Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I was at a programmer convention. A bunch of devs were arguing and they came to me to be the deciding factor for the future of the KDE Plasma 6 project. Each was very passionate about the direction they wanted to go. I woke up really stressed and glad it was a dream.
The last time I tried to solder something, it was just a few pins and it gave me so much trouble and took hours. So, when I was thinking about how how I was going to redo my BBQ thermostat with Adafruit Circuit Python and Stemma QT, I was afraid to get the FeatherS2 since it wasn’t sold in a configuration that came with headers already soldered on. The idea of soldering some 28 pins filled me with fear of screwing up the board. After it arrived, I procrastinated. Finally, today I did it. I don’t know what changed from when I tried to solder last time, but it worked reasonably well. Yes, if you look at the picture, I need to fix the USB pin and pin 38 before I try inserting into any headers, but it just took me about 15 minutes and I didn’t have any feelings of giving up or intense frustration. So, I just wanted to celebrate this milestone. Hurray for me!
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Public Radio
Radiolab – Heard about
them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life.
Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound
effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the
30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)
A big difference from 9 years ago is that I don’t use the dedicated ereader as much as I used to. Mostly that comes down to the fact that I don’t read as much before bed and I have limited other places to use the ereader. Usually I’m either reading on my phone or on the computer. But there’s one time that I really love the ereader - when I’m traveling, particularly by plane. This way I can read during the entire trip without draining my cell phone battery. As Scarlett has gotten old enough to read, I figured she could have the Nook (to keep from straining her eyes constantly with the backlit tablet) and I’d still want an ereader for travel. Additionally, who knows - I might go back to more reading at home or before bed when a backlit phone just isn’t ideal. So I got the Kobo Clara HD.
Ever since I first took a macro photo, I’ve been drawn to the form. I think microscopic photography often turns the everyday into the abstract. Macro photography can do that at times, but more often than not, it just lets you have a good look at something that you don’t normally get such a good look at. My favorite macro shots to take and to take in are of insects. They’re skittish so it takes skill to capture it. And they look so alien compared to mammals (which is why they’re often the template for aliens in movies). This guy was resting near my front door and I ran inside to get my camera and hoped he’d still be there when I got back.
I created my first GPG key 10 years ago when I didn’t really know anything about encryption. So I have created a new key and signed it with my old one. You can find it here: My New GPG Key
I’ve also uploaded it to the servers supported by KGPG.
The local Olive Garden has added these devices to the tables. My first thought was to be annoyed at the fact that this thing takes up a significant chunk of the table. Then I messed with it a bit - it seems to be mostly a neat idea with one think that’s a bit out of place in a semi-classy joint like Olive Garden.
Let’s look at the positive aspect first - you can order drinks or ask for your drinks to be replenished. This helps to alleviate one of the biggest sources of annoyance when out to eat. You also pay on this device so if you’re completely done and don’t need boxes, you can just pay and leave. While a place with good service that isn’t swamped shouldn’t leave you wondering if you should skip the check because you’ve been waiting over 15 minutes for the check, it does occasionally happen. Again - happy customers.
Here’s a letter Governor Jerry Brown sent to Ben Carson when he said that climate change was irrelevant:
Dear Dr. Carson,
I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to the Golden State. It’s come to my attention that while you were here you said the following regarding climate science:
“I know there are a lot of people who say ‘overwhelming science,’ but then when you ask them to show the overwhelming evidence, they never show it…There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused. Gimmie a break.”
Why is this an issue? Because the books you read can be used to discriminate against you or, in some countries, land you in jail. In the USA it could put you on the no-fly list. As soon as I get home I’m uninstalling ADE - I’d installed it for the possibility of checking out digital books from the library. Forget it! I’m sticking to the no-DRM books and physical books at the library.
I think it’s pretty awesome how Google has taken the same tactic as Wordpress and broken out key features into plugins. For Wordpress it leads to better and faster development without breaking the main program. For Google it allows them to do an end run around the stupid carriers who won’t upgrade Android in a timely manner.
[caption id=“attachment_7308” align=“aligncenter” width=“346”] Peer Review or It Didn’t Happen - more and more important to remember nowadays[/caption]
But as you reduce the speed that the drive shaft is rotating, you lower the frequency of the sound it’s making. There comes a lower limit where the engine is making what Gordon calls “groan-y and moan-y” noises which people find unpleasant. The car sounds broken. So cars had to keep the engine’s RPM above a certain level, hurting their fuel efficiency, or risk alienating customers.
GM’s solution was to implement active noise cancellation, the same technique used in some headphones to quiet ambient noise. Microphones in the body listen to the ambient sounds the car and engine are making, and the car plays the opposite of that over the vehicle’s speakers. The sound waves from the engine are cancelled out by the sound from the entertainment system, netting a quieter ride that can be more fuel efficient without being so bothersome.
It’s pretty neat how much technology has changed in the past 8 years. Eight years ago Rich West and I coded up a web server on a microcontroller ( code here) and part of my justification was that, for only $50, someone would be able to have a web server on a microcontroller. Wouldn’t that be so awesome for people without a lot of money for technology? Yet, less than a decade later, the Raspberry Pi can be had for around $50 (give or take depending on the features) and implements an entire computer, not just a web server. You can install a full Linux distro on it and do everything that a Linux disto can do (including serve web pages). I hope we can continue to grow technology like this for years to come.
[caption id=“attachment_6890” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] The Elevator at the Sears Tower[/caption]
A month or so ago I had a disagreement with my sister-in-law. I’d read about how many traffic crossing buttons and elevator buttons to close the doors were not wired up to anything. She claimed I was wrong and I couldn’t remember where I’d read it. Luckily, I recently came across an article on Placebo Buttons at Your Are Not So Smart.
I came across an article a couple weeks ago that baffled me. Let me get one thing out of the way right away, lest it become a distraction: Sidney Meyers is an idiot for calling in a school bomb threat on his cell phone. (And would still be a dummy even if he didn’t do it on his phone) With that out of the way - let’s set up the ridiculous situation here. Sidney Meyers is a 20 year old man. He met a girl who turned out to be 16 years old. They started a sexual relationship. This relationship was actually cool with the girl’s mother. And in South Carolina, where they live, the age of consent is 16 so there’s no big deal that they’re having sex. (Well, you might have some squick issues with the age difference or the fact that an adult would want to be with a minor - but legally they’re OK)
Over at All things D, Venture Capitalist David Cowan talks about predictions he was asked to make about the future. His predictions involve more immersive wearable computing than Google Glass and a loss of the taboo of cyber attacks. He envisions our vision essentially merging with Hollywood’s depiction of robotic or cyborg vision - think of the Terminator. If you’re looking for a specific tree, it could highlight it for you and draw your attention to it. Cowan also thinks it’ll allow us to review past moments it has recorded or allow us to see someone else’s point of view. Interestingly, I think this is a technology that has the opportunity to either bring humanity closer (helping us remember names, auto-translating foreign languages) or be the final nail in the coffin for human interaction. Call me curmudgeonly if you want, but I start to lose my patience when people keep being interrupted by their phones when I’m trying to socialize with them. By definition, there should be very little more urgently needing your attention than me if I’m actually there and the other person is not. A few check are fine. And if someone is relying on your texts to meet up with you or get directions, just let me know and it’ll go a long way towards ameliorating the situation. But once people don’t even have to look away to be involved in something else, it could lead to a roomful of people who are all alone - or interacting with those outside the room more than those inside the room.
[caption id=“attachment_6442” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”] Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip in Packaging[/caption]
I’ve been using MP3 players since they first existed. I can’t remember the name of the device, but I got it with my Audible subscription. Then, I used my PDA for a while - remember those? Then I used an iPod Shuffle, but it didn’t work well with my Linux computer. The database kept getting corrupted since Apple can’t play nicely with others so it has to be reverse-engineered. So I told myself I’d never get another Apple music playing device. About three years ago, I went with a Sandisk Sansa Fuze. Since then I’ve gone through three of them, approximately one per year. What keeps happening is that the headphone jack gets looser and looser until the slightest nudge makes it so that I can’t hear one of the audio channels. Since I use it work out, this quickly gets VERY annoying. But I really, really like Sandisk’s GUI for their devices - it has a specific podcast section that resumes the podcast where I left off, even if I go back and forth between different podcasts. I don’t do that too often, but I do it often enough that it’s important. So I got a Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip because the Fuze+ has horrible reviews (for the way they changed the buttons) and since I’m using it to work out, I could use a smaller, lighter device.
On 6 May Ars published a story about some Chinese scientists who were trying to see if they could make avian flu better transmit to mammals. They claimed the point was to better study how it is that these viruses mutate to become infectious to mammals. However, the scientists used guinea pigs for some reason. For some reason left unexplained in the article, guinea pigs have both mammalian and avian receptors so they’re susceptible to avian viruses anyway! But the biggest problem, as pointed out by Robert May, is that this is China. You know…the country that has lead in toothpaste. He posited that we can’t really trust them to keep the virus contained if they do create a mammalian supervirus. A bit of an elitist attitude from the West? Maybe, but China doesn’t exactly have the best track record on doing stuff up to Western standards. Just one mistake and we have all those crazy infection movies coming true. It’s especially not worth it since other experts quoted in the article also say that you can’t really learn a lot about how to prevent or limit the spread of the mutated flu in the wild with the kind of study they were doing. They almost come across looking like a real life version of Aperture Science.
[caption id=“attachment_6217” align=“aligncenter” width=“496”] German Kids using inflationary money as blocks in 1923 - Bitcoin is supposed to be immune to this[/caption]
Boing Boing pointed me to a few Bitcoin articles and then there was another one on Ars on 6 May. I’d be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard about Bitcoin; it’s been all over the news because of the crazy bubble the Bitcoin exchange rate was having recently. But, just in case, Bitcoin is a currency that exists entirely electronically. This is true of nearly all currencies nowadays (none of them are backed by anything but faith in the countries that issue them). The supply of Bitcoins is only increasing to a certain amount and then no more, preventing inflation. It’s main benefit is supposed to be that it’s completely anonymous. So is cash, but you can’t use cash online.
Remember earlier this week when I said the gun control debate was now pointless? Apparently the State Department wants to pretend that what I said isn’t true. In a complete misunderstanding of how the Internet works, they have compelled the website holding the CAD designs for the 3D gun to remove the CAD file. The reasoning is that leaving it up would be exporting munitions (since everyone all over the world can go to a web page) This, of course, ignores the fact that it was already obtained over 100 000 times and is already on Bit Torrent. Oh well. I guess pointless moves are better than nothing in their eyes.
[caption id=“attachment_6194” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] The Liberator - the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun[/caption]
I’m sorry Obama, Sandyhook victims, and everyone else. You’ve already lost the gun issue. Not because of politicians, but because of technology. We have working 3D printed guns. It’s over. On 6 May my RSS feed reader was ablaze with articles about the working 3D-printed gun including this article from Ars, another article from ars, and one from Boing Boing. This is the same guy who previously created the ability to hold more bullets in semi-automatic guns using 3D printing. The articles all made sure to mention that the CAD files that were uploaded for this new gun had a section that was purposely made of metal to ensure it could be detected by magnetometers. Only one article mentioned that this was a bull-crap attempt at not getting too much flack from anti-gun people. Because there’s no reason why someone who got the CAD files couldn’t change that to be made of plastic and have a nearly undetectable gun. The gun only fires a few rounds, but under the right circumstances that could be more than enough.
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.
As I researched medium format photography in deciding whether or not to participate , I came face-to-face with a trend I’ve seen in other fields. As the technology has “progressed”, users have actually found themselves with worse and worse results. And, just as in other technologies, it is a tale of choosing convenience or cost in favor of quality.
Recently, when I started up Opera, it updated to 10.5. I noticed a huge cosmetic change. Observe:
[caption id=“attachment_3272” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Opera 10.5 new gui”] [/caption]
Yes, they have copied the GUI setup from Chrome. The tabs are now above the address bar. Now, they still have a separate search bar like Firefox, but this is a pretty big change. Also, although I can’t share it in a screenshot, they have changed the tab animations so they are really slick like in Chrome. Overall, the animations are one of those things that really add to the experience without doing much. It just feels nice to have things slide in and out rather than pop into existence. They also seem to have REALLY sped up the startup to the point where Opera is once again a joy to use. They also made a change to the way the text searching works:
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because in Maryland NPR is on 88.1 which is always being interfered with by SiriusXM radio receivers. At first I only listened to a few podcasts because I didn’t own an iPod and I so I burned the podcasts to a CD-R every few days. That got expensive, so I got an iPod shuffle. Since podcasts don’t take up too much space, I started getting into more and more podcasts. Some I discovered in magazines and others were recommendations from Dan. So, I thought I would share the podcasts I listen to so that those following this blog could perhaps discover some new podcasts they didn’t know about. Dan, for example, recently got into This American Life. (I think after I kept telling him about it - but he may have discovered it independently) I’m going to put links to the actual podcast URL, so just copy that into your podcather or iTunes.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“It’s either warmer or not. Read the thermometer.”] [/caption]
Because of the upcoming talks at Copenhagen, everyone’s been talking about global warming recently. The news even featured a member of a Commonwealth government claiming that global warming is not true. In my own country, Republicans like to say that global warming isn’t true. The opposition parties in both countries disagree. Look, this debate is over the wrong question. There can be no debate about whether global warming is happening. It either is or it isn’t. That’s not up for debate. Are average temperatures higher year over year compared to the past? Then we have global warming. The globe is getting warmer. End of debate. If not, then we don’t have global warming. What we really need is debate over whether it’s human caused, human exacerbated, or neither. After all, the planet has been warmer and cooler than its current temperature. So we need to figure out if what we’re doing is enough to make a difference. If it is, we should probably knock it off so we don’t make things worse. If it is solely our responsibilty, then we need to stop right away. But if it’s going to get warmer no matter what and our activities only matter in the thousandths of a degree, then there’s no point in doing anything. So this is where we need to be and this is what we need to figure out. Stop arguing over whether the planet is getting warmer or not. It’s like arguing if the sun came up today.
While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing. I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes. The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in the following idea - what about a subscription model for authors. Right now it sucks to be an author in that your pay is very irregular. I know that my paycheck will be the same week to week. But authors get an advance for a book and then some royalties depending upon how well a book sells. So they can’t really plan their finances easily because they don’t know ahead of time how many books they will sell. But, with digital distribution, it might be easier to sell the author’s readers on a subscription model.
I’ve had the Roku Box for a few months now. It costs $99 and I bought it for one simple reason: my wife and I object to having to use Windows and Internet Explorer to watch Netflix’s Instant Programs. As a secondary reason, we’re not in college anymore and we object to having to watch on our computers. We want to be able to watch these on the TV just as if we had rented little silver discs. The Roku box is tiny. Here’s a shot of the front:
Our sexually crazy and confused friends over in Japan have decided to contribute to the end of humanity with the Honey Doll (warning link contains some images/sounds NSFW) :
Unlike the blowup doll everyone makes fun of, the Honey Doll is supposed to mimic real women. It looks real (or creepily almost real) and has real feeling breasts - or so I assume from the pictures since I can’t understand Japanese. It also make real orgasm sounds. So for loser guys who might spend a little more time finding a real woman, I think they may give up. And then there’s the stereotypical guy that doesn’t want to have to deal with a real woman and all her problems and just wants to have sex. I think it’s roughly the end of humanity……
Today I tested my POS Compaq render node (running freeBSD with no GUI) with the same bouncing ball as in this previous post. It took my node 796 seconds to render the same animation. This is somewhere around 1.65 times slower. However, the software should just be throwing frames at whichever computer is ready for a new frame. The node took about 20 seconds per frame on average to render. My Linux computer takes 12 seconds. Here’s where I’m pretty bad at math, but I think this means that a render farm with just these two computers should finish in a little over half the time as just my Linux computer. But I can also throw in my laptop which should also be in the same range. So a 3 hour render should go down to a 1 hour render. (Roughly speaking)
While thinking about digital music recently, and how great it was the BMI decided to sell some of its music on iTunes without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). However, these tracks will cost $2 while the DRM’d tracks will cost $1. First of all, this seems to be a scheme to prove that the public doesn’t really want non-DRM’d music when Jon Random User probably doesn’t even know the difference and won’t see why he should pay twice as much for the same song.
Some pessimists decry that even electric cars have pollution created at the power plant thus what’s the point - let’s just have our current gas guzzlers. What they forget are their thermodynamics lessons in college. It’s no secret that we have yet to find an efficient way to convert fuel into useful energy. Of that $3 gallon of gas, only around $1 is used to move your car forward. The rest is blown out the tailpipe.
So, according to Thoggen’s count, it took 4.45 hours to encode into Theora. At least with this DVD it seems that the coding team has fixed their error where the software seems to keep going past the end of the DVD. As far as I recall from one year ago, it didn’t add more infomation in - the thread just didn’t get the message that the title was done encoding.
Thoggen is a tool for backing up DVDs to the ogg container with the theora video codec and vorbis audio codec. Theora is the darling video codec in Linux because it is unencumbered by patents. There are other free formats, such as Xvid - a format compatible with Divx, but it is based on MPEG-3, which is patented by the group the controls the MPEG standard. Technically all encoders need to pay them a fee to encode to MPEG formats. This can get expensive - M$ is curently being sued by one of the patent holders of MPEG Layer 3 Audio (AKA MP3) for a very large amount of money. I *think* it’s in the billion range, but I could be off by an order of magnitude. So, theora, which was licensed to the open source community, is the safest bet.
Move your clocks ahead one hour! Congress decided that two weeks earlier would save us tons of oil - so it’s today, not in two weeks. Both my Windows XP SP2 and GNU/Linux Fedora Core 6 automatically updated on time, so your computers should be fine as long as they’ve gotten updates since 2005. (I think that’s when Congress did it)
I’m pretty sure that in previous posts I’ve mentioned that the RIAA has always been wrong about what technological disruptions do to their business. They wanted to kill LPs because they thought no one would go see live performances. They wanted to quash AM radio for fear no one would by LPs. They wanted to kill the cassette tape because it would allow piracy of LPs. Currently they want to prevent the existence of a Tivo-like device for digital radio.
The Inquirer.net reports a boy who is counter-suing the RIAA! Why?
for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.
Awesome! It’s about time someone fought back!
They have demanded a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies for allegedly damaging the boy’s reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees. The record companies have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States, the court documents say. Competitors in the recording industry are a cartel acting together in violation of the antitrust laws by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay”, our precocious teen wrote.
Well, I’m not sure if Timbaland did it purposely or if he was under the impression that he had permission, but he took music for Nelly Furtado’s song “Do It”. The sampled song is in the MOD format, popular in the early 1990s electronic BBS music scene. Currently it has a pretty decent underground following, as you can see at modarchive.org. You can see the MOD artist’s information here. And you can see some more detailed information at this forum. If you listen to the original file and then the background at the beginning of the Nelly song it is extremely obvious that they are the same song. I hope that Tempest (Janne Suni) gets the compensation he deserves. Tempest did not license his music under a permissive license so if the song makes money, he deserves it. After all, it was his creative genius that came up with the song. Obviously, it was good enough if Timbaland wanted to use it.
I don’t know if it’s Global Warming or El Niño, but 2 weeks ago in the Baltimore-DC area it was 70 degrees and outside in a tank top in January. This week, in fact, yesterday or so, it’s snowing in Dallas, Texas! I’m hearing this has ruined orange, lemon, and avocado crops. What the heck is going on here?
I don’t know if it’s the fault of global warming, but something is seriously wrong with the climate recently. Yesterday it was 72 degrees in Washington DC - IN THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY! Don’t get me wrong, I love walking around in a tshirt and tank top in January - it kinda reminds me of when I used to live in South Florida. But, seriously, something very wrong is going on here. By this time last year it had snowed at least two times here, if not more.
Ever though celebrities were a bunch of know-nothing morons? Well, Ironic Sans has used Google’s new patent search feature to discover that many patents have actually been filed by celebrities. The smartest was Hedy Lamar who was actually a brilliant mind in the world of Cryptography. However, her equally good skills at acting caused most not to take her seriously. It was only recently that she has received the attention she deserves.
This is from my brother, Dan, who went to Japan last summer.
Hey all,
I went walking with no apparent destination and, about 6-10 miles
there and back later I found myself home and with impressions of
Japan that I figured I’d share. Pretty much, I’m gonna take myths
about Japan and debunk or support them. Here we go…
Myth: Everyone in Japan knows English.
False! Everyone in Japan knows English about as much as everyone in
the States knows Spanish or French or Italian…they might be able
to understand what you’re saying, but most can’t speak it to any
degree of proficiency (at least in Okinawa). Luckily, with
Okinawa’s large American base presence, road signs are in English
and most restaurant menus in Japan have pictures on them, have
English, or both English and pictures. Don’t expect the locals to
understand too much of what you have to say though, especially if
it isn’t rudimentary.
This morning I watch the Diebold documentary, “Hacking Democray”, on HBO or one of its affiliate networks. The basic information in the documentary was not news to me. Since I currently live in Maryland, the news that Johns Hopkins had obtained the source code to the voting machines was all over the place. I knew, even as I did my civic duty of voting this November that it was possible my vote would not count. I had also seen “Man of the Year”, a movie which has a similar theme as its main premise.
Joystick.com reports that judges are finally starting to make some rulings that make sense! We all know (if from nowhere else, than from this blog) that the DMCA is evil. It allows all kinds of restrictions to be placed on you, even though you were a good citizen and bought the content legally. For example, the DMCA makes it illegal to rip a DVD to your computer because that would entail breaking the copy protections on the DVD. This may have killed a HUGE surge or video iPod-like devices. Sure, you can buy video from the iTunes store, but why do that if you already own the movie?
I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.
We have a tradition in the USA in which we allow the user the right to purchase technologies which can be used both legally and illegally. For example, a camcorder can be used to film a documentary, a child’s first steps, or a birthday party. It can also be used to sit in a movie theater and film the movie to then illegally distribute it on the internet. So is the solution to ban all camcorders? No, that would be silly and there are plenty of legal uses for a camcorder. The correct solution is to police movie theaters to make sure that such persons do not gain entry. In fact, in the Betamax case, the judge ruled that VCRs were legal because although they could be used to bootleg movies, they could also be used to watch legally purchased movies and time-shift programs, allowing the user to watch television on his or her own schedule. VCRs can also be used to copy tapes which the owner has the right to copy - such as his own footage.
Newegg.com has begun selling them and they have a Plextor brand Blue Ray burner for $835.99. Sounds similar to how much a DVD burner would have set you back just a few years ago. Now they are selling for $60 and less. So I’m predicting that Blue Ray technology burners will be about this price in 3-5 years. Also, there was a fiasco with DVD+R and DVD-R just as there is now Blue Ray and DVD-HD. Yet burners now burn both DVD + and - so it may end up the same with the newer technologies.
BitTorrent - up until now, mentioning legal uses of the program was likely to garner snickers from your audience. Afterall, it’s just for downloading music and software illegally, isn’t it? Actually, for the past few years, it’s been the way that most people download their completely legal copies of Linux operating systems. In fact, for Linux distribution companies it has been a HUGE load off of their ISO servers to allow people to be able to use BitTorrent to download their software.
If Microsoft thought they would have the IE 7.0 release to gloat about for long, they were wrong. Firefox 2.0 is due to debut this afternoon. I’ve provided a nice little link over to the page to download Firefox, but I don’t expect it to be updated to Firefox 2.0 until this afternoon when the new code will hit the mirrors. Lots of new code for me to play with today!
In the “Technically Speaking” article of October 2006’s IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Paul McFedries speaks of a new term surfacing to counter the whole “Web 2.0” crap that’s going around. Web 2.0 always smacked of marketing to me - a way to get investors to put money into some kind of upgrade to the Internet. “Oh, we’re doing TWO-POINT-OH stuff here, none of that Web 1.0 stuff.” Of course, as my readers know, the whole point behind Web 2.0 is the blog/AJAX/flickr/etc interface where the users create and modify each others’ content. McFedries reports a few good Geeks who have responded by rebranding “Web 2.0” as “chmod 777 web”. All of my Linux/Unix readers will get this instantly and start cracking up. For the rest of you, this is the way, in *nix, where you say that a file or folder can now be read, modified, and executed by the owner of the file, everyone in his group, and everyone else. Basically, you’ve just made it into a Windows-style file.
I have now adapted my blogroll code for YOU! That’s right! Now YOU can put in the URLs of blogs you want to keep track of and my program will put it all on one page for you! No more wandering from site to site! Just visit the link on the right or this one right here!
AMD is buying ATI for $5.4 billion! This could completely change the landscape of things. If AMD goes M$, they could coerce MoBo makers to make AMD motherboards only use ATI or use ATI better than Nvidia. What’s next? Intel buying Nvidia?
Paradigms are a battle of the mind that take place when we prepare our children with certain expectations about the world. Don’t let them grow up thinking there’s something right about Digital Restrictions Management! Have them read The Pig and the Box and let them learn about why software and culture need to be libre. (That’s free as in speech!)
In biology class we learn about Mendel as one of the pioneers of biology for he determined that tall plants breed tall plants and short ones breed short ones. However, it’s clear that even in the ancient of days there was some knowledge of how genetics worked. Take, for example, the following passage from Genesis where Jacob’s uncle Laban has asked what Jacob would like as repayment for all the work he’s done.
To All Responsible at nVidia for the production of device drivers,
I want to thank you for producing binary drivers for Linux at a time when most other companies don’t feel that the Linux market penetration is larger enough to develop drivers. So thanks for doing that! In fact, that is why I exclusively buy nVidia for my machines whenever possible. Sure, ATI is sharing NOW, but you were the first to divert some programmers to produce it and your reward is faithful customers like me. Of course, supplying closed-source binary drivers is not the perfect solution, as you have no doubt heard from others. However, I think this is an important first step which allows me to use my computer’s hardware to its maximum and allows Linux programmers to make GUIs capable of eye candy rivaling (and in some cases surpasing) that of Windows and Macintosh.
A little bit of info to impart here with respect to using the proprietary nVidia drivers. So, first I went to livna and downloaded the nVidia kernel modules that match my kernel. Then things were running great - even a little better than before, but something seemed wrong. The people in the irc room were unhelpful when I tried to ask them if nVidia was running. When I tried to run BZFlag, it no longer ran! I kept getting GLX missing errors! Turns out that it wasn’t running! I had to go to system-config-display (in Red Hat Fedora) and tell it to use the nVidia card as my graphics card. Then I opened up a terminal and typed init 3 and went to another VT for init 5 to restart the X server. This time I saw the nVidia logo when I got to the login screen. Success!
I got my graphics card today. Nothing crazy - just a $30 PNY 128 MB nvidia graphics card from newegg. I haven’t installed the nvidia drivers yet, but it has already been amazing in difference. The colors are brighter and more vibrant, the cpu, bereft of its need to draw the graphics runs faster, and windows don’t lag when I drag them around - a problem since Fedora switched to Cairo. There’s also no lag in SuperTux!
Acme: n. [from Greek akme highest point of perfection or achievement] The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry — where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an “Acme X” either means “This is insanely great”, or, more likely, “This looks insanely great on paper, but in practice it’s really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it.” Compare pistol.
ACK: /ak/, interj. 1. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one’s presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An appropriate response to ping or ENQ.
2. [from the comic strip Bloom County] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in “Ack pffft!” Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point.
3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (see NAK). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with “Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now”.
accumulator: n. obs. 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for register is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in ‘A’ derive from historical use of the term accumulator (and not, actually, from ‘arithmetic’). Confusingly, though, an ‘A’ register name prefix may also stand for address, as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. “The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator.” 3. One’s in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). “You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator.” (See stack.)
Leave it to content providers to mess everyone up. Slashdot reports that, in an effort to stop piracy, the HD signal in the component jacks of HD DVD players will be down-sampled because it’s analog and letting it come out at normal quality would allow pirates to get around their copyright protections. This is BS! I say we make this into a HUGE issue. Every company is trying to mess with us on the grounds of copyright protections. Sony thinks it can install rootkits onto your computer without permission. HD DVD people think they can render your HD TV obsolete before the first HD DVDs even come out. They should cut the crap! If someone really wants to, they’ll find a way to circumvent it - look at DVDs. Given enough angry geeks, things will be “solved”. Not only that, but they are assuming that consumers of pirated DVDs wouldn’t want to see the down-sampled video. If that were true, no one would be downloading and buying (in Chinatown) video taped footage of Hollywood movies. The fact of the matter is that, except for Star Wars, LOTR, and Harry Potter, no one cares how good the movie really looks if they want a pirated copy.
Think flickr is addictive? Spend hours perusing Wikipedia? Then you better stay away from The Jargon File, a reference to geek terms maintained by hacking demigod Eric Raymond. You can easily spend HOURS learning the meaning behind words in geekspeek or (even more fun) reading about the background BEHIND these terms. Eric Raymond, the major co-author of the introduction, is a great author and the intro is as much fun as the rest of The Jargon File. Especially awesome is the part about the geek psyche. It explains why we find funny:
Recently, all they’ve been talking about on NPR is the Intelligent Design debate. Basically, some people say that when students are taught evolution during biology, they should be informed that not everyone believes in evolution. Opponents say that religion has no place in a biology class. I agree; religion should be taught in a religious studies class. But what is so hard about saying the following:
Today we will learn about evolution. There are some people, including scientists, out there who do not believe in evolution and these are their reasons. Instead they believe that because of all above reasons, that the complexity of life must have been designed or aided by an intelligent super-being. However, the majority of scientists DO believe that evolution is a fact and here are their reasons for believing that evolution is true. In the end, there is no way to prove which is right so it is up to you to decide what you believe in. For the purposes of this biology class, we shall assume evolution to be true.
Although Sony still claims the right to use copy protections in their CDs, this BBC News story reported that they have abandoned the software I’ve been blogging about due to the fact that virus writers have written exploits for the software. And, in a one-two punch, Microsoft announced in THIS BBC News story that they have told their spyware program to treat Sony’s software as spyware! They will be removing it from their users’ computers. Again, this could all have been avoided if Sony had just let people copy their CDs to their computers. They bought it LEGALLY dagnabbit and if they want to put it on their computer or combine it with music from others CDs and create a custom mix CD then they should be able to do that.
Sound card in my server tanked, taking down the ethernet card with it. Result - server was down most of yesterday. I took out the sound card today since there is no need for a sound card in a server. It’s back up and better dang well stay up.
I was walking away from the Tv playing in the lunch room when I noticed the sharp reduction in television volume when I had turned around. Instantaneously I noticed what had been in front of me for nearly 23 years or rather what had been beside me. Human ears are uniquely shaped to funnel in sound most efficiently from the direction in which the person is facing. By contrast, if you’ve ever seen a deer’s ears you know that they face sidways and can swivel to a certain angle towards the front and back. I thought a little more and came to the conclusion that this was just another example of predator/prey biology. Lions, bears, and other predatory animals I could think of also had them facing forward. Elephants were another gargantuan example of prey having ears that faced to the side. This, of course, makes it harder for predators to sneak up on prey from behind. Of course, prey already have the advantage of having their eyes close to (or on, in some cases) side of their head, allowing them to see to the side and, in some cases, backwards. I cannot figure out, however, why it would be advantageous for predators to have their ears facing forward. Perhaps, the same way that having both eyes facing forward allows for stereoscopic vision, having the ears facing forward gives the predator a 3D auditory experience. I can’t see a real benefit for this in humans, but for animals with hearing far stronger than we do, perhaps it provides them with additional details about their enviroment. Just another example of the wonderful design of the Creator who strives, it seems, to make an equal playing field. Neither predator nor prey seems to have an advantage - and that’s a good thing. Otherwise either the predators would eat all the prey or the prey would multiply too numerously. Neither outcome would be good for the environment.
I hope to get the promised slope day post up soon. In the meanwhile, for those of you who were wondering, the new ipod commercial features the new Gorillaz single, “Feel Good Inc”.
For the past few days I have been wondering why there is still a Newsweek or Time magazine. Whereas newspapers come out once a day, these magazines come out once a week. I have already complained that I find newspapers woefully out of date when compared to news on the Internet. Why then do people still buy magazines containing news a week old? At today’s pace this is practically ancient history by the time one read’s it. Yet, today my fiancee’s actions changed the focus of my post.
Today I finished up yet another class. The first one I finished up was a project where I was conducted a study for the School of Electrical Engineering to switch over to Linux and open source alternatives. I also published my study as my first publication at Lulu.com. It was great to have one class out of the way, especially one which was such a joy to participate in.
Today I wrapped up another favorite class, microcontroller design. As my faithful readers know, I’ve been providing the source code to each of the labs we completed during the semester. Well, today my group demoed our final project to our professor and TA. They were quite impressed with the progress we had made on the code, despite its limitations. Our final project, a web server on a microcontroller, was a lot of fun to work on. There were a lot of frustrating times, but it’s the good kind of frustration that motivates one to try as hard as they can to get around the problem. One of my favorite taks is to participate in design and debugging, trying to get my design to work because I know it *should* be working, so what did I forget? Was it simply a semi-colon? Was it something more significant, some kind of oversight? It was hard sticking to the project and keeping Rich from rewriting it from scratch, but I think we had a much better product because we sat through all of our problems and figured out what the original author of the source code we were basing it off of had done. After all, in a real work environment you have to figure what the previous guy did. There is no time to rewrite the code, no matter how awesome you are at coding. I will be posting the code and my report soon, probably over the next few days. I invite and challenge anyone out there to work on the code and make it more robust and reliable, there is PLENTY of room for that. You just need an Atmel Mega32 and STK500 development board. (As well as the computer on which one does the programming)
I’m free flowing my writing tonight. We’ll see how much sense it makes. My dad has encouraged me to listen to Deepak Chopra. He is a western medicine educated Indian who beecame disillusioned with the poor success rates of western medicne. Determined to fuse the best of the West and East he went back to his native country to study the medical practices there. The final result is a fondue of Western Medicine, Quantum Mechanics, ancient Indian teachings, and Eastern Medicine. His books are part motivational and part practical. Sometimes they just offer plain and simple advice - eating such and such a food with such and such a quantity is shown to reduce the chance of disease X. Other times they are more metaphysical in nature.
In a world based on technology, a small error in a program can lead to some interesting results. Take this for example:
This was what weather.com displayed a few days ago when I typed in Ithaca’s area code. Rest assured that it was barely HALF the temperature they claimed it was. I think they probably had a variable slightly off and so it pointed to Arizona or something, but came up as Ithaca. Pretty humorous when it’s the weather that’s so off this way. Not quite so funny when it’s your phone freezing up.
The funny thing about the changing of the time that we do twice a year here in the US is that no one ever seems to know when the day is for changing the clocks. We all know approximately when the time is: in the early spring and early fall. But, even the week before, if you go around asking people, no one seems to know that it will be the next Sunday. Yet, without fail, the night before there is a slew of emails as one person finally figures out that this night is the night to move the clocks. They email their friends and acquaintances who email their friends until about 90% of the people know. Everyone else, like one of my homework group members who isn’t here right now, finds out when they turn on their computers the next day or any other electronic device that automatically adjusts itself.
First time soldering headers
Peer Review or It Didn’t Happen - more and more important to remember nowadays[/caption]
Atmel Webserver[/caption]
The Elevator at the Sears Tower[/caption]
Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip in Packaging[/caption]
German Kids using inflationary money as blocks in 1923 - Bitcoin is supposed to be immune to this[/caption]
The Liberator - the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun[/caption]
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