 and WebM would still exist but would not be as important as they are turning out to be now.

The day when I have the choice to remove Flash from my computer and still view video on the web and not cripple the interface on many sites I visit, will be a day I am a happier man.

After eliminating the router as the problem by connecting with two other laptops and my Android phone I decided the problem was Windows Vista. DD-WRT allows you to create virtual wireless devices so I created a Vista only network with no encryption.

Tried to connect and Vista worked fine, identified the network in seconds and asked me to identify the computers location as normal. So I disconnected trued WEP, same thing. Disconnected again and tried WPA worked fine. Then I tried WPA2 and it hung up on “Identifying Network…”

So I dialed it back to just WPA which is decent security but not great, and for some reason that makes the Vista machine happy. I searched all over the net for this problem for ages and never saw this “solution,” if you can calling having to lower your security to accommodate a shitty OS a solution.

In short it seems Vista can not connect properly to WPA2 networks, and if you use WPA you should be ok. Amazing how bad this is, and it galls me to think I have to buy Windows 7 to fix this properly. I think I might just buy them a iMac and get it over with.

So I signed up for Hulu Plus in under five minutes and got it running on the Roku. But that is where the frustration started. First I tried to find the show and ran into the slightly clunky interface, yes it looks slick but I go into browse TV and I get a basic A-Z listing of every show they have. So I went to K and could not find it. So I searched using the D-Pad to enter in the type which I have always thought is one of the worse user interface components I have seen. But the UI is not the biggest issue.

Huge Problem #1: Content Restrictions

Kitchen Nightmares was not on Hulu Plus for TV! So I signed up for a premium service and a pretty standard show is only available to watch on my computer. Obviously they must be a licensing restriction with FOX or the distributor of the show, and Hulu caved and said ok we will not show this.

The fact that Hulu seems to have cable and content executives all over the place with their fingers in the pie makes me nervous for the future of the product. The networks are going to make Hulu so convoluted that noone will care about it. There should be two services:

• Hulu Free: Web only all the same content as plus, but only the latest episodes and not high def. They will still make their money from the ads.
• Hulu Plus: Web and TV plus complete archives of most shows and in high def.

Now it would seem that Hulu is already fractured into three types of content, Hulu Free, Hulu Plus, and Hulu Web Only no TV. The customer should no be burdened with tracking what shows they can and can not watch and where.

Huge Problem #2: Quality

So I was pissed off about Kitchen Nightmares, but I thought I would try something else they watch. My mother wanted to watch the latest Supper Nanny, so ok I pulled that up and started playing. The damn thing pops up with the huge black bars on both sides of the screen just like ten years ago when HDTV just came out. I am not used to seeing that crap from any modern show, and there is no reason why a show being produced today should ever be shown in 4:3 aspect ratio.

For stuff like reality tv I do not care if it’s high def or not, but there is no reason for the picture not to fill the screen.

Huge Problem #3: Ads

The Ads on Hulu are starting to get worse all the time. First there were just a few ads now and again. Now it seems that even short clips have pre-roll ads, and I have started to notice commercial breaks now have multiple ads. Before it was just single ads for approximately 30 seconds.

Currently the ads are still not a deal breaker, but the rate that Hulu is adding new spots to their shows is a trend I personally do not like to see.

Hulu’s a No Go

After just a few hours of playing with Hulu Plus I am already ready to cancel it again before they try and bill me after the free 1-week trial. It really is a shame because from what I hear from lots of tech news sources Hulu is our best chance at getting new content on the web in a timely manner. Now we will just have to hope that Netflix can hold out and not allow the current TV monopolies to ruin the future of web based TV.

Then today just by browsing Google images I went to a site to downloading a picture of a women knitting (long story watch twit.tv/nsfw59). Immediately the browser window flashed and I got a fake pop-up saying my system was being cleaned. I ran my Virus scanned and low and behold there were several virus all in the Sun JVM directories and JVM temp files.

After cleaning the virus I started planning my next clean install, which is well over due already because Windows 7 is making me lazy with Windows maintenance stuff. The first thing I thought off is why do I even need a JVM anymore? What uses it? The only must have app that I every used was Open Office because I was too cheap to buy Microsoft Office. Now I use Google Docs for everything. So the only thing that Java is good for is the few random web games that may use Java and those I can live without.

So I keep this buggy, security sieve, POS program running in the background all the time just on the off chance that I may find a web game good enough to risk playing it, or find a reason why I need Open Office more than Google Docs.

As of now Java is off of my system, and I feel much better already. I can not think of any application that will compel me to re-install it. I just can not believe I have left it in my system tray for so long eating resources and leaving me open to all kinds of security holes.

When they were installing it I did not think there would be a problem, I figured I would just plug my own router in when they left and be able to do whatever I wanted. For some reason, that eludes me, they ran a COAX cable from the FIOS box outside to the router in the house. So for me to throw out the Verizon router I either have to call Verizon out again, suffer them running dirt all through the house and probably paying a fee, or figure something else out.

Well it turns out that it just adding a new router was not nearly as hard as I though it would be. You can nearly just plug it in and go.

Basically all I did was make two networks a 192.168.1.0 and 192.168.0.0 network. 192.168.1.0 is my old network running on the Verizon router, and 192.168.0.0 is my new network. Nearly everything on my Verizon router stays the same, and I still use it for all the Verizon equipment to connect to, except that I setup a DMZ for the new router.

Basic Map of my nework.

So my new router has the 192.168.1.2 address on my old network and is in it’s own DMZ so hopefully the Verizon router leaves all the packets going there alone. Then it has the 192.168.0.1 address on my new network.

Then all I had to do was physically plug my computers into the new router, and point any wireless devices to the new router and they all used the new DHCP server and acted as normal. The fact that the FiOS devices are on the old network is of no concern to me, because I am not trying to run any media manager software to talk with them directly, they just need internet access to get the channel guides.

With the new router in place I am have already noticed that several glitches in my network are gone, like computer not being able to see my home server or the networked printer attached to it. Also it opens up a lot more power user options like configuring a VPN etc.

This was a very quick description of what I did just to let you know that it is possible to do this. I am not sure if there are any side effects I will run into later, but I will post about them if I come across any.

Memorial Wallpaper – 1920×1200


Memorial Wallpaper – 1680×1050

Memorial Wallpaper – 1280×800

Anti-virus
This section of the review will be very short, because as far as I know there are no virus for Android phones in the Market Place right now. So all you see is the message saying the downloaded app is being scanned then a message saying that it passed the scan. This gives you some piece of mind, but it’s very hard to say if it is actually doing anything to protect your phone.

Backup
Backup is another feature that I personally am not concerned about. What exactly do you need to be backed up? Your contacts are automatically synced with your Google account, and nearly every app is cloud based. Only photos have the chance to be lost on my phone if it dies, and that can easily be fixed with regular syncing to my computer or use of an online service like Picassa Web or Flickr.

I can see other use cases where users might use their phone more as a primary device for storing all their e-mail, photos and maybe even PDF documents etc. But personally I think we are much better served by using cloud services on a phone than trying to store anything meaningful on it.

Missing Device
At the time of this post Remote Wipe was not supported on the Android version, which was the main feature I wanted in the first place. So I just played with the missing device locator. The locator feature has two parts the really lost phone locator, and the slightly lost phone locator.

The really lost phone locator is when you think your phone is not at your location at all. Maybe it was stolen or you left it somewhere. But this feature allows you to turn on GPS remotely and use a web client to show you the current location of your phone. If the phone is not turned on it will keep trying to locate it and if it is eventually turned on the service will notify you via e-mail with it’s location. This feature will hopefully never be needed but it you did need it it could be a life saver.

The slightly lost phone locator just lets you login to the website and make your phone start screeching at max volume for 2 mins until you find it. So useful if you know it’s in your general location but you just can’t find it.

The Problem
The big problem I have with this app is the resources it seems to take up. I have a now relatively old original Droid phone but it runs everything else just fine and is snappy doing it. But after installing Lookout Mobile Security I noticed significant performance issues. Mainly my phone would take several seconds to show the main screens when coming out of sleep. This is very annoying when you are trying to make a call or look something up.

The first thing I tried was disabling the the anti-virus and backup, but that had little effect. I then removed the app and my phone is running well again.

BEGIN UPDATE 12-10-2010
I have been noticing more and more performance issues with my Droid starting around the time I wrote this review. This morning I got the OTA update to 2.2.1 and all the performance problems went away. So I re-installed Lookout to give it another try and I have not noticed any performance hit this time around. It would seem that my phone may have been having some issues which the latest firmware update seems to have fixed.

Seeing as my main concern with this app was the performance, I now have to change my overall verdict to download it now. I still disable the virus scan because I do not download many apps and only from sources I know are reputable. But the backup and lost phone services are great.
END UPDATE 12-10-2010

Overall
The Missing Device features are good, but the performance hit of having the whole suite installed is too much to justify having this installed. If they split the suite up and offered just Remote Wipe and the other Missing Device features without the large performance hit this would be a must have app for me.

As the app stands right now it is off of my phone and I am back to just limiting my apps to well know apps. None of these ringtone, wallpaper or other garbage apps that hackers like to piggy back malicious code onto.

First both of these books are very good, and really open your eyes to what HTML5 and CSS3 are all about. They also make any of your older designed code look a little meek in comparison. For me HTML5 was more exciting just because I had not read much about it at all and was quite surprised by some of the cool new technologies in there.

The new semantic tags are very cool like article, header, and footer really make a huge difference in the look of your markup and improve it immensely.

Needless to say I am looking into redoing the design using some of the HTML5 and CSS3 tags and so far it’s pretty exciting.