How Not To Seek Employment

I just got this email from someone looking for work. This is reminiscent of “please send me the codes.”

LinkedIn

naiteek sangani has indicated you are a Friend:

Hi Rick,
I am a recent graduate from Columbia University and am seeking FULL TIME employment in the field of Software Development. Kindly get in touch with me if you have anything in store for me.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

regards,
- naiteek sangani

I’m not sure of this person’s culture, and what passes for initiative or standard practice, but here in the US (and I think it’s fairly evident from my LinkedIn profile that I’m in the US), this kind of approach is guaranteed to make any potential employer avoid you like the plague.

No, I Don’t Want to Invest in Your Securities or Commodities

For the last several months, I’ve been subject to a dramatic increase in the number of cold calls from companies suggesting I invest in oil fields, precious metals, or some security or another. Lately, I’ve been receiving a call or two per day. I’ve decided to list the companies and phone numbers in this post, so I’ll continually update it.

The number they’re all calling has been listed in the Do Not Call Registry for years. Now, like typical pro-consumer legislation, the Do Not Call rules allow companies with “existing relationships” to continue to contact you, as well as some degree of their subsidiaries and partners. It also has very little teeth. I had hoped for $500 fines per incident (similar to unsolicited faxing), but it doesn’t appear to be so.

So, back to the calls. They’re generally native English speakers, cheerful and energetic. They almost always imply a pre-existing relationship, by saying they’re following up on the information I requested before.

To be clear: I have never requested such information. I am hypersensitive to marketing efforts, and do all my research anonymously online. I never knowingly request information of this nature. I think it’s a blatant lie, intended to confuse me, or cause me to doubt myself, and is an attempt to shield themselves from the law that allows contact in case of pre-existing relationships.,/p>

On to the calls. This list is by no means complete. I’ve received literally dozens of calls, many I ignore. Some wake me in the morning. If I’m patient enough, I’ll get a name from the caller. I also don’t trust the caller ID; it could easily be forged, I think.

When I called one back (to verify it was not a legitimate missed call), he answered as if he were not expecting a business call. A “hello,” some confusion, and after I asked who this was, because I saw the call in my call log, he replied, “This is the after-hours answering service for US Oil Fields” (a company that has called me before, or with a name similar to one). This makes me think that these aren’t even call centers, but individuals in their homes, making these calls.

I’ve filed a complaint via the Do Not Call Registry, but they don’t address individual complaints. I filed a complaint with the FTC, but they don’t, either. I think the next step will be to contact my local representatives.

Update 2010-01-25: I called the FCC today, but unfortunately the people who handle these complaints were gone for the day. Supposedly they’ll be calling me back.

Jumping into Astrophotography with Both Feet

Before you take anything in this post too seriously and drop $5000 (or more) on astronomy gear, know that I have yet to take a really good picture of anything. Partly, this is because I don’t have all the stuff I’m going to suggest you get below.

You may find the suggestions below expensive. That’s part of why I haven’t gotten it all yet. You should know that I don’t like to start small. I like to get equipment that makes my life as easy as possible. You may prefer a different approach. Don’t let this post discourage you from trying. It’s likely you have more patience than I do.

Astrophotography is hard. Shooting bright objects like the moon is easy. Shooting any kind of “deep sky” object, like a nebula, is hard. There is a lot to learn, and a lot of equipment to buy, and you can really go whole-hog. When I was trying to figure this stuff out, I didn’t really want to know everything, just the specifics for the kind of equipment I had already bought (a Celestron NexStar 6SE).

So, here’s a partial list of stuff to buy to get started. I’m sure you can do better, and I haven’t even tried all of these things myself, but it’s what I have or will buy next. Note that I assume you’re using a Cassegrain telescope.

• Orion Sirius EQ-G GoTo 180mm Mak-Cass Telescope
• MoonLite Crayford Focuser
• The Imaging Source FireWire CCD Bayer Camera

Okay, I there’s more stuff to put on this list, but I’m finding it hard to be specific enough in the short time I want to take to write this. A couple of notes:

Telescope

The telescope suggested above is both a mount and an optical tube (OTA). I’d probably recommend getting a different OTA, one with the capability of accepting 2” optics on the back. The Sirius EQ-G mount worked well for me for the short time I had it, although I didn’t like the computer as much as on the NexStar 6SE mount. However, it will work fine with any number of OTAs. It’s often cheaper to buy one of their pre-made combinations, but it might not really be what you want. The actual OTA you get is (in my inexperienced opinion) less important than the mount, the focuser, and the camera. But the more serious accessories are 2”, and you can always add an adaptor to get down to the 1.25” stuff.

Oh, and get the GPS accessory to save you time and reduce errors when setting up.

Focuser

The focuser mentioned above seems like a first-rate device, but I don’t have one yet. Ideally, you want electric, computer-controlled focusing. Focusing is the single hardest part of shooting images, and I can’t stress enough how much frustration I’ve encountered with it. I very much want computer-controlled focusing, and as a beginning step, I would get a focuser that at least has an electric motor on it that I can control manually. This keeps you from touching the telescope and making it shake.

There is so much backlash in the worm gear on the built-in focus in the SCT OTA, it’s very hard to use it to focus. Adding the Crayford-style focuser should vastly improve your ability to focus, and I won’t try to take pictures again until I have one.

Buying a focuser from those guys requires knowing exactly what telescope you have. There are like three different things to order: the focuser itself, the adaptor for your specific telescope, and the remote focus motor and electronics. After you settle on a telescope, call them and they should be helpful in getting you the right focuser.

Before buying the focuser, try shooting without it on your scope, and see what your results are. Pretty soon, you’ll be wanting one.

Camera

There are many choices in cameras. If you have a nice DSLR, you’ll probably want to use that. I borrowed a friend’s for a while, but finally bought a low-res video camera from The Imaging Source. His DSLR was a little too old to be well-controlled by the computer. The key is to be able to have the computer see what the camera sees, with rapid frame updates, to make it easier to focus. Once that’s done, you want the computer to be able to control the camera’s shutter and exposure, so that you can remotely trigger it, and not shake the OTA.

Autoguiding

Once you start taking pictures that need more than a few (10 - 30) seconds’ exposure, you’re going to need to autoguide your telescope. This requires a second camera. Fortunately, this camera can be cheaper and lower-quality, and ideally is black and white.

While your main imaging camera has its shutter open and is accumulating photons, it can’t send back data to the computer. The second camera takes short exposures of brighter stars, and uses the movement of those stars to move the telescope while the main camera is still exposing. You can easily need to take several hour-long exposures to get a really good deep-sky image, and for this, autoguiding is a requirement (simple open-loop tracking isn’t good enough, and you’ll get smearing).

I have no recommendations for autoguiding, because I’ve never gotten good enough at focusing to even consider it. You’ll need a little OTA attached to your main OTA for it, and you’ll need a camera and software compatible with your computer (I use a Mac, and most of this stuff is designed for PCs).

But you can take some nice images with good focus and your mount’s tracking before spending money on autoguiding.

More Stuff

There’s so much more to learn. Get Ron Wodowski’s The New CCD Astronomy to learn it all. For example, the best pictures are taken with very sensitive B&W cameras, and color filters are used. You shoot four separate images, three with RGB filters and one for luminance, and then combine them in software.

There’s stuff about periodic error correction (PEC) and other elements of the tracking mount drive train to improve tracking.

There’s stuff about cooling your imaging device to reduce thermal noise in the sensor.

There’s stuff about shooting dark frames to remove noise from defects in your sensor (this you can do with any setup, and is fairly easy: just put the cover on your telescope, and shoot a frame, then subtract that from your results in software).

I Love Summer!

A graph I made of sunrise and sunset times on the first of each month for Santa Clara, CA. Since today is the Winter Solstice, it seemed appropriate to look forward to the lovely, longer days.

These are sunrise & sunset times on the first of each month.

Funniest Twitter Exchange I’ve Ever Had

This just happened a few minutes ago. I was watching the episode of Futurama where Fry stops by the First Amalgamated Church looking for a way to find his lost friend Bender. He sits down with Father Changstein-El-Gamal. I thought that was funny, so started this conversation:

jetforme: My new twitter name will be Father Changsteine El Gamal

CatherineQ: @jetforme Wow you’re really going to screw us up for RTs then? :-)

Blueskeyes207: @jetforme Um, no.

txflygirl: @jetforme I think that name is 140 characters

jetforme: @txflygirl @Blueskeyes207 @CatherineQ Father Changstein El Gamal from the First Amalgamated Church (of Futurama) :-)

jetforme: @txflygirl LOL!

txflygirl: @jetforme This is what a tweet to you would be like

txflygirl: @jetforme Father Changstein El Gamal from the First Amalgamated Church — how

txflygirl: @jetforme Father Changstein El Gamal from the First Amalgamated Church — was

txflygirl: @jetforme Father Changstein El Gamal from the First Amalgamated Church — your

txflygirl: @jetforme Father Changstein El Gamal from the First Amalgamated Church — day

I started laughing out loud so hard, I was slipping off the edge of my couch, and I could barely read the screen ‘cause my eyes were tearing up. This kept up for at least the five minutes it took me to put my leftover dinner away.

Awesome tweeps.

Red Light Streaming Into My Office

I’m sitting at my desk in my home office, and I noticed strange red light coming in through the slats of the Venetian blind on the window. It looked fairly intense, as if coming from a good sunset. But it was not even 4 pm, and the sun sets on the other side of the building, so there’s now way that’s what it was.

So, I looked along the rays of light to see the source. Turns out, the afternoon sun was reflecting off a stop sign in the street below. I’m still not sure how the reflection occurred, since the sign is roughly perpendicular to the ground, and both the Sun and I are well above the sign, and both on the same side of it (left-to-right and front-to-back). Perhaps it’s the nature of the reflective paint used.

Shooting the sign challenged my otherwise fairly capable digicam, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3. Interesting vertical lines appear prominent in the sign, as does a double image. The image was taken through a somewhat dirty window and screen, but the effect is barely noticeable (if at all) on other elements in the image.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool.

Tracking Antenna Mount

This weekend I’m working on a tracking antenna mount that we’ll be using for our UAV and balloon tests in the next few weeks (months?).

Block diagram:

Here’s what’s inside. A MakeController and an alt-az gimbal mount that I don’t think is available any longer.

The ports. Ethernet and USB (not sure which I’ll implement) for the ground control computer to connect to, and power (may not be used either).

Here are the other parts. GPS (EM-408) , compass module (HMC6352), external GPS antenna (with a little MMCX to SMA pigtail):

Closeup of the GPS and compass module:

Getting all the stuff mounted in the enclosure has been a pain, and has taken much of the day (plus the Cal game, and other stuff). There’s a lot of wiring to do still, and hopefully I’ll actually get some code written this weekend. Stay tuned!

Launching a Balloon

I’ve seen a lot of reports lately of recent and past amateur balloon launches. People have been launching sounding balloons with payloads containing GPS and cameras, and have been very successful. I’ve wanted to do this for some time, and coming across all these reports has excited me about the idea again.

Really what I want to do is launch a satellite. So I’ve decided to expand the scope of the balloon launch in support of a future satellite launch. I’ve ordered the Microhard radio we’ll be using on the satellite to test on the balloon.

We’re going to build a payload with GPS, temperature, pressure, still pictures, and possibly video. Lots of work to do in the link budget calculation to see what we can do, and within the 1.8-kg payload FAA limit. We’re also building a directional 2.4 GHz antenna to automatically point at the thing (a project I began a couple years ago for UAV use).

This is going to be fun. Check back for updates.

MissionClock Sales

MissionClock has been in the iTunes App Store for a few weeks now, and I thought I’d post some sales information. The chart below shows the relative number of unit sales per day from July 30, 2009 to September 10, 2009. The two big spikes in sales corresponded to the STS-128 launch attempt on August 24, and the actual launch on August 28. Labor Day was particularly bad. There is no data for the dates from August 5 to August 8.

Clearly, launch days are good for MissionClock.

Watching NASA on Snow Leopard

UPDATED: 2009-10-19

I’m not sure for how long this little tip will work. I figure when Akamai & Apple catch on to the fact that people are watching a stream they intended for the iPhone, they’ll put a stop to it.

But in the meantime, you can watch a very high quality stream of NASA TV in Snow Leopard’s QuickTime X Player. Just launch QuickTime Player, go to the File menu and choose “Open URL…”. Then enter the following URI:

http://iphoned5.akamai.com.edgesuite.net/mhbarron/nasatv/nasatv_700.m3u8

Old URI: http://qthttp.akamai.com.edgesuite.net/iphone_source/yahoo/nasa/nasa_all.m3u8

You can also follow along with STS-128 with MissionClock for iPhone and iPod Touch.

I’ve been watching for the past hour or so, and it’s not without its problems. It’s about 45 seconds behind Spacevidcast, which seems to be the lowest-latency stream available. Every now and again it will stop momentarily. Sometimes the window shrinks and turns black for a while, then comes back. But overall, it’s a high-quality image that should work on a variety of connections, and doesn’t suck down CPU like watching in a Flash player. However, it does cause the fans in my Aluminum MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz Core2Duo to run a little bit, and I suspect Apple could do some work to improve this.

Making Dots

I am by no means a Photoshop expert, so there doubtless better ways to do this. With that disclaimer out of the way, hopefully this will help someone.

Yesterday I needed a nice-looking dot, like the one next to unread email messages in the iPhone Mail client. At first I tried lifting the dot from the phone directly, taking a screenshot. But that gave me a 13 x 13 pixel dot that was antialiased to white, and I needed it antialiased to transparent, so that it would work against any background. This is the dot I wanted (the final result is at the bottom):

So I tried my hand at creating it from scratch in Photoshop, and it turned out to be surprisingly easy (even easier when I reproduced the steps in order to create the screenshots here). The Photoshop tools are very well designed for exactly this sort of graphic.

For this, I used Photoshop CS3 for Mac OS X. This article assumes you have a basic familiarity with Photoshop, but I try to be specific in how to carry out the operations. I glossed over the configuration of the Marquee tool a bit, but hopefully you’ll get it.

Start by creating a new document of the overall size you want. I wanted a 13 x 13-pixel dot, so I created a 13 x 13 document. It’s important that it be RGB, and have a transparent background:

Zoom way in on the document, by typing Command-+ a few times. I worked at 3200% zoom. Then choose the colors you’ll want to use. I used just two shades of blue, lifted right from the screenshot of the Mail dot. You’ll need three, one for the border color, and two for the gradient start and end.

For this step, make sure the darker color is the front color:

With the Ellipse Tool, create a circle by clicking in the very upper-left corner of your document, and dragging to the lower-right:

It should fill in a nice antialiased circle of the chosen color:

Then choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool:

And create a circular selection that’s smaller than the circle you filled before. I did this by holding down the Option key as I clicked in the center of the image, and dragging toward the lower-right. Holding the shift key while you do this will constrain the proportions to be square:

When you let go, it’ll change shape to show the actual pixels that are selected:

At this point, you want to fill in the circle with the gradient, to give it a highlight. On Mac OS X and iPhone OS, lights are always directly above the graphic.

To fill the gradient, Photoshop needs a layer into which it can draw. Click the New Layer button in the Layers utility window:

Set up the colors for the gradient fill. Since I chose the colors I was going to use already, I just had to make sure the light color was on top:

Then select the Gradient tool:

And make sure the tool is set up to do radial gradients. At the top of the screen, there’s a tool bar that lets you configure the gradient tool. Set it up so it looks like this:

At this point, you should have a selection of pixels and a new layer selected that match the steps above, and the colors you want your gradient to be. Then use the gradient tool by clicking near the top-center of your dot, and dragging downward, not quite all the way:

When you let go, you’ll have a nice gradient filling just the selected pixels, and properly antialiased, to boot, although that’s not as noticeable here since we painted over the same blue color:

Now you can use “Save for Web & Devices…” from the File menu to save this as a 24-bit PNG file with transparency, and it’ll be ready for use in iPhone apps. Here’s the result (it might be ever-so-slightly different, as this is the dot I got from my first run through these steps, and the screenshots above are from the second run through them I made to write this):

Stream overload during LRO/LCROSS launch

I’m sitting here suddenly overwhelmed at the utter coolness of what I’m doing. I’m sitting at my desk in my home office, “working from home,” as NASA’s LRO/LCROSS mission prepares for launch in a few hours. In front of me is a 22” Apple Cinema Display attached to a 15” Aluminum MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo, 2.5 GHz).

Thanks to NASA and Spacevidcast, playing on my desktop I have no less than six video streams, some with multiple angles, showing me the rocket and various other video. Thanks to ScanAmerica, I’m listening to the Kennedy Space Center ground loops via iTunes internet radio streaming. A NASA Java applet shows the Atlas countdown information. I’m chatting with friends via AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and GTalk, as well as Spacevidcast’s chat room. I’m following NASA agencies and employees via Twitter. And I have my as-yet-unfinished iPhone app MissionClock counting down to LRO. It looks like this:

This is all cool by itself, but every now and again I get a tweet like this one from Andy, who works cryogenics (fuel) and other things on the launch pad:

Been on the tower for the last 5 hrs. Finally got down and now they are kicking us out for the Atlas launch.

They just started the go/no-go poll. Time to do some real work while I listen/watch. Weather is a bit of a concern, here’s hoping it holds!

One last bit of commentary: this ULA/Atlas launch has a lot more transparency/awesome geek factor than NASA Shuttle launches. I get to see a lot more info, and hear a lot more. I hope the Shuttle public outreach can surpass that of the Atlas someday soon. There aren’t many opportunities left!

Bird Races

Last night I saw the most extraordinary thing. The shuttle bus to the Cairns Night Zoo stopped to pick up another passenger in the middle of the Cairns downtown area.

A small parakeet, in flocks numbering in the thousands, was racing round and round the block! Right down the street, anywhere from one to 5 meters above the ground. They came in wave after wave of dozens or even hundreds of birds, at incredible speed, weaving and dodging among the people and cars in the street.

And the waves never seemed to end. I asked the driver what was going on, and he told me that these birds like to race around the block at this time in the evening. They start up some time after the sun sets, and keep it up until it becomes too dark for them to see well enough.

I stood in the middle of the street as these flocks flooded the space around me. I tried to reach out to touch them, but they were far too agile and quick for that.

Tully River Rafting

Well, so much for the grand plan to blog my travels. I finally have some time without any specific plan, so I’ve decided to try write up a bit about my trip. I’ll try to get to the earlier experiences eventually, but don’t count on it! I’ll also adjust the publication date on these to put them in order of when they happened, not necessarily when I wrote them. That means that if you’re actually reading along, some things might seem out of order. Sorry!

Yesterday I did what had to be the most exciting thing so far on this vacation: I rafted the Tully River with 50 other people. The trip was a 12 km-long series of grade 2 - 4 rapids. We went down in rafts of 6 to 8 people.

Cairns’ Raging Thunder picked me up at 6:25 am on Saturday, May 2, 2009 and drove me to a Greyhound-sized bus full of other sleepy-eyed people to begin the 2-hour drive to Tully. Along the way, one of the employees gave an entertaining briefing about the day’s activities. They also handed out the typical waiver releasing them of liability if I smashed my head on a rock or drowned. They even required us to have someone sitting nearby sign as witnesses!

My witness turned out to be Rachel, a cute girl from Saratoga, CA, of all places! Halfway around the world, I meet someone who lives only 20 minutes away from me. Seems only natural. Because we were both traveling alone, we would end up together in a raft with a guy from France and some cool Swiss.

We arrive at Raging Thunder’s Tully location, where we can get breakfast, use a restroom, and rent “adventure sandals” (which turn out to be Crocs) and wetsuits. I kinda wish I’d rented the wetsuit, because later they recommended not wearing t-shirts, because it would make you colder. It was an overcast day, at least at first, and I was relegated to being photographed in all my pasty-white flabby glory. (Sorry about that.)

It’s here that I run into Lara, who was one of the dive instructors on the Tusa dive boat I went out on two days before. They were a great ship’s crew, and it was strange to see her now as just another participant. I didn’t even know how I knew her at first, and she had to remind me. But she had never done the rafting before, and it was nice find someone I knew.

After wrapping up our breakfast stop, we get back on the bus and get driven out to the first entry point along the Tully. We file out of the bus, find helmets and life jackets, suit up, and grab a paddle.

We find our fellow crew and guide, and head down to the river’s edge to find a raft. Our guide’s name is Fisherman (yes, that’s his given name), and he’s a wiry, thin, leathery, weathered guy with a deep tan, and a prominent missing front tooth. He has long scraggly hair and the veins along his arms stand out dramatically. Each one of us thinks, “Oh no, we got that guy,” but he proves to be the best guide in the group. He knows the river, he knows how to get us safely through the rapids, and he knows how to make us feel like seasoned professionals while we do it.

We find a raft, and climb aboard. The raft is a yellow inflatable thing that can hold eight people plus our guide, but we’re only six. Fisherman shoves off and jumps in. He repeats some of the briefing we’d been given on the bus earlier, the most important aspect of which is to always keep a hand on the T-handle end of the paddle, to ensure that no one gets hit by it. It’s apparently how he lost his tooth, probably decades before. As he shows us the proper grip technique, you notice he’s missing part of his right ring finger. Everyone assumes a croc took it, and no one asks, because we figure its life ended before he had a chance to take more.

What follows is a straightforward class on river rafting. We learn how to sit in the raft with a foot tucked under the cross-brace so you don’t fall out, and the meanings of “paddle forward,” “back paddle,” “hold on,” “get down,” “right side,” “left side,” and “relax.”

The first two should be obvious. “Hold on” means to put the T-handle down between your feet, tuck the other end under your arm, and grab the red rope along the perimeter of the raft. “Get down” means to slip your rear off the edge of the boat and down onto the floor, with the T-handle down and the paddle blade straight up. It is clear that if we don’t do this when he commands it, the result will be a painful watery death (or at least mouthfuls of river water).

“Right side” and “left side” are like “hold on,” except that those on the opposite side of the command are to shift as far to the right or left as they can before grabbing ropes. This is to keep us from capsizing in the middle of some incredibly slanted chute of rushing water.

We float lazily down the river, practicing these commands, and then he teaches us what to do when the boat flips over. Then he lets us practice what to do when the boat flips over. We all go into the water as the boat overturns and comes crashing down over our heads. Pop up under the boat, take a breath, go under and find the outside, then swim like mad to shore, all the while holding the paddle in one hand.

Let me just say here that you should find your way to the side of the boat closest to the shore, not farthest. In the fast-moving river, it’s really hard to swim effectively with all the crap you’ve got on. Normally we’d swim to the boat, but not for this exercise.

With the briefings more or less done, we head down the river in earnest. As we approach each rapid, Fisherman gives us a quick rundown of how we’re going to get through it. “First I’ll say ‘paddle forward,’ then I’ll tell you to hold on, then we’ll paddle some more, and then I’ll say, ‘get down,’ and you bloody well better get down!” Sometimes he throws in a “left side” or “right side” for good measure.

We get to our first rapid, and everyone’s sure we’re going to fail miserably and fall out of the raft. We’re all trying to remember the briefing on how to float down the river: on your back, feet first, be careful not to bang your bum on the rocks.

“Paddle forward!” We start paddling more-or-less in time (we actually go pretty good at that), at some non-intuitive angle to the first set of rocks that create the rapid. Since our guide is behind us in the boat, we don’t know exactly what he’s doing. A violent, roiling mass of water is just a meter or two away, and there is no turning back. Paddling like made, he yells, “hang on!” and we all shove our T-handles down and grab the rope. We’re committed. The raft plunges into the mess, heaves and flexes enough to burst any pool floaty mere pool floaty. A tremendous torrent of water cascades over the side, threatening to spill us out, and we hear, “paddle forward hard” followed all too soon by “get down!” We bounce off a giant rock, the raft tips precariously, turns, and suddenly we’re past it, upright, in relatively calm water, everyone still aboard.

Our hearts are pounding, we’re breathing hard, and we all have the biggest shit-eating grins on our faces. Fisherman calls out, “high five,” and we all smack our paddles together in the air over the raft. This day is going to be awesome.

We do several more rapids, all variations of one another, and all wonderfully different. At one point, part of our pre-rapid briefing includes instructions to put big silly grins on our faces (as if we weren’t already doing that), and to wave to the camera when he says. It’s our first photo op of the day.

After a few hours, we break for lunch. We doff the safety gear and carry the raft up to the trailer. Lunch is burgers with lots of toppings, including cucumber, carrots, and beets. Apparently beets make it Aussie. They have water and cordials (fruit juices) to drink, and we all learn, by trial and error, that cordial in the plastic bottle needs to be diluted with quite a lot of water.

After lunch, we pile back onto the bus, and drive up to a point 6 km upstream from where we first started. This starts the second half of the day, and gives us more challenging rapids. We’re working better together, and our guide is proving to be very adept at drenching other crews with his paddle. They try to strike back, but are no match. He teaches us how to make a little water go a long way in battle, and how to smack the paddles down on the water with a loud crack. Our high fives turn into a choreographed clack-smack as we crash them together above, and then bring them down and smack the water.

The rapids are definitely more challenging. A lot are named with risqué monikers such as “foreplay,” “wet and moisty”. When we get stuck on big rocks, our guide calls for “group sex,” and we all bounce up and down on the raft to dislodge it (all the while grinning). There’s also “zig zag,” “staircase,” and “maze.” For one, we have to do “right side” followed by “left side”, because otherwise we’ll tip over. We manage to go the whole day with no accidental capsizing or man overboard events. We are pros.

We paddle our asses off through one particularly long set of rapids, and we feel awesome doing it. We often “park” in little pools of calm behind rocks, or up on rocks, and watch the other groups go through. None of them paddle through the section we just completed, and and we realize that we looked much cooler, and enjoyed it much more. Fisherman says it’s the difference between us taking ourselves through the rapids, and him just taking us along.

At the end, he sets us up all crammed together at the very end of the raft. All our paddles have been tucked in under ropes and cross bars, and we wonder what the hell is going on. Every raft is being set up in similar fashion, and there are guides standing on the rocks around a very steep waterfall that must be a couple meters high. We’re basically hugging each other in a six-person embrace as Fisherman maneuvers the raft toward this insane fall. He climbs in the other end and acknowledges that this is basically a set-up. We go over the falls, and the boat flips and we all fall out. Magically, our guide manages to stay on it. Or maybe he wasn’t in the boat at all; I actually can’t remember now. We float around the water for a while, and swim our way to shore.

We haul the raft out, put it on the trailer, turn in our safety gear, and change into dry clothes in “Queensland’s second-biggest changing room,” which basically means anywhere you can find a blade of grass or a leaf to cover your privates. Surprisingly few such places appear, especially considering we’re in a rainforest. I have no idea what Queensland’s first-biggest changing room is.

Back aboard the bus, we head back to Tully, for food, beer, and photo review. They sell us a photo CD for $100 (although if your whole group buys copies it works out to about $20 each). There are over 50 great photos on it, so we all decide it’s worth it.

We think we’re going to sleep on the ride home, and I really want to, but Rachel and I chat most of the way home. She and I have both been rafting before, but this was, by far, the best. Lara was a bit anxious about it at the start of the day, and exhausted for most of it (I had slept about four hours the night before; she got maybe one. They work hard, that Tusa crew), but after it was all over, she really loved it.

If you ever make your way to Cairns, be sure to call up Raging Thunder and run the river. It’s a fantastic way to spend the day, and is one of the best parts of my trip.

Leaving for Australia Today

I’m sitting in my office at work, waiting for a meeting that will help erode the time before I’m to depart for the airpot. It’s hard to focus on anything but getting to the airport, getting a meal, and getting on the plane.

There’s some real scientific evidence that fasting can stave off jet lag. I’m going to try it. It requires eating nothing for at least 16 hours, then taking your first meal at the time people normally take their first meal in your destination (which is generally breakfast). My flight arrives at 0600 local time in Sydney, and I figure it’ll be 30 minutes to an hour before I can eat. Working backward, that means I can eat up until 2130 or so tonight. Hopefully I won’t feel hungry for the first four hours of the flight, after which, I can just fall asleep.

I’m actually a little bit nervous about the fasting thing. What if I screw up? I have a full day the first day, and I don’t want to blow it. I also don’t want to be miserable and hungry. But oh well. If it means having no jet lag, I’m all for it.

About seven hours to go…

Series Continuity Error in Chuck

I’m watching “Chuck vs. the Broken Heart.” In it, the NSA drug Awesome in order to steal his key card, so they can break into the medical equipment room, and plant a bug in a pacemaker that’s about to be implanted in a bad guy.

They set up a bachelor party, drug Awesome, take his key card. Later they show the bad guy discovering the implanted bug, and they decide to assassinate the surgeon responsible. Turns out, it’s Awesome.

Then they cut to Awesome waking up, hung over from being drugged. My question is this: when did he perform the surgery? He was drugged beforehand, or they couldn’t have planted the bug. The assassins were already after him by the time he woke up, after the surgery. Who did the surgery?

And why is Ellie mad at Awesome? It’s obvious he didn’t do anything; he was out.

Sloppy.

Typical Tech Movie

I’m watching bits and pieces of Stealth. There’s a scene where Jessica Biel (be still my beating heart) has trouble in her fighter and ends up ejecting over North Korea. Before she does, she breathlessly gives her lat/lon position over the radio. Now, these are planes that send, back to the commanders on the carrier, real-time, high-fidelity video of the pilots, along with biomed telemetry, and who knows what else. Why wouldn’t they already know exactly where she was?

Did I miss the part where her systems were knocked out and didn’t work? Guess it’s lucky that the radio still did.

Safari 4 Public Beta

Hmm. I just installed it, and after 5 minutes, I’m disappointed and unconvinced. The tabs now live in the window’s title bar. Inactive tabs’ close boxes only appear when you hover over the tab, a practice I generally despise (don’t make me hunt for shit in the UI). The close boxes also look different from how they did in 3.x. The tab/title bar text doesn’t look like title bar text (the font is different), giving Safari the fragile, unpolished feel of non-Mac-native apps (like Java apps or Qt-ported apps).

Most disappointing, Safari continues to SPOD when loading pages and there’s any kind of I/O burden on the system (possibly even just the I/O burden caused by Safari itself). This is on a last-gen 15” MBP Core 2 Duo, 2.5 GHz, 4 GB RAM.

Going from a “top site” thumbnail to the actual page is slow, I’m sure due to typical Safari page rendering slowness.

I’m running Klicko, so it’s hard to know how inactive window clicks actually behave, but there might be some oddness there. Overall, I’m not at all sure what the improvements are in this new Safari. Good thing it’s a free update, but I think, so far, they should be paying me to update.

Chuck Movie References

Tonight’s Chuck had some great movie references. Topping the list is probably Sgt. Al Powell, played by Reginald VelJohnson. He also eats Twinkies in both shows. Astute readers will remember VelJohnson playing Sgt. Al Powell in ! Michael Rooker plays the hostage negotiator. The bad guy is known as “Ned” Rhyerson (a character from ).

There’s probably more, but those were great.

I Hate the Way “Chuck” is Going

No, no, no, no, no, NBC, no! Tonight’s development in the love story between Sarah and Chuck is terrible (worse than having Nicole Richie guest next week). I live vicariously through Chuck, and I don’t like the way my vicarious life is suddenly going.

Fix it. Immediately.

Government-mandated Standardized Economy Gauges

In typical fashion, republicans attack good ideas, even ones they have no legitimate basis for discrediting. Just to make the other guy look bad.

In this case, I’m referring to the McCain camp’s response to Barack Obama’s suggestion that Americans make sure their tires are kept properly inflated. They accused Obama of being ignorant of energy issues, but in typical fashion, they are wrong. Most cars on the road have under-inflated tires. Each 1 psi of under-inflation loses about 0.4% fuel efficiency. Most cars are 20% under-inflated. (You can also maintain your air filter. More information on the EPA’s site.)

The amount of oil saved if America were to properly inflate all her tires would significantly exceed the entire production of all new offshore drilling, and drilling in ANWR, combined. Moreover, it would happen immediately (within weeks, or however long it takes Americans to check and inflate their tires). Not 10 - 20 years (which is how long we’d have to wait for new oil drilling production to come online and ramp to full capacity).

Economy Gauges

Another place where you can improve fuel economy is driving slower, and accelerating more gently. I don’t know about you, but I like driving fast and accelerating hard. But if I could see what my actual fuel economy was, I might think twice. I might ease up on the pedal a little bit. Some people might ease up a lot.

Which brings me to my idea: the government can mandate that all new cars and trucks sold in 5 years must have fuel economy gauges. Many new cars already have them (and some, like Mercedes & BMW, have provided them for decades). The gauge should be on all the time (many today are buried in the pages of the trip odometer), and needs to show at least a couple of moving averages: one spanning a few days, one spanning a minute or two. You could get fancier, by making a prediction on when you will next need to visit the pump (in days & hours). Also, the computations need to be the same across the entire industry, so that automakers can’t fudge it, and so you can compare vehicles. They need to be treated the same as odometers, in terms of legal requirements for accuracy and precision.

This one would take a few years to implement, but will have return in much less time than drilling, and will come at a much lower price. It will be resisted by the auto makers who will whine that the requirement will put them out of business. But that’s all bullshit. The BOM on a good display should be less than $50 in production quantity, and the R&D is trivial (these things are not rocket science; the hardest part will be the ID, and they’re doing that already).

Conceivably, the government could even give some of the tax breaks it gives to Big Oil over to Big Auto to help implement the gauges.

I’m sure the republicans will side with Big Business Auto and never allow it, or water down any such proposal until it’s useless. After all, such a change would reduce oil consumption (virtually for free), and we can’t have Big Oil making less money. Fucking republicans. Assholes.

New Garage Workbench

Not sure if I’m just procrastinating, but as I was working on the eBike’s carbs this week, I realized I really needed a workbench in the garage. I’d been planning to put one in, something that went along part of the back wall, around the corner, and down the side a bit. Tired of hunching over the carbs on the floor, I finally decided I should build something this weekend.

The vision is something like this (although I may not bother with the upper cabinets; we’ll see):

I realize what you’ll see below doesn’t look anything like that, but it will. Someday.

I spent a good five hours (and $280) at Sawdust Shop cutting the pieces for the carcasses of 1.5 workbench-cabinets. I’ve partially assembled one of them tonight, but I’m done for the day. I’ll finish it in the morning, and hopefully make some real progress on the carbs.

Here’s a wide shot of the left half of my garage. You can see the beginning of the pedestal near the back wall.

The completed pedestal. I was originally going to just hang the cabinet-workbench from the wall, but the expert at Sawdust Shop convinced me to build a pedestal. This will support much more weight more effectively:

Here the three walls have been screwed in:

A closer view of the pocket screws:

The rear nail strip is fasten to the carcass with pocket screws:

Here’s more detail on how the pedestal sits under the cabinet. The floor is pretty heavily sloped, so I will have to shim things up. The wall seems to be plumb, though, which is good.

I rested the top nail strips and work surface on top. Tomorrow I’ll glue and fasten them down properly, but this gives you an idea of how it’ll look.

PG&E Claims Nuclear Power is Climate-Neutral

In my most recent PG&E energy bill, there’s a little insert labeled “Power Content Label.” It breaks down PG&E’s power mix by type, with 22% of the power coming from nuclear sources. On the pie chart, that wedge is green, which, according to the legend, means it’s “climate neutral or renewable.”

As it turns out, that’s incorrect. Nuclear power requires refining uranium ore to produce nuclear fuel. According to the Lean Economy’s Guide to Nuclear Energy, “Every stage in the nuclear process, except fission, produces carbon dioxide. As the richest ores are used up, emissions will rise,” and:

Uranium enrichment uses large volumes of uranium hexafluoride, a halogenated compound (HC). Other HCs are also used in the nuclear life-cycle. HCs are greenhouse gases with global warming potentials ranging up to 10,000 times that of carbon dioxide.

There are more shortcomings of nuclear power. I encourage you to read the whole Guide.

Comcast Block Port 25, AGAIN

I moved into a new house, got a new Comcast account for my internet & cable, and not four weeks later, they had blocked port 25, for exactly the same reasons they did it before.

I called the number again, and Eric was very competent and agreed to put in the unblock request. He also helped me to understand why Comcast suggests using a port other than 25. It’s not as ineffective as I had thought, but I still don’t think it’s worth the invconvenience.

His reasoning goes like this: By blocking port 25, they prevent most spamming viruses from getting to open relays that typically run on port 25. Even if the virus is updated to use port 587 (Comcast’s suggested port), Comcast’s mail server requires authentication, and so it won’t be able to send (of course, if they hijack your local Mail client, none of that will matter).

Now, if open relays start appearing that listen on other ports, then it won’t matter.

The real problem is this: Comcast claims that they had reports that spam was being sent from my IP address (at the time it was assigned to me), but they won’t tell me anything about these reports. Now, I’m certain no spam has gone out from my house. My wireless network is locked up tight, the access logs don’t show any unauthorized accesses, and I’ve never run Windoze, so there’s no way I got one of those viruses. So, the report must be in error. But I have no way to track that down.

Hopefully, thought, I’ll get unblocked. And maybe the FCC’s point of view will eventually prevent them from blocking port 25 after all.

Customer Service Experience

Before remembering that I had written an entry about this problem (which had the info I needed), I tried using the regular Comcast online chat customer support. The first time I called, they insisted this was a permanent block and there was nothing I could do to remove it. That, of course, wasn’t true. This time they tried to pull the same shit, and after explaining to them that I was able to unblock it before, she said no, now it’s really permanent. As it turns out, it’s not.

I also have been trying to get a PIN number, so that I can get online access to my account. The agent could only give it to me if she called my Comcast Digital Voice number (a service I have but don’t use because it makes my bill cheaper). She couldn’t even call the number listed on my account (which I do use).

Here are a couple of photos showing our conversation (their stupid chat client doesn’t allow copy-and-paste):

California High Speed Trains Projects—Not as Cool as It Could Be

I got spam from California High Speed Trains identifying me as a business leader (clearly I’m on a mailing list somewhere). The information on the website is sketchy. It’s really just trying to convince visitors that high-speed rail is a good idea.

But I’m watching a video produced by KQED Quest. From what I can gather, they are not planning to build the awesome maglev train used in Shanghai. It looks like conventional electric rail, with a supply wire hung above the track. The video also shows more conventional trains running on the same tracks. In all, pretty lame.

The Shanghai Maglev technology (developed by Transrapid) is superior in every way. The track is typically slightly elevated, preventing wildlife from having their habitats cut in half. It needs no structure above the track, making it much more attractive. It’s much quieter, because there is no mechanical contact between the train and track. For this reason, the ride is also smoother, and faster (430 km/h vs. 354 km/h for the proposed system; the maximum design speed is 550 km/h).

Japan also has a maglev train, but their approach is different. The trains must roll on wheels until reaching a critical speed, and require more power. It also requires superconducting electromagnets.

The California project is expected to require $42 billion and take 12 years to implement. It’s a pity it won’t be state-of-the-art when complete.

Electric Motorcycle Project

I’ve decided to convert my old motorcycle to electric. This involves ripping out all the gas-related parts, and putting in an electric motor, batteries, and associated control electronics to make it all work. I’ve started a new blog for the project, go check it out:

Electric Motorcycle Conversion Project

The cure for “meh”

Updated 2009-10-22: I added a step after a great new “I Love xkcd” video was posted.

Follow these steps (even if you seen some of this before):

1. Watch the wonderful Discovery TV Commercial.
2. Read XKCD (and read its whole archive).
3. Watch this:

4. Watch this:

   I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

   
   



5. Watch this:

   
   Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

   Not all Americans suck.

Will Smith is a Scientologist? Shit.

I can’t believe it. Another actor I enjoy watching has stepped off the deep end of some nutjob crackpot religion. Will Smith joins Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson in this sad trend. I was going to go see Hancock, now I think I won’t.

The article says he hasn’t admitted to actually joining the church, so maybe I can rationalize it that way.

Feh.

Update: Maybe he’s okay after all, claiming not to be a Scientologist.

Image Upload Utility Idea

A quick entry to record an idea I had for a useful utility. A droplet application that takes the images dropped, makes a set of thumbnails, and uploads them and the originals to a server, and then puts markup on the clipboard.

It could be enhanced to pop up menus for frequent destinations, and image sizes. It could even pop up a crop editor, which could provide constraints for common aspect ratios/sizes/widths/heights. These could be set by destination.

University Satellite Delfi-C3 Successfully Deployed

The Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands successfully launched and deployed a 3U Cubesat called “Delfi-C3”, into polar low-Earth orbit. Because it carries no batteries, it only operates when not in eclipse. We on the West coast of the United States, and those in Alaska, were the first ones able to hear it. I was unable to hear it on its first pass at around 0455 UTC (2155 local), but they encouraged me to try again for the second pass, at around 0631 UTC. I finally heard it at 06:39:08 (give or take a second or two). (Pictures of the satellite.)

I had almost given up, when I remembered to try the backup frequency, and voilà! There it was! I was able record audio (received by an ICOM IC-R1500 connected to my Mac via USB, recording into QuickTime Player at the device-native format) and send it to the team.

…

And I just got off the phone with Wouter! He called me to thank me for sending them the audio file, and to tell me that it was, in fact, Delfi-C3, and that I am the first person to hear it. He says this confirms that it is operating in Science mode on the backup frequency. Sadly, it appears that my recording was too noisy to allow any telemetry to be decoded.

What a rush! I’m so thrilled for those guys, and thrilled to have suddenly been a real, if small, part. Wouter tells me they are all very happy to hear that their satellite is alive and well.

Congrats, guys!

iPhotos of Saturn

I snapped these by holding my iPhone, with its crummy, scratched-up lens, up to the eyepiece of my little telescope. The cold wind was shaking the scope and making me shiver. The actual view was much better, but I was surprised enough to get these that I decided to post them here.

I tried with my digicam, but gave up too soon; I couldn’t get it to show up at all.

My first amateur radio contact ever, with Astronaut Dan Tani aboard the International Space Station

On February 6, 2008, I had the great honor of making radio contact with Astronaut Daniel Tani, as he flew overhead aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This was one of the most exciting and awesomely cool things I’ve ever gotten to do. It was my first voice ham radio contact ever, and after a great deal of help from the tireless Kenneth Ransom, Dan and I finally managed to schedule a time to chat.

Today I received permission to post publicly a photo, taken by Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, of Dan while he was talking to me:

Almost as cool was the email I got from space when I was first trying to schedule the contact with Dan. It was a bit of a challenge, because you need line-of-sight in order to establish radio communications at the frequencies we were using (144 MHz, also known as 2 meter). This means that the contact has to occur during a pass. Since ISS orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, and the Earth itself rotates during that time, it’s only overhead during certain times of the day, and those times are different every day.

Add to that the fact that Dan is an incredibly busy person up there, so we had to find a time when he was both off duty and ISS was in sight. Around 1600 PST on February 6th that finally happened (I think Dan stayed up late to make it happen, and for that I thank him). We were able to chat for about 9 minutes, and it was great fun.

Thanks again to Kenneth Ransom, Yuri Malenchenko, and Mike Kobb (who assisted on the ground as my antenna tracker).

I had the privilege to go to Florida to see Dan’s first shuttle mission launch (STS-108). I lack the words to express my extreme appreciation of Dan, for making that possible, and for taking the time to do this with me. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Dan!

Using dd to write floppy disks on Mac OS X

At work I had the need to write a bootloader directly to a floppy disk. In-house we use dd on Linux to do this, but it was giving me trouble on Mac OS X. I finally figured it out. Here are the instructions I wrote up:

These steps work on Mac OS X 10.5.2. They probably work on earlier versions, too, but I haven’t tried it. This works with a TEAC FD-05PUW USB floppy drive that I picked up at Fry’s (sometime in 2008-02).

When you plug in the USB floppy and insert a disk, the Finder will mount it on the desktop (if it’s formatted) and create a couple of entries in /dev like /dev/disk1 and /dev/rdisk1 (the actual numbers corresponding to the drive will depend on how many other drives are attached. Be sure you’re working with the right one!)

You would then be tempted to execute something like the following. Unfortunately, you’ll get an error:

If you try using the raw device instead, you get a different error:

In this case, the file is actually 195936 bytes in length. I’m not sure why it seems to write some of the bytes (I’m not sure it actually even wrote that many).

Using the buffered device (/dev/disk1 is correct, but it’s busy because it’s mounted by the Finder. If you simply unmount it via the Finder, then all the entries in /dev for the device go away, and you’re unable to tell dd what to do. The solution is to unmount the disk using diskutil unmount, which leaves the /dev/disk1 entry in place, and then you can use dd correctly:

After that, I think it’s safe to just unplug the USB drive, but I’d feel better if I knew how to completely unmount the device before doing so. In any case, the OS didn’t complain like it would if a volume were mounted and online.

DNS Standards to Support Wide-Area Bonjour

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to move my DNS services to third-party DNS providers, like DreamHost, FreeDNS, and DynDNS. So far, I haven’t found a provider that accepts arbitrary data for the various resource records’ values (including spaces), severely limiting how nice wide-area Bonjour can be. I’ve been able to advertise services, they just look bad.

For more information, consult these pages on Bonjour and Wide-Area Bonjour.

Here I’ve tried to collect relevant parts of DNS-related RFCs to provide evidence that DNS service providers should support arbitrary characters in their DNS records.

Summary: there’s no reason a DNS provider should restrict the content of any resource record name or data field, except for its length. Those providers who use HTML forms for configuration can also make it easy to use UTF-8 text by just accepting what’s entered into each form field, and handle conversion to BIND configurations themselves (if that’s their implementation).

Uneffingbelievable. San Carlos is suing a man for having no trash

I couldn’t believe the article when I read it. I live here. I wish I lived in a house so I could do the same thing (I’m in an apartment ‘till my house is built).

Uh…Windoze in Space?

I’ve been watching a lot of NASA TV lately (always do when the Shuttle visits the ISS, although probably more this time than previously).

One thing I’ve noticed a lot more this trip than any other: lots of stupid issues with Microsoft Windoze software. Problems getting email, problems getting printers to print, etc.

Now, I’ve seen lots of Macs in use at NASA. You can see them in Mission Control on NASA TV. You can see them in photos of the various labs all over the country.

Why aren’t they using Macs in orbit? I know Macs have their share of problems, too, but seriously. Email, word documents, printing…this kind of stuff works much, much better on a Mac than it does on Windows (if you don’t think so, you’re a fucking moron and should be sterilized to keep you from reproducing). Plus, you get the benefits of a virus-free OS. I know if I were in space, that’s what I’d want.

Update: Time Machine

Feh. Time Machine sucks. After a painful setup process, I left Time Machine to do its thing. I just saw it mount a disk image that it created on the remote volume, so I know that all the speculation about enhancements to AFP (and possibly HFS+) are bunk. If it’s going to create disk images, it could do the same thing on any kind of file server. There’s no excuse for the AEBS not working.

That, I’m sick, and it’s pretty clear Cal’s going to lose to ASU. Fuck, what a shitty weekend.

Update: Feh. Time Machine does not estimate time remaining nor current data rate. I seem to be getting about 28.92 GB/h (over wired gigabit Ethernet).

Update: Time Machine really consumes CPU cycles. When the MBP is idle, the fans are not audible. Since Time Machine has been backing up, they’ve been continuously audible. The average data transfer rate has dropped to 16.9 GB/h. I have spent a few minutes of the last two hours watching streaming video, and doing a little bit of other work, but mostly it has been running undisturbed. mdimport is also running, not sure why.

Update: The combination of Time Machine and Leopard on the client and server make for some seriously fast network volume mounting! Whereas SuperDuper! takes ages to mount a network volume served by a Buffalo GigaStation NAS (first the volume, then the disk image on that volume, a process that takes several minutes), Time Machine and Leopard get the disk image mounted in seconds. After clicking on the Time Machine icon in the Dock, most of the time spent waiting for time machine to actually engage (with a tip of the hat to Picard) is waiting on the server’s drives to wake up.

I have yet to see how well the whole system does when I sleep the MBP, go to another network, and wake it up again. Maybe I’ll try that this afternoon. For sure I’ll try it when I go to work tomorrow.

One other note: When engaging Time Machine, the network volume does not mount; only the disk image mounts. Not sure how they pull that off, but maybe that’s one of the enhancements to AFP in Leopard. Hardware Growler reports both the server volume and the disk image mounting; just the network volume is hidden from the desktop (even though I have configured things to show mounted volumes).

When Time Machine begins an automatic backup, it does not display the floating progress window. Opening the System Preferencs panel shows a progress bar, though.

Update: Time Machine doesn’t deal well with lost servers. I engaged Time Machine, let it mount the backup volume (disk image), closed the lid on the MBP (it took a minute or more to sleep, but this is not new behavior in Leopard for me), and went to a breakfast place with free WiFi. There, I opened the MBP, saw the Time Machine screen still up, waited for Hardware Growler to indicate that the system had self-assigned an IP address, and then started moving through time. After a bit of back-and-forth, Time Machine appeared to hang (although the starry background animation continued). After several minutes (5 - 10), I decided to force-quit Time Machine. Pressing Command-Option-Escape had no effect, and after pressing it several times, Time Machine suddenly disengaged and there was a server-disconnect dialog on the screen.

Also, during the time that Time Machine was up, a dialog was presented asking if I wanted to join one of a couple of networks, including the free one at at the breakfast place. However, I was unable to click on any of the networks to select them, and hence, was unable to join a network (the window could move, and the “Other…” and “Cancel” buttons worked fine). Feh. Feh.

Time Machine, AirPort Extreme and ZFS

First, the good news. It’s not new news, but it’s still good. Leopard shipped with a read-only implementation of ZFS. To get a beta version of a full read/write ZFS, you need to have an Apple Developer Connection account (the free Online membership is enough). Look in the “Mac OS X” section of the downloads area. I’m using v1.1.

Now, the bad news: you can’t use ZFS storage pools as your Time Machine Backup drive. Sigh. I’m not surprised, but I had hoped. Eventually, it makes sense for Apple to move to ZFS as the default file system, but who knows how long that will take? For the time being, HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) file systems store meta data about files that other file systems can’t handle natively. I suspect this is true of ZFS, too. You can hack your way around these limitations, by simply creating additional files on the system and storing the meta data in there, but that’s ugly. My hope is that Apple will enhance ZFS to support HFS+’s metadata natively, and that will be that.

Time Machine has other limitations, too. I’m not too upset that I can’t yet use ZFS for my backups (so long as Apple fixes this in the next six months or so), but I am upset that I can’t use the AirPort Extreme Base Station as a backup file server. It was said, in the months leading up to the release of Leopard, that Time Machine could back up to the AEBS. In fact, it’s the reason I bought the AEBS: I couldn’t be sure that a non-Apple file server would properly support AFP, and I had it on good authority (Apple) that the AEBS would do the trick.

I can speculate as to why: other Mac backup solutions, like SuperDuper!, create a disk image on the target volume to work around limitations in AFP. Although I’m not certain of the precise limitations, they have to do with file ownership and permissions (for example, a user ID on one system is not necessarily the same as a user ID on another system). From what I understand, Apple has enhanced AFP in Leopard (and by one account, HFS+, or at least the filesystem API) to accommodate the needs of backup software.

So, at the last minute, Apple tells us that you can’t use an AEBS as a backup server, but you can use Personal File Sharing on another machine running 10.5. I have an older PowerBook sitting around, so I decided to buy a FireWire external drive and use that as my backup solution (for now).

I bought a Buffalo DriveStation Duo. I chose it because Fry’s had it (I could get it right now) and I was able to verify that it can operate in JBOD mode. I wanted to try using ZFS first, and if that didn’t work, the DriveStation supports mirroring.

I followed the directions in the Apple ZFS Readme’s Getting Started section. As described in the readme, it was necessary to repartition the drives to use the GUID Partition Table. I had a bit of difficulty with this. The volumes mounted when I first connected it, and I used the Finder to unmount them. I tried to make a ZFS pool before repartitioning, which ZFS did without complaint, and which subsequently caused a new volume to mount. I unmounted that, but attempts to repartition resulted in “resource busy” errors (the other drive repartitioned fine). Disconnecting the entire DriveStation and reconnecting it seemed to fix it.

I built a nice ZFS mirrored pool out of the two drives, shared it via Personal File Sharing, and mounted it on the other Mac. Time Machine refused to recognize it as an acceptable backup volume. I briefly considered making a disk image on the drive and trying that, but decided I disliked that solution enough that I didn’t want to use it even if it worked.

Attempting to use the ZFS pool on the local machine also doesn’t work.

The next step was to reconfigure the DriveStation as a mirrored array, with an HFS+ volume format. I tried to do this with the RAIDSetting application from Buffalo, but it failed with complaints about the “The old volume lable [sic] is not valid. Delete volume label by using disk utility.” After half a dozen attempts to repartition the drives as PeeCee drives, I still can’t get RAIDSetting to function without complaint. The front of the DriveStation shows a green #2 and a yellow flashing #1.

Also note: the RAIDSetting app from Buffalo only works on PowerPC Macs. Basically, the Buffalo DriveStation Mac support is crap, and I would recommend strongly against using it (if you want to use their RAID support).

I finally decided to just play through the pain, and ignore the error. It seems to set the drive into the right mode, so we’ll see what happens.

As I write this, I’ve mounted the new, shared HFS+ Backup volume on my MacBook Pro, and Time Machine is “Preparing.” I’ll try to post an update if it works.

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) First Impressions

Well, I’ve had 10.5 installed for about 24 hours now, and so far, it’s not really worth the money. In day-to-day use (as a developer), none of the new features has yet to significantly impact my life. Sure, windows look a little different, and settings have been rearranged, but so far I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. For reference, I chose to “Upgrade” my system, rather than “Archive & Install.”

A few things are better. The variety of user interface styles has been reduced, and brushed metal is gone, replaced by a nicer-looking gradient (the Menu Bar looks a bit too much like a title bar, and I thought something was wrong with it until I realized it was transparent, and I was seeing the stars in the default desktop image through it).

Xcode has at least one improvement: it shows error messages in the editor window, directly underneath the offending line. It also complains a lot more about implicit conversions from double to float, but I can fix that.

One thing I’m not sure I like is that many standard icons have changed. Some have changed dramatically, like the System Preferences icon (it now looks like the iPhone’s Settings icon), and others have just been modified. These kinds of changes leave insecure users (like my parents) feeling disoriented, and I think they’re generally a bad idea.

One big fix: Apple Mail no longer seems to break long URIs! It has taken three or four major releases (an unacceptable delay to fix a minor, but very annoying, bug), but non-Mail clients can finally use long URIs sent by Mail without having to hand-edit them (Mail used to break them in a way that destroyed the URI for non-Mail clients).

Hardware Growler still works. My ARM development tool chain still seems to work. The Keyspan USA-19HS USB-to-serial adapter still seems to work. The FTDI USB-to-serial IC on the Sparkfun EM406 SiRF III Evaluation Board still works. ZTerm still works!

In the next post, I’ll talk about my experiences with Time Machine, the AirPort Extreme Base Station and ZFS.

People Should Stop Whining About Cell Phones

A recent story about the U.K. possibly allowing cell phone use on airplanes quotes someone saying, “It would drive me absolutely mad if the person next to me was using his phone.”

Now, some people speak more loudly when they’re on the phone than when they’re talking to someone next to them. Those people need to learn to quiet down.

Putting that aside, the only reason to be annoyed by a cell phone conversation is because you can’t eavesdrop on the whole thing. You only get half of it. You know what? Tough shit. You’re not a part of the conversation. Why don’t you concentrate on your own business?

As far as the safety concerns with cell phones, I’m unconvinced. I’m both a pilot and an electrical engineer. I’d be surprised if a cell phone caused any real interference with flight-critical systems. Certainly everyone’s heard the DSSS noise leak into amplified audio channels, and that could conceivably make its way into the pilots’ comm radios, but I doubt it would actually prevent communication. In any case, it should be generally allowed, and each pilot should decide on a case-by-case basis when to prohibit their use.

If ON Air’s system really can allow cell phones to work without interference with aircraft systems, then by all means, allow it!

Don’t forget, without special help, most cell phones won’t work at typical flight altitudes.

I’m Buying a Townhouse

Yesterday I took the first step toward buying a townhouse: I wrote a check for nearly $17,000. This check reserves my specific townhouse unit. On Monday I go in and sign the sales contract, a 1" thick document. I’m very nervous about the whole thing.

The townhouse (legally, a condo) is a KB Homes Cielo at Terra Serena Plan 5. As of this writing, the base price is $562,000, plus options, with a $50,000 incentive, which I can use to pay for a lower interest rate, buy options, or pay closing costs (I can’t use it to reduce the sale price below the base price, however).

I’ve posted some pictures of the framing work.

It’ll be done sometime around November, but move-in is scheduled for May. They (the sales office) say this is because the City of Milpitas does not allow move-in when adjacent buildings are still under construction. After spending some time with a Milpitas building inspector yesterday, I think this is true, but he was difficult to understand (I wasn’t sure he exactly understood my questions, either). He said that landscaping work is acceptable, as there’s little likelihood of falling objects and no deep excavation into which one might fall.

I’m going to the KB Design Studio on Saturday morning to pick up my options price list, and have a look around. Apparently July 27 is the framing choices cutoff date, meaning that certain options must be selected by then (however, Leona? at the Design Studio said they often give a few extra days to a recent buyer). These types of options include the type of stairway bannister rail, whether or not you want arched doorways, the built-in appliances you want (like a trash compacter) and most importantly, additional outlets and other electrical options. I’m most concerned about the latter, and hope that I can make my choices known in time. I have an official appointment on Tuseday the 28th, so we’ll see then.

Why Buy?

There are a lot of things going on in the nationwide housing market today that would indicate one should wait before buying right now. Record foreclosures as subprime borrowers (borrowers whose credit worthiness is below average) default on loans, or forced sales because borrows can’t make their rising mortgage payments, suggest that more homes will be on the market and that prices will fall. In fact, they’re falling in many parts of the country.

But the San Francisco Bay Area is a special place, and it seems that, while prices are holding steady, or even falling a little, declines are not nearly as dramatic here as in the rest of the country.

I got a new job in San Jose. I hate my current crappy one-bedroom apartment in San Carlos, and didn’t want to commute to work. So I started looking around the area (primarily Santa Clara) and found that rents for a nice, new (or nearly new) two-bedroom apartment ranged from $2200 to $2400 (including the ever-so-enraging pet rent they all seem to be charging now). After running some numbers, it became clear that a $500,000 to $600,000 property would end up costing me only a few hundred dollars more, including the property tax, HOA fees and insurance. It seemed clear that I should buy.

My friend Bob, who’s been in the market for over a year, showed me some manufactured properties (like the KB Homes stuff—there are many others). I’m drawn to the fact that they’re band-new, and generally have nice interior layouts (although, for some unfathomable reason, they rarely lend themselves to large entertainment systems with a couch opposite—there’s always a fireplace, or stairway, or door, or dining room preventing optimal viewing).

More importantly, KB Homes is offering very compelling financing incentives, and thanks to that I’m abel to get into a nice, if not perfect, home with very little money out of pocket. This lets me keep my stock portfolio in the market, making me much more comfortable about the whole thing. If I lose my job (and the stock market doesn’t tank), I can live comfortable for a year, longer if I scrimp. Because of the higher interest rate I’d have to pay going with a different lender, I’d have to put more money down up front, and that leaves my portfolio uncomfortably small. I plan to move in five years, but can stay longer if forced to. All in all, I think it’s the right move to make.

iPhone Success!

After help my my good friend on the iTunes team, we determined that my account was still registered as a corporate account, rather than an individual account (iPhone only works with individual accounts). This was the result of me being a customer for more than 10 years.

I called AT&T back, and the CSA very quickly took some action to somehow finalize the conversion of my account from business to individual. Apparently, this final step had not been taken by the previous CSA. As soon as she did that, I was able to activate my phone, and my number ported within the hour (probably faster; I didn’t check it until an hour later).

Thanks to everyone (especially Mike W.!) who helped set this mess straight.

So far, I’m blown away by the phone, but there are some peculiarities. First and foremost, I wish all list views could have entries deleted by gesturing, rather than having to enter edit mode. Perhaps Apple will refine this sort of thing soon.

More to come, I’m sure…

iPhone Activation Woes

Feh. I’m sitting here with my beautiful new iPhone, trying to go through the activation process. iTunes keeps reporting to me how sorry it is that AT&T has determined that my current account cannot be used with the iPhone. It provided me a number to call, or offered me the option of creating a new account, which is really not what I want to do. I’m sitting on hold with a very kind Canadian customer service agent for AT&T.

Apparently I am on a promotional rate plan that is incompatible with the notion that all existing Cingular/AT&T customers can upgrade to iPhone. Okay, fine, after several attempts, he was able to switch me to a non-promotional plan.

Then, it turns out, my account is a business account. This is very strange. I’ve never asked for a business account. I’ve had my Cingular (the new AT&T) service since it was called Pacific Bell Mobile Services. Not once have I ever been told I had a business account. I’ve always used the “personal” account avenues when contacting Cingular (personal account contact numbers, the personal account link on the web page, etc.)

So, the poor Canadian CSA is waiting on hold with the AT&T business account division to convert my business account into a personal account, which should then allow me to activate my iPhone. Apparently the benefit of having a business account is that only a poorly staffed call center can handle your specific issues.

Sigh.

Wow. Shit is going overboard

Ugh. What incredible bullshit. A high school senior was arrested for something he wrote for class. All the conservative, uptight fucks in this country need to go jump in the ocean and leave.

Boo. SpaceX Scrubbed for the Day

As of 1712, they are beginning scrub procedures. This means they will not launch today, and it sounds like they may not launch for 24-48 hours. They will begin de-tanking (removing fuel) shortly. Sigh.

Damn. SpaceX Abort

Demo Flight 2 has been aborted with less than 3 minutes to go. The rocket was secured (a pretty exciting process to watch and listen to), and the countdown stopped at T -00:01:02. I’m still waiting to see what the outcome is.

They’re just now saying they’re going to spend the next 10 minutes to assess why they aborted.

SpaceX Launch in 5 Minutes

This is very exciting. I’m watching the webcast right now. I hope it goes well…

New AirPort Extreme base station

Well, I just finished installing my new AirPort Extreme base station. This is the one shaped like a Mac mini. The new software is very nice. They added the client signal strength graph feature, something that used to be there, then wasn’t, and is now back again. They’ve also added link status lights to the ports on the back (although no indication of connection speed).

There were a couple of things that caused a fair amount of difficulty. One was that the new admin software has been renamed. The old one was called “AirPort Admin Utility.” Thew new one is “AirPort Utility.” I kept trying to upgrade my software before I realized the difference. When I was on the phone with Apple tech support, the agent told me this was a frequent source of confusion.

The other problem I had was that Comcast’s cable modem seems to not assign a DHCP address to a new MAC address without being rebooted (this is what initiated the aforementioned support call). The AEBS behaves as if it can’t get a DHCP address from Comcast, which is exactly what’s wrong. The fix (in my case) is to unplug the cable modem for 30 seconds or so, and plug it back in. (Note: the Apple support agent wanted me to unplug it for 5 minutes, but I told him I’d try 30 seconds first—it worked).

I have yet to hook up a drive, the whole reason for getting it in the first place. I want to find out if they’ve improved AFP enough to where applications like SuperDuper! can back up over the network without needing to create a disk image first.

Now, to get an MBP with 802.11n networking in it…

Carbon Application Development in D

D is a very nice programming language by Walter Bright. Carbon is a very nice API for developing Mac OS X applications. I wanted to develop Carbon applications in D, so I created an open source project to let others do the same. Please check out Darbon, and let me know what you think!

This is what I want next: iPhone

This is the best phone ever, and I want one. The Apple iPhone.

Sandel SN3308 and Garmin GNS530 Config Issues

I’ve had a Sandel SN3308 EHSI and a Garmin GNS530 panel mount moving-map GPS in my plane for over 5 years. They’ve never quite worked right, thanks to the botched installation by Eagle’s Nest Aviation in Ukiah, CA. The most recent problem: the Sandel/Garmin wouldn’t stay in GPS mode; they would automatically switch back to VLOC.

I spent over $3000 having a different outfit rewire the panel, and it finally seemed to all be done right. However, there was one small, show-stopping issue: if you selected the GPS from the SN3308 (or from the GNS530), after two seconds it would go back to VLOC. It didn’t matter if it was tuned to an ILS or not (if it were tuned to an ILS, you wouldn’t get it out of VLOC mode at all, presuming the GNS530 was configured to auto-switch to the VLOC if an ILS is tuned in).

After getting Sandel on the phone, we went through some configuration checks. Turned out the GNS530 wasn’t properly configured. I wish I could remember specifically what it was, but it’s several pages into the configuration (which you get to by holding down the Enter key while powering up).

There’s an LOC / GS / ARINC page. On it is a setting that can be something like ARINC 429, or several other things. It should be ARINC 429 Graphics w/Int (or something like that).

If I get a chance to look at the plane again, I’ll get more details and update this post.

When Do My Favorite Shows Start?

(Originally published: 2006-05-30 19:57:02; I update this periodically, and I’ve decided to repost it as current each time.)

This is a nearly-complete list of the shows I watch. Some of these are very good, others I’m tring out to see if they’ll last. A couple aren’t yet on here, because I’m freakin’ tired of making this list (Standoff and Smith).

It’s incredibly difficult to find out when the new season of a show starts. I don’t know why the official sites don’t have it in big letters at the top of the main page. After far too much Googling, I found a list that has some info. I’ve copied the relevant entries here (who the fuck cares about all those shitty reality shows?):

The highlighted shows below I consider to be outstanding.

4400, The, Season 3 (“one hour special presentation”)	2006 06 03 2100
Dead Zone, The, Season 5	2006 06 18 2200
Stargate: Atlantis, Season 3	2006 07 14 2100
Stargate: SG-1, Season 10	2006 07 14 2000
Eureka, Season 1	2006 07 18 2100
Prison Break, Season 2	2006 08 21 2000
Bones, Season 2	2006 08 30 2000
Family Guy, Season 5	2006 09 10 2100
House, Season 3	2006 09 12 2100
Heroes, Season 1	2006 09 21 2200
Grey’s Anatomy, Season 3	2006 09 21 2100
Six Degrees, Season 1	2006 09 21 2200
Ghost Whisperer, The, Season 2	2006 09 22 2000
Numb3rs, Season 3	2006 09 22 2200
Veronica Mars, Season 3	2006 10 03 2100
South Park, Season 10	2006 10 04 2200
BattleStar Galactica, Season 3	2006 10 06 2100
Lost, Season 3	2006 10 11 2100 (projected)
O.C., The (only ‘cause my friend is in it), Season 3	2006 11 02 2100 (projected)
24, Season 6 (“one hour special presentation”)	2007 01
Psych, Season 2 (1.5?)	2007 01
Kyle XY, Season 2	2007

Great New Show: “Heroes”

I just watched the pilot of “Heroes.” I’d venture to say it’s one of the best new shows to come along in a long while. I’d put it somewhere behind “Battlestar Galactica” and “Eureka.” It’s very well written and acted, elegantly designed, beautifully shot, and it sucks you in within the first ten minutes. It has a lot of elements of “Six Degrees” (another show I’m keeping my eye on), which I’m finding very appealing.

I believe it normally airs on NBC Mondays, at 9 pm. They are repeating the pilot tomorrow (Tuesday 9/25/2006) at 8 pm (7 central). Watch it, decide for yourselves.

Followup: MacBook Pro Kernel Panic with External Monitor

Some time ago I wrote about how my shiny new MacBookPro crashes whenever I plug in an external monitor. Turns out, Apple displays don’t make it crash.

I wrote a bug about it, and Apple responded well. They gave me a tool to use to record information about the monitor.

Interestingly, I no longer have privileges to read or append to the bug I originated, and neither does my friend at Apple. I finally wrote a new bug referencing the old one to try to get some info, but it’s been four months (and a few updates) without a fix.

Also, I’m on my third MBP since then, and it still crashes, so I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a hardware defect (but it could be a hardware design flaw).

A Season is 22 Fucking Episodes

NBC (USA, Sci Fi), your so-called “seasons” of The Dead Zone, The 4400 and Stargate (both series) are a joke. 10 episodes? 12? 13? Cheap bastards. Those are good shows, they deserve to run for a consecutive 22 (or more) episodes.

Advertising and ratings suck.

You know what else sucks? “Pro” wrestling. That crap doesn’t belong on the Sci Fi channel. Put it on the channels that the trailer trash who watch that shit watch. Fox, or QVC. Fuck you.

Tesla Motors

I’ve added a clickable ad for the Tesla Motors electric sports car. I’m not getting any money for doing this, but I believe very strongly in this thing. It’s incredibly fast, beautiful and has excellent range for a high-performance electric car. If I had $85,000 to spend, I’d get one in a heartbeat.

Leopard

There are some cool things coming in Leopard (Apple’s newest version of OS X). I recommend you take the time to watch the Keynote Address. As usual, there’s a bunch of eye candy/fluff in Leopard, and it’ll be interesting to see if they fix any of the numerous bugs that have been around since day one.

Mail

So, they’ve added a bunch of wizzy stuff in Mail that I could care less about. The ToDo thing might be cool; we’ll see. I really want to know if they fixed the URL-splitting bug. My insider friend tells me that bug is fixed in Leopard, but it wasn’t mentioned in the keynote (had it been, it would’ve received the loudest applause).

More

There’s tons more cool shit. Watch the video.

Watermelon…surprise

Between the packing, and the commuting to work, and the general funk, I’ve been ignoring the watermelon halves in the kitchen. I go in there maybe once a day, and otherwise the door is always closed to keep the noisy-ass refrigerator out of mind.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing the little civilization growing on the watermelon the last couple of days, but was stunned to see how it has evolved in the last 24 (48?) hours. The grey-green puddle of toxic sludge is the most fascinating. At least now I know what fermented watermelon smells like…

Packing weeeee

Not. I’ve gotten this far. It’s almost all books, so far. 20 boxes of books. 20 very heavy boxes…

Muir Hiking, Napa Wine Tasting, Sonoma Food Eating

Yesterday I went hiking with some Cal EECS peeps in Muir woods. Been there before, but it’s always nice (except for the part where I bit my tongue).

After that, some of us went to Benziger winery and took the tour, then tasted wine. You’re allowed to try tiny samples of two wines from a list. Then you coax them into giving you one or two more tries. Then you wait ‘till they walk away and ask the next helper for a recommendation. They’ll usually give you two or three things to try, also. And even if the tour guides tells you that the vineyard owner’s personal stash isn’t available for tasting, you can probably get one of them to let you try that, too. Wine tasting can be fun. I’m sure everyone was very impressed with my record-breaking 8 trials.

Benziger recommended a restaurant called Doce Lunas. Delicious food, and the sweetest, cutest server (Jolene) one could ask for. They offer family-style (combo) and a la carte versions of most of their entrees, and their Sticky Toffee Pudding dessert was amazing (it needed more ice cream, but everything does).

All in all, Saturday was decently salvaged, despite having imploded the day before.

I Graduated!

As of today, I have officially graduated from UC Berkeley, with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It only took me 19 years to finish.

Pictures

Fun Fact about Air

If you put a cylinder around the Eiffel Tower just big enough to enclose it, the air inside the cylinder (from the surface to the “edge” of the atmosphere) will weigh more than the tower.

A Thief Stole Our Secrity Cameras

Apparently this loser

stole two security cameras from our garage. The irony is not lost on me.

Nevertheless, if you do happen to know anything about this guy, please contact either me or the Berkeley PD: 510-981-5900. Thanks!

Neat Scrolling Trackpad Tricks

So, if you use the index fingers on opposite hands, and put them far apart on the trackpad, you can hold one still and move the other and watch things scroll (sort of). Sometimes it helps to make initial contact with the trackpad simultaneously. If you move one up and the other down, they can cancel each other out.

Cinema Display Seems to Work

I just tried plugging in my 22” ADC Cinema Display (via an Apple DVI-to-ADC adapter), and it did not cause a kernel panic as did the Princeton LCD19D monitor. Hopefully, the school projectors will work, too, or I’m screwed.

Lest You Think I Have No Sense of Humor About New Technology

In my head, Jason is suggesting not buying one of the new machines because he read about my problems, so maybe this is still bitter and annoyed:

However, I don’t think that Apple should’ve released these new PowerBooks without more testing. I don’t think I’ve done anything particularly esoteric so far, yet my experience has been less than stellar.

Don’t get me wrong, when the new MacBook Pro works, it works very well. But for the amount of money I’ve spent, and the sacrifices I’ve been willing to make (e.g, not being able to run “mixed-mode” apps, like in the 68k-to-PowerPC transition days), I feel like things should work better.

4 Cycles, 5446 mAh Capacity

After a “proper” recharge-full discharge cycle, my MacBook Pro battery is reporting 5446 mAh capacity.

MacBook Pro Kernel Panic with External Monitor

Followup

Wow. I keep finding more things wrong with this Intel machine. Now, if I plug in an external monitor (something I had not yet tried at home with my Cinema Display, but which I just tried now with a Princeton LCD19D flat panel display), I get a kernel panic. If an external monitor is plugged in when I reboot, I get a kernel panic. I’ve sent the crash report to Apple, but who knows if anyone will ever see it? Meanwhile, I’m now stuck without being able to use my big screens.

Here’s the crash reporter info and the unfriendly message I sent along with it to Apple (I have no tolerance for crap like this):

MacBook Pro Sleep Seems to Have Issues

I decided to run my battery down to do the calibration as suggested in the MBP manual. I got one warning about imminent sleep, and dismissed it. As I was copying a folder, the Mac went into forced sleep right in the middle of playing the “copy complete” sound. It repeated this sound a half-dozen times before the system finally went to sleep.

It darkened the screen, the little white LED came up dully (as it does when the screen’s asleep), and then eventually it went into full sleep mode.

I tapped the shift key, to make sure it was really asleep. On my PowerPC AlPB, this is ignored. On this machine, it woke right up. I used it for a few more minutes, and then it completely shut down losing anything I had not yet saved. This was pretty bad.

I’ve now launched XBattery and plugged it in. Let’s see if it gives us any more juice. Currently: 5419 mAh capacity, 3 cycles.

Busted the Cat!

My cat knows better than to walk on my desk. But, because the office is so messy, that’s her preferred way to get to the window sill.

So, I’m sitting in the living room, and she comes over, so I pick her up and turn her upside down, as I’m prone to do. I notice a little piece of paper stuck to her belly. It’s the “activate this card” sticker from a credit card I just got, which I had left smack dab in the middle of my desk.

Busted!

More Migration Difficulties

I reinstalled the OS (via “Erase and Install”, removing unneeded languages, printer drivers and apps), completed the Setup Assistant without migrating. Then I allowed Software Update to run, updating to 10.4.6, and updating 9 other apps. Finally I ran Migration Assistant again, and it ran into the same problem: Apparently I have more than 60 million gigabytes of data in my home directory.

I’m currently on the phone with Apple support, but I am not hopeful that they’ll resolve this issue (update: nope).

I tried before to remove all of my movies & images, but I had left music and sources from work in there. Maybe I should remove all four of those and try again. Here goes…

My New MacBook Pro

Yesterday I picked up a shiny new 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro. The packaging was expectedly beautiful, and the thing came up immediately after I powered it on. Nicely, Apple didn’t insist that I charge it overnight before use; instead, they said to do the charge calibration steps sometime in the first week. It was 3/4 full when I got it. The beauty ended there…

I made sure it was plugged in and charging, and got started. I’d head good things about the Migration Assistant, so I opted to let Tiger migrate everything from my old PowerBook to the new one (via the Setup Assistant). I put the old one into FireWire Target Disk mode, and let it rip. After a few minutes, it had determined that there was in excess of 60,000,000 GB (yes, sixty million gigabytes) of data in my home directory to be transferred over. Unfortunately, I opted for the 100 GB hard disk (thinking that would’ve been enough), and so all the stuff on my old (80 GB) drive wouldn’t fit.

Note the computed sizes of my home directory data to move (sorry about the utterly crappy photograph). Click for a larger image.

The other unconscionable thing the Setup Assistant did was go to sleep before finishing (mind you, it was plugged in and powered). I tried again later with the Migration Assistant directly, and it had basically the same problem. I’m guessing there’s either a 32-bit int where there should be a 64-bit int, or someone forgot to swap bytes (I hate little endian, and this is one of the biggest reasons i hate Intel architecture, but since the old Mac is mounted as a drive on the new system, I doubt this is the real problem).

I’m now reformatting, reinstalling, and trying again. I’ll post again after that’s over.

Engrish? Wow.

My friend was looking at craigslist posts for a place to live. She came across this gem:

NiCe HoMe RooM - 4 - ReNt - AnD YoU CaN((( SaVe $$$ ReNt is NeG))) (milpitas)

Reply to: ZaMBaKusa@aol.com
Date: 2006-04-09, 10:49PM PDT

@@M 4 _ Rent

PLEASE read the whole post.
& if it sounds good to you, please reply to the Questions below.

I lil give for the good roommate for good deals.
And good For Hess levying to help to that person long is ho is good and deserve for good living.

And A+plus good dependable friendship Maybe even comes to be som day better than may be even three own family.
I do have good hart And I do like helping to pupil.
The way I have bin brood up.
And I have be tech from my own loving family.

NICE ROOM FOR RENT FOR (MALE ONLY) rite (female may be so to)
CARPETED
SIZE OF 11X12
BIG CLOSET
(bedroom has a full bathroom inside the room) all moused p/exit way to coming to the house
$ — WITH UTILITIES INCLUDED (neg.)
$ —SECURITY DEPOSIT (neg.)
CABLE HOOK UP IF YOU LIKE AND WAN WE A GRE
PHONE LINE
SWIMMING POOL
KITCHEN PRIVILEGE NEW RE DECOR/
DINNING ROOM PRIVILEGE NEW FURNISH
REFRIGERATOR, TOASTER, MICROWAVE ALL NEW
VERY QUIET AND CLEAN HOUSE
QUIET AND SAFE NEIGHBOR
AVAILABLE NOW OR SUN
2 - WINDOW`s IN ROOM
VERY CLOSE TO FREEWAYS 237,880,680 AND 237 . 101
ALL SHOPPING CANTER NEAR BY TO

•Well, this is it. I have a room that will be available wan we talk over and agree whit EC other.
•Everything in the house is newly remodeled
in a single family house, Good size-room and House, is newly remodeled and new furnish whit everything.

•Room is about 11X12 and 1 of the window has beautiful modern shaver .
•Nadnice mirer closet door Hill View and 2 windows all moist •All Moist Private Entrance and Very nice and quiet neighborhood, safe neighborhood Full use of the common areas including the kitchen is permitted include
•When you come home to have dinner, relax, and have a nice evening. I am very respectful and I expect the same from you, so no drama, party, or any crazy stuff.

If you really need a place to live and have respect for others in our home then this is a place for you. we do a lot of cooking whit are friends and in the summer a lot of BBQ, up ground pool. soon to come also

Remodeled kitchen, refrigerator, gas stove and a nofe cabinets to use for
and all other - facilities Clean, spacious & quiet home with 1 bedroom/ with your own private bathroom to rent. & $ _ we can a negotii/ includes basic utilities (water, gas, electric & garbage) use of laundry facilities and other parts of home (living room, kitchen,
dining room) also.. The house has a nice yard with a BBQ & patio and a good stocked kitchen some nice fish tanks and stuff. You will feel right at home. Everything you could need in this house you can use for it
& parking is available. As car > port or front parking.
Also, the has a pool open during the summer moths… . . home is a 2 bedroom/2 bath near 880 and 680 in Milpitas

-friendly male (discreet, clean, respectful, pet-friendly)

To>>> >>Share a nice clean house with a discreet, closeted professional >> (whit Open M/maile ) and you must be wary discreet, and clean, respectful >> Open mined >>( W/M.) I hope som one ho is European or italyan Latin .

And I am looking for a cool guys ho is wry respectful,
Clean Open minded Male to we can share as good friend lots of think to be whit.
Not jots as room maid .
Good body and family tips family orientate .
I am down to earth & I am looking for social out going person.
I do love cooking I am ex/ant cook and i love giveing som diner party som times .
And I love to joke I do have grayed hummer and looking the for ho has one to same whit as my room maid .

•I Prefer someone who works during day, home evenings (Senior or disabled be OK to help them to.
•Long is ho has good ATI Tu. and out look in there life)
this is a great opportunity for som adults looking for shared housing at a fair price. •The neighborhood is very clean, quiet and nice. located close to bus stop, shopping

•No smoking in the house and no pet .

•Rent is negotiable with rite person comes long whit Are you looking for a room in a great house.

•About Me
I’m a yung Europein Devours and (S/w/M ) ho is cleen fun, outgoing, considerate, neat, respectful, easy going, and appreciate similar qualities in the person to share the my home.
•Who I’m Looking For: Open Mien Male in the age is are 27 -35 and Gr/ up
age range may be until 50 or so long is person ho is clean and halt/ and in shape who is courteous, responsible, doesn’t smoke in houes or do have- Drug, likes to have fun but isn’t a crazy parties, can pay rent (on time), and who will say hello and talk to me when passing by me

(i am neat aaaaand clean freaks, and i am great cook just want someone who won’t leave food and dirty dishes around.. someone who will pick up food if they drop it, wash dishes after they use them, not leave food in the sink, & help keep common areas clean: like sweep if it’s needed, and take out the trash when it’s full)

• Friendly, low-maintenance and considerate.
• Stable and professional and ho can be hi and low key wan time and place rite whit others to
I’d prefer a person that has a good, clean, easy going atmosphere.
In my house.
And I am Looking for a clean, honest, easy going, friendly roommate(s). I’d have to say roommate chemistry is key.
You have to get along with your roommate and respect each other’s lives, stresses and everything.
I am looking for someone laid back. I would hope that we become friends and can hang out wan we are at home. It is important to me that we build a home; I don’t want to live in a boarding house. Whit boarding roomed

I am down to earth & I am looking for social out going people.
Looking for someone honest and responsible. I am a easy going, and some time a quiet.
I won’t mind washing your dishes that you may occasionally leave behind.
I am not your servant but am always willing to do a few extra dishes or share a meal
It is important to me that we build this a home together keeper up together i am looking for Open and young and strong responsible tenants to add to the home.
to som day that They can be Abel to come up as owners of this place to because i don `t have family in USA i am from over see that’s why

Let’s make this happen the Security deposit and rant is negotiable.
Minimum of time is 6 months rental
or One year lease preferred wan we meed and wan you are conferrable to do so maybe
after you are having meed whit me.

•My Current roommates is: Latino and ho he is age 60 or over person and he is disable I can say this.
He is alcoholic I can say.
I don’t know what he is we have nothing in commend and to talk for Anything.
He has bad and Nasty attitude all he doz.
And all he doz.
is locks hem self in house and in the room drinks all day long I don’t know he is life or dad lots time to in that room.
Orally in the morning some time he comes out in kitchen to get some ice cub for he drinks.

That’s why he like to do what he ones after wield living whit someone.
And than he also curries to breaks the rules and agreement what we have before to when he moved in
I am not going for that again whit any one.

•And I am not looking fore same types of person at all again.
And place be open about your self and anything whit me to lest meed up whit rite person now and on to OK.
And I lil say tanks for fu that to.

I am going to make my Current roommates move out from my house.
Because he takes to much alcohol Avery day and he has open hart serge/ to.
He takes hart Madison and + Alcohol I don `t wont hem to passed out som day or dying in my house I deer.
That’s why I feel sorry for hem but he dozen lessen and I have to do what I have to do.
For my self to the not to let that happened in my house thetas why.

And i hope to find the right person at the `s time to not go true to looking for roommate all the time again.
wan I do find the right person to fit into the household on a long-term basis i hope

•Room: Large RooM with private bathroom & large closets, in-room/cable with •Lines for cable TV and private phone hook up available in the room
Wall-to-wall carpet. Room can be furnished or unfurnished (negotiable).

What’s Needed to Move In?
• I am looking for a roommate to build and share a home together.
• First and last months’ rent are required to move in ($ neg.).
• Rent is due every fist of the month.
• One year or -to-do 6 month commitment;

•Sorry no pet, children, overnight guest or smoker.who is quiet and smokes outside

OK long is not in house.
• NOW, Month to month lease (long term commitment welcomed).
•Serious response only please.
Also what I can do is som times wan I do need som help may be in the house wan you do have time to do so also
• som-part of the Rent is can be a free in exchange for providing some help to that’s deepens to I am adding and still remodeling Som. Area in my house .

• About you:
• -male and open minded male
• -you pay the rent on time
looking for a kindhearted like my self , mentally and emotionally stable Guy who
• - pays rent/bills on time
and open /mien / guy and friendly
cleans up after himself!! seriously!!
• -your name & sex/gender
and i do >>(Puffer/ Whit Male or open / Guy / you must be as Latin Spanish or any one of as >European German Canadian > as American guy and
all that good pupils to know one to.
>>Gobbles America .

• —age/ethnic background
• —what are you looking for in a house/housemates?
• —ideal cleanliness level for the house
• —will all your stuff fit in your room?
interests? job? music taste?
• —what do you usually do at home
• —frequency of and # of guests you usually have over
(we have people over occasionally, and of course you can too, but i hope we don’t want a dorm-like atmosphere in the house) thanks!
I hope you’re the right person, & I ‘ll get back to you.
• -you are respectful of common areas and noise

• So that’s a bit about everything. If you think you might be a good fit, drop us a line and tell me a bit about yourself. Any questions, feel free to ask. Wan we get on talephone confe/or if you can found better dii may be Good luck hunting!

• Interested?
•Please tell me a little about yourself and may be if you do have any of PICS.
your self even beter to that to the best way to contact you. whit your (( phone number)
I lill call you soon as i can OK.
•Place Not just whit e-mail writhing back and forth
•Place and asking so much of non sansei of Que/ OK i don’t have time for that OK.
if you are sive/ person do what it takes or spouse to be to do so OK .
•Tanks again .
• Serious only !!! and tanks Redding my add
• Reply to >> my email Tanks and good lack to began whit also and have great day

SpaceX Experiences Setback

The coolest company around made their first launch attempt today, but flight lasted only a minute. Nevertheless, I hope they succeed on their next attempt, and I sent them a small note of encouragement.

Coolest thing? I got a personal response (from the PR person, to whom I sent the note):

Thanks so much for your kind words of support. The entire team at SpaceX greatly appreciates it.

Best regards,
Dianne

Awesome. I want to work there.

Why Blog?

Soekris net4521 Single Board Computer

I got my net4521 a few days ago, and after borrowing a CF card (‘cause I stupidly forgot to get one of my own), I had it up and running Pebble Linux (from Tor Amundson) in no time. A few days later the CM9, miniPCI 802.11a/b/g card, arrived.

I’ve been poking at getting the 802.11 card up-and-running, and met with some success. Right now a kind soul is helping me learn how to use buildroot to build a Linux from the ground up for use on this box. We’ll see how that goes, and I’ll try to post the steps here.

Damned Hotlinkers

I discovered that the vast majority of the bytes I was serving was due to sites that hotlink, that is, sites that use image src URIs that refer to my site (thereby stealing my bandwidth), rather than copying the image to their own site and serving it themselves. Using Apache’s RewriteEngine, as described in this article, allows me to refuse to serve images referred by any page not my own.

Hopefully this will put a stop to the practice. I currently only FORBID the request, but I may serve up some obnoxious image instead. Not yet sure.

Cingular GPRS and Mac OS X

I just subscribed to the $20/mo, 10 MB/mo plan that Cingular offers. Unfortunately, while you can use your cell phone to subscribe, and they can give you all the information you need (although it’s like pulling teeth to get Mac info…like so many others, they only officially support Windoze), you can’t download the necessary modem script to enable the whole thing to work.

They recommend you download GPRS Script Generator, which requires that you pay the $10 shareware fee before you can generate the necessary script. Fortunately, a very quick search on Google turned up an article on how to configure the Mac for Cingular Motorola use. It provides a modem script that seems to work well.

I have a RAZR V3, and I modified the script to connect at 115200 bps (rather than the default 57600). It worked great!

This is all temporary, of course, ‘till I get my 3G card. We’ll see how smoothly that goes…

Is Big Brother Listening? I Have a Conversation for Him

My New HPI RS4 Pro 4 Hara Edition

I should’ve been packing, and then sleeping, before getting up at 0600 to catch a flight to the ’rents for the holidays. Instead, I spent the day (after work, of course) finishing the car, an HPI RS4 Pro 4 Hara Edition electric R/C. Three long nights, perhaps a total of 25 hours’ build time. Here’s a picture of the (more-or-less) finished car:

Click for a larger image

There’s also a large Gallery of pictures taken throughout the build process.

Overall the kit is well-crafted, with high-quality parts and a clear instruction manual. I do have a few complaints about the parts references, which caused me to waste a bit of time searching parts bags, but in the end, no necessary part was missing. I’ll try to post a more thorough review, along with descriptions of the specific issues I had.

This car will be my (actually, my team’s) entry into next semester’s EE192 class and next year’s Natcar competition. Hopefully the professor will allow us to use this car, and our intended processor, the Cypress PSoC.

Minigwen

Collegiate Solar Car Challenge

The North American Solar Challenge is a great race in which college students from all over the US & Canada build highly aerodynamic and efficient solar cars, then race them thousands of miles across North America.

I’m watching a bit of the race on INHD right now, and something ridiculous struck me: each solar car is trailed on the road by five or so gasoline powered cars! Irony in the extreme.

Wishlist

Okay, my family doesn’t know me very well, and they tend to get rather lame gifts (with the exception of my mom…she gets great clothes). So, here’s a little help for you guys. This list is roughly in “most-desirable” order.

• Tori Amos’ version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I believe it to be from the album Spark, but amazon doesn’t list that song among the ones for Spark parts 1 & 2. I don’t know where to find it. The only online link was broken.
• Freescale ZigBee Dev Kit, $209, OR Chipcon Zigbee Eval Kit, $140
• Agilent MSO6034A Mixed-signal Oscilloscope, $9,729.20.
  
• A machine shop, with a CNC Bridgeport Mill and lathe
• Agilent E3630A Benchtop Power Supply
• My Amazon Wishlist has more reasonable items on it, and yes, I really do want those books on the list! :-)
• Apple Intel MacBook Pro 15”, ~$2500

I’ll update this post as I think of more things to add.

Coolest R/C plane ever

I thought the A-10 was cool, but this beats it: An R/C A380, with four microturbine engines.

I am Supreme Nerd

Thanks, Alice. You had to go put it there, so I would click it, and learn the depressing truth.

Acronym Wars

I’m chatting with my friend Amanda, describing my sudden Haiku kick. She makes me laugh. You probably had to be there, and since you weren’t you probably won’t laugh. Here’s a transcript anyway:

Haiku #1

I should be studying for an upcoming EE128 midterm. Instead I’m working on office code.

Code streams from fingers

As iTunes plays The Police

My grades slowly drop

I need lots of practice…

Serenity

I saw Serenity last night. What a great movie. I won’t say more, for those of you who haven’t yet seen it, other than to say, Go fucking see the movie!

Great quote from the Serenity Official Visual Companion, out of a couple paragraphs from Nathan Fillion:

I remember when Joss called me, back when he’d just written the movie. He said, “I’m done, I’m done, I finished.” I said, “Read me the first line and the last line.” He goes, “Okay, the first line is, ‘Earth-That-Was.’ And the last line is, ‘Wow, sure was weird the way Mal died in the first act.’”

Personality Tests

They’re generally pretty silly, and often presume something about the test-taker (religious beliefs chief among them). Nevertheless, when the alternative is studying Fundamentals of Applied Electromagnetics, they can be a welcome diversion. Here are the results from one I just took (link to the test below results):

My Sony Saga Continues…

I wrote before about the problems with my new Sony TV. The same problems persist, but what started off as a very pleasant experience with Sony support has grown into a frustrating fight against a corporate behemoth.

The TV arrived on August 30, 2005. It broke on Monday, Sep 5. Crutchfield was now out of stock on the TV, so rather than have them replace it, I decided to arrange for repair from Sony. Tuesday the 6^th an Elite Electronics tech came out, tinkered a bit, and decided I needed a new part. Because parts are apparently scarce for the new TV, he arranged with Sony to have an exchange sent to me. He called and informed me of this on Wednesday or Thursday (the 8^th). I called Sony on Friday the 9^th to verify that he had, in fact, done this, and they seemed to show a record of it. The second-tier CSR to whom I was transferred told me I would receive a call within three days (I confirmed this with her several times) to arrange delivery of the new TV.

Well, today is that third day, and I had not received a call from Sony, so I called them. After again speaking with two tiers of support, the CSR told me that it would be two weeks from the 9^th before I could expect a call from the freight company to arrange local delivery. I tried to explain to the CSR that if they had been this informative on the very first call, I would simply have asked Crutchfield to take care of it. I only went with Sony because their various representatives implied it would be quicker. However, no expression of dissatisfaction was enough to get Sony to take any additional steps to help me out. The only good thing I can say about Sony is that they were initially very gracious on the phone (I mean you, Lola), and they were willing to send me an advance replacement (which, frankly, so is Crutchfield, and so should every company).

Checking today, Crutchfield has them in stock, and with a 10 minute phone call I was able to arrange to have a new TV shipped to me. Unfortunately , it will take seven to eight days, as before, but that’s still quicker than Sony. I’ve already received email confirmation of my exchange from Crutchfield, with very nice wording, but a couple of key words gave me pause:

On behalf of everyone here at Crutchfield, please accept our apologies for the problem you had with your order. Even with the best intentions, sometimes things don’t go as planned and we hope this shipment takes care of it.

As promised, we are preparing the shipment listed below. We’ll contact you again when it has been accepted and processed.

The “accepted and processed” part has me waiting to cancel the exchange with Sony until I get ship confirmation from Crutchfield.

The only thing that would make my experience with Crutchfield better would be if they expedited the new TV to me, and if they arranged with Sony financing to re-time the 18 months of interest-free financing I used to buy it in the first place.

Hurricane Ripples

Undoubtedly the effects of hurricane Katrina will be felt for years to come, but here’s one I didn’t expect. I ordered a textbook for my EE 125 class from half.com, and have been wondering where it is (it should’ve been here by now). Well, today I got a refund notice. In particular, note the part in italics:

Dear ––—,   We are writing to inform you that Half.com seller mowfoo has issued you a refund in the amount of $114.88.   To see more information about this transaction visit the Purchases page in the My Account section of Half.com. The funds should be credited to your credit card within the next two business days.   The seller has left the following note regarding this refund:

We have checked the status of the shipment, it seems that it has gone missing as we have lost tracking of the book after the damaging hurricane. The book had been idle in Jackson, MS for some time now. Since it has been quite a while, I do not expect you would want to wait for another replacement copy. Hereby I will refund you in full. Million apologies for any inconvenience arise.
 
This is a notice only, do not reply.
 
Thanks for shopping at Half.com,

The Half.com by eBay Customer Service Team

I’m very impressed that the seller was paying attention; I expected to wait until say, Tuesday, and then have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get my money refunded.

Sony TV Problems

Well, I received my TV on August 30, 2005. I was using it without any problems until last night (Mon, Sep 5, 2005). A few days ago I subscribed to Comcast digital cable, including their HD PVR (a Motorola DCT6412 III). The PVR is no TiVo, that’s for sure, and TiVo has announced an HD product with CableCARD support. But that’s not the urgent matter.

My new TV has has failed! I was watching the PVR last night, on a standard definition channel (not that it matters). I paused, did stuff for about 20 minutes, then came back, only to find the image colors wrong. Basically, the brightest areas of the screen turn purple/pink! That is, whites turn pink, yellows turn red, etc. I’ve included some pics of the screen. The camera seems to wash out the pink a bit, but you should be able to see how it’s not white. Furthermore, you should be able to see how darker colors appear relatively correct (although I suspect they’re off from what they would be in a functioning model).

You can see from the pictures that it does not matter which input the TV is on (in all the photos, the signal is coming over the HDMI port); the Sony on-screen menus are affected, too. Also noteworthy: if I adjust the “Picture” setting, I can increase or decrease the number of affected pixels in any given frame. Thinking about things, it seems that the green color channel is shutting off for high green values. For example, yellow turns red. Yellow is red and green, so if it’s turning red, it means that the green channel is being turned off. Similarly for white, which is red, green and blue together, if the green channel shuts off, you’re left with red and blue, which gives magenta (or purple/pink). If the channel doesn’t saturate, it doesn’t seem to cause the LCD to turn off. I’ve seen greens in the images, so it partially works.

Click the images for the full-size version (very large)

I called Sony this morning. They were very kind, and in short order set up an appointment for a technician to come out, on Thursday morning. The lovely and competent CSR Lola recommended I call them (Elite Electronics of Alameda, CA) to confirm, and after some difficulty communicating the model number, they said they could be out today! So, I’m waiting for 6:30 pm to roll around, and hopefully they’ll be able to repair it on the spot (although I doubt it).

My TV is almost here!

A week ago today I ordered a Sony KDF-E42A10 42", three-lcd, high-def TV from Crutchfield. They said they’d get it here in 5-7 days. Well, this is day 7. At least Eagle Global Logistics is showing that it’s in SFO. Hopefully tomorrow they’ll call to arrange a time to drop it off here.

I suppose I can’t really complain. $500 cheaper than the local Good Guys, no tax, and free shipping. Add to that 18 months of interest-free financing, how could I say no?

Isn’t a consumer-oriented society great?

nVidia Ethernet Slowdown Solved

I hate PCs. I’m a Mac user for a reason. But I needed a backup solution for my Mac, and the miserable best I could find was to run Retrospect on a Windoze box. Sure, I could run it on a Mac, but that would mean dedicating a Mac to the boring and mundane task of sitting there all day waiting to back me up. Plus, a Windoze box is much cheaper, and I was able to set up an SATA RAID array to hold my backups.

Okay, so I started putting some other software on my PC. Not much, stuff like the TiVoToGo software that still isn’t available for the Mac. Anyway, at one point, after a few weeks of reasonably reliable operation, networking on the PC started to go south. After reboot, it would work fine, but you could watch Retrospect scanning my Mac and see it slow…down…do a crawl. Just a few bytes per second. Nothing like the 100-200 MB transfer rates I was getting before.

After much poking, learning more about PCs than I ever wanted to know, and lucky Googling, I discovered that the on-board nVidia Ethernet hardware has some trouble with power management. So, I disabled that feature in the driver, and now it seems to work fine. Not sure when that feature got activated, or why it was only now giving me trouble, but who cares?

By the way, if you need more evidence as to why PCs suck ass: there are databases on the web explaining the function of various cryptic files you find executing on any Windoze box. In my case, I was trying to determine what piece of software might’ve been causing problems. There were lots of vague things in the process list, stuff like nSvcIp.exe and nTrayFw.exe. I knew my box had a lot of virus protection crap (wholly unnecessary on a Mac) from nVidia (they make the chipset on the motherboard), so I investigated some of these files. It’s amazing how many entries in the DB were for the actual file (maybe one), and how many were for files of similar or same name that were the leavings of various trojan worms (literally dozens). What a piece of shit Windoze is.

Welcome Home, Discovery!

Beautiful landing, Cmdr. Collins! Welcome home. Congratulations to all!

Apple Ordering Problems

I ordered a Mighty Mouse last Thursday, after much anguish trying to determine if it was suitable. No Apple store had it in stock, and few even had it on display (both of which I consider egregious errors on Apple’s part).

So, I finally placed an order via the online store on Thu 8/4. At this point, they’re estimating 2-4 days delivery (it was same day/one day). I get an order confirmation, and forget about it for a couple days. I go to check status during the weekend, and the system is “down for scheduled maintenance.”

I check order status today, only to discover that the order has been canceled. So, I call, and after speaking to three different people, learn that due to a prior fraudulent order using my credit card, I can no longer use that card with Apple’s online store.

Back in April, I received an order confirmation email for a new PowerBook. Now, I never placed this order, so I called Apple. They quickly canceled the order, but my card was never charged (AFAIK). I tend to use a debit card with a $1000 daily limit, so there’s no way for something as expensive as a PowerBook to have been purchased.

At no time, did Apple inform me that my card was flagged and could never be used again. Nor did they inform me when my Mighty Mouse order was canceled, nor did they inform me that the card was invalid when I placed the Might Mouse order.

And, to top it all off, the Mighty Mouse delivery estimate is now 7-10 days. While the fraud supervisor was gracious enough to approve this order and give me free overnight shipping, and he made it a “replacement” order, which apparently increases one’s priority a bit, he could not really do anything to make up for Apple’s incredible lack of communication.

Much of this could’ve been avoided, of course, if Apple had just shipped 200 mice to each store instead of 20. If they were trying to keep it under wraps, they could’ve ensured that a subsequent larger shipment arrived a couple of days later, rather than leaving everyone hanging.

But really, why make such an effort to keep it a secret? Who the fuck cares if we learn that Apple is going to ship a new mouse? How could it possibly affect anything about Apple’s business? I’m not suggesting a six-month-early leak. But a week or two would not give anyone any kind of competitive advantage, and might have kept a few people from buying competing mouse products in anticipation. Instead, Apple has probably driven away frustrated customers.

In any case, secrecy on this product was not so important that Apple couldn’t have shipped more units.

TextWrangler & BBEdit as External Editor

I use tools like Perforce and Subversion on a daily basis. I’m a Mac user at heart, and I hate tools like vi and emacs. However, Perforce and Subversion both use external editors like vi and emacs to allow the user to change things, namely checkin comments.

Well, BareBones Software has a pretty decent little text editor called “Text Wrangler” that comes with a command-line utility edit to make it easy to use TextWrangler from the command line (they also make BBEdit, TextWrangler’s commercial big cousin). Invoking edit (use "bbedit" when working with BBEdit) all by itself launches TextWrangler. Specify a file name and TextWrangler opens that file, allowing you to edit it with a proper Macintosh user experience.

But, edit can do much more, including this: if you invoke edit -w <file>, it will open that file in TextWrangler, and block until you close the window! (I’ve tried this before using Apple’s open -a command, but it immediately returns, making it useless.) This means you can use edit -w in the external editor configurations in Perforce and Subversion. And, if you add --resume to it, it will return to the Terminal.app after you’re done editing. This may not seem like much, but it’s more than any other non-CLI Macintosh text editor has been able to do.

Note: Chris Cotton tells me that TextMate also supports this usage.

Basic configuration for most UNIX tools is to set the $EDITOR environment variables (like this in bash:

EDITOR=edit -w --resume
export EDITOR

Read on for alternative information on how configure these tools.

Stamps

Being a fairly wired (and wireless) kind of guy, I rarely send out snail mail. I use the web, email and IM whenever I can, and I use an online bill paying service. Hence, I rarely need stamps. I used to alway ask someone for a stamp, and inevitably they refuse the dollar I offer in exchange (lacking change but considering my time to go buy stamps more valuable).

But I finally got to where I have a small book of stamps in my wallet and another on my desk. Now the problem is that I use them rarely, and often have old stamps after the Post Office hikes rates.

Instead, The Post Office should issue stamps for first-class mail with some kind of code, rather than a price. Something like FC-1, -2, -3…etc., incremented each time new rates are effected. I think they already do something like this, but in addition, they should honor older uncanceled stamps as valid for first-class letter delivery, rather than for their face (or book) value. I mean, I paid for some number of first-class stamps, I should be able to use them without having to get extra stamps, just because I don’t mail that often.

Now, I’m happy to have the stamp revert to it’s monetary value when I combine it with other stamps. But they’ve gotten to use my money since I bought them, money that could otherwise be earning me interest. So, I figure they owe me the delivery of several first-class letters.

NASA Flies Again

A stunning and awesome return to flight liftoff at 7:39 AM, PDT. STS-114 couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day for a more perfect launch. Plus, the new cameras made for some kickass views!

Congratulations to NASA and to the thousands of people who helped make it a success!

I got in!

Finally! Woo-hoo! Awesome! My application to transfer from U.C. Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science into the College of Engineering was accepted.

Interestingly, they wanted me to accept the admission (like I’m going to say “no”…)!

Nice to know NASA’s well on its way to stupidity

In this Reuters article, NASA’s new administrator talks about how we won’t get to the moon ‘til 2015 at the earliest, and that that mission will likely be followed by a multinational space station on the moon.

There’s nothing on the moon worth the money and the time. It would make much more sense to go straight to Mars, skipping the Moon entirely. We could land humans on Mars by 2015, and have a regular rotating mission every two years, for about a tenth of the cost of the proposed Moon missions.

Bush fucks everything up.

Why Intel is Bad for Apple

Speculation hit the fan a few days ago when CNet (and WSJ?) reported that Apple would end its partnership with IBM and Motorola, and switch from using the PowerPC to using the Intel x86 architecture (I had heard the rumor even earlier through some old friends). Knowing this is almost meaningless, because there are so many details missing. For example, will Apple simply start manufacturing x86 computers that can run Mac OS X or (shudder) Windows? Does that mean that Mac OS X would run on any x86 PC?

This just in: the rumor is true.

Almost certainly not. Despite soaring sales of iPods, Apple’s income comes almost entirely from the sale of Macintosh hardware. Releasing Mac OS X for x86 would kill their Macintosh hardware sales, because very few people would continue to go to Apple when they could get machines elsewhere for much less. I don’t see any way Apple can make the switch without a significant drop in income.

But that’s not the real problem. Apple could still make x86-based hardware that runs Windows, but allow Mac OS X to run only on their hardware. This would piss people off, but it’s completely feasible (I’ll post another entry about how sucky it will be for loyal Mac users to switch to x86 hardware).

The real problem is much more complex and subtle. And at first blush, doesn’t sound like a problem. It sounds like a windfall for Mac users. Try to follow along.

Picture this: Apple makes the switch to Intel-based hardware. Mac OS 10.5 is released and runs flawlessly on it. All of your favorite apps release updates (never mind that these will be expensive upgrades, not maintenance releases), even Metrowerks. Then, using the knowledge gained from the 68K-PowerPC migration and a clever adaptation of WINE (an open-source implementation of the Win32 API), Apple adds the most significant feature: the ability to double-click a Windows application and run it on your Macintosh. No Virtual PC, no separate environment, no Start menu.

It’s not that big a stretch. The windows might even look like Aqua windows. No doubt it would be a boon to Mac users, and would remove serious hurdles to Mac adoption across all market segments.

Mac users would notice a difference. See, Windows applications generally suck. While Apple could put the window close box in the right place, the OK and Cancel buttons would always be backward. Text selection in fields would be different (although Mac OS X kinda broke that anyway). Pressing the Tab key would tab through all of your controls, regardless of your system settings (although maybe some apps could be made to respect those settings). In many cases, menu shortcuts would require that you use the control key, not the Command key, to access them (no, you would not simply be able to replace “ctrl” with “command” inside WINE…for many reasons I can’t get into here). I could write an entire article about differences between Mac and Windows apps, pointing out the real reasons why Windows is inferior to Mac OS. But I think most of you understand this. The Windows UI is fundamentally different from that of the Mac.

OK, so you say to yourself, so what? I’ve had to run VPC for years, I’m used to that. It’s only in the one app I have to use, but now I can have it run fast? Sign me up! This is a perfectly understandable reaction. There’s no reason a Windows app couldn’t run at nearly the full speed of its Windows XP counterpart (there would be some overhead mapping I/O to the Mac OS, but not much; double-buffering windows takes time).

Now imagine you’re a software developer making an application for both Mac and Windows. Your Mac customers comprise, generously, 15% of your market share (you’ve got more competition in the WIntel market). In reality, it costs you to work on the Mac version enough that your Mac margins are pretty slim, but it’s still more income overall.

All of a sudden, Mac OS X/x86 is released with WINE. It doesn’t take you long to realize that you will lose only a few of your Mac customers if you drop the Mac version of your product, because now they can run the Windows version just as easily. Sure, it’ll take a year, maybe two, for Apple’s base of Intel users to grow enough. But the old version of your app will still be available for your Mac customers who don’t switch.

But you’ll save so much money on development! Now all you have to do is make sure each new version of your Windows app runs on Mac OS X/Intel! And you won’t have all of the marketing costs associated with delivering multiple versions of your app. What a boon!

If this sounds alarmist, it’s because I haven’t explained it well enough. (I have to get back to work, and I’ve already spent too much time writing this.) But think it through. Software developers who’ve made Windows and Mac OS versions of their applications will inevitably drop their Mac efforts. It’s in their bests interests. Most people don’t care enough to do more than grumble. They need the functionality, hamstrung as it is, to do their work. They will continue to pay for the application, especially because they can run it reasonably well. Mac-only developers will rarely, if ever, be able to profitably compete with established Windows applications. The growing momentum to provide Mac versions of applications will stop dead in its tracks.

It may take a few years, but you will slowly see the erosion of the Mac into an elegant OS for launching crappy apps.

And how long after that will once-loyal Mac users simply switch? There are so many more hardware choices in the WIntel world. Apple can never allow Mac OS X to run on that hardware, so we users won’t see that benefit if we stick to the Mac. And once all our important applications are available only in their Windows flavors, what’s to keep us using the Mac? Safari? Mail? iMovie? Sure, there will be some who stick around, like those who use FInal Cut Pro 90% of the time. But most of us? What would be left?

All of this is predicated on developing an architecture that allows Mac users to “painlessly” run Windows applications. Does anyone believe that will never happen?

The move is certainly bad for us. Within a few short years, we will lose many of our native Mac applications. But within a decade, it will be bad for Apple, too, as users abandon a platform that’s lost all its advantages.

.xxx Will Never Work as Intended

ICANN has finally approved .xxx as a top-level domain. Unfortunately, according to one article, the strictly volunteer use will never encompass the majority of porn sites because ICN, the group responsible for administering the TLD, is going to impose rules about where and how a porn site may operate. Not only that, but domain names will cost significantly more than .com domain names do today:

The new domain will cost less than $100 and will be available to registrants willing to adhere to the predetermined best business practices.

There will remain countless porn sites in the .com TLD, dramatically reducing any “save the children” benefit that proponents claim the new domain provides.

Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” First Impressions

Okay. I’ve been running Tiger now for about 24 hours. Rather than work on my CS184 final project, I’ll tell you a little about my experiences. This isn’t terribly well organized, but I want to write things down before I forget them.

In a nutshell: there were some frightening hiccups along the way, and some bizarre behavior by the Spotlight indexer, but it all seems to be working fairly well now.

Windoze Sucks

What a bunch of assmasters the people in Redmond are. According to David Kirkpatrick’s article, Jim Allchin, some cheesehead at Microsoft, says Longhorn will be much better than previous versions of windows. At the start of the article, he (Kirkaptrick) writes “Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide.” And he’s proud of that fact!

So what? So what if your company is so big it can cram its product down the throats of millions of unaware customers. So fucking what? All the things Longhorn supposedly will do (like automatically reconfigure its network settings when you move from office to home), Mac OS X (even with its sucky-assness compared to OS 9) has been able to do for years. “If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen”? This is a feature? With its armies of engineers (and a year and a half to go), this is the best fucky Microsoft could come up with after decades of stealing other’s ideas? Losers.

“Longhorn will automatically clean up, or defragment, your hard drive, if it is required.” Whoopdie-fuckin’ do. Mac OS X’s filesystem rarely requires defragmenting. But my old housemates shitty home theater PC choked on its own excrement if he did defragment daily.

Longhorn will show me the first page of a document instead of an icon? BFD. Been there, done that. I can put the same file in multiple places on my drive? Been there, done that.

“Microsofts research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items.” That’s because Microsoft has never encouraged any sense of consistency among its legions of third-party developers, and because Windows’ window management is piss poor, at best. No wonder people have a hard time finding things on windows. It’s a direct result of the design of the UI. (More like LI…”loser interface”).

Allchin talked about an upcoming 64-bit release of Windoze. Kirkpatrick writes, “For Allchin, this is a very big deal for businesses and individuals. The reasons are technical, but the bottom line is that 64-bit computers will be much faster. They should also be more secure.” Is this what Allchin is spouting? Sorry, wrong and wrong. Not even the 64-bit Tiger will make your computer faster or more secure. Application developers will have to re-build their apps, and even then, most of what you’ll get is the ability to address more memory. Which will probably mean that developers will create even more resource-hungry apps, creating additional burden on our already-overtaxed I/O subsystems.

And, I should point out, that the G5 is already a 64-bit processor, and Tiger ships this weekend, as opposed to “the end of the year” in Allchin’s predictions.

Windows “Just Works”? Give me a break. Windows seems to go out of its way to prevent the user from getting work done. What a joke. And to those blind cattle who use windows: you suck, too. It’s your fault Windows is as wide-spread as it is, and it’s your fault computers suck as much as they do. Windows even pulls down the Mac (which, despite being utterly superior to Windoze, sucks too). Sure, lots of people use Windoze. Lots of people believe in a god, too, and look where that’s getting us.

And Kirkpatrick, as a Mac user, you’re way to upbeat and positive in your story. Afraid you’ll lose future interviews?

Figures.

RayTracing is Fun

CS184’s assignment due a few hours ago was a simple ray tracer. So far, the most work, but also the most fun. I implemented a ray tracer that supports ellipsoids and triangles, point lights and directional lights (oops, forgot to mention that to the reader…hope (s)he picks up on that from the images), subsample antialiasing (jittered). It also renders to the screen and outputs jpeg directly, and uses an ANTLR-generated parser to read in scene files. Here are the images I submitted along with my assignment.

Some represent mistakes, but they’re interesting anyway. I thought my images were cool, but Sarah Beth’s snow globe takes the cake. Creative and refractive. How cool is that?

I Always Thought the Japanese Were Smarter than We Americans

But not I’m not so confident of the assessment. Sure, they’ve got some wacky cultural surprises (Japscat? Eeesh), but generally the Japanese employ wisdom and elegance in their endeavors. So, why would they jump on the same wasteful space exploration initiative as the U.S.? Why take two decades to go to the moon, when they could go straight to Mars in half that time?

Our political leaders need to recognize the merits of a human Mars exploration program, and they need to set the goal of accomplishing serious scientific research on Mars.

If this works, Ecto kicks ass

I’m not sure how to use it yet, but I’ll give it a try. Hopefully it will play nicely with SmartyPants.

This is some indented text. Dunno if it’s really block-quoted, or what. Hmm, no, not block-quoted, which means Ecto might restrict the HTML structure I can impose on my entries.

Now, let’s see what the iTunes button does: Let Go from the album “Details” by Frou Frou. Cool. It inserts the currently-playing song. Not sure why that needs to be a button right here in the app, but I guess we’re all likely to have lots of need to make emergency references to songs…

The Dish

Wonderful movie. Funny and inspiring.

And it contains a great quote: “Failure is never quite so frightening as regret.”

Assignment: Trace Rays

The current CS184 assignment is to write a ray tracing program. In typical fashion, I can’t help but want to do all sorts of unnecessary stuff, like provide an ANTLR grammar for the scene description language, and a full-blown Mac application for rendering and displaying the images.

We’re supposed to render axis-aligned ellipsoids and polygons only. We need to support simple Phong shading, shadows, reflections, point and directional lights, and some sort of ray test acceleration. We also have to save images in some standard format. Along with the code, we’re to provide five or more example images. I’ll try to remember to post them here when I’m done, so you, too, can enjoy the glory.

I made the mistake of looking at some POVRay example images. My renderer will never be this cool, so I’m mostly just depressed about the assignment now.

The Most Amazing Laugh

Rachel McAdams in The Notebook. Wow.

Watching TV in your car

So, I’m coming home from work yesterday, and I come up on this pickup truck with an extended cab and huge tires. I can see through the smoked back window that they’ve got two screens showing video, one in front of the passenger and one in the center for the rear seats.

We get to a red light, and I get close enough to where I can see what’s playing. I snapped a picture, if you want to see. In case you can’t tell, it’s a girl on her knees in front of a guy.

They had the volume up loud enough that you could hear the cheesy music in my car.

EE120 “Is not a Math Class”

Yeah, right.

I like my professor, I really do. He’s personable and funny, and a good lecturer. EE120 is “Signals and Systems” at UC Berkeley. He has told us time and time again that we’re in engineering, and we don’t like to do math, and that this is not a math class.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see anything but math on that board, do you? Click the image for a view of the entire blackboard(s).

Now, to be fair, this lecture was pretty cool. He demonstrated how the sinc function can be used to perfectly reconstruct any band-limited continuous-time signal from a sampled version of that signal (assuming it was sampled above the Nyquist frequency, of course). Very, very cool.

The pretty graph in the middle shows how the individual sinc functions line up with each other and sum to the original signal. It’s evident from the graph that at least the sample points are correct (the analytical expression for that is on the board to the right).

Still, not a math class?

Why Apple Fucked Up with Aliases

Aliases used to be this thing in the Mac OS, prior to Mac OS X, that allowed applications to remember where a file was located. More importantly, if you moved that file, the application could still find it. They worked across network volumes, too, automatically mounting a volume if necessary.

With Mac OS X, Apple recommends that an application store URLs to reference files. The problem with URLs is that they are just fancy pathnames to files, so if you move or rename a file, they break. To be fair, I’ve seen documentation that suggests CFURLRefs should be used only for transient storage of a file reference, but this gets abused across the board.

Safari’s downloads window, for example, is guilty of this. Try donwloading something, moving it, and then finding it via the download window. You can’t. And Apple puts the blame on the user by popping up a message saying, “Safari can�t show the file ‘foo.pdf’ in the Finder because it moved since you downloaded it.”

Fuck you, Apple. So what if it moved? You can find it, almost always. You had tried and true, superior technology, and when you shitcanned or otherwise drove out all the true Macintosh engineers, replacing them with NeXT Unix weenies, you got rid of that good technology. Everyone knows engineers brought up on Unix are lazy, and don’t give a rat’s ass about the user. Well, that attitude shows through in Mac OS X.

Stupid Puritannical Bullshit

That’s the subject line my friend gave the email he sent me containing this link:

http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBU85UDQ4E.html

I can’t even begin to describe the outrage I’m feeling at the parents and the jury, but mostly at the prosecutor. Sure, the babysitter experienced a lapse in judgment, not because she put the boy at any risk (she didn’t), but because of the fucked-up society we live in, where children and sexuality are like matter and antimatter.

“She did a bad thing, but our biggest concern is that she doesn’t do it again,” the mother said, noting that Slicker is now a registered sex offender.

Why are prosecutors so enamored with alleged sex offenses? What drives them to prosecute these cases with such zeal, more so than drug offenses or even, say, murder cases?

The babysitter was a caretaker and a teacher, not a sex offender. The sex offenders are the parents, the judge and the jury. She was caught sitting naked on the couch, watching a Bond flick with the boy. No one has said she engaged in any kind of sexual act, she simply answered a question.

Their son, the couple said, has had counseling and is doing fine.

Like so many cases of this nature, the boy is worse off because of his parents’ reaction. He didn’t need counseling. He needed explaining. Thanks to the so-called counseling, he’s probably going to reveal a “repressed memory” about a sexual act that never happened (no doubt implanted by the “counselors” during their incessant questioning).

I sympathize with the babysitter, and I have nothing but contempt for the prosecutor, jury and parents. They epitomize one of the most serious illnesses in our society today.

God Does Not Exist

It’s simple. God is a made-up idea. Made up by men. A crutch used by humans to ease their fear of the unknown. A sword wielded over countless millions to subjugate. It is time to grow past the notion.

OpinionJournal has a surprising number of editorial pieces in support of a non-secular America. I can’t think of a more stupid idea.

Take your heads out of your asses; quite burying them in the sand. There is no such thing as God, no “invisible man in the sky.” Learn some tolerance, open mindedness and most of all, learn to think for yourselves.

Aaron Sorkin on Why We Should Go to Mars

In the episode of West Wing entitled “Galileo,” one of the plot lines centers around an unmanned probe, sent to Mars, with which NASA has lost contact. Mallory and Sam are standing beside a limo outside a concert hall, and they have this exchange:

Mallory: “I spoke to my dad. I’m sorry about Galileo.”

Sam: “They’ve got a lot of tests they can still try.”

Mallory: “How much money is it going to cost to try them?”

Sam: “Don’t start with me.”

Mallory: “I’m asking as a taxpayer! It costs a hundred-sixty-five million to lose the thing, how much more money is it going to cost to make sure you’re never going to find it?”

Sam: “I don’t know, Mallory, but we certainly won’t divert any municipal tax dollars which are always best spent on new hockey arenas.” (Sam likes Mallory, Mallory is dating a hockey player.)

Mallory: “No, it’s best spent feeding, housing and educating people.”

Sam: “There are a lot of hungry people in the world Mal, and none of them are hungry because we went to the Moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber because we went to the Moon.”

Mallory: “And we went to the Moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?”

Sam: “Yes!”

Mallory: “Why?”

Sam: “‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky.…The history of man is on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.”

Mallory: “I know.”

Sam: “People like you, who say tha—what?”

Mallory: “I said, ‘I know.’ We’re supposed to be explorers.”

Sam: “Then, what the hell?”

Mallory: “I just like hearing you talk about it.”

Sam: “You know something—”

Mallory: “You get all puffed up.”

Sam: “You’re a pain in the ass.”

Mallory: “Yes.”

Like so many things of this nature, the impact is much greater when heard. To that end, I’ve provided an AAC file for it.

Later, CJ and the President are talking about the broader theme they had been trying to come up with. Earlier in the episode, they had arranged to have some sixty-thousand public school students join with the President in a televised classroom event, to watch the probe land. Throughout the course of the episode, the President decided he wanted to expand the theme of the event. At the end of the show, they still didn’t know if Galileo Five was okay, but here was more argument for the exploration, in terms of how it captures imaginations and drives people to achieve. By the way, the President had been giving CJ a hard time for not getting into the spirit of exploration, teasing her about the way she said “Galileo Five.”

CJ: “Mister President, about that televised classroom for tomorrow—”

The President: “I’m gonna wait up for a while, see if we hear anything. It’s out there somewhere. So close.”

CJ: “I think you should do the classroom either way.”

Pres: “Yeah?”

CJ: “We have, at our disposal, a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don’t go to the blackboard or raise their hand ‘cause they think they’re gonna be wrong. I think you should say to these kids, ‘You think you get it wrong sometimes? You should come down here and see how the big boys do it. I think you should tell them you haven’t given up hope and that it may turn up, but in the meantime you want NASA to put its best people in the room and you want them to start building Galileo Six. Some of them will laugh, and most of them won’t care, but for some, they might honestly see that it’s about going to the blackboard and raising your hand. And that’s the broader theme.”

Pres: “I’ll say.”

CJ: “I’ll be in my office, Mr. President.”

Pres: “CJ.”

CJ: “Yes, sir?”

Pres: “You said it right that time.”

CJ: With a smile, “I’ll be in my office.”

Pres: After she leaves, looking up at the sky, “Talk to us.”

And the audio file.

20 Hours in America

One of the best episodes of The West Wing is “20 Hours in America”, Part 2. It elegantly and powerfully collects a series of story threads (without necessarily concluding them), so for the best impact you should watch several episodes before it. Among other things, President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) gives one of his better speeches (which is saying a lot, since they’re all very, very good), written by Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe). Naturally, the speech is actually written by the brilliant Aaron Sorkin.

In the hours before the speech, pipe bombs have exploded at a university swim meet, killing 44 people. The show reveals the entire staff’s reaction, elevating the importance and seriousness of the attack. As Tori Amos’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” gently begins to play, the episode wanders up to President Bartlet’s speech. We’re revealed a large ballroom filled with guests at tables, and the audio picks up in mid sentence:

…securing peace in a time of global conflict, sustaining hope in this winter of anxiety and fear. More than any time in recent history America’s destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek, nor did we provoke, an assault on our freedoms and our way of life. We did not expect, nor did we invite, a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people’s strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive.

Forty-four people were killed a couple of hours ago at Kennison State University. Three swimmers from the men’s team were killed and two others are in critical condition, when, after having heard the explosion from their practice facility, they ran into the fire to help get people out. Ran into the fire.

The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They’re our students, and our teachers, and our parents, and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we’ve measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that that capacity may well be limitless.

This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. God bless their memory, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. Thank you.

Of course, the speech carries much more impact when listened to, so I’ve ripped the audio for your listening pleasure. I also included a little bit of humor at the end, when their campaign consultant leans over to Sam Seaborn and takes a stab at his extraordinary writing ability (“When did you write that last part?” “In the car.” [pause] “Freak.”). It’s too bad Robe Lowe is a staunch Republican; I want to believe in Sam Seaborn (it shows his acting ability, though!).

Would that we had a President with the integrity and strength of character of President Bartlet. Would that our president had at least a command of the English language, and would that our White House had a speech writer of Aaron Sorkin’s caliber. Sigh

lib2html

I’ve created a Delicious Library-to-HTML converter. It’s very raw, but it gets the basic task done. I’ll try to avoid schoolwork by continuing to improve on it over the weekend.

Sometimes you just stand there…

hip deep in pie.

Why Do I Do These Things?

I’m chatting with my friend and classmate AA, and for some reason felt compelled to share with her my bedroom. Now, get your minds out of the gutter. This is what I meant:

(click for larger image)

Followup: Safari Pauses

Some time ago I posted an entry about how Safari always pauses for interminable periods of time. I found a reasonable, although not ideal, solution.

At least one possible cause for the delays is Safari poring over its cache of form field completions. If you uncheck the “other forms” in this preference panel, you can avoid that searching.

Interesting Blog Voting Experiment

My friend Tantek, who works at Technorati, pointed me to an interesting tally of blog-based votes. It appears that they scan blogs for a particular link (i.e., for Kerry, against Bush), and then accumulate the results. So, in order to be a good voting blog citizen, I hereby cast my vote(s):

I support Kerry. Howard Dean would have been my first choice, followed by Al Sharpton, but I actually think Kerry’s pandering is going to be a good thing, allowing him to be much more moderate.

I oppose Bush on the strongest possible terms. His stance(s) on religion, gay rights, the environment, domestic policy, foreign policy, fair elections, and probably everything else run so counter to my own notion of what’s right for the country, that I can find no redeeming quality in the man. He couldn’t even get the space program right (consider Mars Direct, instead).

Followup: Brother MFC-8840DN

A while back posted an entry about my Brother multifunction laser printer. In it I mentioned that 20-lb 3-hole paper almost always jammed, but that 24-lb paper worked. Well that wasn’t quite true. 24-lb paper works about 70% of the time, but still jams far too frequently.

The longer I own this printer, the more and more disappointed I am with it. I could care less about the fax and scanner if the printer doesn’t meet all my needs. It’s painfully slow (at least compared to the HP 2300N at work), and often times can’t print.

For example, printing AMC theaters movie listings from Safari results in a command syntax error. Printing the same page to a PDF file and then printing also does not work.

My new Tempurpedic Mattress

With my work and school schedules as demanding as they are, I decided that anything I can do to reduce number of hours I spend sleeping would be worthwhile.

Rejuvenate in Berkeley, CA (510 540-7100) just delivered the Tempurpedic 10” mattress I ordered a couple weekends ago. It’s a little smelly (as was the pillow I got), but they assure me that the smell will dissipate (as it did for the pillow). In the meantime, I’m looking forward to my first night on the thing.

The Brother MFC-8840DN Multifunction Laser Printer

I recently bought the Brother MFC-8840DN Multifunction Laser Printer from Staples online. I wanted an HP 2300DN, but what I needed was a duplexing, networkable, Mac OS X-compatible laser printer. Mike Kobb pointed out the Brother, and I decided that it was a much better deal.

It arrived the day after I ordered it (free shipping!), and I excitedly set it up. It’s very important to pay attention to the installation instructions—there are a great many pieces of stabilizing tape that need to be removed.

Of course, getting a Windows XP machine to work with it proved to be difficult, but the Mac OS X setup was a breeze (just copied the PPD, didn’t bother with the MFC ad-ons yet). The printer supports Rendezvous, which is very cool.

Now comes the bad part: Almost everything I’m going to print will go into a three-ring binder. So, I bought some Hammerhill 20 lb. 3-hole multipurpose paper, which claims to work well in any copier or laser printer. Unfortunately, my MFC-8840DN just couldn’t cope. It jammed 9 out of 10 times. My first attempt to get support from Brother was useless. My second attempt was better, in that I got a response, but they simply said that the printer is not advertised to work with 3-hole paper. Although the user manual mentions kinds of paper you should not use, it does not even mention 3-hole paper. Another exchange with the customer service rep produced nothing helpful. The manual did recommend Hammerhill 24 lb plain paper, so I decided to try a heavier stock.

The only way to get that was via Office Depot online, so I ordered a ream. Fortunately, using Hammerhill brand 24 lb 3-hole paper seems to work. If it starts to screw up again, I’ll post here and let you know.

Mars Direct on West Wing

I think the actors who play the staff on the television show The West Wing should all just play their characters and do the jobs for real. (Too bad the incredible wealth of knowledge the characters possess is probably not available to the actors.)

In the episode entitled “Ghengis Kahn,” Josh Lyman, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, gains new respect for NASA and space exploration. A character goes so far as to mention Mars Direct by name, and Josh is intrigued enough to listen. He doesn’t believe Congress would ever support it, but if someone like that was actually in the White House, Mars Direct could become a reality.

The argument hinged primarily on the incredible inspiration manned space exploration creates. At one point, Josh had to convince his assistant of it, and the dialogue was very nice.

All this from an episode not written by Aaron Sorkin.

I finished Halo

What an accomplishment. I played the entire game through on “Heroic” difficulty, and re-played the last level on “Legendary.” The alternate ending was cute. I wonder if there’s another ending for playing the entire game on Legendary.

I didn’t know KTVU was an evangelist TV station

I recently sent this email to KTVU, a local Fox affiliate:

From: Rick Mann
Date: September 18, 2004 20:46:17 PDT
To: Lori.darnell@ktvu.com
Subject: I didn’t know KTVU was an evangelist TV station

I was dismayed to come across your programming this evening, a movie
called “Last Plane Out.” I only saw the last portion, but the
commercial break I saw contained nothing but Billy Graham
advertisements. The movie itself was an undisguised Christian sermon.

It seems somehow wrong for a public television station to broadcast
such a specific religious message, and worse, to promulgate the
deceptive and exploitative practices of something like the Graham
conglomerate. This was nothing but a two-hour advertisement for them,
helping them prey on the weak-minded viewer, no doubt raising millions
in the process.

Despite Republican’s and the religious right’s wishes the contrary
(and subsequent practice), the United States is a secular society,
with a clearly mandated separation between church and state.
Programming and advertising such as tonight’s is unwarranted and
unethical, and certainly irresponsible.

Given the general trend in Fox network programming (canceling
intelligent, well-written shows and promoting “reality” fodder), Fox’s
propagandistic, right-wing news, and now (what I assume to be locally
determined) religious programming, I think I will remove KTVU from my
channel lineup.

A New Xbox

Wow. Your friends can always surprise you. Today, Tantek and Amber showed up with a new Xbox for me, from Tantek, Mike and Patrick. It was a very nice gesture, and a huge surprise coming the day after my birthday. Thanks, guys!

By the time my Dad was my age, he owned a home and had a son (me). I rent an apartment and have a video game console. I’m certainly not complaining, but I wonder if he would have owned a video game console had they existed when he was 35.

In any case, I love it. Thanks again!

It’s My Birthday Today

I just had a few people over, people who filled my home with warmth and friendship. The day was overcast and chilly, but once we got off the roof and inside, it didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s spirits.

A big thank you to all who came by…

I’m ashamed I’m from Missouri

The residents of Missouri just voted to ban gay marriage (or rather, to define marriage as between a man and a woman). Stupid hicks. Small-minded, intolerant hicks.

“SmartyPants”

So, I got this nifty little MT plugin called “SmartyPants.” If I installed it correctly, the quotation marks around “SmartyPants” will be proper open- and close-double-quotes, even though I typed them as straight quotes (") when writing this entry.

Cool…

Prison Experiment

I am convinced that the facilities and methods of incarceration used in this country are very poorly implemented, and that the “system” chartered to manage it has turned a blind eye, or is otherwise incapable of seeing the wrong in it. Here’s a copy of an email I just sent to a list I’m on:

So, having recently signed up on Netflix, I was picking movies left and right based on their recommendations. One was called “The Experiment.” Here is Netflix’ description:

An artificial prison has been built as part of a psychological experiment in which 20 male participants are asked to take roles as either prisoners or guards. As psychologists watch the results unfold, our focus is on a former journalist who was intrigued by the experiment and volunteered to be one of the prisoners, thinking there might be a big story in it for him. But he ends up getting a lot more than he bargained for.

I didn’t realize until I started watching that the movie was in German. Nevertheless, I found it to be gripping and intense.

Here’s the thing: I just learned that this experiment really took place (NOTE: if you think you might want to see the movie, you might want to wait before reading this material, otherwise it will give things away):

http://www.prisonexp.org/
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/relaged/970108prisonexp.html

Not only that, but reading the description of the experiment and their results, and comparing that to the movie, I was amazed at the accuracy of the reproduction.

When I watched the movie, I thought it was based on a fictional story (there was some story credit given in the German opening credits). So, I was sitting there watching, thinking, “this experiment would never be conducted; it wouldn’t reflect the reality of real prisoners, because each of the subjects a) knew he was not guilty, and b) knew he was done in two weeks.”

Having viewed the slideshow describing the actual experiment, I am somewhat sickened by the results. The speed at which human behavior breaks down (moves from decent and caring to power-hungry and abusive) is astonishing.

Here’s a Ruling that Makes Sense

A judge in Rhode Island ruled that a private (religious) school could not punish a student for his hairstyle.

Religion Is the Root of All Evil

In yet another example of how bipartisan rancor has failed us, the U.S. Senate has recently confirmed another Bush federal court appointee.

Reading from the Bible on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch endorsed a federal judicial nominee who wrote that wives should have a subordinate role in marriage, with the Utah Republican emphasizing “millions and millions of people will agree with” that view.

You can read some of Tuesday’s comments (search for “Leon Holmes”, and click the link; there’s no notion of a permalink on the site) about Leon Holmes from the U.S. Senate Website. There are a couple of testimonials, including one from a supposed pro-choice female attorney (not actually present, as far as I can tell). There is also some bashing of “liberals” and “activists in Washington”.

The presence of these kinds of comments alone makes me worry more, not less, about the appointment of Leon Holmes. There are plenty of qualified candidates for federal judge; why must we appoint ones with such obvious controversy surrounding them?

The complete voting roll is available. My quick counting shows three abstentions (Kerry, Edwards and Murkowski), four Republicans against (Chafee, Collins, Snow, Warner), and six Democrats for (Breaux, Landrieu, Lincoln, Miller, Nelson, Pryor).

I consider it failed leadership. I’m convinced, although without much citable evidence, that Holmes was confirmed pretty much on party lines (that is, senators voted with their party, rather than on the merits of the appointee). There are too many people like Holmes in positions of great influence, and someone as intolerant as he should not be considered. But politicians are more concerned about politics than what’s right, and so we end up with people like Holmes.

The news article quoted Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) as saying, “We hear so much from the other side about tolerance. Where is the tolerance for people who want to believe what has been taught for 2,000 years?” The problem with this statement is that what has been taught for 2000 years includes substantial lessons in intolerance, and the general regard that if someone doesn’t believe in those teachings, they are either less than human, and should be converted, or that they are evil and should be wiped from the face of the planet. Perhaps the Senator should keep his accusations of intolerance to himself.

It is this view held my many of today’s popular biblical religions that is the root of their evil, and that is the cause of so much suffering today.

The only thing one should not tolerate is intolerance itself.

Get Over It

Yes, I know the attacks on 9/11 struck close to home. But you people on the East Coast need to get over it, and like Americans everywhere, you need to learn a bit more about the environment around you.

A formation flight of a few aerobatic aircraft do not pose a threat to you. Now, perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect the average citizen to be able to distinguish a small aerobatic airplane from, say a Boeing 767. But you should also realize that a hijacking like the ones that occurred on 9/11 are extremely unlikely to happen again.

On the one hand, no one on board one of these planes is ever going to be coerced into allowing hijackers to gain control of the cockpit. Second, in the extremely unlikely event that a terrorist actually gained control of a large airplane, the response by the various responsible agencies would be too swift to allow such an attack to succeed.

So quit panicking. Our governmen’s handling of minor threats since 9/11 has fostered this hair-trigger fear, and it’s time we took back control of our emotions and lives.

Safari Pauses

What is going on with Safari constantly SPODing on me? Almost every page that loads then requires a few seconds of SPOD before I can type (or finish typing) in a form field, or click on a link…what is this?

My guess is that it happens because Safari is looking in its enormous history of Things I May Have Typed Into a Form Field at One Time or Another. This is really annoying. The operation needs to be done in a separate MP task, certainly. More importantly, a much better algorithm/data structure needs to be implemented to avoid such incredibly long waits. (This rant assumes, of course, that it’s this search through some history that’s causing the problem).

I’ll post a solution here if I find one.

124.0568 meters

Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne beat the Ansari X-Prize requirement altitude by a scant 124.0568 meters today. Congratulations!

This is the beginning of an exciting time. I’m more and more convinced that it will be private enterprise that gets humans to Mars in my lifetime, because politicians are catering to too many special interests to be capable of doing things right.

First Night

I just woke up, a few minutes ago, from my first night’s sleep in my new apartment. There are moving boxes scattered everywhere, and I don’t look forward today to the task of getting them straightened out. Moreover, I’ve got to find a place to put the litter box, because I’m bringing my cat home today.

How exciting.

No Doubt…

…rocked! What an absolutely fabulous (if a bit short) show! There were themed sets, Gwen in all her never-ending abdominal hotness, and cool people all around. Blink 182 did this nifty trick near the end of their set: the drummer rose up out of the middle of the crowd, on a rotating dais, playing a second drum set. He was about ten rows away from us, and soloed for ten minutes or more. It was awesome.

Around 11:45, when I finally got out of the $20 clusterfuck that the Shoreline Amphitheater calls “Premier Parking,” I decided that I was hungry and needed to get a little bit of food for the next few days in my new place. I ended up with $244 in basic necessities (cooking oil, eggs, butter, garbage bags, cereal, Pop Tarts, Chef Boy-ar-dee, etc.). Wow.

When I got home an hour later, I actually put it all away while chatting online with a friend two timezones later (what the hell she was doing awake is beyond me, but I’m not complaining). Finally, I had to unpack the box with all the pots & dishes in it, because I was really hungry by then.

Is This Thing On?

Looks like my new DSL is working! I am very impressed. I ordered DSL through Sonic.net. They promised to have my DSL activated (via SBC) on June 21, although they hinted that it might be active earlier. Sure enough, while we were unloading the moving truck, I plugged in the DSL equipment (which had been delivered a few days before), and got a solid green light (solid green lights are good).

A gargantuan “thank you” goes out to my good fiends who toiled for hours to get all my stuff from the old place to the new: Danielle Cassley, Tantek Çelik, Bob Grosso, Mike Kobb and Russ Sanon. I could not have done this without them

Epson USB Printers Leave Something to Be Desired

Yesterday, I help a friend get their Epson Stylus Photo R200 USB printer up-and-running. Although they support Mac OS X, treating it as a first-class-citizen in the documentation, the software has many shortcomings.

First off, downloading the driver is a cumbersome process. After clicking through several pages on their website to find the right one, you end up downloading a self-extracting StuffIt archive. That produces a folder containing a disk image file. Double-clicking that produces an Installer VISE app. Launching that finally gets you to the installation process. This process requires that you quit all running apps and that you restart at the end. Now, as far as I know, as of Panther (and probably earlier), you don’t generally need to restart after installing USB drivers.

In addition, while searching for the driver on the website, you’ll see a note that warns you not to connect the printer before you install the software (a common Windoze admonition when installing USB devices); the printed instruction sheet that comes with the printer very clearly has you connect the printer first, then install the software (for both Mac OS and Windoze).

Next, after you’ve completed the installation process and restarted, you need to add the printer in the Print Center. (I’m not complaining about this step; every printer requires this.) There is a menu whereby you choose what type of printer to add (TCP/IP, Rendezvous, USB, etc.). What’s tricky here is that if you choose “USB,” as one would expect, the Epson printer shows up, but always displays “Driver not installed,” and you won’t be able to select it. Instead, you must choose ”Epson USB Printer“ (I may not have that quite right) from the menu, and only then can you choose the printer and set it up. The Epson printer driver should not create a separate menu item just for its printers.

After all that, you can, depending on what capabilities you choose, end up with two printers in your list of available printers, one for “normal” printing, and one for “borderless” printing. These should instead be a single printer, with appropriate settings available in the print dialog.

Anyway, after figuring all that out, it seems to work. I only printed a simple black-and-white text test page, and the printer took upwards of 30-45 seconds to get started printing, but was reasonably fast after that (for an ink jet).

Entertaining Spam

Every now and again, maybe one in one thousand incoming spam messages makes me laugh. The latest:

Subject: Elisha Cuthbert recommends these penis pills.

For those of you who don’t know, Elisha Cuthbert, one of the stars of the Fox television series 24, is one of my favorite sexy celebrities. So the subject definitely caught my eye and made me chuckle. But what made the message laugh-out-loud funny was the sender:

From: Vaughn

I still didn’t read the message, because it is spam, after all, but I did get a kick out of it. If it isn’t funny to you, then you need to watch so much Alias that both shows meld into one.

I’m In!

Berkeley called today to tell me I’ve been readmitted. Unfortunately, I have to wait until Monday to get the oh-so-symbolic student ID card, and to ensure that I can get it on Monday I have to go to campus tomorrow to ensure my approved application gets into the system before the Friday night deadline, but I’m walking on air (and writing excessively long sentences to boot)!

The Application is In

Now it’s up to the Deans’ Conference. I’ve turned in a rather large pile of forms, recommendations, letters, and transcripts. They’ll meet on Thursday and I should know if I’m readmitted by Friday.

Wish me luck!

Don’t Bother With the Moon

More and more people seem to be fawning over Bush’s ridiculous “vision.” It’s not a vision, it’s political strategery. It is nothing but a waste of money, and the negative impact is already being felt, as evidenced by the recent announcement to abandon Hubble. (I only reference one article referring to the announcement).

OS X Still Sucks in So Many Ways

I just recently came across this message in the Finder when I tried to rename a running application:

Are you sure you want to change the name of <appname> while it is open?

Changing the name of an application while it’s open may cause problems with the application.

This is caused by the same problem experienced in ScreenSaver: if you change the name of, or move, the folder of pictures to which ScreenSaver is pointing, it will lose track of it.

Both of these problems happen because Mac OS X dicourages the use of Aliases, system-standard data structures for referring to file system objects. Instead, applications are encouraged to use path names. The problem with a path name is that it’s fragile: if you move the item or change its name or the name of any of it’s enclosing directories, an extant path no longer points to that item.

Opportunity Egress

I’m watching the egress of Opportunity live on NASA TV right now. Very exciting. I wish there was more live video.

Opportunity Lands

It’s about 0127 PST, and I’m watching the NASA channel live showing us the MER mission control room as the first batch of images comes in from Opportunity, the second of two amazing Mars rovers.

The terrain surrounding Opportunity in Meridiani Planum, is so amazing looking. Unlike the rocky surface we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on all the Mars images we typically see, Meridiani is very smooth. But, there are these amazing outcroppings of rock structures in view that are very exciting to the scientists, and to me!

I really wish JPL would give us an audio track that’s just the comm chatter, without the commentators. They’re trying to explain things, but I’d really rather just listen to the scientists and engineers.

Spirit, after getting a little sick, seems to be doing much better. Once again, congratulations to the JPL team. You’ve done amazing work, and have made me very proud.

Check out the mission at the MER Mission Home Page. They’ve gotten over four billion hits in the last 24 days. That’s about 1929 hits per second!

On to Mars!

As I feared, Bush Jr. announced a new plan for space exploration, containing a terribly misguided “extended human presence on the moon”. I’ve come to recognize this as typical of politicians in general and of Bush in particular.

I fully applaud refocussing NASA and the space program to support sending humans to Mars. However, the science and engineering goals and constraints are best served by Dr. Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct approach.

I’m not going to try to argue the merits of manned exploration to Mars. That’s a huge subject all by itself. Thankfully, this administration and most of Washington seems to accept the need.

Typical Mars mission plans (including Bush’s) call for the assembly of large spacecraft in orbit (or on the moon), a process which requires multiple launches of heavy lift vehicles. These have been deemed so expensive as to relegate such programs to future generations.¹

Commentary I heard on NPR today suggests that we can expect the return to the moon by 2020 and humans on Mars by mid-century, at a cost of $1 trillion. Personally, I plan to see humans land on Mars. In 2050, I’ll turn 81. It’s likely I’ll be alive, but I’d sure hate to miss it because of senility or death.

Dr. Zubrin and others have for years espoused a plan that can get humans to Mars in ten years, for a fraction of the cost, by skipping the moon. There’s no scientific reason to go to the moon, and no good plan for Mars requires mining the moon or using it as a shipyard.

I’ll try to post more information on this subject soon. In the meantime, check out these links:

• NASA’s Mars Direct Page
• Mars Direct Home Page
• International Conference for the Exploration and Colonization of Mars
• NASA Ames Center for Mars Exploration

And I encourage you to read Dr. Zubrin’s book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet.

¹Zubrin, Robert M., Practical Methods for Near-Term Piloted Mars Missions.

Congratulations to NASA/JPL

Congratulations to the Mars Exploration Rover team at JPL for their successful Mars landing, 20:35 on 1/3/2004. By all accounts, everything is going better than expected.

I envy you guys and wish you all the best in the coming weeks.

TV Network Executives Suck

Because of strong DVD sales and syndication popularity, the awesome show Family Guy might find its way back to Fox. Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Television Entertainment Group apparently called the series a late-blooming phenomenon that may have been aired before its time (according to an article in USA Today).

Dumb bitch (asshole?). He/she has to spin it so they don’t look like dumb fucking pigs who can’t judge a show on its merits. Family Guy aired sporadically at best, and was hardly given a chance to shine.

The same is true of the greatest show ever, Firefly. Fox aired Firefly without consistency, for less than 13 episodes, and put it up against Major League Baseball. Firefly was a complex, intelligent show, and requires time in order to grow a following. With programming like that afforded to it, it’s no wonder that its ratings were less than stellar.

Networks (Fox in particular) it seems are moving ever more toward cheating the viewing public (or at least, toward cheating the intelligent viewing public). A season of a television show used to be a solid set of weekly episodes from some time in the Fall to some time in the Spring. Now, we’re lucky to get four consecutive weeks before a repeat is aired, and no network will give a ratings-challenged but excellent show more than a few episodes to climb the ratings ladder.

But ratings must be inaccurate. How else can you explain the dearth of excellence like Firefly and the nauseatingly abundant crap like Survivor, The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire? Are there really so many more dumb cows watching television than there are high school graduates? Is public education so bad in the U.S. that someone with no more than a high school diploma is enthralled with crappy reality TV and would rather experience other people’s (supposedly real) misery rather than be whisked away to lands unimagined? How pathetic are we?

I certainly never get polled. I’ve never been polled about any of the recent shows I’ve thought were excellent but got cancelled. So I&rsuqo;m forced to wonder: who makes the ratings? What sub human, trailer-home-dwelling piece of Bush-electing shit chose what shows I get to watch?

For the record: I would pay substantially ($30/mo) for a single channel that brought me the best (and even better-than average) that television had to offer: shows like Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Star Trek (all of them), X-Files, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Glory Days, Strange Luck, Alias, 24, The Dead Zone…the list of good programming really does go on and on! Is there a model where ratings isn’t the driving force behind what kind of programming is offered?

AirPort & USB Problems with AlPB and Panther

I love my new 15” Aluminum PowerBook G4 (1.25 GHz, backlit keyboard, SuperDrive) very much (many thanks to my facilitator at Apple who helped make it a reality). It’s mechanically much more sturdy than was my TiPB, the fan runs almost never, and the backlight works (which is why I replaced my otherwise fine TiPB). I also think Panther (10.3.1, build 7C107) is a huge improvement over Jaguar.

However, I’m starting to have serious problems, and I don’t know how much of it to blame on Panther and how much to blame on the new hardware.

It started yesterday or the day before, when I restarted (I can’t remember why) and all of sudden my separate keyboard and mouse stopped working (I typically connect the PowerBook to my 22” Cinema Display which has a black/clear Apple keyboard and mouse connected to it). I have an Apple ADC adapter which is normally plugged into the DVI port and the USB port on the right side of the PB.

The USB devices had no effect on the UI, and the mouse light was dark. After a bit of unplugging and re-plugging, I discovered that if I plugged the mouse directly into the port on the left, everything came back, and I could plug the mouse back into the Cinema Display.

BTW—I’ve noticed that unplugging or plugging in a USB device causes a sleeping PowerBook to wake. I understand this to be a problem other PowerBook/Panther users are experiencing, and not just on AlPBs.

I came into work this afternoon, plugged everything in and opened the lid on the PowerBook. Everything came up fine. I read through the day’s mail (Mail), checked to see who was online (Adium), listed my bugs (IE; normally I use Safari, but Bugzilla doesn’t work quite right with it), and then headed for lunch with the group. When I came back, both screens were dark, and hitting keys on either keyboard failed to wake the machine (this is the kind of problem I’d been having on my TiPB prior to Panther).

So, I held the power button until the PB shut off, pressed it to start it up, and ran into the same USB problems described above, but slightly different. Before, the mouse’s light would not come. This time, the light was on, but the mouse had no effect. I unplugged it and plugged it back in to the Cinema Display, but now the light was off for good. I finally discovered that I had to plug the ADC adapter into the left-hand USB port to get those devices to work at all, but they still had no effect on the UI (although the mouse’s light would at least come on).

Apple System Profiler shows two USB roots. Nothing under the first, a hub under the second, a hub under that, and an Apple Optical Mouse under that.

Now, here’s where it gets much worse: the PowerBook thinks there’s no BlueTooth and no AirPort! They’re not off, they’re simply not installed!

So I restarted a couple of times throughout all of this, trying various things (e.g., I removed the Cinema Display from the mix altogether). The PB now recognizes that there is BlueTooth hardware, but refuses to see the AirPort card. And no amount of restarting or USB device permutations seems to make USB work. I just tried plugging the mouse directly into the left port, and the light comes on feebly (just sort of flickers, and not in the way it does when you move the mouse and it gets brighter), but the cursor won’t move.

At this point, I’m at a loss. I’m writing this entry using the PB’s own keyboard and mouse, and hopefully that will hold out so I can get some work done today.

Oh, one more issue: I got into a situation a couple nights ago where the keyboard backlight refused to come on (or be adjusted). The room I was in was very dark. I had to restart to get it straightened out.

I hate Cocoa

I’m getting so tired of hearing people say things like “our product for Mac OS X features a completely new Cocoa-based user interface to take maximum advantage of Apple’s new operating system.” Cocoa does not give an application any superiority over Carbon. Cocoa is not more stable, nor does it perform better. It doesn’t even really make life any easier on the developer.

But people continue to buy into the hype, and then regurgitate it on their customers.

Crap.

Nerf Herder Makes It to Public Radio

NPR always manages to play the most apropos music during their program breaks. Today on Talk of the Nation, Ira Flatow did a show about bats. While my local affiliate (KQED) was making announcements during the NPR break just before the bat segment, you could hear Nerf Herder’s theme song to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the background.

Panther & Office X

Here’s a hint for those of you upgrading to Panther. I just tried running Office X for the first time since installing Panther, and Word kept crashing. After a little investigating, I realized that (for some reason I don’t remember), I had Office X 10.0.0. After applying three updaters, Office X 10.1.5 seems to work fine.

http://mactopia.com/

HTTP Future Features

I have no idea what’s in store for HTTP 1.2 and beyond, or if there’s even any work being done on it. But here’s one feature I’d like to see.

In general, an HTTP request is made to be secure or non-secure by the scheme used in the URL sent by the user agent (https: or http:, respectively). However, this puts a burden on the developer of the website (usually a webapp) to ensure that URLs get written correctly.

This is a consequence of the use of SSL for HTTP security. SSL happens at a protocol layer below that of HTTP. The secure connection is established first, then the HTTP protocol is layered on top of that. By the time the server gets a chance to determine what resource is being requested, the SSL connection must have already been established.

It makes much more sense for an HTTP request to be made, and if the server determines that the requested resource is secure, that the connection then become secure. In other words, the requested resource should be able to dictate whether or not it needs to be secure.

This means we need a way to transparently make secure a connection that began unsecure.

There are complications with this, of course. Many times, information needs to be sent as part of the request in a secure fashion (your login and password information, for example). A way to handle this needs to be devised, of course.

Even the specific URL might need to be secure. That’s what HTTP currently does. The only thing you can’t keep from prying eyes is the IP address and port to which the request is being sent.

There are ways to mimic this behavior. For example, an unsecure request to a secure resource can cause a secure redirect. But redirects cause problems in the user agents, most notably involving the back button.

Okay, that’s all I can write for now, but I’ll try to get back to this subject later&hellpi;

Excellent Teaching

A middle school teacher has chosen to educate her students about the many perils of drug abuse by discussing the financial costs. In the reported story, a young girl comes home and reveals to her parents that she has a $300 (monthly?) pot habit. I think that’s terrific. Not the addiction, but that the realization of the (very tangible) financial cost allowed her to go to her parents with it.

On the other hand, one parent figured it was a bad idea to educate kids in this way, saying that they have enough temptations as it is. Whatever. Information and education are never as dangerous as ignorance. The only time information becomes dangerous is when it’s incomplete.

Especially in America

I came across this article about Fundamentalist Mormons. Well, really, it’s an article about a book written by one such Fundamentalist who murdered his wife and daughter in the name of his religion.

Afer hearing that Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapper was an excommunicated Mormon, Dan Lafferty correctly deduced something about the crime that even seasoned lawmen failed to suspect: “I immediately guessed that he was probably a fundamentalist, and that Elizabeth was somehow involved in a polygamy situation.” Lafferty ought to know…

Now, I’m not so naive to think that this sort of extremism never happens in America; on the contrary, I’m very concerned that the religious right (usually the Christian right) has far too much influence in American politics and society. Although extremists can be found anywhere (look at various Islamic countries), there’s something especially sinister about finding non-Islamic zealots in America.

This entry will hopefully be the start of a series of comments reflecting my feelings about religion and social aspects often affected by it.

Panther Rocks

Yes, I’m special. I’ve got Panther. Not a pre-release, the actual GM. Weeks early, no less.

I must say, it really rocks. So many improvements, so many things I’ve been waiting.

Although you still can’t let go of scrollbars.

More to come…

Blogging Friends

My dear friend Yellie has a blog. Check it out. She’s much better at it than I am.

Launch Services Cache Corruption

In the first what is sure to be an ongoing series of entries on how Mac OS X sucks, I’ll describe an issue I came across recently and how I solved it.

Yesterday I restarted my PowerBook (which is running Mac OS X 10.2.6) and found that I could not log in. The login dialog would appear, it would go through the motions, then disappear, then finally reappear.

I suspected that something early in the login process was crashing so hard it was taking down the login process itself. After a couple hours of snooping, and some luck (I was able to ssh in from another machine and watch the system log report the crashes), I discovered that Launch Services’ cache was corrupted, and was causing lsregister to seg fault. Removing that file (/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.LocalCache.csstore) allowed login to proceed normally.

Update (2009-03-10): Thanks to this post, I now know that the filenames have changed in more recent OS releases. Launch Services caches information per-user, in files of the form com.apple.LaunchServices-023<uid>.csstore, where <uid> should be replaced with the user ID of the user with which you’re having trouble (my default user ID was 501).

New MSN for Mac OS X

Folks, I don’t work for Microsoft. I can’t help you get MSN for the Mac. You should dump any friends you have that insist on using it, anyway.

Tantek mentions a new Tasman rendering engine in his log, with promises of speed and bug fixes.

I ask, “When will we see this update in IE/Mac?“ I simply have no desire to use MSN, but I’d sure like to see fixes to IE. I also wonder if there are stability enhancements.

Maybe MSN is IE. It’s not in Software Update yet, though.

Surgery

Well, I go in for laparoscopic surgery tomorrow (actually, today!), to correct a bilateral hernia. Strange, seeing a distinct bubble bulge out of my lower abdomen for so long now. It will be nice to have it finally corrected. It never caused much pain or discomfort (until recently), but nevertheless I’ve put it off for far too long.

I expect to have video of the procedure. I’ll try to post QuickTime movies in the near future.

Now, to sleep. No more food, and only clear liquids. Hope I’m not too hungry in the morning.

Software Sucks

Well, I’ve barely got MT configured, this is the first entry. It was sufficiently difficult to get MT to work the way I thought it should. Partly because the installation instructions expect you to install things in a less-than-ideal way.