Life and Technology in Southwest Virginia

Google Docs Issues

2012-02-19T09:25:00.004-05:00

So, we're using Gmail/Google Apps at my new job. The doc feature makes collaboration a breeze. It has issues though.

1. There is no lossless way to backup documents. This shouldn't be a problem because Google shouldn't lose stuff. However, some of us were using our personal gmail accounts until the new system was available. If you only had a few docs, it's easy to share the docs between accounts and make a copy in the new account. You lose all revision history in the new doc.

If you have lots of documents, this is difficult to do. There's a download tool that will allow you download the docs in a specific collection, but only in a different format. Formatting is lost. So, it's not lossless.

2. There are only a few specific styles and you can't add any new ones. You can change the pre-defined ones, but that's of limited use. In previous versions, you had the opportunity to change styles via the html input capability, but that's gone now.

3. No ability to reference another doc and stitch multiple docs together at export to pdf time.

4. No image caption capability. This isn't a big deal. Insert a 1 cell table and put text at the bottom.

Because the range of formatting options are limited, it would be really nice if GoogleDocs provided a basic DocBook or even LaTex export capability. It would make it easier to integrate the documents into CM repository. It would also allow you to create your own formatting and combine documents as needed.

The strength of GoogleDocs is it's online collaboration capability. You don't to pass around word documents and worry about who has what revision. I don't know if Sharepoint makes this easier now. Probably not since it's just a storage location.

Switching to XFCE for F15

2011-06-13T21:38:00.007-04:00

I've begun the process of upgrading my home machines to Fedora 15. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to switch to XFCE. The new Gnome 3 Shell is pretty horrendous on my wife's D820 laptop. The opensource nouveau drivers aren't good enough to run it. It's not only the lack of speed but how they seem to have gone out of their way to make it not easy to use. The one thing that sticks out is the lack of a shutdown button. If you want to shutdown the computer, you have to hold down the ALT key while hovering over the suspend or log out and hit shutdown. Here's a bug report for the lack of shutdown and resulting conversation.

I've not tried my work laptop yet. While it's docked it will crash when I try to suspend using the Nvidia closed driver. I'll try the nouveau driver under F15 eventually. If it fails like it did under F14, the suspend only button is totally unsatisfactory.

Prior to release, the buzz was that Gnome 3 was going to avoid the problems that accompanied the transition to KDE 4. It looks like the transition to Gnome 3 will be just as bad. I imagine that XFCE's user base will grow immensely now.

Fedora 15 is the most disappointed that I've been in a while with Fedora.

Updating machines to F14

2010-12-31T23:57:00.000-05:00

I've updated most of the machines in the house to F14. I purchased a 500GB 2.5" hard drive and used that for a new F14 64bit install for my desktop machine. The virtualization stuff seems to be working better. When I get the new work laptop, I'll use F14 on it.

Jira/Confluence vs Trac

2010-10-15T22:53:00.000-04:00

I've used Trac in the past for projects. For my current project we have Jira and Confluence. Jira and Confluence are nice. However, trying to manage tasking for sprints is a pain. With Trac it was easy to create tickets representing tasking. Those tickets could be assigned to a milestone. There doesn't seem to be an analog Jira.

Confluence is a wiki, but integration with Jira is limited. Trac tickets can be referenced within it's internal wiki. When a ticket is closed it's displayed with a line through it. There are Jira macros for Confluence but it's not a nice as what trac offers. There's even an eclipse plugin for Trac to make it easier to deal with tasking.

We're going to examine the Greenhopper add on for Jira. Maybe it will make things better.

Put Your Name on a Patent?

2010-10-01T20:24:00.000-04:00

Considering all of the bad press that software patents have been getting, would you take pride in having your name on a software patent? They're pretty much a joke. The only reason you'd want one is so you can sue your competitors when they start competing. Look at MS and Apple. Google is starting to eat their lunch in the smart phone market. Their only option is to sue.

Marilla Walking

2010-09-24T20:40:00.000-04:00

Marilla is finally taking her first steps. She's taken a few small half steps over the past couple of weeks. Today she actually started walking to people. Our babysitter's daughters had her walking between them today. Tonight she's walked to me and Lee Ann.

Training Your Leaders

2010-09-05T08:46:00.000-04:00

I found this article on training managers at tech companies on slashdot. It's interesting in that new companies don't really have a culture of management. The founders may still be running the company. Since they're techies, they are probably young.

This may be a little different from other people starting small business, but I don't know. If you're starting a small business (non-tech related), it seems to me that you may or may not have all of that knowledge either. You'll probably hire an accountant to keep the books and make sure that you get your taxes paid on time. An attorney will probably need to be engaged, especially if the company will be incorporated. There are lots of books and local programs that will help the new small business owner learn things that they probably don't already know. So it seems like this may be a common issue.

The issue with tech companies especially the very large one is that they seem to grow very quickly. Other small business may not have this problem. Tech companies seem to grow into huge behemoths almost over night. If a business has this problem, it's probably prudent to hire someone that can help manage the company while not interfering with founder's vision.

The same author had another article aboutold techies. It paints a pretty discouraging picture for those of us that are aging and doing tech. It's almost an either or proposition. You can do tech related things, not focus on growing tech skills while picking management capability. Or, you must focus solely on tech skills picking up enough to do tech lead/team mgmt perhaps even enough for product management. The skills that you need as a someone that wants to maintain technical path are project level budgeting, hiring, and a focus on improving your capabilities.

You might ask why someone would want to remain on a technical path. My answer is better job security. Highly skilled technical people with update to skills and excellent background may have an easier time finding jobs than middle managers. Middle managers seem to be a dime a dozen. It seems to be the first to go at companies especially large ones.

Another issue is that at places like government contractors, getting into management position is harder due to competition with those that may have MBA and have started at the organization on a management track. This is especially true for those contractors that are Department of Defense (DoD) related.

The problem with DoD companies is that they'll be hiring most of their management from the either recently released/retired officers. Those individuals have plenty of experience managing people. (Probably not so much with EEO types of things though.) Middle mgmt will more than likely be ex military. This is especially true if they're expected to do business development/bring in contracts. They'll know the lingo and have contacts that are needed to form those connections.

Moving above middle mgmt in the above type of organization probably means that you'll need to have been a flag officer. Admirals and Generals are flag officers. It will be tough moving up. Perhaps those Generals/Admirals are worth it. I'm skeptical.

Former members of congress or high ranking government officials also take up those positions. Don't forget that Dick Cheney used to be Chairman and CEO at Halliburton. He certainly brought home the bacon once he became VP. (Yeah it's a snarky low blow.)

All in all, learning the soft skills of management/leadership is important. Even highly skilled individuals maintaining a technical path will need to lead teams of people. (Linus Torvalds is an example.) Just like your tech skills, you can't count on the company providing the training. You'll have to do your own reading or take classes for those things that can be taught. Leading and dealing with people will need to be learned on the job. Try to find a mentor that can help.

Has Oracle Destroyed JAVA?

2010-08-13T21:03:00.000-04:00

If you hadn't heard Oracle has sued Google over the Dalvik. Dalvik is a knock off of JAVA. It's a clean room implementation but apparently there are some patents that Oracle is alleging that Google is infringing in addition to some other charges.

Since Bilski didn't clear up the patent mess it looks Google is going to have fight a pitched battle with Oracle. If Google rolls over and just pays off Oracle, it won't bode well for FOSS applications that rely on JAVA.

The irony in this situation is that everyone complained about Mono and the submarine patents that MS could potentially wield against any free implementations. Instead, we've now discovered that our new JAVA overlords aren't as friendly as Sun. It's not really surprising. Gates, Jobs, Ellison have the same basic business personalities. It's now holds barred and anything goes. Oracle is shooting itself in the foot just like MS and Apple has.

I wonder how much Oracle will start charging for either the JAVA runtime, SDK, or both. Oracle will probably squeeze as much money out of JAVA as they can. They bought it after all. It just seems sad that the nice ecosystem that has grown up around JAVA could be in trouble now.

Watch Patent Absurdity if you can.

Groklaw has a nice write up of the situation.

Using RMagick to Resize Pics

2010-08-07T09:21:00.000-04:00

I wanted to upload our beach pics to Facebook, but I didn't want the Facebook system to have to resize the pics. From what I could determine, Facebook has a limitation on photo sizes of 720 pixels on the largest side. Also some of the pics needed to be re-oriented.

The tool that I used to do accomplish this task under Linux is called ImageMagick. ImageMagick provides some nice command line tools for working with pics. However, I didn't want to have to write complex bash scripts to accomplish this task so I decided to use Ruby and RMagick. (Ruby, ImageMagick, and RMagick are available for Windows as well.)

Below is the script that I ended up using. It reads the name of the file to be resized from the command line. If the camera adds orientation information to the image, the script will orient it in the proper direction. After orienting the image, it will constrain the image to a maximum of 720 on each side while maintaining the aspect ratio. This means that it will stretch or shrink the side in a manner that distorts the image.


Name: resize.rb

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'RMagick'
include Magick

ARGV.each { |filename|
  origpic = Image::read(filename).first

  newpic = origpic.auto_orient
  origpic.destroy!
  newpic.resize_to_fit!(720)
  newpic.write("lores_"+filename)
  newpic.destroy!
}

Usage:
  reseize.rb image.jpg
or 
  resize.rb *.jpg

Note that I'm using the destroy! option. This tells the libraries to release the memory that the image was using. Otherwise, running this script on a directory of images will quickly consume all of the memory and make the computer slower and slower. I discovered this the hard way. I had expected it to release the memory after each trip through the loop. It didn't work that way.

IT dept. reason for a new Job?

2010-08-04T20:33:00.001-04:00

If your IT department sucks, is that a good reason to find a different job?

Republican Economic Failure

2010-07-25T17:29:00.000-04:00

Got this from Paul Krugman. Martin Wolf explains why current Republican economic policies are a failure. Double dip recession here we come.

Zip Code Data

2010-07-18T13:36:00.001-04:00

After reading a story about the local situation with aging schools and consolidation that provided some population statistics, I went looking for data on Social Security benefits for the area's population. I found it but I need some data on zip codes. During my searching, I discovered that there's no free zip code except for the one that the census produced for a 1999 Census product. It seems as though it's not going to be updated.

I went to the US Postal Services website. You have to purchase the data. If you want the data for the entire US, it will cost you $900 per product. While I can understand the desire for the Post office to recoup their costs, it would seem like this key information about how citizens should be communicating would be free.

Another issue is the fact that zip codes change. I was looking at correlating historical data to the zip code. However, zip codes for particular geographic areas change over time. This makes it hard to correlate data to particular zip codes when there is data that goes back over a period of years. It makes me wonder if there some historical zip code that that can be purchased.

For example, Social Security publishes data broken down by the field office. The field office services particular zip codes. If a person's zip code changes, it's possible that they could change SS field offices. I don't if that's true, but it's a possibility.

In any event the 5 digit zip code data should be free and open to the public.

Hitler in the Bunker (Movie Downfall) Parodies Removed

2010-04-20T22:49:00.001-04:00

Apparently the makers of the movie Downfall have asked YouTube to remove all of the parodies of the Bunker Scene. I hadn't even heard of the movie until I started see these parodies way back when. I had been meaning to buy it, but now this movie joins Metallica on my list of Douche Bags not to support. (Metallica came out strongly against mp3 way back when. Look at the industry now, owned by Apple.)

Here it is:

Hitler, as "Downfall producer" orders a DMCA takedown from Brad Templeton on Vimeo.

Note that the director of the film loves the parodies. Too bad the ones that he likes aren't available on YouTube anymore.

Marilla eating

2010-03-11T21:22:00.001-05:00

Here's a pic of Marilla eating prunes. It's not the first but not long after the first time. She's about 3.5 months old.

911 Dispatchers

2010-03-11T07:21:00.000-05:00

Why do 911 dispatchers show up at news conferences? I don't understand it. I suppose it's a human interest story like this morning when they showed the dispatcher who took the kid's call for a break in. But, I saw that they had interviewed the dispatcher for the California runaway Prius.

Why? Is it really necessary? I don't get any additional information from these people. Does the press request that the dispatcher's show up? How about answering the question as to why they've not caught the perpetrators. I bet that they don't catch them.

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later

2010-02-13T13:12:00.000-05:00

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later is an interesting look at the static analysis tool made by Coverity. It was spawned by the static analysis research project at Stanford. It is being used on lots of open source software as a way of testing the tool.

The article is an interesting look at some of the problems with management that must contend with a tool pointing out errors. I highly recommend reading it. You should read it soon. I don't know how long before it will before it goes behind the paywall and the above link is now good.

AMD IOMMU is AMD Vi

2010-01-14T23:37:00.000-05:00

This post isn't about the kernel boot error regarding 64MB of memory and IOMMU. This post is about IOMMU and virtualization

Much to my chagrin, I've discovered that the AMD IOMMU virtualization technology now called AMD Vi is not supported on any of its 7xx chipsets. I've recently upgraded from a 780G motherboard to a 790GX. From whatever reason, I was under the impression that AMD was supporting this IOMMU capability already. Intel has been supporting it forever. They call it VT-d. Since Intel has been supporting it for so, it's probably why I assumed that AMD was supporting it. Finally after digging around wikipedia and the AMD website this evening, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't supported. I should have dug around a bit more before I purchased the Intel Gigabit ET ethernet card that has SR-IOV support.

Now, I'm feeling pretty jaded about my decision to buy AMD products. I've been buying them because they have reasonable performance for a good price. All of the AMD processors have virtualization support, whereas not all Intel processors had it. Even some of the higher end Intel desktop processors didn't have it.

Even if I had chosen to go with Intel, I would have had to be careful. Not all of Intel's chipsets support VT-d. Just a quick search with google shows that there has been quite a bit of confusion. Some people were calling Intel support and couldn't get an answer.

The confusion associated with finding out what virtualization tech is supported by a particular processor and chipset should not exist. At the very least the there should be a table for processors and a table for chipsets that list capabilities. Instead there's lots of confusion.

Even PC/laptop manufacturers make it tough for consumers. HP and another big name vendor, either Sony or Lenovo, have been known not to support enabling of virtualization in the BIOS. (Yes you typically have to enable it in the BIOS. It's not on by default.) HP finally enabled it in one model after enough outcry, but the other vendor gave their customers the finger. (Not literally of course.)

Overall, I'm please with how well the virtualization stuff is working. I no longer have to use a proprietary Virtual Machine solution to run windows and other items. KVM+QEMU work well. Fedora 12's implementation is great. I'm just disgusted that determining capabilities about vendor solutions is so problematic.

Update:
If you want IOMMU (VT-d or AMD-Vi) on a desktop chipset, you'll have to stick with Intel for now. The wikipedia page for Intel chipsets seems to have the best information about VT-d support for chipsets in one place. If you can provide a better link to more information, please post.

X86 Virtualization
AMD Server Chipset
AMD-Vi

Update:
AMD's newest chipset for desktops, the 890FX, has support for IOMMU 1.2 according to Anandtech. From what I know, IOMMU 1.2 is AMD-Vi.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

2009-12-22T18:47:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

More Snow pics

2009-12-19T17:02:00.000-05:00

Here's some more snow pics for Dec 19, 2009. I've left them at full resolution so that there's more detail. I had a guy that was driving his tractor around with a scraper blade scrape the driveway for me. I would have been out there all day.

Snow fall Dec 18 2009

2009-12-18T23:42:00.000-05:00

Update: While we didn't lose power, some people in the surronding counties were without power for 14 days. A month later, there are people without telephone service. AEP has posted some pics of the damage.

---

Here's some pics of the snow tonight. Abingdon, VA, has about 8" - 9" of snow on the ground before midnight. The two images are of the back deck.

New Baby

2009-11-04T08:58:00.000-05:00

Our baby Marilla Larken was born on Monday Nov 2. She's spent some time in the NICU due to "breathing" the meconium. Mother and baby are doing well. Hopefully, they'll be coming home Thursday.

Update: Lee Ann is coming home Thursday night and Marilla will come home early Friday morning. Marilla was moved into the nursery after 4:00p on Thursday.

Update: Everyone is doing fine. Marilla came home Friday morning. We've had lots of vistors. Both sets of grandparents have been by to visit. Aunts, uncles, and cousins too. She slept pretty good through all of the Wii games being played and the running around of the two youngest boys.

Lee Ann had her week after follow up. The doctor said that everything was healing well. So everything is good to go for now. We're slowly becoming sleep deprived, but I've been told that comes with the territory.

Grandmother, Great-Grandmother, Baby, Mother

Updated Pictures:

The Failure of Previous Generations

2009-10-31T16:38:00.000-04:00

As I sit here writing, watching TV and waiting for my wife to go into labor, I wonder about failure. More specifically, I wonder how my generation will fail our children. My parent's generation (Boomers) and their parents (WWII) have failed us. A couple of examples are energy and health care.

The failure in energy is that they couldn't muster the strength of character and will to do what was needed after the 1970s oil crisis. They did start the buying smaller cars, but it didn't last long enough to make the lasting changes needed. Now it's 2009 and we have a economy that's in the toilet. We're bailing out automotive companies that didn't see the writing on the wall because we weren't smart enough as consumers to see that gas might go up a lot one day. Our parents didn't remember the lesson of the 1970s to teach us. They believed cheap gas would be here forever. (When my wife and I bought a car this year, we didn't buy a gas guzzler.)

Health care is another issue where they've failed us. I don't care if you're a Republican or Democrat. You are to blame. (Party loyalty is another joke.)

The Boomers are in the process of retiring. They're going to get health care via Medicare. While they get theirs, they're leaving their children and grand-children behind. Premiums are going up. It may not be seen because the employer is covering the costs, but that's less money in our pockets.

This isn't the only problem. On average it used to take six months to find a job. Even before the recession, the time to find a new job was increasing towards one year. This has special implications for health care. An individual/family can go no more than 6 months without health care coverage before pre-existing condition causes issues with your new coverage.

I had hoped that the health care bill coming from Congress would provide a reasonable public option but it's not going to be. Once again Democrats and Republicans have screwed over their children. They didn't do what really needed to be done which was to prohibit employer provided health care plans.

The current system relies on the employer providing the health care coverage. Why does it have to be this way? My employer doesn't provide my car insurance. I buy the coverage that I need for my car. I have to buy it or I can't drive my car on the road. The money for health insurance should go into my paycheck.

This system is a throwback to the company town where the company owned the town. The employee lived in the company owned house and bought groceries at the company store with company provided scrip. This system makes the employee beholden to the company and probably reduces the number of people attempting to start small businesses due to inability to buy coverage. (Try buying coverage on the open market with pre-existing conditions and see how bad/costly the policies are.)

Oh well, you reap what you sow. Medicare payments to doctors may be slashed up to 21%. This may force many doctors to not accept new Medicare patients. (I saw this first hand a few years ago while sitting in my doctor's office in Va Beach. They told an old lady that they didn't accept new Medicare patients.) Even the doctors are scared about going on Medicare. The irony is fantastic.

But [Dr.] Hagan himself became Medicare-eligible this month -- and he's nervous. "If I accept Medicare for myself and my wife, I'm fearful I won't be able to stay with my cardiologist and my wife won't be able to stay with her physicians," he said.

I wonder how my generation will fail our children.

Update 1:
The article What a Long, Strange, Thoroughly Obnoxious Trip It's Been will probably offend you if you're a boomer. It's an even more scathing look at Boomers and Hippies.

Update 2:
Here's another example of how Boomers don't get it. I think that it shows the real disconnect between Boomers and their children/grand-children. Peggy Noonan is talking about how no one believes that politicians have answer anymore. I don't believe that anyone of my generation believes that politicians have the answer anymore, if they ever did.

Boomers are looking for salvation in their politicians. As Boomers die off, expect political party affiliation too mean less and less. Democrats or Republicans probably aren't prepared for this. Political party affiliation is becoming less about ideology and more about not putting in the same ol bunch of idiots every time.

Replacing DIS/HLA with AMQP/ProcotolBuffers (Part 1)

2009-10-31T11:43:00.000-04:00

High Level Architecture (HLA) is way of passing simulation data around. HLA was meant to replace DIS. Both systems are crap.

DIS is still used because it's simple, standardized and well understood. Anyone can implement it and inter-operate with other implementations. The biggest problems is that since it's standardized, implementing capabilities outside of the spec means that the new feature/packet won't be supported on others systems.

HLA was supposed to solve the above problems. However, it's cause more problems than it's really solved. It's the reason why the Air Force and others outside of the Navy are sticking with DIS.

One problem with HLA is that there are multiple standards. There's a DOD standard that everyone inside the Navy modeling and simulation world uses and the IEEE 1516 standard. I've not seen anyone actually using the 1516 standard.

Another issue is what the standard actually specifies. HLA while a standard is not an product that you would use. Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) is the middle-ware that is used. The standard specifies ways in data is distributed and programming interfaces, but it does not specify a wire protocol. As a result, implementations of an RTI are usually not compatible on the wire. So, competing implementations can't talk to one another. This leads to vendor lock-in in that everyone that wants to play in a sandbox must agree to use a common version.

There are various RTI implementations. Raytheon makes one called RTI-NG Pro. It's the "standard" that the Navy has chosen. From what I understand it based on the original DMSO source code. The code has been closed up and you can now buy the "standard" RTI from them.

Other implementations are around. Portico is an open source effort to implement the DoD standard and 1516. RTI-S, while not compliant with the HLA standards, it implements the programming interface and can be easily swapped out with other implementations. It has features that make it desirable to use. RTI-S has funded by a few government agencies. It's government open source in that you can get it if you need it and you're working on a government contract. There was some talk of open sourcing, but I'll believe it when I see it.

The nice feature of the HLA is that the data to be shared between the federates is defined in the Federation Object Model (FOM). As long as all of the players agree on the FOM (and an RTI), it's easy to play together. The FOM can be shared and everyone can implement those pieces that interests them.

The FOM side steps the problem of having to re-convene a DIS committee to update the standard for the new features that are need. It's more agile and easier to change when the players decide that the original understanding was faulty. (What? We were wrong? Doesn't happen here.)

So, we come back to our original problems: DIS => Simple easy to use. HLA => More flexible but must sell soul for licenses.

I think that there's hope for the above problems and TENA isn't it.

What's needed is to combine the simplicity of DIS with the flexibility of the FOM while making it opensource. I believe that Google's ProtocolBuffers (PB) may be a potential solution to part of the problem.

Read the link to get more detail, but a PB is a way of specifying data to be sent on the network or stored in a file in a binary format. The PB is actually specified in a simple text file. It's not even xml. The file with PB definition is processed by a code generator. The resulting code is used to marshal/unmarshal the data. There are code generators for C++, Java, Python and Ruby.

While code generation and simple format specification are great features, the best one is the ability to be backwards compatible with previous specifications. This is accomplished with the required and optional tags for fields in the specification. (Click the PB link above and you'll see an example.)

The PB could be used with UDP, TCP, or Multi-cast to push data onto the network. Just a quick glance at the PB group at Google, produced this example of using PB on the network.

Since DIS is simple and easy to understand, it probably won't take much effort to create a PB version of DIS. NPS has created an XML version of the specification. While it will take some work, parsing the xml and generating the necessary PB files should reasonably straight forward.

While it's nice to have DIS in the PB format, it's just DIS in a new format. As mentioned above, PB provides an easy way to extend an existing packet with new data while maintaining backwards capability with applications that might not have the new data fields. This would allow experimentation and extension without worrying about convening a new committee meeting.

This same capability could be extended to the FOM for HLA. The FOM format is well defined but it has it's own issues and could be more flexible. (Why did it have to have ID numbers specified?) It would not take much to parse it and generate the appropriate PB files.

Since there is no wire standard for HLA, it's not a problem to just broadcast the packets need for HLA. However, HLA specifies certain capabilities that is needed compliance. Data Distribution Management (DDM) is one item that would need to be addressed. DDM allows players to subscribe to data that meets special requirements. PB by itself can't do this. There is potential fix that is open source way and has some standards support.

Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) may be the standard that is needed to fix the problem. QPID is an opensource implementation that is used by RedHat and others. I'll cover it in Part 2.

Update:
Thrift is an Apache Incubator project that could serve as an alternative to PB.
Benchmark of PB vs other systems.

Update:
Fixed problem with link to DIS XML spec developed by MOVES.

Adblock and CNN

2009-10-23T22:47:00.000-04:00

I've noticed that CNN is putting more ads on their videos. This means that if I have AdBlock enabled that I can't watch them. If I want to watch something, I have to disable AdBlock. All this adds up to watching less video on CNN's site.

Comcast and Encrypted Digital Content

2009-10-17T21:30:00.000-04:00

It looks like Comcast is encrypting many digital channels that I could previously watch on my television. Previously, I could watch many channels that I get on Extended Basic cable in HD on a digital channel. SyFy, Discovery, AE, TNT, TBS, and many others was being broadcast unencrypted in HD. It was nice that I didn't need a digital cable box. Many of those channels have disappeared.

It would be nice to HD television, but I'm not "renting" a digital cable box. I've got enough stuff connected to my TV. I'm not investing in a cable card television either. TVs cost too much to be buying a new TV to get the latest new feature. If anything, I may end up dropping the cable television and just continue to buy my Internet access from the cable company.

Hulu now has a linux desktop client. Perhaps, I'll use that to watch television programming that I normally couldn't watch without cable. The other option is to buy DVD's of those shows or use NetFlix.

DVD's of popular shows average around $50 for the season. My extended cable costs ~$45/mth or ~$540/year. For that much money, seaons of 10 programs could be purchased every year. Most seasons of a particular program like House ($35) has 24 episodes. This means that ~240 hours of programming could be bought. (Really it's less, because an episode is about 50 minutes.)

Or, more could be bought if you factored in the cost of digital cable. If digital cable with HD support cost $100/mth or 24 seasons of television programs for a year. That's a lot of television. Of course you can't watch sports on ESPN.

Sports would be the biggest problem. If you love sports, you're still tied to cable. Some of the problem could be mitigated by using Over The Air broadcast reception. That is limited to the local station broadcast and the ability to receive those.

Overall, considering the quality of programming, the cost, and the awful boxes that have to be connected to receive the higher quality broadcasts; it doesn't seem worth it to have cable except as a connection to the Internet. If I need to hook a box up to my tv, I might as well use a computer that would allow me to read my email and use a keyboard. The Wii, Xbox, and Playstation aren't good enough for that. They suck.

Nvidia, AMD, Intel and GPGPU

2009-09-30T23:58:00.000-04:00

As of now it looks like AMD is hitting Nvidia hard. The latest 5xxx series from AMD is impressive. The theoretical single precision performance is over 2TFLOPS and double precision is is over 500 GFLOPS. Nvidia won't have a competing product until next year. Intel is working on it's answerLarrabee, which should ship next year.

Both Intel and AMD are providing specs to create open source products. Because of this, I've been supporting them. Most of my recent purchases has been AMD products. The open source video drivers have been working. I don't do a lot of 3d stuff so that's not so important. I'm hopeful that open source video acceleration will soon be possible.

I've not been buying a lot of Nvidia hardware. They were the best at producing binary drivers and supporting the various distributions. Now that AMD has reasonable opensource driver support, it's more of a hassle to worry about getting the binary drivers installed. It's fairly easy to install the binary drivers if your distribution has a non-free repo that maintains them. But, sometimes stuff breaks and if you have to fix it. Also, binary drivers may not immediately support the latest and greatest kernel/xorg for your distro. I'm glad that the we've got opensource drivers that are fixing this problem.

The biggest problem now is the lack of opensource drivers for the GPGPU hardware capabilities of the newset equipment. AMD and Nvidia both require binary drivers to allow general purpose programming access through OpenCL. This presents a problem, because we're back to the problem of being reliant on the whims of a company to be able to write programs to make use of hardware.

This is where Intel comes into play. They've been providing the information to developers to create the necessary drivers for their hardware. I'm hopeful that they'll do the same with Larrabee. If they provide opensource software/drivers, they'll take a big chunk of the market from AMD and Nvidia. They'll take it because it'll be easier to use Intel hardware in compute clusters. The necessary drivers and software will come with the distributions by default and will be very easy to use just like the Intel CPUs.

Herb Sutter's article on multicore system gives you an idea of what it might be like when Larrabee comes along.

In 2006, instead of shipping a dual-core Itanium part, with exactly the same transistor budget Intel could have shipped a chip that contained 100 decent Pentium-class cores with enough space left over for 16 MB of Level 3 cache.

If Larrabee is a massively parallel x86 ISA that is open, it could really shake things up. Hopefully, they'll provide it on a PCI-E card and not tie it to their CPU, otherwise it'll be a while before I can buy one.

BCM5752 no Jumbo Frames

2009-09-22T07:54:00.000-04:00

According to the programming guide for the BCM57XX chipset (pg 133/pdf pg 198):
The BCM5705, BCM5788, BCM5721, BCM5751, and BCM5752 devices do not support Jumbo Frames and hence both

This chipset is used on a lot of dell laptops. The one that I use for work is Dell M65. The Dell D820 has the same problem.

Network Television Season Premier Dates

2009-09-17T22:03:00.000-04:00

Why is it that most of the networks don't put their season premiers on the main page of the shows? Do they think that they'll get us to watch their re-runs more? It's just another reason why they're failing.

AR9285 driver for linux

2009-09-07T21:27:00.000-04:00

The Atheros AR9285 driver, ath9k, is barely usable in Fedora 12 Alpha and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha. I've been using the Ubuntu on the Gateway LT31. The wireless will fail under heavy load. I've not tested F12 Snapshot 1 yet, but I don't expect much better behaviour. There's a bugzilla entry for it. The number is 520539.

Update 2009-09-26: I updated my install of Ubuntu 9.10 alpha and received that latest interface changes and such. Suspends seem to be working. However, I have to use the NetworkManager applet to stop the networking and start it again before I get acceptable performance leves out of it.

I've not tried Fedora 12 Snapshot 3, but 2 works about as well as the Snapshot 1. I've noticed that the I have to restart the NetworkManager applet know matter what laptop I try. I don't know if it's the LiveCD or what. I'll wait until F12 Beta comes out before I try it again. FYI, I've been using unetbootin to test F12. If you use unetbootin, make sure that you re-label the USB key's volume name to LIVE.

Update 2009-10-10:Using the Fedora 20091007 nightly of the desktop livecd, I was able to get reasonable performance after a suspend/resume of the card. I need to do a throughput test to see if it works now. I'm able to use the desktop affects on fedora which I can't on Ubuntu.

Update 2009-10-25:I've moved over to using Fedora 12 Beta. (Sorry Ubuntu.) Performance of the card isn't what I would like it to be, but it is working. It continues to disconnect from the AP under heavy load, but will reconnect. Transferring a large files will cause it to disconnect 2 - 3 times per minute. I've updated the Fedora Bug report. Fedora 12 works reasonably well and I can enable the 3D effects for the desktop with the open source driver.

Update 2010-05-01: I'm now running Fedora 13 Beta. The card hasn't given me any issues. The Gateway LT31 seems to be working reasonably well. I haven't had a corruption issue with the ATI video while using the opensource driver. So far so good.

Update 2010-12-31: I've tried the the AR9285 with a N router. I was pushing almost 13MB/s (~90Mbps) when sitting about 5 feet away. I had to set the router to N only with Turbo enabled.

Compaq Headache

2009-08-03T22:33:00.001-04:00

Once again my decision to stay away from Compaq (now owned by HP) is confirmed as a good one. Sunday, I picked up a Compaq CQ50-130US computer from a family friend. The kid that owns it has been having problems with it. I've been told that it's been sent back twice. I got the call the check it out Sunday.

The problem it turns out is the hard drive. I confirmed that the computer itself is okay by booting Ubuntu 9.10 alpha 3 from a usb key. It worked fine. It recognized the wireless and the X display was excellent. Ubuntu could not see the hard drive.

When I ran the hard drive diagnostic it says "Hard Drive Not Exist". That's a pretty good sign that the drive is bad. To verify that it wasn't just the drive not being seated properly, I removed the drive and put it back in. It didn't fix the problem.

To verify that the drive controller wasn't bad, I removed the drive from the caddy and put it in my machine. (It's easy to do this since I have a 2.5" drive carrier that I can slip the drive into.) I booted my F10 box and immediately I see that there is a SMART error. The hard drive is definitely bad.

Tonight I go to the hp site and try chatting with a service rep. I thought that I would get a new drive on the way this evening. Unfortunately, I failed. Below is the transcript of the chat session.

I would recommend that you stay away from Compaq systems.

Trever Shelton : HI James, how are you doing today?
James Hubbard : Fine. How are you?
Trever Shelton : I am fine, thank you for asking.
Trever Shelton : As, per the above description your notebook hard disk shows failed, am I correct?
James Hubbard : Yes.
Trever Shelton : Let me see how best I can help you with this issue and make the day better for you. Your satisfaction is our primary goal.
Trever Shelton : I would require few details about your product before troubleshooting.
James Hubbard : Presario CQ50 S/N: xxxxxxxx P/N: xxxxxx
Trever Shelton : Thank you for the information.
Trever Shelton : Did you make any software or hardware changes to the computer recently?
James Hubbard : No
Trever Shelton : Could you stay online for 5 minutes, while I retrieve the System information from our database?
James Hubbard : Yes
Trever Shelton : Thank you for being online, I appreciate your patience.
Trever Shelton : May I know are you chatting with me from the same notebook?
James Hubbard : No from a different machine.
Trever Shelton : okay
Trever Shelton : May I know did you perform any hard drive self test?
James Hubbard : I tried, but the error messages says hard drive not found.
Trever Shelton : Okay, in this case you need to reseat the hard drive.
James Hubbard : Actually it says "Hard disk not exist"
Trever Shelton : You need to remove the hard drive and insert it.
James Hubbard : I've already done that. Didn't help. I even placed the drive in my computer and it can't do anything with it. I tried to format it and it won't work the hard drive is dead. Trever Shelton : Thank you for performed the steps, I appreciate your efforts.
James Hubbard : You're welcome
Trever Shelton : I would like to suggest you, could you please enter into the BIOS?
James Hubbard : I'm in the bios now.
Trever Shelton : May I know which options do you able to see in BIOS
James Hubbard : I pressed ESC to get the startup menu and then pressed F10.
Trever Shelton : Okay!
Trever Shelton : Now do you able to see the BIOS screen in your notebook?
James Hubbard : Yes I see the BIOS screen.
Trever Shelton : May I know which options do you able to see in BIOS?
James Hubbard : There is Main Security Diagnostics System Configuration Exit.
Trever Shelton : Could you please go to the Diagnostics system and try the hard drive self test?
James Hubbard : I get "Hard Drive Not Exist" same as the previous message.
Trever Shelton : I appreciate your efforts.
Trever Shelton : I have to create a service ticket for replace the hard drive, is that fine with you?
James Hubbard : Yes.
Trever Shelton : First, I would like to register your notebook in our system data base.
Trever Shelton : May I know your mailing address, telephone number and email id?
James Hubbard : It should already be registered. The kid that owns it has called tech support before.
Trever Shelton : Could you please reconfirm the mailing address, telephone number, email id , product number and serial number?
James Hubbard : The owner's name is abcd efghi
address:
xxxx
xxx
phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx
James Hubbard : send the ticket information to
xxxx@xxxx.xxx
Trever Shelton : Let me explain you, your notebook has not registered in our data base.
James Hubbard : okay.
Trever Shelton : We have limited access for users, so I dont have to send the ticket information at your email id.
James Hubbard : okay.
Trever Shelton : May I know the owner of the notebook?
James Hubbard : abcd efghi
Trever Shelton : Okay! could you please stay for a while.
James Hubbard : Yes
Trever Shelton : May I know do you have abcd efghi email id?
James Hubbard : I don't know his email id.
James Hubbard : Use mine for now. He doesn't have a computer at home that works.
James Hubbard : Mine is xxx@xxxx.xxx
Trever Shelton : May I know the alternate number of the owner for this notebook?
James Hubbard : I don't know of an alternate number for the owner.
Trever Shelton : I would require the owner of the notebook to register the notebook.
James Hubbard : I've given you all of the information that you need to register the notebook.
Trever Shelton : I understand your concern, for authentication purpose its necessary the owner of the notebook to chat with us. Or else you need tell to Johnny to call back and register the information in our system.
Trever Shelton : I would like to give the alternate option, you need to visit our neareset authorized service center.
James Hubbard : Where is the nearest authorized service center?
Trever Shelton : You need to follow the below link, where you can find the service center.
Trever Shelton : The link: http://h20465.www2.hp.com/GPL/search.aspx?language_code=en&country_code=us&SearchType=SSP
Trever Shelton : I hope I answered your query.
James Hubbard : No not really. My query was to get the hard drive replaced.
Trever Shelton : I knew that, you will get the hard drive in service center.

Purchased Netbook

2009-07-16T23:20:00.000-04:00

I purchased a netbook this evening. The one that I bought is the Gateway LT3103u. It comes with Vista. Vista works on it and I've installed F11 on it. I've not verified that Vista still works.

I used unetbootin to setup the USB drive with Fedora 11 i686 livecd. However, I did have a video corruption problem with the X that came by default with the F11 Live CD. I had to use Ctrl-Alt F2 to switch to a console and switch back to X via Ctrl-F1. The video would look better. I rebooted after the install and was able to get through First Boot where I was able to enter the user account and other things. After getting to X, I went to the console and run yum update. There's 284MB of updates installing now.

Other than the X windows having the corruption problems, it looks like everything else has just worked. Atheros wifi seems to be working. Sound works. The machine has a decent sized keyboard and lcd screen.

I'll post additional updates here.

Update: I've not been able to get the Atheros AR9285 wireless to work under F11 yet. I've installed the latest wireless drivers from linuxwireless.org. So, I'm using the machine under Vista Basic most of the time. Vista Basic doesn't perform too badly. The machine does get a little warm, but overall it's a nice machine.

Vacation in Pennsylvania

2009-07-08T21:43:00.001-04:00

My parents, Lee Ann and I went to Pennsylvania for vacation. We went to Gettysburg, Kutztown, Lancaster, and Hershey. The trip was good.

We drove around the Gettysburg battlefield doing the auto tour until it started raining. The next day we drove to Kutztown for the folk festival. We spent several hours there looking through the booths. The next morning we drove to Intercourse. We took the 55 minute buggy ride that went through a covered bridge. The ride was nice and we looked through some of the shops in town.

Before driving to Hershey the next day, we went back to Gettysburg to Boyd's Country. Thomas Kincade was doing a signing. My parents bought a small print, had him sign it, and got a picture of my dad with Thomas Kincade. We drove to Hershey's Chocolate World afterwards. You can take a "tour" of the factory for free. There is now real factory. It's just a ride with some videos and smells to make you think that you're going through a factory. The cost of candy is reasonable though.

On the way up, we stopped at the Green Valley Book Fair. I was able to get several non-fiction books that I had been putting off. Among the books that I purchased was "Fooled By Randomness", "Made to Stick", and "Not Even Wrong". These books sold for $4 - $7.

Eclipse Test and Performance Tools

2009-05-20T22:29:00.000-04:00

I used the Eclipse Project's Test and Performance Tools for the first time. I needed it to help determine a problem I was having with network responsiveness for a project. After running the profiler, I was able to look at the execution time for the threads in a nice graph. The graph showed me where most of the time was spent by one thread. By modifying the run method, I was able to improve the performance.

Why Care About a Political Party?

2009-05-03T11:19:00.000-04:00

Why do people care about whether or not a lives or survives? Paul Graham seems to have it right when he says that it's a part of someone's identity. The party is another form of religion. It's not just the GOP, but Democrats are the same way. Political party as an extension of religion is especially obvious in places like Iraq and Iran.

I don't care about any political party. They don't have anything to teach me about morality. Those that are in charge only care about furthering their own career.

I write this because it bothers me to see people talking about saving a the Republican party. Why does either party need or deserve saving? It's about change. It scares them. They wouldn't know what without the party machine to take care of them.

Updating software

2009-04-04T22:15:00.000-04:00

In the previous post, I wrote about my frustrations with Windows and updating the software to fix perceived performance problems. My biggest beef is with the amount of stuff I have to download and how often I have to hit the Update Windows button.

I mentioned that I after I installed SP3 I had to go to the Update Windows page again to get additional updates. Prior to getting to the page for the updates, it had to update the authorization program. (If memory serves me correctly.) Why can't the MS update software download everything all at once and update the system?

On Fedora/RedHat/Ubuntu and many other systems, when it discovers update it downloads them all at once and installs them. I realize that Windows locks certain files and won't allow changes until it reboots, but why doesn't it continue installing the other things that is needed?

Also, why can't I download all of the updates and run them separately while not being connected? (Yes, I know the reason. Control of the software.) I can do that for the above Linux based systems. I can download all of the updates to a DVD and carry them to another machine and have it update the machine.

Fedora makes it even easier. If you have multiple machines on a network, you can have one of those machines act as the repository for updates. This means that when the repository machine is updated, the other machines can pull the updates from there minimizing your network traffic.

This means a lot now that you have providers such as Comcast and Time Warner capping data transfers. Which would you rather spend your bandwidth allotment on watching Hulu or downloading Windows updates to the 1 - X machines in your home? If you have 5 machines in your home and you had to pull down 200MB worth of updates, you just used 1GB of your data allotment.

It's not only Windows, but the latest release of Acrobat from Adobe asked me to install a language pack update that was 19MB when I clicked update. The Acrobat installer also installed Air which I didn't ask for.

Fixing Windows Again

2009-04-04T21:35:00.000-04:00

Once again I've spent part of a day working on a Windows PC. The general complaint is that it's slow. I've decided not to wipe it and re-install the software yet, but I probably will if it still seems slow. This time around I'm applying updates for all of the software that is installed. Yes ALL of the software.

Part of the problem is that this computer connects to the Internet via dial up. You can't update the computer with dial up. You can tell windows to download updates. It will do it in the background, but on dial this is slow. So, I brought the machine home and doing the updates from here.

First thing this morning I told it to update and first thing it installed SP3. Yes, I could have taken that with me (I had already downloaded it) but why bother. After updating SP3, it wanted to update 3 other things for Windows which took another 248MB of download. I believe that it was some .Net update.

In addition to the Windows update, I'm updating FireFox, AVG Free, Java, Spy Bot, Flash, Acrobat (you really need to update Acrobat), and OpenOffice. After that I'll run spy bot and defragment the hard drive over night. Hopefully this will help.

There are efforts being made to get some type of broad band connection into the area where this computer lives. It's a small rural farming area that has one dial up provider. Once it's installed I think that I'm going to set up the machine for dual boot and see if I can the users to run Ubuntu.

I can't do that now since the modems they buy are WinModems. There are no drivers for them under Linux. I'd have them buy more expensive modems, but they usually get one per year fried due to surges in the phone line. (Yes a surge protector helps.)

I need to do the same thing for my parents. I've put off putting linux on their computer even though do have high speed. The reason for that is that they've got some programs that only run under windows. I think that I'm going to try it anyway.

Attention all Burglars

2009-04-02T20:14:00.000-04:00

Apparently having your village in Google street maps is an invitation for more burglaries. It's ironic that everyone in the world now knows that Broughton in Buckinghamshire is an affluent place that might be a good place rob a home.

Ext4 and Writing Filesystem apps

2009-03-15T11:25:00.000-04:00

There's a brouhaha over the way in which ext4 and applications work together. It was first noticed on Ubuntu and has a bug report. Ted Ts'o has written up an explanation of what is happening on his blog and the the bug report has a similar explanation.

Later in the bug report, he explains how applications should be written to ensure the data is written to the disk. He illustrates how Emacs and Vi ensure that the data gets written. It was an eye opener. I always wondered why they write the files that they do and now I know.

The problem is that writing applications that ensure data is correctly written to the disk is hard. I used to follow the PostgreSQL mailing list so I know how difficult it is to get data to the disk reliably. The presentation Eat My Data by Stewart Smith gives you an idea of how hard it is.

Most databases have been written to ensure that data gets written to the disk. In the above posts, Ted Ts'o makes the assertion that if want your data to get to disk use a database. Everybody hates the windows registry, so that didn't go over well. If you don't want to worry about making sure that data gets to the disk, you're best bet is to use a database. It will take away some of drudgery of verifying data written.

Testing Syntax Highlighter

2009-02-14T19:57:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to get SyntaxHighlighter working. This is a testing post.


class TestHighlight 
{
public:
    int mTestInt;

private:
};

SELinux KVM QEMU errors

2009-01-28T21:05:00.000-05:00

I'm getting close to disabling SELinux under F10. I'm trying to setup a bridged network so that my windows guest can have full access to the network. Windows runs fine in qemu_kvm using the "-net nic -net user" options. My problem is that in bridge mode it uses "-net nic,macaddr=11:22:33:44:55:66 -net tap". When I try to run the virtual machine I get this message "warning: could not configure /dev/net/tun: no virtual network emulation".

Update: I disabled SELinux, but that didn't fix the problem. I got rid of the error by configuring the tap at least somewhat correctly. I still can't get the bridge to work.

Update: My virtual machines now work with bridged networking. The MAC address that I created above doesn't work. You need to make it something else. Use the networking information on this page as a guide to setting it up. I'm using the /etc/qemu-ifup. I use this script to create 3 taps corresponding to three virtual machines so I can run them at the same time. I don't let my scripts for the virtual machine startup run the /etc/qemu-ifup script. If you're running SELinux make sure that you apply the proper labels to the image.

I'm running a machine with 8GBs of RAM on an AMD Phenom II 840 processor. I'm getting good performance with it. I did upgrage the Fedora 10 kvm module to one from Fedora 11 development repos so that it wouldn't have so many problems with audio.

Send Hostname to Router

2009-01-24T11:09:00.000-05:00

I have Tomato firmware on my Linksys WRT-54GL wireless router. I purchased the router so I could put Tomato or another open source firmware version.

One of the things that I wanted with this was to assign the same ip address to each computer through DHCP and get my internal DNS working without setting up bind. The tool that performs this duty and comes with most of these firmwares is Dnsmasq. It's a very easy to setup DNS and DHCP server.

The Tomato web interface makes it easy to assign an ip address to the specific MAC address of the ethernet or wireless network card. If the machine has one interface this isn't a problem. This becomes an issue for laptops that connect either via the wireless card or the ethernet cable. The problem is that Dnsmaq (and most other DHCP software) will not allow the same ip address to be assigned to two different mac addresses.

Most DHCP clients have the ability to send a hostname so that the DHCP server can assign a specific address to the machine everytime no matter the interface being used. This prevents tying the ip address to a specific MAC addresss. This ability is easy to enable in the Dnsmasq interface in Tomato.

Go to the Advanced -> DHCP/DNS. Enter the following in the custom configuration section:
dhcp-host=MyHostname.domain.what, 192.168.xx.xx

Change the information to be what you want it to be for your internal network. I don't use a "domain.com" or "domain.anything" that is could be a real domain name.

In Windows, change the computer name to match "MyHostname" and reboot. After rebooting, go to Start -> Run -> type cmd and click Run. A command window should have appeared. Type ipconfig[ENTER] to see the IP Address assigned. I had no problem setting this up in Windows.

Under Fedora 10, I ran into more difficulty. I used the normal Network Admin tools to attempt to set the "DHCP-Hostname". After starting the interfaces a few dozen times, I was never able to get the IP assigned in this manner.

NetworkManager is used to control the interfaces on the laptops. If it used to edit the connection information, there is an option on the IPv4 Settings tab for DHCP Client ID. This is not the same as sending the hostname.

In the man page for dhclient.conf, there's an option for sending the hostname:
send host-name "MyHostname.domain.what";

The problem is that NetworkManager does not read the file called /etc/dhclient.conf. NetworkManager generates it's own .conf file to pass to dhclient. Finally I came across a post that mentioned creating a file called /etc/dhclient-ifname.conf. In my case, the files are called:
/etc/dhclient-eth0.conf
/etc/dhclient-wlan0.conf

I placed the above configuration option for sending the hostname into these files and restarted NetworkManager. NetworkManager or the dhclient program picked up these file for the interface and sent the host-name. So it works for me now.

This is what's in my /etc/dnsmasq.conf file on the router:


interface=br0
domain=doman.internal
resolv-file=/etc/resolv.dnsmasq
addn-hosts=/etc/hosts.dnsmasq
expand-hosts
min-port=4096
dhcp-range=192.168.xx.mm,192.168.xx.rr,255.255.255.0,1440m
dhcp-option=3,192.168.99.2
dhcp-authoritative
dhcp-host=00:15:C5:BB:37:3C,192.168.xx.aa,1440m
dhcp-host=00:0B:82:04:03:E7,192.168.xx.bb,1440m
dhcp-host=00:04:F2:02:27:62,192.168.xx.cc,1440m
dhcp-host=MyHostname.domain.internal,192.168.xx.hh

If you don't want to maintain a /etc/hosts file on all of your machines, ssh into the router and edit the /etc/hosts file. Any ip and name pair will resolve when doing the following from the command line:
host machine-name

The /etc/hosts/file looks like this: This doesn't work


192.168.xx.aa MyHostname
192.168.xx.bb AnotherHostname

Update: Modifying the /etc/hosts files directly doesn't work. This post describes what you need to do. Go to Basic ->Static DHCP and add an entry. Don't fill out a mac address.

Update: Added a semi-colon to the send host-name line.

W2COG Agile for the Government

2009-01-20T19:10:00.000-05:00

I came to W2COG website because it was referenced in an article in the Communications of the ACM on using agile software methods for government projects. They did an experiment where two projects were to produce similar software. One project used the "standard" procedures, spent $1.5 million, and only produced a document. The other project used agile methods, spent $100k, and produced working software.

They've published some information on using agile in government projects. Go to their website and click the publications link. I would provide a link, but it's one of the worst uses of flash for a website that I've seen (see previous post).

Update: Changed some of the sentences around and did away with worst website moniker. I've seen much worse sites. I was frustrated so I was harsh.

Flash Gone Wrong

2009-01-20T18:51:00.000-05:00

If you want to a site where flash has gone wrong check out the website for the World Wide Consortium for the Grid. I don't understand why someone would want to create the entire site in flash.

Don't Use Boost Test

2009-01-19T11:19:00.000-05:00

I've been using Boost Test in some production code that I work on. This code has to run and compile on RHEL 5. This should include the test, otherwise the tests aren't very useful. My work environment had been Fedora 7.

I recently updated my work laptop to Fedora 10. I started running my unit tests and noticed that they were failing. In version 1.34.1, the way to create and run tests was changed to what appears to be an incompatible way of setting up and running tests now. Because of the above requirements for RHEL 5 compatibility, this means that I can't rely on Boost Test.

I've been somewhat skeptical of using Boost, this kind of reinforces it for me. From what I can tell, there's been no guarantee of backwards compatibility or I've never read one. Perhaps the other modules/libraries in Boost do provide some kind of statement. The libraries that are scheduled for inclusion in the new C++ standard are probably the most stable.

If anyone can provide any hints how to fix this without adding too many ifdefs, feel free to chime in. I've not been able to use the suggested fixes in the link below.

Here's the error message that I get on link using the old style of Boost Test.
/usr/lib/gcc/i386-redhat-linux/4.3.2/../../../crt1.o: In function `_start': (.text+0x18): undefined reference to `main'

Discussion about changes:
http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20071218.095023.e2639d79.en.html

Here's an example using the new way that actually works.


#define BOOST_TEST_DYN_LINK 
#define BOOST_TEST_MODULE MyTest
#include < boost/test/unit_test.hpp>

BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE( my_test )
{
    BOOST_CHECK_EQUAL(2, 2 );
}

Update:I'm still using Boost Test even though it's not backwards compatibility. There's no requirements for testing in the code base that I'm using so I just use the post 1.34 capability. Also, there's no way that I could use another tool associated with the software product that I'm using. The requirement is that the software be available on RHEL 5.

Windows 7 Beta Fail

2009-01-10T16:47:00.000-05:00

So, I was going to download the Windows 7 Beta and install it on a qemu+kvm virtual machine. This would be the first time that I've ever downloaded a MS Beta product. Unfortunately, I need a MS Passport account so I can sign in and get it.

Considering all of the flack that MS has gotten for Vista, you would think that they would make obtaining the beta really easy. They're handing out keys for the OS like candy. Why would they limit a user to a Windows Passport account?

I may have had one in the past, but I don't remember what it was/is. I'm certainly not going to sign up for one now. My wife has a HotMail account. I may have her download it tomorrow.

Books read in 2008

2009-01-01T17:03:00.000-05:00

Books that I've read during 2008.

Non-Fiction

The (Mis)Behavior of Markets

SuperCrunchers

The Tipping Point

Clean Code

Others not listed

Fiction

Ender in Exile

Infoquake

Lots of Raymond Fiest books

Others not listed

TSO in Knoxville Tn

2008-12-22T23:39:00.001-05:00

Lee Ann and I went to Knoxville to see the Trans Siberian Orchestra for our anniversary. It was a good show. Too bad Thompson-Boling Area messed things up by not putting up signs for the Will Call. We walked up to the entrance (3 Flights?) in 24 degF temps only to be told that we had to go back down for the Will Call. I noticed lots of others walking back down. I should have caught a clue.

Windows, USB drives, Military

2008-12-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

If you hadn't heard, there is a ban on removable re-writable media in effect for the US Military. From what I'm hearing, this could be indefinite. I'm not in any position to know this for a fact, but I've heard that they're looking for a solution to this problem. If it was as easy to fix as not enabling autorun, I'm sure that it would have blown over and personnel would be getting their usb drives back.

The above really illustrates the problem of security in a Windows environment. Targeted exploits are being written that are not caught by virus scanners because they're not common enough in the wild. The virus scanners are doing pattern matching and no one has entered the new pattern. Consumer Reports pointed out just how bad the situation was in 2006.

The interesting thing about this is that this worm/virus probably propagated without the user having admin access. Most people take for granted that when running as a limited user it's harder to infect the system. It looks like this didn't stop this virus, since most of those users won't be running as an admin.

Perhaps it's time that the U.S. Military stopped depending on Windows and decided to use other operating systems. The NSA has provided a very valuable Linux kernel security addon called SELinux. It should be possible to create policies that would prevent this from happening on a linux system.

To begin, the USB drive should not be mounted with execute permission. This will prevent casual program execution. Using SELinux, it should be possible to limit the user to running only applications specified by the admin in the most restricted environment. I don't know how it's done, but it should be possible to prevent all shells and interpreted programs from running code from the USB drive.

I know what you're going to say next. There's a lot of windows applications that are needed. Run them in a virtual machine, but prevent that virtual machine from having access to USB drives. If the user needs data from a drive, the user will have to copy it to an appropriate location. This option will work well in the field. Laptops with virtualization enabled processors will be able to run VMWare or some other vm product reasonably well enough for most applications. Harden the laptop with all of the security that it needs.

In an office environment skip Citrix and provide the users with a virtual machine running on a software like Qumranet's (purchased by RedHat recently) virtual machine products. Watch the video of 1080p HD video being streamed from the virtual machine to a thin client. I hear that Wyse, makers of thin clients, is having a record year with the economy in a slump.

The Fragility of the Economic System

2008-11-23T15:28:00.000-05:00

I watch the Bozo Business reporters on CNBC and Fox. Mostly CNBC early in the morning and during lunch. They're pretty much cluess and I don't mean that in a nice way. Here's an excellent example of this. Follow the link and watch the video. It contains interviews with Peter Schiff on various news programs. The video was floating amongst the traders.
Trader Talk

Here's an interview with Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbroit on the economy. They're very worried about what will happen.

Read more by Taleb at his website Fooled by Randomness. I've read his book The Black Swan, but haven't read the book Fooled by Randomness.

I'm in the process of reading Mandelbroit's book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets.

Computers, Malware, Law

2008-11-22T13:21:00.000-05:00

Simplification: A substitute teach was charged with showing students pornography when windows with pictures of naked people started popping up on the classroom computer. She could have gone to jail for a long time. It's an example of how clueless law enforcement is when it comes to computers. There was no forensic investigation as to what happened with the computer. It's hard to believe that New London County State's Attorney Michael Regan kept his job.

She was cleared of the pornography charges but still had to plead guilty to disorderly conduct. I suppose that this was a face saving move by Michael Regan.

Go here to get more detail: Connecticut drops felony charges against Julie Amero, four years after her arrest

Reviews, Bonuses, Loyalty

2008-11-22T10:45:00.000-05:00

Since it's the time of year for reviews and bonuses, there's been a few articles to come out recently. The following link is to a posting of Bob Sutton's that contains links to information about performance reviews. Sam Culbert in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance Review!

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?
What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.

None of the above is new. Annual performance reviews are, at best, a time to rank people. It's easier to justify who to layoff or fire.

When given yearly, bonuses are expected. When it becomes an expectation, it's not really a bonus anymore. It's a part of the yearly compensation. If there's a year when one isn't given, you'll find out that someone was expecting that money to buy their kids something for Christmas or pay some type of expense. Worst yet, you may be sending a signal to employees that things aren't working out so well at the company. Ideally, the company is open honest with it's employees such that company performance is known and isn't a surprise. The employees should have been treated well enough that you wouldn't expect them to leave when bad news is announced. This is called loyalty and it's something today's worker can't afford to give lightly.

Companies that want loyalty should know that it isn't earned easily. It's earned with trust which is built on honesty. Employees need to trust their supervisors and management. Trust comes from being able to believe what management says.

If I were an autoworker, there's no way that I would have any loyalty to automakers. It was obvious from the testimony before congress that don't know what they're doing. They danced around questions and couldn't give good direct answers. They can't be trusted.

It's the same thing with politics. I'm an independent because I can't trust what either party says. I won't sign up for the dogma that is espoused by either side, because I don't believe that they're honest.

Sutton on Automaker Mgmt.

2008-11-21T08:51:00.000-05:00

Instead of pointing the finger at the workers and their compensation perhaps it time to talk about mgmt. Bob Sutton does this in his post, The Auto Industry Bailout: Thoughts About Why GM Executives Are Clueless And Their Destructive “No We Can’t” Mindset

I could list hundreds of management, cultural, and operational reasons why I believe that GM is such a flawed organization, but to me, a pair of root causes standout: Most of the senior executives -- and many of the managers -- are (1) clueless about what matters most and (2) suffer from a "no we can't" mindset.

Joe Biden Anti-Tech Guy

2008-08-24T11:42:00.000-04:00

I've never really cared for Joe Biden this CNET article sums it up for me. Looks like I have even more of a reason to write in Ron Paul's name.

He's just another example of big government advocates trying to help maintain the status quo.

Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans' ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)

Clients Can't be Assholes

2008-08-21T08:38:00.000-04:00

Here's a presentation by Obie Fernandez on running a consulting business. There are some good ideas here. I like the part near the end (30 minute mark) where he says that they don't tolerate asshole clients. He provides an example of client "misbehaviour." His remedy was that the person had to apologize to the entire team.

This ties in well to the book The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton. Obie's goal is to head off "asshole poisoning." By not allowing this behaviour, he maintains a good working environment.

Build Times

2008-08-06T21:51:00.001-04:00

Oh I wish that the product that I work with could have build times like the linux kernel.

For example, for the kernel, I can literally rebuild my whole kernel (which is just what I use on _that_ machine) in about 16 seconds. This is _not_ using ccache or anything else - it's rebuilding the whole tree with -j16.

Obviously Linus has a machine with at least 8 cores if not a machine that has 4 quad core processors. Also, he has enough memory to keep the entire kernel tree in the buffers. In addition, the kernel is highly modular so there aren't as many dependencies between systems. This means that there aren't a lot of extraneous header files that would slow down the build.

If you know about agile, you know why this is important. Fast build times means:

An automated build that can let you know at the minimum that your project is/is not building.

Fast builds "probably" means that your product doesn't have a lot of dependencies if it is large and this lends itself to incorporating tests and running those test via automation as well.

The above is the beginning of continuous integration. It can help your software quality especially if you take it seriously and start doing the other things that go along with Agile processes.

Diets

2008-08-03T16:08:00.000-04:00

This is a follow up to the Bias and Diets post earlier. The latest long term study on diets suggests that low carb diets work better than the low fat diets.

The biggest weight loss happened in the first five months of the diet — low-fat and Mediterranean dieters lost about 10 pounds, and low-carbohydrate dieters lost 14 pounds.

By the end of two years, all the dieters had regained some, but not all, of the lost weight. The low-fat dieters showed a net loss of six pounds, and the Mediterranean and low-carbohydrate dieters both lost about 10 pounds.

Another article about this study has more information:

For people with cholesterol problems, the low-carb diet seemed best; for those at risk for diabetes, the Mediterranean diet provided more health benefits.

"The take-home message should be that we should abandon the idea that low fat diets are the number one way for people to lose weight –- it wasn’t the best diet, it can be helpful for some people, but overall I think the first choice should be the Mediterranean or the low carb," he said.

Dunbar's Number, Rule of 150

2008-08-03T13:30:00.000-04:00

I came across Dunbar's Number or the Rule of 150 while reading the The Tipping Point. I've noticed that the small companies where I've worked have been less than 150 people. BMH was approaching 150 employee's when it was purchased.

Since being bought out by a much larger company, the BMH operation has changed quite a bit. It no longer has the same feel even though I work with the same basic people. This probably has to do with the way in which the more common processes have been changed and the fact that one of the founders of BMH has become part time as he transitions into retirement.

Don't get me wrong about the above statements. I am not trying to be derogatory toward my current employer. It's more of comment/observation about the fact that small companies that want to grow need to realize that will need to change or they won't be successful.

Management has to prepare for the change and make that change easy or else they will lose the people that made them successful. (They may lose them anyway.) The Hutterite communities mentioned both in the article and the book recognized this early on and have a rule that communities must split once they reach 150 members.

Bias and Diets

2008-07-30T09:02:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting blog post about Bias and Diets.

Why is Taubes so interested in bias? For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Judging from Taubes’ exhaustive research -- indeed, I'd be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail -- the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored).

I recommend that you read the article and read the interviews at the bottom. If there's this much bias just for diets, it makes you wonder about the global warming debate.

Tomato Firmware

2008-07-13T16:55:00.000-04:00

After listening to the discussion regarding wireless routers n the TWUUG list, I finally decided to buy a WRT54GL. About 4 years ago I purchased a Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 with the intention of replacing it's bios with one of the custom firmware releases. I never got around to it and I didn't want to brick my only router. So I bought the WRTG54L since it's the only one of the WRT54G/GS models that you can put Linux on now. All of the others have limited memory and only run VxWorks.

I installed OpenWRT. It installed without a problem. I wanted a nice webgui, but the latest didn't have one or I didn't find it. Instead, I used Tomato.

Tomato's webgui is nice. I set it up within a few minutes and replaced the old router with the new. The network statistics are cool. It provides a realtime graph that can be viewed in the browser and it maintains a daily, weekly, and monthly log.

I've turned on QOS, but I don't know how well it is working. This week should give me an idea of how well the QOS works. I set my Vonage voip device to have the highest settings.

I need the extra router for a trip to the beach later this month. After that I'll play around with OpenWRT. There are some interesting things that can run on the router. I want to play around with Asterisk. I've got some actual voip phones that I can use.

CC licensed images

2008-07-01T22:43:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting post about the usage of Creative Commons material available on the internet.

Google C++ Style Guide

2008-06-30T20:23:00.001-04:00

Here's the Google C++ Coding Style Guide. I looked for other languages but didn't find any.

Processor support for 64 bit?

2008-06-28T21:54:00.000-04:00

While chatting with a friend online the other day I became curious how one would determine if a processor supports 64bit and if the kernel is 64bits. Know the answer to first question could have helped me out a few weeks ago when I tried to install the x86_64 version of Fedora 9 on my wife's laptop. Unfortunately when I booted the install disk, the installer message stated that it was not 64bit capable.

To determine if you processor supports 64bit mode in Linux, the easiest thing to do is:
grep lm /proc/cpuinfo

The lm stands for long mode and it's in the cpu flags section. If more than one line is returned with the same information, the processor has multiple cores.

To determine if the OS kernel what instruction set it is running use:
uname -m

A value of x86_64 indicates that it is running the 64 bit extensions for Intel/AMD.

Could not chdir to home directory /home/xxx

2008-06-26T17:27:00.000-04:00

I recently installed Fedora 9 x86_64 on my home machine. This is the first time that I've run the 64 bit version. I didn't disable SELinux this time either.

I've got most things working well on the machine. The most annoying issue that I've had is when I used ssh to access my machine from somewhere else. Everytime that I logged in I would get the the following message and get dumped to the / directory.

Could not chdir to home directory /home/xxx: Permission denied

I could type cd and it would take me to my home directory. I could read files in those directories. Looking around I found that others were having problems but usually it was a pam problem or something else related to authentication. Eventually I decided that it was a SELinux issue.

Since I've never run SELinux on my machine, it stands to reason that none of the proper contexts were ever applied to the home directories. After digging around with google and figuring out what I needed I discovered the problem. Below is what my context looked like:


> ls -Zd * 
drwx------  xxx  xxx system_u:object_r:file_t:s0      xxx

I created another user and discovered that what it should look like is this:


drwx------  aaa aaa system_u:object_r:user_home_dir_t:s0 aaa

To change the context to be that I used:


>chcon -t user_home_dir_t xxx
> ls -Zd * 
drwx------  xxx xxx system_u:object_r:file_t:s0      xxx

SELinux tended to be difficult to use. Fedora and the other distributions are working hard to make it easier to use. Consider leaving it enabled when working with newer distributions. It could prevent a zero day exploit from taking over your machine.

New Railing and Storm Doors

2008-05-18T10:04:00.000-04:00

We decided to put up railing last year. It's not required by code but we figured that it would help improve the look of the house and prevent any unwanted accidents. We wanted it to last but didn't want to spend a fortune for it. We finally settled on ColorGuard railing. Each piece of railing comes with everything that you need.

Some of the original posts had some rot on them. They looked nice but were not pressure treated. Two of them would have need to be replaced this summer no matter what. The posts were replaced with pressure treated 4x4 posts that had a vinyl sleeve placed over them.

New Larson Tradewinds storm doors were installed. These have the retractable screen. The door on the front of the house is a full view and the one on the back is a mid view. The retractable screen is nice since you can open the door at any time and pull down the glass to reveal the screen. There's no mess with the removing glass and installing the screen.

Here's the before pics.

The new look:

Family and Cancer

2008-05-05T22:35:00.000-04:00

Lee Ann's cousin's wife has cancer. She has been documenting her progress on her MySpace site. She and her family are doing as well as can be expected. I can't even imagine what it must be like to deal with it.

The brother of my best friend from high school had his son diagnosed with Leukemia a couple of years ago. He's made it through the chemo and I believe that they have stated that it's in remission. Again, it's not a situation that's easy to imagine. There is a good documentary called A Lion in the House that appeared on PBS a couple of years ago that deal with children and cancer. It's probably one of the saddest things I've watched.

Pthreads

2008-04-13T13:23:00.000-04:00

I needed to learn a little about pthreads so that I could modify some code for work. Below is a sample program that does some basic counting in threads. I've used pthread_join to wait for the threads to finish. I did this because I wanted to signal to the threads when to finish. There's a global value, thread_exit, that is shared with the threads. Setting thread_exit = true signals all of the threads to exit. It is set after the program sleeps for 1 second.

If a thread needs to do a certain amount of work and finish during it's own time, a status flag could be passed into the thread. When the thread is finished, the flag would be set. This method is described in the pthread_join man page.

Numerous examples demonstrating the use of pthreads can be found using google.

Put iostream and pthread.h between the <>.


//============================================================================
// Name        : pthread_test.cpp
// Author      : James Hubbard
// Version     :
// Copyright   : Public Domain
// Description : Pthread Example
//============================================================================

#include <>
#include <>


using namespace std;
bool thread_exit = false;

void *thread_test(void *arg) {
    int thread_num = *((int *)arg);
    int *count = new int(0);  //clean up elsewhere
    while (!thread_exit) {
        (*count)++;
        //if ( !(*count%5000000) )
        // cout << "thread " << thread_num << ": " << *count << endl; 
    }
    cout << "Thread " << thread_num << "  complete: " << *count << endl;
    return (void *)count;
}

int main() {
    int num_threads = 10;
    pthread_t *thread_id = new pthread_t[num_threads];

    cout << "Pthread Test" << endl;
    for (int i = 0; i < num_threads; i++) {
        int error = pthread_create (&thread_id[i], NULL, 
                thread_test, (void *)&i);
        if (error)
            cout << "Error: " << error << endl;
    }

    sleep(1);
    thread_exit = true;
    int *count_value[num_threads];

    for (int i = 0; i < num_threads; i++ )
        pthread_join(thread_id[i], (void **)&count_value[i]);

    cout << endl;
    for (int i = 0; i < num_threads; i++) {
        cout << "main count " << i << ": " << *count_value[i] << endl;
        delete count_value[i]; //cleanup counts from threads
    }

    delete thread_id;

    return 0;
}

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

2008-03-31T18:43:00.000-04:00

After watching the primaries this year it's obvious that all of the news agencies are biased. Fox News is just as bad. I have less faith in Fox News than I do in CNN. They are truly horrible. Without a doubt, they pushed other candidates aside to so that they would not have a chance. Ron Paul raised more money than any other Republican candidate directly from the people. At every turn he didn't get the coverage that he deserved.

Here's an interesting video on Fox News:
Outfoxed: Rupert Murchoch's War on Journalism

Update 1: Just so you know I don't really care for any of the news networks. This article by Chez should give you an idea of just how bad it is at CNN. I used to watch a lot of CNBC, but the housing crisis and current economic woes illustrates just how clueless they are. I find myself watching MythBusters and How it's Made on the Discovery channel more and more.

Update 2: Here's another example of why I don't watch CNBC, Larry Kudlow. He's one of those that has been talking up the economy. He's been calling it Goldilocks for more than 1.5 years now. During this time he's give Roubini and others that have been talking about how bad it was getting and is now the short end of the stick.

Kudlow is a real cheerleader for less gov't regulation and intervention. To a certain point I think less is more. The gov't economists really don't know how to model the economy. (It would be nice to have a scoreboard to see how badly they've done.) Almost all of the regulation seems to have come after major problems like Great Depression, Savings/Loan, Long Term Capital Managment, Dot.Com Bubble and now Subprime.

The Subprime problem has essentially fixed itself. The banks are scared, people now know not to buy a home they can't afford. (Keep on charging the card though.) The only reason to enact legislation now is to clean up some of the bad mortgage and loan procedures. It will also provide a reminder for later generations 40 years from now when they start doing stupid stuff again.

Your rental is being foreclosed

2008-03-19T07:37:00.000-04:00

Quinn's situation isn't unique. It's happening in a lot of places. It's just a shock when someone you know is having it happen to them. What probably happened is that the owner took out a sub prime loan or took out too much equity thinking that he would be able to sell it at a profit. The housing market in HI is doing fine from the reports that I had been hearing, but it's not crazy. Local lenders had been more conservative as well. Most of the subprime problem in Hawai'i has been caused by outside lenders.

Update: Fix spelling mistake in title. Also note that it is Washington Mutual that owns the mortgage. WaMu is in trouble because of all of their subprime lending.

The End of America

2008-03-16T20:29:00.000-04:00

Book: The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

Update: Jerry B. mentioned that the book Ominous Parallels may be a better book.

Pics from Ohio and Niagara Falls

2008-03-11T17:27:00.000-04:00

We went to Ohio and Niagara Falls the March 3 - 7. When we got to Ohio there was 3"-4" of snow on the ground. The snow melted on Monday when it was in the 60s F. When we left Ohio Wednesday there was some snow on top of the .5"-1" ice/sleet that had fallen the night before. There was ice on the trees from Ohio to somewhere in Pennsylvania. In Niagara, there was snow on the ground but none on the roads. The river was frozen below the falls.

The low value of the dollar makes going to Niagara expensive. One US dollar is about or less than one Canadian dollar. A meal at TGIF was $100CDN for 4 people that didn't order expensive dishes compared to other items on the menu. Fish & Chips, quesidilla, salad, and another chicken dish was ordered. The 4 soft drinks cost ~$16CDN.

Sleet/Ice falling in Independence, OH.

Sleet/Ice with snow on top the next morning.

Picture of a bird taken at Bird Kingdom in Niagara.

Driving on I-79 in Northwestern Pennsylvania on Friday. It wasn't very fun for about an hour.

Fix Patent Law Not Protect Special Interests

2008-02-18T19:33:00.000-05:00

Looks like someone owns the patents cover check scanning and clearing those checks electronically. Instead of fixing the patent laws, Congress is planning to pass some special measures to protect the banking industry. I wish that I could buy a couple of congress people to help protect me.

Laptop Suspends in Dock

2008-02-18T07:39:00.001-05:00

I hadn't tried suspending my laptop while it was on the dock in a long time. Sunday evening I decided to give it a try. It worked. Hurray!!! It's good to know that this is finally working. Suspend has worked well in Fedora 7. The are only few issue that I have so far. On my wife's laptop, if you play with the touchpad it seems to cause the keyboard and touchpad not to work. I have to close the lid and wait for it to suspend again.

Comcast Filtering Pushing Customers Away

2008-02-13T11:36:00.000-05:00

Comcast has briefed the FCC on their traffic policies. They are shaping the traffic to slow down some user's data transfers. Music and video transfers are two that are being slowed.

Time Warner is running a trial of hard bandwidth caps. Comcast is also considering the same thing. A fee will be charged for exceeding the bandwidth cap.

All of this makes me think that I should cancel my Comcast service. Luckily, I live in an area where I have some choice. I can get satellite from Direct or Dish. Embarq offers DSL and I've used their service. It looks like speed of 10Mbps/860kbps (Down/Up) is available.

I spend about $100/mth with Comcast. I'm guessing that Embarq will cost about $55-$65/mth. Direct will probably cost another $50-$60. Is it worth the potential extra $120/yr plus equipment costs? If it will help make Comcast wake up, maybe it is.

Subprime and Black Swans

2008-02-12T20:53:00.001-05:00

It goes without say that the subprime mess is a Black Swan event, though many people will say that it was obvious. (We didn't purchase a home in Va Beach in 2005-2006 because of it.) The abundance of cheap money fueled a bubble. This is a well known phenomenon. It happened with the DotComs and other things. It caught the money people on Wall Street off guard. (Are they ever really on guard?) Everyone was looking to get fantastic returns so they kept pumping money into the system.

Another Black Swan event is the shown in this article from this article of the Financial Times.

Here's a quote:
In particular, it seems that mathematical models used to predict future default rates, based on past patterns of losses, have gone wrong because they did not adjust to reflect shifts in household behavior. Or, to put it another way, financiers have been tripped up because they ignored one of the most basic rules of investment, which is usually found in product literature: the past is not always a guide to the future.

What makes this a Black Swan event is the fact that the models being used didn't take into consideration a potential shift in the way that people value their possessions. A home used to important. It was the American Dream. Homeowners wouldn't stop paying the monthly bill. Money was saved to purchase a place where the children would be raised. Credit cards would be paid last.

Consider the fact that homes have been used as cash dispensers and there was no down payment for most of the non prime loans, people have no reason to stay in the home. From what I've been reading, foreclosure only hurts credit scores for two years so long as all of the other bills are paid on time. People are walking away from what is bad investment. Traders do the same thing with stock why shouldn't regular Joe's do the same thing?

The modelers and their models never considered this change in human behavior. They used the past as a predictor of things to come. It's a past based only on a few years of observation. It's weak and their short sightedness is going to cost everyone big.

(Roubini has some things to say about "Jingle Mail" phenomenon.)

Google, MS, Yahoo

2008-02-04T08:22:00.000-05:00

Google is complaining about Microsoft. I still can't setup a multiuser (group) chat using a pidigin. It's only available to google talk gadget users.

I went to my neighbor's house for a birthday get together. Everybody there had a Yahoo! account and no one wants them to be bought by Microsoft. Some of these people were over 70 years old. What does that tell you about Microsoft's credibility?

Zimbra users are concerned about the Microsoft offer to purchase Yahoo!. Zimbra is an Exchange competitor. It uses a pseudo opensource license that is similar to Mozilla's. It requires attribution. It is possible to fork it, but whom ever does will have to put a powered by Zimbra notice at the bottom of the web pages served.

Cat Plays Fetch

2008-01-28T21:09:00.000-05:00

Our cat Mossy plays fetch. One of her favorite toys is a wire tie. (Plastic coated wire.) The video is 2.5MB.

Update: If you can't see this under windows you'll need to download and install ffdshow.

"The Two Party Swindle"

2008-01-01T17:29:00.000-05:00

This is a good post discussing the our Two Party System.

And I dare say the Big Mess is not likely to be cleaned up, until the Republifans and Demofans realize that in many ways they have more in common with other Voters than with "their" Politicians; or, at the very least, stop enthusiastically cheering for rich lawyers because they wear certain colors, and begin judging them as employees severely derelict in their duties.

Until then, the wheel will turn, one sector rising and one sector falling, with a great tumult of lamentation and cheers - and turn again, with uninhibited cries of joy or apprehension - turn again and again, and not go anywhere.

Getting emotional over politics as though it were a sports game - identifying with one color and screaming cheers for them, while heaping abuse on the other color's fans - is a very good thing for the Professional Players' Team; not so much for Team Voters.

FoxNews NH Forum

2007-12-29T13:18:00.001-05:00

Ron Paul is being excluded from a Fox News Republican forum in New Hampshire. This is fine since they're a business and get to decide what they want to do.

It really doesn't matter if they're supposed to be "Fair and Balanced." We already knew that they weren't. It only matters that they're being fair and balanced in their own minds when looking at the other stations like CNN. If you're the opposite of another entity, doesn't mean that you're any better than that entity.

Republicans and Democrats are different sides of the same coin. They're not really the yin to the other's yang. They're about consolidating power and doing what is best for their own power base.

After the Republican loss you would think that they would understand that America doesn't like where they're going. It's going to happen with the upcoming Va Senate race when they put forward Jim Gilmore as their candidate. Gilmore will be hammered by Mark Warner. Warner basically had to step in to fix the budget mess that Gilmore got us into.

Republicans don't really seem to have any fiscal control. Democrats might want to spend money, but at least they understand that they have pay for it in some manner. Republicans seem to want to spend and spend, but want to defer payment.

I love the following quote from this article:

The Finance Committee's top Republican, Charles Grassley of Iowa, said it was time for Democrats to abandon their "PayGo obsession," referring to the "pay-as-you-go" principle that tax cuts or spending increases should be paid for so as not to add to the federal deficit. With the "clean" AMT bill, "the Senate Democratic leadership seems to realize that the AMT should not be offset," he said.

Circuit City and Bonuses

2007-12-23T22:03:00.000-05:00

Here's a good post about cutting top sales people and having to pay bonuses to senior management to get them to stay on. The basic point is that Circuit City fired its top sales people. Their sales are horrible and stock is dropping fast. They're now paying bonuses up to $1 million to keep their executive management.

Of course management isn't going into the store to sell things. It sounds like they're trying to make themselves more appealing as an acquisition target. Keep management around and someone will come along and buy. Why would you buy them unless it's for the property and maybe the brand? CompUSA is out of the picture now. Best Buy will probably rule the retail electronics business.

UK Banning Swords and Other Blade Weapons

2007-12-14T12:31:00.000-05:00

Apparently the U.K. is having a problem with knife crime. They're in the process of banning various forms/styles of knives. It looks as though people found other means to commit murder after the gun ban. Here are some more links. A google search will provide many more.

There's even a group called Mother's Against Knives.

Dialects of Mountain People

2007-12-06T17:59:00.000-05:00

I was curious about dialects and found this interesting article. What made me think of searching for something was the wasp which as a kid we would turn into wasper or waspers for plural. We discussed this in an Appalachian studies class that I took in college.

Snow Today

2007-12-05T15:33:00.000-05:00

It snowed in Abingdon today. It snowed in a most places north of here. It was nasty in Smyth and Tazewell Counties. Icy in patches.

Here's a pic:

Verizon and Hell Freezing

2007-11-27T14:33:00.000-05:00

Hell must have frozen over because Verizon will be opening up it's network to devices that it doesn't sell. The device must certified on it's network so we'll see how easy it is for device makers to achieve this. I'm really interested in an OpenMoko device.

Developers, Linux and Memory

2007-11-26T09:55:00.000-05:00

Ulrich Drepper wrote a series of articles for LWN called "What every programmer should know about memory". He put it together into one big pdf that is 114 pages long. I've read parts of it. It's something that I need to read.

The copyright forbids redistribution. It's at the bottom of the first page.

Linux, NVidia, Projectors

2007-11-26T09:43:00.000-05:00

Here's an article that tells you how to get the nvidia driver to work with projectors when it won't autodetect the correct settings.

http://techxplorer.com/2007/11/15/getting-a-projector-to-work-under-ubuntu-linux-with-nvidia-drivers/

Bangkok and America

2007-11-25T23:34:00.001-05:00

Here's a video of Bangkok with it's empty buildings that were left incomplete after the Asian Crisis. I wonder if this is starting to happen in some of the hardest hit by the subprime mess.

If Roubini's forecasts are to be believed, it probably will.

IE only form

2007-11-21T09:13:00.000-05:00

Periodically, I have to fill out some online forms. These forms have their own problem. I live with them since I can do almost everything in Linux using Firefox except for one thing. The one thing is the ability to upload a pdf that contains some scanned images. The form puts the file into a SharePoint repository.

Why would you do that? This upload section has it's own form with a few fields and an attach file button. I cannot do the upload from there. I have to either reboot, startup VMware, or use my wife's laptop. I'm in Linux 100% of the time on my primary laptop.

I don't know if the problem is because of the developers or SharePoint, but I don't care. I've heard enough bad things about SharePoint that I would never willingly use it unless it was for work. Alfresco seems to be a better alternative, plus it's OpenSource.

Ron Paul followup after debate

2007-11-08T22:08:00.000-05:00

This is the follow up to the debate. Hannity is complaining about the polling when he knows that a phone can only be logged once. Fox News is driving an agenda just like any other network.

At Rubyconf 2007

2007-11-02T10:30:00.000-04:00

I'm at RubyConf in Charlotte NC.

Go Ron Paul

2007-10-22T08:17:00.000-04:00

Ron Paul is the only Republican that I'll support in the election. Otherwise I'll be voting for the Democratic candidate.

Never moving to Cali

2007-10-20T19:13:00.000-04:00

Traffic is the reason that I never moved to California during the dot com time, besides the cost of living. It's one of the primary reasons why we moved back to Southwest Virginia after spending 5 years in Hampton Roads. The link at the beginning describes going to a concert on a Thursday night in LA.

I-95 A$$Hole Song

2007-10-14T20:57:00.000-04:00

Got this by way of Bob Sutton, it's the I-95 A$$Hole Song. It's appropriate and applies equally well to I-64/I-264/I-81 and just about every other interstate I've been on.

**Warning: Profanity in the form of A$$Hole is used through out the song

Kitten

2007-09-25T21:55:00.000-04:00

Lee Ann and I picked up a kitten from a teacher that her sister works with. We named it Mossy.

ATI and device specs?

2007-09-05T12:03:00.000-04:00

Supposedly ATI will be releasing specs to make it easier to write open source drivers. I'll believe it when I see it. This is one of main reasons that I don't buy laptops with AMD chips. The video card is typically an ATI and the wireless card is something that does not have open specs.

Perhaps AMD and their vendors can purchase some intel wireless cards to bundle with their laptops. By buying an Intel Centrino laptop, I know that usually there's an Intel wireless card in the laptop.

Update:
If you didn't see it, AMD/ATI has released specs for the 2D portion of one of their graphics chipsets. We'll wait to see what happens with the 3D specs. The link will take you to X Org's website.

Our Server Won't Go Down Either

2007-08-15T21:19:00.000-04:00

Got a clue about the QSOL ad via a link from Obie Fernandez blog. Before you click the link consider that the number of women entering CS/Tech programs are down. Then number of women entering IT is declining. The question that everyone is asking, "Does sexism exemplified by the ad cause women not to enter the field?"

The ad is in this month's Linux Journal to which I subscribe. I hadn't even noticed it. I don't normally read the table of contents because I usually flip through the whole thing.

Y2K Climate Bug

2007-08-10T12:31:00.000-04:00

Got this from http://slashdot.org. Apparently there was a Y2k bug in the processing of the climate data. The warmest year on record was 1934 and 5 of the 10 warmest years occurred before WWII.
http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm

Wow, it sounds like the peer review process didn't really work.

Quote:

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

Jim Cramer on the Colbert Report

2007-08-10T08:24:00.000-04:00

Cisco VPN on Fedora 6 & 7

2007-08-09T17:56:00.001-04:00

Unfortunately, I have a need to access a network behind a Cisco VPN. I didn't really want to install the Cisco Linux VPN client. I found vpnc. There are rpms that can be installed using yum.

Here are the steps that I used to setup the connection. The assumption is that your logged in to your system as a userr and gnome is running.

You'll need the filename.pcf file, typically located in c:\Program Files\Cisco Systems\VPN Client\profiles

In Fedora, as root do:
yum install vpnc NetworkManagervpnc rdesktop

If NetworkManger is already running restart it.
service NetworkManager restart

If you don't have NetworkManager started do the following:
service NetworkManager start
service NetworkManagerDispatcher start

You should have a NetworkManager icon in the sys tray.
Left click VPN Connections->Configure VPN
Click Add in the VPN Connections box.

There should be a Create VPN Connection box.
Click Forward
Choose Compatible Cisco VPN client.
Click Forward
Click the "Import Save Configuration box "

You may get an error about TCP tunneling not being supported. I've gotten the same error and the connection still works.

In the Override username enter your username.
In the Optional tab, enter your domain name.
Click Forward, Apply, Close

Your connection should be setup now.

Left click the NetworkManager choose VPN Connections.
Choose the connection that you just started
Enter your password.
Enter the Group Password
Click connect.

The group password is typically encrypted in the pcf file on the line encGroupPwd. This password can be decrypted. The instructions for this are located here.

Update: Removed duplicate sentences.

House for Sale Chesapeake Va

2007-08-07T12:10:00.002-04:00

If you're looking to buy a house in Chesapeake a friend of mine has one for sale:
http://www.forsalebyowner.com/listing/7E9AB

It's in Great Bridge.

Small Victories against big companies

2007-08-06T22:30:00.000-04:00

I love it when things like this happen.

Warrant Issued For Verizon's Arrest
Verizon lost in small claims court for not correcting erroneous information on a man's credit report. He sued and won. They didn't take it seriously either.

Customer sends bailiffs in to seize bank's computers
In this case a man sued the bank of Scotland, won and they didn't take it seriously. He went to bank with bailiffs to take equipment including a cash drawer.

Update: Fixed formatting