For the hardware side of things, Other World Computing has a variety of Blu-ray solutions for all Macs, as well as instructional videos on how to upgrade your Mac Pro with a new Blu-ray burner. Once you’ve got that part taken care of, you’ll need special software to make use of your new drive.

Burn High Definition Blu-ray Content

With more cameras supporting HD video, the desire to burn that content on a format that supports HD playback is increasingly important. Toast Titanium has had the ability to burn to Blu-ray discs since Toast 7.  Version 10 supports Blu-ray through a $20 plugin.  It works especially well with high-def videos created on your iPhone, Flip or other HD video cameras.  Just drag and drop your raw video files into a new Blu-ray video project and click the big red burn button. Be warned, the process can take quite some time to complete depending on your source format. If you opt to purchase Toast with your Blu-ray burner from OWC, you may want to check out its step-by-step account of how to burn your high-def video.  Toast developer Roxio also has a video tutorial of the process on its site.

Rip Blu-ray Content to Your Hard Drive

When it comes to getting the raw content of a Blu-ray disc onto your hard drive, Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper is about as good as it gets. Using the “Full Disc Copy” feature, you can preserve the Blu-ray’s original file structure.  The process is straightforward. Insert the Blu-ray disc, click on the “Full Disc Copy” button, and select a folder to copy to.  While Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper also supports conversion to popular device formats, I find that getting the raw Blu-ray files onto my hard drive, then using another tool like Handbrake to convert the file to the format I want is easier. Using the latest release of Handbrake which can now read Blu-ray file structures, and has an updated template that supports the latest Apple TV yields noticeably better results. Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper is on sale at the company’s site through Jan. 10, 2011 if you choose this option.

Play Blu-ray Movies on Your Mac

This is where it all starts to fall apart. Direct playback of Blu-ray content from the disc directly to a player is the real forbidden fruit. Leaving aside that Steve Jobs has changed Apple’s status regarding Blu-ray support from “Bag of Hurt” to “Mafia,” one would think that an independent developer would have stepped up sometime in the last two years to fill the gap.

You can work around this limitation by streaming a movie from a Blu-ray disc using MakeMKV and  then open the networked stream in VLC.  This trick may come in handy if you want to watch a Blu-ray movie on your MacBook Air using your Blu-ray drive in your Mac Pro.  The interesting part is that VLC can play the raw MPEG-2 Transport Stream files (.m2ts extension) after they have been ripped to the hard drive as outlined above, but can’t find the files on the disc itself.

Actually watching Blu-ray movies is my last priority when using the format on my Mac. Backing up or archiving content, or transferring my digital memories into a format I can easily share with friends and relatives are much more relevant. If I want to watch a movie, I’ll use Netflix or iTunes, which is probably why Blu-ray never officially made it to the Mac to begin with.

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When you get a spam message, don’t open it, but don’t trash it right away. You should first report the message as spam to your provider. Here’s how Gmail and Google Apps users can report spam. Other mail systems have similar procedures.

• If you’re using Gmail’s web interface, check the box to the left of the sender’s name, then click “Report spam.” The mobile web interface has a similar option.
• If you check mail using IMAP and a mail client like Outlook or Apple Mail, you can report spam by moving messages to the folder called [Gmail]Spam.
• If you use the Gmail app for Android, check the box to the left of the subject line, then click the Menu key and select Report Spam.

How do you keep the spam level down in your inbox?

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The update to iOS 4.2 that rolled out last Monday went pretty smoothly, but there were many cases of people who updated to 4.2, then seemingly lost all of their music. I didn’t have this bug on my iPad, but I wasn’t so fortunate with my second-generation iPod touch. Luckily, the fix isn’t difficult.

In reality, your music hasn’t been deleted off the device; iOS has just forgotten it’s there. Here’s how to remind it:

1. Connect your device to your Mac or PC. (If your device is set to automatically sync when connected, you can cancel it.)
2. In iTunes, click arrow next to your device in the source menu on the left-hand sidebar, and go to “Music”.
3. Play any song.
4. Sync your device with iTunes.

That should do the trick. It worked for me as well as other TAB staff affected by the bug. When you fire up your music app, you should see your music there again. If those steps didn’t work for some reason, let us know in the comments.

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Math 101: The Basics

1. As with citation management, you access the math tools under the Document Elements tab on the ribbon.
   
2. Clicking the pi symbol brings you to a ribbon where you can either select from a commonly-used equation or build one of your own.
   
3. Let’s say we want to solve x²+5x+6=0 using the Quadratic Formula. For those unfamiliar with the formula, in this case a=1, b=5, c=6. Choose Quadratic Formula from the pull-down and then enter in the correct values.
   
4. Working through the first part is just a copy, paste and change of the previous equation.
   
5. While we could keep cutting and pasting, this is a good time to demonstrate adding your own equations. Lets do the fractions by hand. The final result will look like this:
   
6. Choose fraction from the ribbon and click on the first option.
   
7. Enter -5 into the numerator. To get the +/- symbol, use the Math Symbols pane in the ribbon:
   
8. For the radical, choose Radical from the ribbon:
   
9. I just cut, pasted, and changed the fraction to get the rest of the equation transcribed.
   

Math 102: Conclusions

One big problem I had, as you can see from the screenshot, is fractions are compressed to fit into a line. Using the preset quadratic formula looks ok, but once Word interprets the formula as a fraction, it’s noticeably smaller.  While I can resize the font size on fractions, it also resizes the equal sign. Is it a huge problem? No, but it’s something that annoyed me. Another little annoyance is if I enclose a fraction in parenthesis, the parentheses don’t extend the full height of the fraction; they are standard-sized parenthesis.

I think users with a heavy requirement to typeset equations will still be better served using a tool such as LaTeX, which is designed to write articles with lots of math formulas. LaTeX has a fairly hefty learning requirement, though, so Word’s editor is fine for light-to-medium users.

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A few things about references to get out of the way: Currently, most third-party citation software does not work with Word 2011. Luckily, Word’s citation tools are fairly good on their own. However, if you already have an extensive library in one of those apps, you’re going to be out of luck until they get upgraded.

Also, remember that to be able to keep editing the citations and bibliography after you’ve saved, you’ll need to make sure you’ve saved the document in .docx format, and not as a .doc.

Managing Citations

1. To manage your citations, click on the Manage button in the ribbon and click the + button in the lower left-hand corner of the window. This will bring up the Create New Source dialog box.
   
2. Fill it in with all the relevant information.
   
3. After you enter the relevant info, the citation will appear in the document, and in the citation list in the “Manage” dialog box.
   
4. To edit the page range of the citation, click on the arrow to the right of the citation, choose Edit this Citation and enter the page number.
   

   Choose "Edit This Citation"

   

   Enter in the page range

   

   Updated Citation

Bibliographies

Once you’ve got your citations in, it’s time to build the bibliography.

1. To create a bibliography, choose Bibliography from the Document Elements section of the ribbon and choose which type of bibliography you want to insert. Note: You’re probably going to need to insert a page break if you’re working within MLA requirements, as I most often am.
   
2. The bibliography is now in the document as an object. If you insert more references, click the arrow next to it and choose Update Citations and Bibliography.
   

   In-place Citation

   

   How to Update Citation

Final Words

Citation management in Word 2011 is largely unchanged from Word 2008; the only big difference is you now invoke it from the ribbon. While citations are included in Word, there are advantages to using a third-party tool, like EndNote, but until it gets a compatibility update, doing your bibliographic work right in Word is probably your best bet.

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Apple first announced the new Apple TV broadband set-top box on September 1, pricing it at $99 and announcing a new business model for streaming rentals of TV episodes and movie files. With the new streaming model, Apple rents TV episodes from Fox and ABC for 99 cents, compared to the $1.99 price for standard definition episode downloads and HD downloads for $2.99.

To put that into perspective: Roku reported at the beginning of this year that it had sold 500,000 of its set-top devices after about a year-and-a-half on the market, and hopes to have sold more than a million of its box by the end of the year. So Apple is tracking well ahead of other, similar devices already in the market.

That said, Apple TV is still very much a hobby when compared to the other products it makes. Apple sold 4.2 million iPads and 3.9 million Macs in the third quarter, as well as 9 million iPods and 14 million iPhones. While those products were available all quarter, compared to just the last several weeks like the Apple TV, it’s clear that it could be some time before Apple’s video set-top box becomes a significant portion of Apple’s business.

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Users come to love services like Facebook and Twitter (even Foursquare) so much that it resembles a national crisis among some circles when one of their sites goes down for a few hours. How do they try to avoid these occurrences in the future? Well, they spend some of those millions improving their physical infrastructures and creating specialized software to address unique needs. Greenpeace aside, I don’t recall hearing any complaints about Facebook’s first data center, nor about Twitter’s planned data center, and these companies aren’t even making money.

So why is it that financial analysts and shareholders get so up in arms when massive public web companies like Amazon or Google embark on spending kicks? After all, they bring in billions in revenue each year, and Google is responsible for more web traffic than Facebook and Twitter combined. Because it detracts from near-term profitability, that’s why. Om calls such analysts “idiots and short-term thinkers,” and he’s spot-on with his analysis of the situation.

Imagine if Google’s search engine, or its paid Google Apps service, went down as frequently as Twitter. What about Amazon Web Services, which hosts a good number of popular web sites and relatively important enterprise applications? What if these companies never rolled out new services because that would require spending more money on infrastructure? The answer is that they wouldn’t be too popular for too long. Companies delivering services via the web have to spend money – on infrastructure – to make money.

I can only imagine the number of cloud computing providers who’d love to have the problem of needing to scale to meet demand, and actually having the cash to do so. That day will never come if they don’t do infrastructure right in the first place.

When we’re talking about companies for which millions today might mean billions tomorrow, it might behoove shareholders and analysts to lighten up a little bit on the bottom line.

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I, Cloud (From High Scalability) I agree that cloud computing probably will result in more job-shifting than job-cutting, but I wouldn’t be so sure that software can’t use context to make human-like judgment calls. (see, e.g., IBM’s Watson supercomputer).

Verizon Medical Data Cloud on Track to Serve 350,000 Doctors (From SearchCloudComputing.com) It looks like the “Field of Dreams” logic works for data clouds, too: If you build it, they will come. Even one of three doctors uploading records there could mean a big improvement in health care efficiency.

I’ll start with some of the easy ways to automate your work and gradually move on to a few more advanced techniques.

Email

Most of us spend more time than we would like in email, so it’s a great place to start your automation; most email clients have built-in filtering and processing options that can save you quite a bit of time. Using color, setting up filters and canned responses are good places to start.

RSS

RSS readers are a great way to keep up with blogs and news; having all of your news in one place can be a big time saver. However, there are also many other tasks that can be automated and sent to your RSS reader. You can get RSS feeds for many commonly performed tasks like searches, keeping up with changes on wiki pages, notification of new events and much more. You would be surprised how many things have RSS feeds if you look for them, and there are even tools like Dapper that you can use to create RSS feeds from standard web content.

Filtering and Processing RSS Feeds

By combining and filtering RSS feeds, you can automate the manual task of wading through irrelevant data to find the bits that you really want Beginners can use simple tools like Feed Rinse, Feed Weaver and others, while more advanced users will want to use something like Yahoo Pipes to filter and process data with more precise control over the output.

Automated Results

Many tools allow you to automate certain tasks, so for any tools that you use regularly, you should look for options to have data sent to you periodically. For example, Google Analytics has a variety of email options to send you reports every day, week, month or quarter, and you can get notifications when something specific happens, like when you hit x numbers of visitors on any given day.

APIs

Non-developers tend to think of APIs as something magical that can only be used by programmers to build applications that pull complicated bits of data together and display them. While APIs are incredibly powerful, many of them can be used simply by creating a specially formatted URL for displaying results in your browser. For example, the Twitter API can be used to get all kinds of interesting information, and I use the MediaWiki API to gather statistics on our wiki usage every week. Once you get the data you need out of the API, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to process the data and get it automatically updated in your RSS reader, or you can use a tool like Wget to download the output file to your computer for additional processing later.

Scripting

Yes, this is where you start to get into some programming, but it is easier than it looks. If you can use your command line interface to perform an action, you can probably automate it using shell scripts. I have some basic BASH shell scripts on my Mac that contain lists of commands that can be run once to gather a bunch of data from various sources and dump it all onto my hard drive for further analysis.

Scheduling

After you get a script or two set up, you’ll want to take the next step and set those scripts to run every day, week, month or on some custom schedule. If you work at company, you can talk to your system administrator about scheduling your script to run periodically; however, for those of you who need to do it yourself, this is much easier now that it once was. Many web hosts, like Dreamhost, have an easy point-and-click configuration tool that can be used to schedule scripts to run periodically and send you the results via email or place a file somewhere on your server.

If you think about your routine, I’m guessing that you can come up with at least a few things you do manually every day, probably without giving them much thought. Those are the tasks that you should think about automating. Once I started thinking about a few tasks that I could automate, I started thinking about other tasks. Before long, I was back in the habit of thinking about automating those boring, routine tasks. While it can take a bit of time initially to set up your automation, you’ll find that it saves a lot more time than you might have expected over the long-term.

What daily tasks do you automate?

Photo by Flickr user Hillary, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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What separates New Relic from other APM providers is that its RPM service monitors live software from the inside instead of simply monitoring external web application metrics. RPM comes in five editions, ranging from the free Lite version, which gives basic monitoring capabilities, up to the Enterprise version, which provides a range of capabilities to discover and cure performance issues. According to founder Lew Cirne, the internal view helps customers identify problems early and avoid “the thorniest issues,” citing the recent Foursquare outage as a problem that might have been avoided if the company could have been proactive in addressing the problem.

Formerly, New Relic supported only Java and Ruby web applications, but as of today, it also supports .NET and PHP applications. This is nothing new for cloud-based services, which tend to start with a focused offering and expand their customer bases as they grow by adding additional language support. Even larger companies like Google and Salesforce.com took this approach with their cloud offerings. More applications mean more money, after all.

New Relic’s already-expansive footprint would seem to underscore the value of its service and of the SaaS model. The company counts just about every cloud provider as a technology partner (Joyent and Heroku offer it as an add-on in their offerings), and the company has experienced 200 percent growth annually since launching in 2008. Cirne says the company presently has 5,600 customers running the service in production, with 900 of them paying New Relic directly. Among them are large enterprises running New Relic within their data centers.

Perhaps more important than the product, however, is how the economics of New Relic underscore the power of the SaaS model –- specifically, the freemium model prevalent among SaaS 2.0 vendors. Nine hundred paying customers is no small feat when you consider that the company just increased its sales force to three from two a couple of weeks ago.  Cirne contrasts New Relic’s approach to that of Salesforce.com, which customers can’t start using without speaking with multiple salespeople, as well as to the last company Cirne founded, Wily (an on-premise APM vendor), which he sold to CA for $375 million.

When CA bought Wily, Cirne says it had 500 customers, 270 employees (about 150 of them in sales) and had raised $45 million. Keep in mind, New Relic just closed its latest round. Most of what it has accomplished was with about $10 million. Cirne says $20 million is way more than New Relic needs to achieve profitability, but it’s good to have some extra cash to capture opportunities in what he thinks will be a billion-dollar business.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons user KlausFoehl.

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One is its evolution from an internally developed virtualization-management solution at megabank Credit Suisse into, a spinoff company selling that software to the greater IT community in 2008. Credit Suisse was managing thousands of virtual servers and desktops while DynamicOps’ underlying Virtual Resource Manager software was developed, so scalability isn’t an issue. In fact, said VP of Marketing Rich Bordeaux, one customer currently manages 30,000 VMs and virtual desktops and is looking to have more than 60,000 within 18 months.

Furthermore, because the bank wasn’t about to move certain application from physical servers, physical-resource management is inherent in the Cloud Automation Manager. The new features in Cloud Automation Manager are what make it truly cloudy, though: multitenancy, self-service provisioning, and the ability to provision and manage resources from Amazon EC2.

DynamicOps’ other ace is that Cloud Automation Manager is an integral part of Dell’s recently announced Virtual Integrated System (VIS) offering. The DynamicOps software is the foundation of the VIS Self-Service Creator component. VIS is Dell’s attempt to combat competitors’ converged infrastructure solutions (e.g., Cisco UCS and HP BladeMatrix), so such an OEM deal should help validate DynamicOps’ claims of enterprise-readiness (if the Credit Suisse heritage doesn’t already do so).

Of course, it’s hard to get too excited about any cloud software right now before organizations actually start buying it. Web hosts and MSPs have been buying up software from vendors like VMware, Cloud.com and 3tera, but most other businesses appear to be doing no more than dipping their toes in the water right now.  DynamicOps has a strong virtualization-management history, though, and an existing customer base to tout (and sell), so perhaps it can break in where others appear to be left outside.

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“Clustrix has built a truly impressive Clustered Database System from which Internet-scale businesses can benefit,” said Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook VP of technical operations in a press statement. When writing about the company back in May 2010, Stacey pointed out that this clustered database system was webscale’s Holy Grail.

Paul Mikesell — CEO of Clustrix and the former co-founder of storage system success story Isilon — told Stacey the appliance being built by his company would be ideal ” for companies managing large amounts of data, such as big travel, e-commerce and social websites.” Heiliger believes that CDS can “make it very easy for fast-growing companies to scale their infrastructure, and enhance reliability, while driving down cost and complexity.”

Clustrix is backed by Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), and ATA Ventures.

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It looks like it currently only has details of flights using Gogo, and it can’t be 100 percent accurate, as carriers will swap aircraft in and out depending on scheduling, etc., but it’s still pretty useful for quickly checking if you’re likely to be able to get online at 30,000 feet. The results should improve over time, too, as users can hit the “You Tell Us” links to vote on whether HasWifi’s details of a particular flight are accurate.

If you’d like more detail on the services available on a particular flight, SeatGuru can also tell you whether a flight will have Wi-Fi, together with other useful information, such as seat pitch, and whether particular seats on a flight are good or bad for some reason (SeatGuru also has details on flights from a far greater number of carriers than HasWifi; it’s a better option for non-US residents).

Found a good site for frequent travelers? Share it in the comments!

(Via Lifehacker)

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For this round, I’ll look at companies that share these common themes:

• They market to application and infrastructure developers.
• They have a simple sign-up button on their home page.
• They integrate through simple web-based mechanisms that turn conventional deployment times of days or weeks into minutes or hours.

Transactional email. Most applications, consumer to enterprise, rely on email as a communications mechanism with users. With a large user base, sending users something as simple as notification emails can be challenging with spam filters, blocked IP addresses and other email hurdles that complicate the process. SendGrid helps improve the chances that the email you send will reach a user’s inbox. SendGrid does this by using its email servers as a proxy, and maintaining the purity of the IP addresses, one of the biggest email management challenges

Compute-intensive cycles. While it’s getting easier to “dial up” virtual machines in the cloud, some applications still need instant access to compute cycles for CPU-intensive functions: for example, in the software development process and with math-centric calculations. Without having to actually spin up your own server, PiCloud allows application developers to send functions to the cloud where they are executed and returned. The company is initially focusing on the Python programming language, but I see no reason why this couldn’t expand later on.

Network services. Network services have been hosted for years, but the integration and simplicity of deployment has dramatically increased with cloud computing. Managed DNS is one area that is seeing rapid innovation. The Domain Naming System (DNS) maps web address domain names to network IP addresses, and companies using a DNS service benefit from improved security. OpenDNS and Zerigo provide ready-to-go DNS services.

Database as a service. Every application needs a data store, and if you know what you need at that level, why not let someone else manage it? That’s the premise behind the service offering of Cloudant, which offers a version of CouchDB in a shared cluster that’s ideal for development and small- to mid-sized applications. Instead of buying and configuring a database server, you can dial one up in the cloud.

Indexing and search. Our real-time world demands up-to-date search, and Solr, the “blazing fast open-source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project” helps companies provide just that. Websolr, a company that provides support for Solr, also offers managed indexes. In this case, they host the index of your content in their shared cluster and can manage and optimize performance.

More segments are adopting the infrastructure apps model every day, and when people think outside the consumer web box, there are significant investment areas. Are there more infrastructure app areas that we’ve missed?

Gary Orenstein is the host of The Cloud Computing Show.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user michaeldbeavers.

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