The Mad Computer Scientist's Mind

STOP SOPA

2012-01-17T23:32:00.000-06:00

Rather than disrupting the content of the blog and potentially wiping the whole format out ... consider this my contribution to the "STOP SOPA AND PIPA" movement.

See www.sopastrike.com and americancensorship.org for more details and to sign online petitions against the offending legislation.

Tell your representatives that you do not wish to have the Internet censored.

Property Tax Bitching

2011-11-08T22:28:00.000-06:00

Dear Certain Travis County, TX Voters:

Please don't gripe any more about your damn property taxes being too high. Please, just STFU.

Let me explain to you what it means when you vote to approve the issuance of a municipal bond: It means your taxes go up. That's right. The municipal bond fairy doesn't somehow wave her magic wand and suddenly money comes out of thin air to pay for the project the bonds were proposed to fund. No, those bonds are issued and our property taxes go up to pay for them.

I'm sick of you people constantly voting to approve spending more money and then bitching about how your property taxes are going up. If you keep voting to issue bonds and approve tax increases to pay for them, then your taxes will go up. How many different ways can I convey this concept to you?

For those of you who had the good sense to realize that this isn't a good time to start projects that require an increase in property taxes: Please join with me in telling the rest of the people to stop the griping and just pay their damn taxes. They got what they wanted. Now shut up.

Love,

CPU

PS: Oh, may I also direct the other 90% of the registered voters in Travis County who didn't even bother to come out and vote to shut their mouths as well.

R.I.P. Andy Rooney

2011-11-07T19:48:00.000-06:00

I just found out that Andy Rooney - a person who was an inspiration to me in some subtle ways - died on November 4 at 92 years old. I suppose, in a way, I could see it coming. When Andy stopped appearing regularly at the end of 60 Minutes, I knew something had to be going wrong. It was always clear to me that the grumpy old guy really did love being able to dispense his form of wisdom every week. I say "grumpy old guy" truly in the most admirable way, since I really think that's exactly how Andy Rooney wanted to be remembered. As grumpy as he was, though, I think he did so with the best of intention. He always seemed to be able to cut through the sentimental crap and get right to the point on things. This is what I admired about him and, in many ways, I think how he inspired me. If Andy didn't truly care, deep inside, about the stuff he spoke about, he wouldn't have said it. The people who didn't like Andy were probably those who expected the normal sugar-coated commentary they had come to expect from the usual news droids.

There were times I wanted to jump through the TV set and say, "Hey, Andy, the reason why they put cotton in pill bottles is to prevent the pills from banging against each other and breaking!" Then I thought about it for a second and realized that was his way of saying, "Then why in heck didn't the idiots make the bottle the correct size for the pills?"

There is not a whole lot more to say except that I will miss Andy Rooney's commentary on 60 Minutes. If he were here right now, he'd probably be really pissed off that everyone (including me) was making such a big deal about his work after he died. Well, that's okay. We all grieve in our own ways.

I'm Eating A Ham and Swiss Cheese Sandwich

2011-10-30T14:33:00.000-05:00

I'm currently eating a ham and swiss cheese sandwich for lunch. I bet you want to see a picture of it!
I urinated in a white commode in the master bathroom 4 hours ago. I need to go again. Hey, do you want to see a picture?
I played Quake III Arena a few weeks ago. You should too! Hey, let me show you a video of me playing the game!

These things are all true. "Why," you ask, "are you telling us all this?" That is an excellent question.

The real question is why someone would want to ram this information down anyone's throat. This is my gripe with facebook and Google+. There comes a point where I need to say, "Enough!" Google+ is about to be the first fatality of this feeling, for me.

I've been thinking about this a lot and trying to decide at what point a status update becomes too much information. It's really a hard question. I'm sure that some people want to hear, several times a day, how the rich are screwing-over the less rich, from all different sources. "Here - this proves it!" I'm sure people want to hear a play-by-play (practically) of every single event that happened at the high school ball game where their kid is playing in the band (hey, and here's a picture!). I'm sure that there are some people who want to know every single location that a person stops at every single day. I'm also sure that these are things that the people who post these things really do find important. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to say, "Y'know, these things aren't important to me."

This is where I stumble all over my own words. On the one hand, here is my blog. I'm sure that there are things here that you all agree with, and some things that leave you shaking your head saying, "I can't believe he feels that way." Probably even more likely, "What in the world is he talking about?" Some of this is kind of timely. Some of it is topical. Some of it is stream-of-consciousness-based. Perhaps some people would question why I don't put this into facebook or Google+ and share it with everyone I know. To me, while I think this is important, or I wouldn't write about it, I also don't think it is something I want to share with everyone I know in real-time. Even more importantly, I think because it isn't just a few lines with a link to something someone else said, it means I have to spend a bit of time thinking about it myself before I share it with the rest of the world. I also like the semi-anonymity that takes place by having this separate from what I write on social networks.

The bigger problem is volume. If one person is a fire hose of information about his every activity, that's probably tolerable. However, that one person is not the only person who is my "friend" on facebook or in a circle of mine on Google+. If you're on both social networks, well, that crap gets really messed up. The same fire hoses post the same stuff on both networks. At what point does this just get way out of hand?

On facebook, I have simply made a decision to hide status updates from anyone who starts to grate on my nerves. Unfortunately I believe this list is more than half the number of people who I am actually friends with. On Google+ no such mechanism exists - they are either in one of your circles or they aren't. You can see the status updates from a single circle. That doesn't really help much, though. So what should I call all my Google+ circles? Instead of "friends...family...acquaintances...coworkers...former classmates" do I now have "blabbermouths I'll look at someday when I'm really bored ... TMI but I may look at them sometime ... really smart people I would like to hear from often ... people who I need to hear something from even if I don't want to" ??? This is why I don't like Google+. I have no idea how people who follow the constant ramblings of more than one or two other people have the time to do so. At least in facebook, I can still remain friends with someone who I just wish would STFU for a while ("a while" too often meaning "from now until one and one are three").

This brings up more fundamental questions: Should I actually be friends with people who virtually grate on my nerves? Is facebook and Google+ trying to tell me something? Do the status updates people put in facebook and Google+ say something about their character and personality in real life? There are people I care about in some form but avoid as much as possible because they're toxic to me. In my case these are people who basically interrupt everything I have to say, or belittle me, or choose topics that are sure to push me further and further away from the conversation, that violate my moral compass, or are just plain rude. You probably know some of these kinds of people. They don't think they're doing anything wrong - and maybe they even think they are helping me in some convoluted way. In any case, I can't handle this in the real world, and in some ways this is what is happening in the virtual world on social networks. As I typed this paragraph, I started wondering why I should care about anyone who would treat me in a toxic way, regardless of the reason. Why should anyone subject themselves to this kind of treatment under the guise of "friend?" In the case of facebook, I am allegedly friends with people who wanted nothing to do with me in high school, simply because they recognized me during the planning of the reunion online. I doubt that these people would think any better of me now, and frankly, I would go as far as to say they don't have any idea who I am or what I even stand for. They didn't know then, they didn't care then, and they probably don't care or want to know now. Yes, I realize this is a negative thing to say and a generalization at best, but I bet you that this is really the case.

The ironic thing about this is that by my own lack of interest in a person's political beliefs or in their kids' activities or in their movement to various places, there is a part of me that feels I am not being a friend either. After all, here is someone laying out there those things that mean something to them, but I'm sitting here bitching about it to all of you. What kind of friend does that make me? I'm trying to resolve this in my own mind and I can't. I could simply conclude I'm just a thoughtless person, but I know other people who feel the same. The very fact I'm discussing it here and that it bothers me says that I am absolutely not thoughtless.

Perhaps what's really the problem here is that in a real-life conversation, I would most definitely be interested in someone's political beliefs, their kids' achievements, and where they were. The difference is that in a conversation those are time-limited and kept relevant to the conversation at hand. While I know of people who want to captivate the conversation by recalling every detail of every single event that has happened to them since we last got together, those kinds of people end up being pushed aside pretty quickly as they monopolize the conversation. In facebook, there is no natural throttle. There is no context to the stuff the "fire hoses" of conversation spew out in their facebook updates. In some circles, the conversation is entirely relevant. In others, it is meaningless banter. Because context is absent in social networks (absent of just knowing someone), there is no natural filter as there is in real life conversation. That's what's wrong with social networks.

Anyhow, thanks for listening and sharing my thoughts about this. Now, I need to use the rest room. Pardon me.

The One Percent

2011-10-08T13:38:00.000-05:00

There's a war brewing out there and it isn't taking place in the Middle East...

Lately I've seen nothing but repeated jabs at the so-called "one percent" of Americans who hold a majority of the wealth but not paying their "fair share" of taxes. Carried one step further are the Wall Street protests that are taking place. I understand why this is happening. With a 9+% unemployment rate and countless people forced to cut back spending due to the depressed economy it doesn't surprise me that people are fed-up with the income disparity. On the other hand, what is being spouted by those protesting makes almost no sense, and is only serving to fuel a class war that is not going to end well for both parties.

I have repeatedly said in this forum and I will say it here again that the solution to the economic problems is for people to get back to work (ie. we need jobs for them with a living wage). I also think it is time for people to start accepting responsibility for their own personal economic condition and stop behavior that is expensive and unsustainable. What do I mean by that? Well, when I see a homeless person on a street corner with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth asking for money for food, they are not making their case for poverty. If you are making the decision to forgo food or health care for cigarettes, then you're not getting my sympathy - homeless or not. If you're already having trouble making ends meet and you decide to have kids, then you don't have my sympathy. If you've decided to have more than 2 kids, even if you do have the means to support them at home, then you don't have my sympathy when you complain about the lack of funding for schools. While I'm not in the "one percent" that people speak of, I think it is safe to say that if I'm not garnering your sympathy, then it is likely you're not garnering others' sympathy either. Why should someone who has worked hard to get ahead be penalized for doing so, provided they did so ethically? They don't have any obligation - moral or otherwise - to support your unsustainable lifestyle. To ask government to steal money from these people in the name of helping those who have fallen on hard times because of their own lack of forethought is not really fair, just as it isn't fair that the banks and many of the Wall Street financial institutions effectively stole money from the American people to support their unsustainable business/lifestyle. Seriously, I have a problem with both sides of this equation.

What pisses me off is that what is generally done by the 99% side is that they pick the worst, most unfair, most heart-wrenching case to present as evidence for what is happening to everyone. I am not denying that these cases exist, but to say that this represents even a sizable minority of the population is just plain bogus. I don't think there's anyone out there who wouldn't want to help out someone who genuinely fell on hard times - including those 1% that everyone seems to feel are ripping them off. The problem I see is that there is a vocal group of people who are trying to assert that a majority of the 99% are in the same category as the worst, most unfair, most heart-wrenching case, and they're clearly not.

I was thinking about this whole thing and came up with an interesting idea: Let's get the government out of the "wealth redistribution" business entirely. That's right, no more federal subsidies for social programs, education, etc. Establish a relatively small program that is only there to sustain someone who is truly in need - the heart-wrenching cases we all see - and only to the extent that they are able to afford food, reasonable shelter, and health care to treat their life-threatening condition. Likewise, eliminate every loophole that would allow for individuals and corporations to avoid paying their taxes. Now, for everyone else in need, the government would only serve as a conduit by which people or educational institutions who are in need of assistance could contact the 1% of the population. A simple, standard, form is filled-out with the basics of the reason for the need, how much money is necessary to correct the situation, and the length of time that money will be needed. A written statement of need would be attached to the form, indicating the details of the circumstances and reasons for the need (in the case of education institutions, a balance sheet would be helpful, for individuals a budget). At that point, these forms would be made available to anyone who wished to contribute to the cause, especially the 1%. Any money that was given to these programs would be entirely tax-exempt to the giver, as bona fide charitable contributions should be. The recipient would only need to pay those income taxes as they would be normally eligible to pay (which, at a poverty level or if an educational institution, should be little to none). The government's responsibility would be to assure that the monies are directed to the correct places, and to investigate fraud in the process (anyone misrepresenting material facts on their forms would be subject to a felony prosecution, be required to pay back whatever they received, and could never participate in the program again).

This accomplishes the following:

It takes away the entitlement mentality that people have and calls public assistance what it really is: charity
It creates a conduit for those truly in need to state their case to those who have the ability to provide assistance
It provides an incentive for those who have funds for assistance to help those in need. Instead of the wealthy being taxed and giving it to the government to do with it what they want (and inefficiently as well), the money goes directly to those who need it, and wealthy individuals can obtain tax breaks through acts of kindness rather than through crafty accountants and tax loopholes.
The public as a whole becomes more aware of shortcomings in various areas, and can spend more time and money addressing those shortcomings directly rather than to almost randomly throw money at a problem and hope it gets fixed.
A sense of community is created, even among people who are potentially hundreds of miles away.
People who consistently maintain risky or unsustainable lifestyles will not receive funding to reinforce their bad choices

One final thing that should be part of this program is that the individuals or organizations receiving assistance must be required to write a thank-you note to those who have helped them. It cannot be a form letter and cannot be written by an outside agency. It must be written by the recipient(s). In the case of a school, for example, have a class project writing a note thanking the people who have helped their school. Individuals or familes could write their sponsor indicating how the contribution has helped resolve an issue in their life. The idea here is that the recipient(s) recognize that they are being helped by someone else, and that they have the opportunity to express their gratitude for the assistance. It isn't a sterile, faceless government program that blindly gives money out to people who think they need it.

I imagine if a school or person was being directly helped by a gazillionaire and all of a sudden a group of people started accusing that person of being greedy, there would be someone around to say, "Well, they're not so bad -- they're helping me!"

I know this isn't perfect. Heck, I don't think it would ever happen. It's far easier to bitch and complain that the rich people caused all these problems instead of accepting some of the responsibility for it. I'm with you all who say that the banks who got federal assistance so they could stay afloat (then gave their CEOs a bonus) should never have been given any assistance (in fact, they should pay it all back immediately). I have always thought (and still think) that businesses (in particular, larger corporations) that outsource jobs should have a stiff penalty for doing so, since they take good jobs from people here in the United States. I also think that tax loopholes that allow businesses and corporations to shelter their money from taxes by placing their headquarters in another country should be kicked right the hell out of this country. I think that "blue collar" workers and teachers should be paid a better salary for what they do. But... As much as the wealthy are at fault, it is up to all of us to accept responsibility for our own personal finances and our lives. I know (and you do too) that you are not entitled to have the same lifestyle as someone who makes a million dollars a year. They have more than you, and most of them probably worked long, difficult, and potentially risky jobs to get there. If you want to live like a rich person, then come up with an idea for a business, set aside plans for a family while you build the business, and work the long hours that come with running a business. For those who just want to support a family (or even themselves), it's up to you to take a job when it's available. So you're not in your dream job? A lot of people aren't, but they show-up for work and do the best job they can every day. You should too.

We're not going to get out of these bad economic times by griping to the people on Wall Street. Sure, feel free to protest. Actually, I would really enjoy hearing some people providing real solutions that doesn't turn the United States into a communist country. So far, I haven't heard anything being said that isn't simply a Robin Hood mentality. If that's the best you have, then I'd say that you didn't really pay much attention during the publicly-funded education that we all paid for.

fit-PC2i Initial Impressions

2011-09-16T00:49:00.004-05:00

Note: I like to write these "initial impression" postings in order to share what I've learned about a product. All too often, I've discovered something a lot cooler or quite disappointing after having owned the product for a while. Check back here for updates.

This review is of the CompuLab fit-PC2i Value:

1.10 GHz Intel Atom Z510 CPU (single core, no hyperthreading)
1 GB memory (DDR2-533)
Intel US15W SCH ("Poulsbo") Chipset
Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports (Realtek RTL8111-based)
Slot for a single 2.5" form-factor SATA hard disk
Mini-SD socket (note that this is related, but not the same as, the SD or MicroSD)
Intel GMA500 graphics chipset (video output via DVI adapter)
Realtek ALC662 audio chipset (not tested)
4 USB 2.0 ports (two normal-size, two micro-size ports)
RS232 Serial port (micro port with adapter)

I equipped my unit with a 32GB OCZ Onyx SSD.

In Short

The good:

Small size 4" x 4.5" x 1.05" (per specifications)
Very low power consumption (5 Watts idle, 7 Watts under load measured using the Kill-a-Watt)
Made of metal (durable)
Power cord has a retaining screw to keep it from pulling out ("that's what she said")
Comes complete with necessary adapter cables

The not-so-good:

Cost (price tag for the "value" version is US$279.00)
Gets very warm (an add-on heat-sink is available)
Intel SCH chipset presents the SATA drive to the OS as a PATA drive
BIOS doesn't have a "serial console" mode
Documentation (particularly for some of the BIOS options) is somewhat lacking

My Goals

I was trying to find a small, very low power consumption system based on Intel architecture with two Ethernet ports that could be used as a sophisticated router/firewall and Asterisk PBX. I was doing these functions on my server system, but as I added more functionality to the server, I got nervous about the idea of applications binding to the "outside" interface. While this problem is mitigated by the use of a firewall, applications like NFS (RPC) that use unpredictable port numbers made me feel increasingly more uncomfortable running these on the same box that was my interface to the Internet. What made this worse was that using Asterisk to interface to Google Voice meant opening an even wider range of outbound ports. This was pretty much the last straw.

I first considered the idea of using a commodity consumer-grade wireless router with OpenWrt or something similar to do the same thing. However, while the cost is good, OpenWrt is lacking some of the management flexibility I have come to enjoy with a full Linux distribution. It's no wonder, too, being that these devices have a limited amount of flash memory. They also are running a MIPS-based CPU rather than an Intel architecture (IA) CPU, which meant I needed a cross-platform development environment rather than using the native development environment on my server. Since my time (and patience) is at a premium these days, I wanted something I could put together (running Gentoo Linux) and just have it work. When I need to do updates, I can compile packages on my fast quad-core server in a chroot environment without the need for a sophisticated cross-compiler environment.

I wanted whatever system I used to be fanless (preferably, or a VERY quiet fan) and very low power consumption (on the order of what I could get from a consumer-grade router).

I chose the fit-PC2i Value because it met my criteria pretty well. I was first scared away because of the cost, but when I factored-in my own time and decreasing patience level, the higher cost seemed worth it. In order to keep the power consumption low and further eliminate any moving parts (read: not likely to fail anytime soon) in the design, I added a 32 GB OCZ Onyx SSD. I chose this SSD because it was relatively inexpensive, and I knew I wasn't going to need much in the way of disk space. I also had heard that the chipset in the fit-PC2i was not very high performance with respect to disk I/O, so there was no reason to get a really fast (and expensive) SSD.

I am using less than 4 GB of the 32 GB SSD (including a full Gentoo portage tree and package tarballs) using a conservative Gentoo install (no X windows, for sure).

Putting Things Together

Right from the start I could tell this was going to be a nifty little computer. The initial configuration was done by doing my chroot package compile trick on my fast server. I then attached the SSD to my server via a USB interface cord, and discovered quickly that even a cheap SSD on a cheap USB interface was impressively fast.

I had a bit of trouble on first boot because I neglected to learn anything about the Intel SCH chipset prior to building the kernel. This was immediately remedied with a quick kernel reconfigure/recompile on the server. Just keep in mind that (at least with the older Gentoo live media I used) the drivers were not loaded automatically for both the SCH chipset and the Realtek RTL8111 Ethernet adapters.

Once I got everything booted, the first thing I noticed that it seemed pretty fast given the configuration of the system (see more about this below).

Looking at the hardware this is not a system that you're going to try to run everyday software on. Okay, someone may do that, but I'm not sure it's beefy enough for anything even near that serious. Not serious enough, in my opinion, to justify a DVI port on a monitor. Okay, but that's not much of a problem. What I was surprised about, given the fit-PC2's leaning toward an embedded device is why the BIOS didn't have an option to redirect console output to the serial port. I intend to run with no keyboard and no monitor, but getting to a console is really helpful when I put something dumb in iptables and lock myself out of the network. What I ended up doing was simply to tell grub to output both to the serial port and DVI console, and have the default Linux boot option use a serial console.

Performance

The fit-PC2i Value is actually pretty responsive even with a 1.1 GHz Atom CPU. However, be forewarned that this system is not going to come close to running a firewall at full Gigabit Ethernet speeds! Running very little and acting primarily as a firewall, I saw the idle CPU down just below 50% measured by "top" when I started streaming Netflix on the Roku. All of the utilization was in the interrupt stack, indicating that the Ethernet chips were effectively gobbling up the system. Now that being said, that Atom CPU still has plenty of cycles left, but I'm a bit concerned what would happen if I had an Internet connection that exceeded 15 Mbits/sec. To be sure, the Linux driver may be slightly at fault, but my guess is that the RTL8111 Ethernet chip is simply not very efficient.

Everything else on the system was plenty responsive during management and running normal system applications. I haven't tried to run Asterisk on it yet while the unit was doing its firewall/routing application. Once I do that, I will have a better feel for how well it performs under load.

One thing to note is that the unit runs very warm...I would almost say hot. CompuLab sells a heat sink that snaps on the case, but that shouldn't be necessary under normal circumstances. My guess, from looking at the specs, is that the warm-hot aluminum case is okay and won't affect the PC's electronics. However it is for this reason that I would caution against installing a regular (mechanical) laptop hard disk into the unit. I anticipate early failure of the bearings in a normal hard drive due to excessive heating of the spindle lubricant, so for longevity's sake I would recommend using a SSD as I did.

Final Initial Thoughts

There's something cool about having a system that fits in the palm of your hand that performs like a system that, just a few years ago, took-up a significant part of your desk. This is such a system. It's important to understand its limitations -- you're not going to be using this as a home theater PC or something to run MythTV on. Why? Because while these applications may run on this kind of a system, they are not likely to run well.

I'd like to see a version of this with a newer Atom processor and a more efficient Ethernet chip. However, I don't have any reason to suspect (yet) that the current hardware will be a bottleneck in my application. Seriously, I haven't seen any small system that doesn't suffer from some degree of this.

The power consumption (or lack of it) is fantastic. CompuLab's motto, "do without wasting," is very applicable here. Likewise, not wasting space is also a virtue of this system. I wish I could do this without spending so much money.

I really like being able to ssh into a Linux system and do what I always do when I administer a box and not get caught-up in fancy web interfaces and other stuff like that. The fit-PC2i really works for this, so far. I have no reason to believe that it will have trouble running a pretty full-featured Asterisk installation as well, although I wouldn't expect it to be a PBX for anything bigger than a fairly small business. It should be well-suited to running a PBX that will be an interface to Google Voice and some other things. I will soon find out if I'm right.

Update: September 18, 2011

I had a problem tonight with the Ethernet interfaces (both of them) simultaneously going down in the middle of watching a Netflix video on the Roku, with no other indication except the following in the log:

Sep 17 22:12:29 neuron klogd: r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth1: link up
Sep 17 22:12:29 neuron klogd: r8169 0000:02:00.0: eth0: link up

This was weird since there was no indication that the link even went down. Doing some googling turned-up that there appears to be a bug in the r8169 driver with the links spontaneously going down on RTL8111/8168B chips on some recent versions of the Linux kernel (I am running 2.6.39), with the fix being to go to the Realtek driver (source is available from their site). I created a Gentoo ebuild for the r8168 driver from Realtek and that seems to be working. This also seems to have addressed the high CPU interrupt utilization (which is now about 25%, leaving the CPU 75% idle) when stressed. There were also some network performance issues while viewing some HD YouTube videos with the Roku that caused the Roku to step-down to a lower-quality video. This seems to be solved with the new driver. What is also interesting is that my server system uses the same chipset, and while I haven't seen this issue with 2.6.39 on that system, I am tempted to install the Realtek driver anyway as a proactive measure.

I also installed Asterisk this afternoon with very promising results. I held a conversation with my parents for over an hour through Google Voice with excellent audio quality. No complaints at all. While not fit-PC-related, it may help someone out there looking to use Google Voice on Asterisk for my firewall rules. If you limit your RTP ports to ports 10000-20000, you need to make sure that the following are opened outbound: tcp/5222, udp/{10000-20000}, udp/3478, and udp/443. That last one was a bit of a surprise, but it seems that it is used in the STUN code with Google Voice.

Update September 21, 2011

Well, it seems that the Ethernet problem has surfaced again. This time only eth0 went down, but that is still annoying. This time it was when I was VPN'd into work. The connection dropped for about 5 minutes or so.

I am actually at wits end. I went onto the fit-PC forums and was disappointed to see that CompuLab's answer to hardware issues with a Linux OS that they haven't tested is: We don't support that OS (it was RedHat, as I recall) - in order to get support load Ubuntu on it. Thanks, CompuLab, for that overwhelming feeling of support (said dripping in sarcasm).

What I did see and was worth a try was going into the BIOS and disabling "C-States" and only enabling GV3 support (per this forum article and this forum article). I also disabled hyperthreading and anything else that this box didn't support, in the hopes that this would prevent any potential issues from that from surfacing. I'm not sure I have any other ideas at this stage.

If the Ethernet ports are not stable, my only recourse is to dump this idea and go to a more power-hungry and more standard PC. The whole idea of running this is to support a reliable network router/firewall/PBX. If that doesn't work, then I am wasting my time with this system.

This is why I think I should wait a few weeks before posting my "initial impressions" even though that seems to be dishonest.

Update October 8, 2011

It seems that the BIOS change made above worked, and I am no longer seeing problems with the Ethernet ports.

Aside from the temperature issue (that doesn't seem to negatively affect the operation of the computer), the fit-PC2i is working great. Let's hope it stays that way for a long time!

Reflections On 9/11- 10th Anniversary

2011-09-11T23:13:00.001-05:00

Like everyone else, I have felt compelled to reflect on what happened on September 11, 2001 on this 10th anniversary of that event.

I had gotten to work on an otherwise uneventful morning. Someone mentioned that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. There was a lot of speculation as to what happened. While nobody at that time openly considered that this was an intentional act, I felt right away that this was done on purpose. A short time later the second airplane hit the other tower, and then the news came in that there was some kind of an explosion at The Pentagon (it was a while before it was confirmed that it, too, had been a suicide mission using an airplane). By then, it was pretty much felt that this was an intentional attack. Was it a domestic attack like what Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City, or was it an attack from an extremist group like Al Qaeda? Of course, we now know it's the latter.

My brother had been interning at a business in the WTC only a few weeks earlier, and my sister-in-law worked near the towers in Manhattan. I remember calling my parents to find out whether they were OK. It was a stressful time. Thankfully everyone in my immediate family were safe, but I know of people who weren't as lucky. To me, it was a horrific and needless way for over 3,000 people to die. Immediately following the attack, I shared the sentiments of most Americans who wanted to see the people responsible brought to justice (the definition of "justice" at the time meaning "just desserts").

A few weeks later I flew to New York to visit my family, and while I was in New York I took a trip out to Manhattan to see the wreckage. The air was thick from the dust and smoke, and it was hard to breathe. There were piles of dust and debris on the visors on the traffic lights in the area. It was sad to see the remains of a building that once stood proud and where business was conducted every day. It was even more sad to consider that the people who worked in these buildings were no longer with us.

They say to never forget, and these images and experiences will be forever engraved in my memory.

What followed was, in my opinion, some of the worst handling of such an event that I could have ever imagined. Out of one side of their mouths, our government said that the best way to tell "the terrorists" that this didn't stop us was to carry-on as usual and show them that our liberty and way of life could not be stopped like this. Then the same government carried out some of the most intrusive abuses of the liberties of its own citizens that I have ever seen. They used the event and political spin to justify a war with Iraq that, while it probably needed to happen, had nothing to do with the events of September 11. It spawned two terms that I have come to detest: "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)" and "war on terror."

As I have discussed in a past blog entry, there is no such thing as a war on terror. "Terror" is a tactical way of fighting an enemy. You can't wage war against a tactic. You can only wage war against a specific group of people or ideology. In my opinion this so-called "war on terror" is just a big political snow-job that is a justification to do things that a government has no business doing without a much stronger justification. All I want is the U.S. government to tell us, the people who they represent, the truth. If you're fighting Al Qaeda, then that makes sense. If you're waging war against a dangerous dictator (Saddam Hussein) who used chemical weapons against his own citizens, then just say so. Using September 11 and "the war on terror" as justification for such actions is dishonest and just cheapens the lives that were lost. As much as I love this country, I feel that our government has sacrificed much of our liberties that our forefathers fought so hard to gain for a false sense of security that has really moved our political system away from a representative republic and toward a more authoritarian system. This needs to be fixed.

This week I also saw an episode of NOVA on PBS that was about the usage of the land where the former WTC was located. There is a large memorial and museum to respect those who lost their lives, and a new, modern, and safe office building is also being erected. In the program they mentioned that some of the materials for the memorial and/or building were manufactured in other countries (one portion specifically in China). I find it very ironic and almost insulting that the materials to build at this location cannot be entirely of U.S. manufacture and supplies. You'd think that the best way to honor those who lost their lives would be to show that the United States still can stand on its own. I would rather have seen a smaller memorial with the materials being all of U.S. origin than to have a large memorial with foreign materials (particularly from China). The program also glossed-over the bitching session that has taken place over the previous 9 years over what was going on the WTC site and what the memorial and new building would consist of.

There was also recent talk about a Christian cross being placed on the site of the WTC memorial. This has come under criticism because it leaves-out other faiths of the people who died on September 11. The memorial is not a religious symbol, but rather a way for we, those who survived September 11, to honor and respect those who lost their lives that day. It seems that people have forgotten the motivations for the attack on September 11. The attack was perpetrated by a group of Muslim extremists who feel, in the eyes of their belief system, that the United States and its people are evil since they do not subscribe to what is in the Qur'an and they feel that our influence in the Middle East has interfered with their culture. Their beliefs are a justification to work toward eliminating us and our society. Our strength comes from our political system being overall neutral to personal religious practices. When our government starts respecting a single religion more than others, no matter what the prevailing majority practices, it starts us on the slippery slope toward becoming a theocracy, much like the one our forefathers also fought to break-away from. Worse, though, is that we are promulgating the same kind of behavior that fueled the acts of September 11, Basically it's an "our god is better than your god" argument.

To me, it's not enough to just say, "Never surrender...Never forget." Yes, we all experienced September 11, 2001 in our own way. Those experiences are important to history, for sure. However, if we are to learn anything from the tragedy that happened 10 years ago, then it requires that we understand the motivations involved. It means we don't just feel sad for those who lost their lives, but we also understand what it means to be American and the value of the liberties we have as a result.

General Annoyances I

2011-09-03T10:03:00.001-05:00

It's time for some new rants, I'm afraid. Here are some things that the world needs to know:

I. Use your OWN picture for your facebook profile picture

There are a whole bunch of people who, for whatever reason, find it necessary to use their kid, their pet, their spouse, a celebrity, or something just plain stupid as their profile picture. If I'm looking for you, I want to see what you look like. If you have someone else's picture in there, how in heck am I supposed to know if it's you or not?

If you want to highlight things about your kid, give 'em their own facebook page and put it there. If you're so obsessed with your kids that you have to replace your own picture with their's, then maybe it's time for a bit of therapy. Seriously, perhaps you've forgotten that your kids do not define you (or they shouldn't, anyway) and that you're important as well. Substitute "pet" and "spouse" and "celebrity" for "kid" and read this paragraph again.

I'll give some slack to those who are genuinely uncomfortable with having their picture available for people to look at. Still, in this case, pick an avatar (one that resembles you would be cool) and stick with it.

PS: Yes, I know that my Blogger profile picture has been my cat and is certainly not looking entirely like me right now. That's a privacy issue... It's not what I do on facebook.

II. Too much information (TMI) on facebook

It seems that many people are convinced that every single thing that they do is worthy of broadcasting to everyone they know. They broadcast nearly every place they go. Everyone they see. Every single thought they have. Sometimes, the thoughts have absolutely no context.

When facebook asks, "What's on your mind," it doesn't necessarily mean that you must elaborate on every single thing you're doing or thinking. Have we all become so narcissistic that we truly believe that everyone with whom we're associating truly wants, in real-time, to know every single thing we do or thing? This is one reason I like a blog-style format. It doesn't demand the level of attention that a facebook "News Feed" stream does.

There is also the issue of boundaries: There are some things about you or aspects of your life that I really don't need to know about because they're private.

Perhaps the correct fix for this is ~~a fix~~ an enhancement to facebook: Through some word analysis and, maybe, some classification of various applications in facebook, there could provide a "level" of importance given to each status update (it would default to an assigned value from 1 to 4, and you could manually change it). Anything from gowalla or indicating "I am here" or "I'm here with someone" or "my picture changed" or "I'm now friends with {blah}" could be assigned a 1. Phrases that seem to be merely a sentence fragment that don't really appear to be anything more than a disconnected idea could be a 2. An update with any religious, political, or current event could be a 3. Everything else is a 4. If Google can transcribe voicemail messages into text and facebook can do analysis on photographs and automatically tag people, then this priority system surely could be established.

III. I am not just browsing the web (and your site)

Perhaps I'm just too old fashioned, but not everything I do (on the computer) is related to the Internet, and some things I do on the Internet does not require a web browser. My web browser is still oriented in a "portrait" (more tall than wide) manner, and it does not consume my entire computer screen. I realize that, to some people, this concept is completely foreign, but I actually do more with a computer than browse web pages on the Internet. You should try it sometime.

Message to web developers: YOUR SITE IS NOT THE ONLY THING ON MY SCREEN. So when you assume that I have an entire 1900x1080 pixel screen devoted entirely to your site, you are most sorely mistaken. Likewise, I don't have a 1280x1024 pixel display or a 1024x768 pixel display or even a 1024x600 pixel (netbook) display entirely devoted to your web site. To assume that I have devoted my complete and total attention to your web site is pretentious and insulting. In fact, as I have been writing this blog entry, I have been opening up additional windows to look-up words and facts, or reference other things, or check to see if someone is trying to reach me, or monitor my computer system's health.

I have said this before with Flash, and I'll repeat it here for any other web content: Web standards were developed so that you could develop content that would adapt to the user's environment, not the other way around. I'm not asking that you design your site around a 320x240 pixel display, but for heaven's sake, most netbooks have a display that is 1024 pixels wide. Considering that I would be using about 2/3rds of the display for my browser, figure that your web page should generally be usable at 680 pixels wide ("usable" means that I may need to horizontally scroll once in a while, but not all the time). Also remember that there are a variety of display heights (particularly with newer, 16:9 format displays). This means that if you clutter the top with crap, then I'm going to be constantly vertically scrolling as well.

Shrink down your browser during development, and if you find yourself having to horizontally scroll frequently to get to navigation buttons, then you're pissing off a bunch of people. Stop doing what Weather Underground does where they make it so if your browser is too narrow, even horizontally scrolling doesn't work right (the content simply disappears, permanently)...or some developers that verily piss me off and disable the horizontal scroll bar completely. Yeah, you idiots, you know who you are...

People who make web pages that have text that needs to be horizontally scrolled back and forth in order tor read it should be forced to endure some amount of torture (to-be-determined). IMDB...warn your web developers. I'm coming for them.

IV. Soliciting information or soliciting religious preferences is still soliciting

I have a sign at my home's front door that says, "NO SOLICITING." I bought that sign, and I put it there. According to the dictionary, the word "soliciting" means:

1b. to approach with a request or plea
2. to urge (as one's cause) strongly
4. to try to obtain by usually urgent requests or pleas

So when I say, "NO SOLICITING," I mean that I don't want people knocking at my front door to:

Sell things (that's the obvious one)
Try to convert me to their religion or "save me" by religious conversion (I'm atheist, give it up)
Request information (as in polls or surveys)
Kids selling raffle tickets, candy, or the like
Try to "save me money" (that's just trying to sell stuff in disguise)

In fact, the only solicitations I really am interested in are those from people who I know or care about in a time of serious need (which are likely not any of the above) or someone who I have arranged for a solicitation in advance.

No means no. I don't generally care about your motivation. Just because I don't have an electrified barbed-wire fence and an attack dog in my yard doesn't mean that I'm inviting you to come and disturb me. If you see a "NO SOLICITING" sign at someone's door, it probably means they've had enough of people bothering them when they're in their pajamas trying to edit a blog entry on the computer. Or something like that. Ignoring the sign just pisses people off.

V. People who's blog consists mostly of rants

Oh, crap, that's me...

[to be continued]

Rick Perry, his pals, and Constitutional Amendments

2011-08-18T13:29:00.001-05:00

I originally started this as a pointed, humorous open letter to Rick Perry, but I have been having trouble channeling my inner-humor to deal with this.

In case you haven't heard (I hadn't), it seems that Rick Perry and a handful of other potential Republican presidential candidates have decided that we need a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I heard about this from BionicDance's YouTube channel (see her video titled Sector Control: Persecution specifically). I think that Kate (BionicDance) handled the subject pretty well by herself, but I have a (slightly) less emotional analysis and would like to address the bigger issue that this creates. For the record, I am not part of the LGBT community (I'm straight as an arrow, in case any available straight women like what they read here!!). However, I do support their rights as I generally would any other group of people who don't interfere with my rights.

I'd like to first mention the immediate issue, which is a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. My question: "Why?" I think this is a perfectly valid and simple question. Why must the United States of America have an amendment to its Constitution banning gay marriage? Why is gay marriage even an issue? The usual answers I've heard are:

"Gay marriage taints the sanctity of marriage." -- The United States does not make laws with respect to religious preference (more about this below). If marriage is, indeed, a religious construct rather than a legal one, then marriage as a legal construct should be abolished immediately. End of conversation.
"Gay marriage is contrary to family values." -- Two US citizens capable of making decisions for themselves and are in love with each other seems, to me at least, to be the foundation for marriage. As I have mentioned in previous blog entries, the gay/lesbian community has been excluded from the privilege of marriage for so long that their decision to marry is typically much deeper and more thought-out than heterosexual marriages. Seriously, there is nothing about homosexual marriage that is causing the hetero marriages out there to fail. They are doing so on their own merit (or lack thereof).
"Gay marriage is an abomination!" "If gay marriage is allowed it will cause the human population to die off." -- The first statement is typically an excuse for religious dogma shrouded in an opinion statement, but when the people who speak it try to separate the religious aspect from it, they say it means the second statement. First, there is no requirement that married couples have offspring. Second, the population is continuing to increase without gay marriage or the requirement for married couples to spawn. There is no reason to believe that allowing gay marriage will create any problem for humankind. Besides, it is not the role of government to institute population control policies (and if it is, then I think we need to start to spay/neuter some of our human population).
"Gay couples who raise children will encourage the children to be gay." "Allowing gay marriage will mean that being gay is acceptable behavior and set a bad example for children." -- Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 20 years, it is pretty well-established that homosexuality is typically more deeply rooted in the psyche than simply a learned behavior. In point of fact, most heterosexuals (even kids) are genetically predisposed to be attracted to the opposite sex. They won't learn this behavior from an adult, and most people in the LGBT community will tell you that life would be much easier if they were more like everyone else. It isn't a choice -- it's more deeply rooted than that. Is it a genetic issue? a deep psychological issue? a mis-wiring of the brain? Who knows? Who cares? A child isn't going to "learn homosexuality." The worst case would be that a child who is predisposed to homosexuality would have a sense of understanding and acceptance of themselves rather than to put a bullet in their own head later in life as they become so depressed and confused and isolated when they feel "different" and have no place to turn.
"What next? People will start asking to marry their pets!" -- Pets/livestock are considered property (at this point in time) and do not have the faculties to make decisions as you and I do about love and the responsibilities surrounding it. While we love our pets and feel they "love" us, that is not the same kind of conscious love that happens between two intelligent beings. When it becomes that way, then it would not necessarily be unreasonable to allow inter-species marriage. Consider that black (so-called "African-American") people were considered property and sub-human not so long ago in recent history. We have since become more enlightened...or less bigoted...whatever the case may be. Society hopefully adapts to what it learns about the life around it. Consider what will happen when and if intelligent life from other planets inhabits the Earth with us. The question of marriage between human and alien life will ultimately need to be considered.
"I just don't like gay marriage." "It makes me feel uncomfortable." -- Thanks for being honest. My comment about your answer is below.

So I think that covers all the usual answers. None of these have any business being a matter for government policy, and definitely not a constitutional amendment. If you're religious and are convinced that the U.S. is a "Christian nation," then please re-read my other entry called "School Prayer" where I cover this ad-nauseum. You're wrong, get over yourself. If you can't figure out why this is a serious issue for gay people, then I invite you to perform a thought experiment: Pretend you are not able to marry. Figure out how you will deal with power-of-attorney and access to your loved one in time of sickness, how you will manage health care for a non-working partner, how you will handle the death of your partner and property ownership, etc, etc. Think about how the rest of the nation will arbitrarily refuse to accept the loving union between you and your spouse. That's what our gay friends are dealing with, and it most definitely is and should be a big deal to them!

My final thoughts addresses the larger issue of "reason #6" (above) and legal/constitutional policy in general. If you're wanting to ban gay marriage because it is uncomfortable to you, then while I applaud your honesty, I disapprove of your using comfort as the basis for law. Basically, Rick Perry and his cohorts are effectively using this as a basis for law, and they're wrong. While they likely haven't yet done so, I'm sure that they will ultimately compare it to anti-smoking laws. Here we have a legal substance, but it is illegal to use it in various places. The reason for the law is that it is thought to harm others (and it does), but more realistically the law protects those who are made physically uncomfortable by the presence of tobacco smoke. There is a difference, though. Tobacco smoke, as I mentioned before, is not simply an idea you don't like, but is a physical irritant. When people smoke around me, for example, I have a negative physical reaction. When someone smokes around me, they affect the ability for me to enjoy my rights as a citizen without physical harm. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is an idea that some people dislike. Gay marriage doesn't cause anyone physical harm, nor does it negatively impact the rights of others. A same-sex couple holding hands, while potentially offensive to you, would actually be legal whether or not there was a gay marriage ban. If ideas are allowed to drive legal and constitutional bans, would it be OK for me to initiate a ban on Adobe Flash? Flash is offensive to me and is actually far more harmful to the population at large than gay marriage. When we talk about tolerance, these are the times when we should be considering what that word means. There are acts - such as animal cruelty, rape, murder, and family violence - that are examples of things we should not tolerate. That's why there are laws against these acts. There are laws against child pornography. We have decided, as a society, that such ideas are so unconscionable that they need to be illegal. This is very far from banning gay marriage or Adobe Flash.

I am somewhat embarrassed that I live in the same state where Rick Perry is governor. First he tries to get rid of the drought through a mass prayer event. Then he speaks out against gay marriage. This is a man that I cannot respect because, while his intentions seem to be well-placed, his decisions are based on pure ignorance. Instead of setting an example of behavior that can be emulated by the public, he is promulgating (and even validating) the same ignorance and bigotry that the most uneducated or stupid of people believe.* He is not the kind of person I want representing my country as president, and I am sorry to say that he represents me as governor of the state where I live. Unfortunately I can say the same about most of the politicians in office -- both Republican and Democratic. Our system of government was founded on the assumption that those who served in office would do what was best for its citizenry, regardless of what popular (or corporate, or special interest, or political party) pressure would say to do. They were supposed to be the more highly educated among us. Instead, elections are a popularity contest based on the empty promises they give us all and how charismatic they are with the public. While I sit in awe of those who have the responsibility of representing the United States of America, I also sit in disgust wondering how the founders of our great nation are rolling over in their graves when they see the kind of people that followed them.

* - I don't mean to imply that everyone who has religious beliefs is stupid or uneducated, but what I am saying is that, well, using your public office to organize an prayer event to try to affect the weather is both stupid and uneducated, and it would be more useful for our public servants to be helping those affected than to try to change the weather....and of course, there is that issue of gay marriage.

The Week In Memes...

2011-07-24T23:58:00.000-05:00

I think switch chips in wireless routers are going to be the bane of my existence. I spent this weekend trying to document the Realtek RTL8366SR switching chip that is in my new Netgear WNDR3700 wireless router. Basically I am documenting the chip's internal registers from the smattering of Open Source and datasheets that are related to the RTL8366SR. Why am I doing this? Well, I am not convinced that OpenWrt's driver for the chip is entirely correct. I found one or two issues with it already, and in looking at their documentation it is clear to me that they were also working from an extreme scarcity of documentation. In fact, the OpenWrt folks didn't even realize that the chip is a RTL8366SR (they thought it was an 8366S, which has some significant differences). What made me realize that we were dealing with that specific piece of hardware is that I can see from the traces on the PC board that the WAN port is connected to the switch chip, and it appeared that the second Ethernet port on the WNDR3700's SOC was connected to the switch chip.

It turns out that one of the features that the RTL8366SR is that it provides a 5th PHY (10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet port) that can be either used as a 5th switch port or connected to the CPU via a second RGMII port. In this case, they route it to the second RGMII port (coming up as eth1 under Linux) which provides some measure of additional security and performance for the WAN port. The first RGMII port on the switch chip is what the OpenWrt coders called the "CPU port" and is actually treated as the 6th port (p5 in zero-based nomenclature) on the switch. The second RGMII port is ONLY available as an interface to port 5 (p4) if that port is configured out of the switch fabric (according to a preliminary spec sheet I was able to dig up on the Internet, for the exact purpose the router uses).

In any case, the driver developers didn't realize this and made a fair number of assumptions about the chip that are somewhat wrong. My goal is to produce a document that accurately represents the chip registers like I would have gotten from the official Realtek datasheet if I could get my hands on one, and then fix the driver accordingly. Despite some incorrect information in the driver source code, it was an excellent base for understanding enough about the chip to be able to extrapolate some of what I needed based on what I know. I wonder how in the world they were able to get so much information without the actual datasheet. Unfortunately, I am discovering that this router is suffering from the same lack of information than my previous router did. Sigh. Realtek and Broadcom: WHY OH WHY do you require a non-disclosure agreement and be a "development partner" to get a datasheet?! This makes no sense. There is no IP in a datasheet - just the information that allows one to use the friggin' chip!

It has been hotter 'n hell down here in Texas for the past couple of months. I don't mean like, "You live in Texas, you should expect it to be hot," kind of hot. I mean day after day of 100 (or near-100) degree temperatures since May. I think we had one day since then with any significant amount of rain (we had a sprinkle or two a few mornings back). The drought is serious at this point where I anticipate some draconian water restrictions coming.

When it gets this hot outside, I really can't say I feel much like going anywhere outside of the air conditioned house. Today I thought about going for a ride in the country in the car, but just driving around in this heat even with an air conditioned car seems kind of pointless.

I have been following the YouTube musings from a gal who calls herself "Bionic Dance" (her real name is Kate). She has been trying to explain to people why babies are atheist. This has prompted a series of responses from people who think etymology is the study of hearing one's self babble endlessly without thinking. Kate has been trying to get people to understand that effectively people are born without a belief in a god, and therefore our default position in life is being atheist. We must learn to have a belief in a god, and become a "theist" as that learning takes place. The reason why is simple: The word "atheist" means "without belief in a god" - in other words, not a theist. This is important for two reasons:

Getting people to understand that atheism is simply without belief in a god (and not satan worship or baby killers or some other such nonsense) is the first step toward all of us being able to coexist.
It doesn't matter what you are talking about, if a person or thing or animal does not believe in a god for any reason whatsoever, then by definition they are atheist. It doesn't have a negative, positive, or any other connotation. It just is. It's like saying, "I have blue eyes." You know the definition of blue, and what eyes are, and when you look at the color of my eyes, you see blue.

The big controversy comes from religious people (and I think even a few dense atheists) who disagree with Kate that babies are born atheist. Heaven help that when a baby comes out of a bible-thumping theist the little tyke is atheist. But, really, there is nothing wrong with that. As soon as the little spawn is old enough for same theist to indoctrinate him or her with their nonsense, the poor kid, not knowing that their parent is running on automatic, will probably believe it, and no longer be atheist. However that isn't good enough. That's because religious types want to believe that absent of any intervention that somehow their offspring will magically believe as they do, for to not do so would make them defective in some way. Actually, the truth is that their offspring is more likely to believe in the monster under their bed or the evil monkey in the closet than their parents' god without the proper teaching.

The battle over religion vs. atheism seems to be coming to the forefront more and more lately, and more and more I see lots of misinformation being passed around (aside from the superstition making up religion itself). Watching a show on PBS, I saw a country singer who recently "came out of the closet" declare that the USA is a "Christian nation." Yet another person who paid no attention in history class and has never looked at the Constitution, or is simply spouting something they heard from someone else that they never verified. It makes me wonder how long I can handle the ignorance and stupidity that is around me. Yeah, folks, I'm not perfect and I don't know everything, but when I hear people fight with "Bionic Dance" over the meaning of "atheist" without a rational thought whatsoever, I have to wonder how in hell I ended up in this world.

For what it's worth, Kate, I'm with you!

(courtesy of memebase "Rage Builder")

In spite of all this, I've been listening to "K-Earth Classics" (oldies pop from the 1960s) from Los Angeles on my Roku, which is a great station. I actually lost track of the time and need to get to sleep...since the alarm and my cat will be waking me up in the morning, and this time it really will be time for work!

Is Open Source Headed In The Wrong Direction?

2011-07-21T23:56:00.000-05:00

Over the time I began writing here, I have made many comments about Open Source projects and have, overall, been a fairly vocal advocate of Open Source Software. I still feel that open standards and keeping a rich library of open source software is the only way that computer technology can continue to be innovative, particularly in light of the patent frenzy that looms over the computer science and technology community as a whole. In my line of work I get to work with both commercial (closed-source) and community (open-source) software and, in general, I find that while the commercial software tends to be more polished, the same kinds of bugs and software quality issues exist. The difference, generally, is that to get the commercial software fixed you first have to convince the company there is a bug, then convince them that the bug is worth their time to fix in a reasonable time period, and if you get that far you may actually see the fruits of your labor in a software update for little or no cost (generally, you end up having to buy a new version or a support contract). Traditionally Open Source software had a quick turn-around on bug fixes due to the fact that you could, indeed, fix the bug, or someone among a large user community could usually do so.

There are some dirty little secrets, though, festering in the Open Source community that I feel compelled to reveal in the hope that we can reverse the trend. Note that I am not an OO (Object-Oriented) type-of-person, so what you will see here references procedural software design. However, I feel that these same issues apply (maybe even more so) to OO classes as they do to subroutine libraries. That said...

Issue 1: Poorly Documented Code

If you have a small utility program that does a specific task and is not generally embedded in some other program, then documenting your code is not critical (nice, but not critical). When I refer to code documentation, I refer to subroutine/class libraries or major OS subsystems that are meant to interface with (or act as an interface for) other software. What I am finding more and more is that automated utilities are being used to interpret meta-tags in comments and produce documentation, but this really isn't documentation. These systems produce loads and loads of HTML documents and subroutine descriptions, but don't really show how the subroutine or subsystem is meant to be interfaced with.

The example I like to cite often is the Linux D-Bus system, which is an IPC (inter-process communication) system that is meant to allow various software subsystems to talk to each other. It is meant to replace many IPC methods that are both incompatible and non-interoperable. Search in Google for "dbus documentation" you may end up at several places. The de-facto place to start is the freedesktop.org site, where the D-Bus specifications are located. While the introduction to D-Bus in the specifications say that it is "easy to use," I still find the entire description of it so incredibly complex and obtuse that I have still yet to understand how all the pieces fit together, what is going on inside, and most importantly, how and why I would use this rather than trying to roll my own (in actuality, I know why I wouldn't want to "roll my own" -- it's because I wouldn't want to write yet another non-interoperable IPC system!). However, by the time you've read the third or fourth dot-separated interface definition example, your head begins to spin. By the time I'm done reading, I don't really have a clue how to write a program that uses a D-Bus interface, nor do I have a really good idea what my responsibilities are in utilizing that system. Okay, yeah, you've given me an API in several different languages, and maybe even written an example program, but I still don't know, both as a software developer and as a system administrator, what I have to do for the care and feeding of the D-Bus system.

I call this poor documentation not because the people involved didn't attempt to document the code, because they clearly did. In fact, they wrote a lot. What's bad is that it is not helpful to me. It goes through lots and lots of pieces of history about the inner workings, but is not organized such that a system administrator can read a section and understand their responsibilities with respect to D-Bus, and an application developer can read a section and understand the interfaces they need to know with respect to D-Bus, and finally, if i want to hack on the internals of D-Bus, a deep investigation as to how it really works (complete with some diagrams, because pictures really do speak a thousand words). Instead, all of these are probably documented somehow, but are so jumbled together that it is impossible for these three groups of users to truly understand the system as it applies to their role.

I am not picking on D-Bus alone. This is the same for many projects - particularly in the Linux world, because of the rapid development taking place. D-Bus is also not the worst offender either. There are other libraries or OS interfaces which have little to no documentation at all, so your best bet is to grab source code and try to wrap your brain around what the authors were thinking when they wrote it. That makes for a very elitist group, and seriously limits who can participate in development.

I remember when I was using the VAX/VMS and TOPS-10 operating systems and they had excellent documentation on the OS libraries and system services (TOPS-10 had the Monitor Calls Manual). Here, you knew what the library call did, when you would want to use it, how to use it, and what data structures were required to be defined. I think I have just dated myself...

PS: OO programs and classes are not self-documenting.

Issue 2: Unnecessary Complexity

I always laugh when I talk about SNMP - the Simple Network Management Protocol - because it is so far from simple as to nearly be an oxymoron. I've been working with network equipment for years, and even network giants like Cisco can't implement SNMP correctly in their products. In fact, I have never seen SNMP implemented entirely correctly anywhere. The reason why is that while the protocol may be "simple" (ASN1 may be simple in theory but it is not simple to implement), the interfaces are so complex that nobody really implements it properly. Anyone who has downloaded a manufacturer's MIBs and tries to run them through the ever-friendly (said rich in sarcasm) Net-SNMP (originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University) interpreter will notice that they end up with hundreds of error messages.

After looking at SNMP for a while you start to ask yourself, "Can't this be done any simpler?"

In defense of SNMP, I actually wonder if it can. I mean, I certainly haven't come up with anything better, but I also haven't tried much either. In any case, organizationally speaking, it is actually hard to figure out how to manage any network equipment with SNMP even after looking at the MIBs the device implements. You'll typically end up having to join one OID (object identifier) in one "table" to get information about some OID in another table. Cisco even makes things worse by requiring that you get information for different VLANs by using the community string in an undocumented way (for those interested, it's {community}@{VLAN}). Sure, this is all documented in the MIBs, but trying to navigate them is a chore. Cisco at least had a web-based tool to navigate their OIDs, but given Cisco's slow web site, it isn't pleasant to use either.

Some software simply grows organically in such a way that its interfaces or functionality becomes so complex that it would be better to re-think how it is done than to pile more and more functionality on the already complex framework. I point to two other examples of software that has grown in this way: two newer syslog daemons for LInux, and the latest Linux OS startup manager called "systemd." These are two simple functions should really have (or retain) a simple interface, but are becoming more and more complex as time goes on.

One other casualty of excessive software complexity is that it becomes so difficult to use and/or configure properly that latent security holes form that can eventually be exploited. While I have come to like sendmail, it is an early example of a software system that suffered from this kind of issue.

UNIX was originally created such that simple software tools were developed as building blocks, and these simple tools were meant to be coupled together to form more complex systems. While the problems we're now solving are more complex than these original tools were designed to handle, it seems that we've lost the basic principles that made UNIX a desirable operating system to use.

Issue 3: Bloat / Scalability

I almost feel that the issues of bloat and scalability should be handled independently, but upon further thought I think they are so closely related that I am going to keep them together.

When I talk about bloat I am talking about a system that has become so large that it should be questioned whether the system should be broken into smaller, more manageable, pieces. Most often, bloat occurs because the software (like what was described under excessive complexity) grows organically and eventually starts to do things that it wasn't originally meant to do. At other times, it simply grows too big because it is trying to do everything all at once. I have a few examples of this that I am going to pass-on, because my writing is also becoming kind of bloated as a result.

A cousin of bloat is scalability. Scalability problems generally arise when someone writes code to solve a small problem, someone sees it and thinks it's a great idea, and uses it to solve a much bigger problem. In Open Source software the biggest scalability problem I see can be categorically called memory abuses. In so many software systems I see software that will casually read an entire configuration file, parse it, and keep it in memory. This acceptable when the configuration file doesn't grow to be too big, as most configuration files are. However, there are some configuration files that hold data that is probably better suited to be kept in a database of some kind, rather than being read into memory from a configuration file. The Asterisk Open Source PBX contains many classic examples of such an abuse. In addition to the application tying-up loads of memory holding copies of these configuration files, it also prevents any other applications from being able to modify the data outside the application in such a way that the multiple applications can work together.

Another example of a hidden and subtle memory abuse and scalability problem is OpenWrt's UCI (Unified Configuration Interface). UCI works by taking a common configuration file format in multiple files in a single directory tree (/etc/config, in their case). Applications wishing to use UCI use a library that effectively takes all the files in the directory, parses them, and converts them to a tree of dot-separated-key/value pairs. The configuration language itself presents a scalability issue because its syntax is limited, and is expected to be used for virtually all OS configuration tasks. The bigger scalability issue is that shell scripts that use UCI has an API that reads the entire configuration file tree into shell variables. So if a shell script uses only a small portion of the UCI-based configuration, it must read, parse, and store all of the configuration files in memory. In fact, every time the UCI library is used, the configuration files are effectively parsed, because the application never knows which configuration file it may be using, and the UCI system doesn't know if one of the configuration files were changed by another process. As I started to understand more and more of what UCI was doing and how it worked, I asked myself, "Why in the world didn't they just use SQLite?" Now, granted, there are some advantages to UCI, an important one being the ability to maintain temporary state by grouping temporary directories with the normal configuration directories. Yes, I get that. However, SQLite gives you the flexibility and scalability of a SQL-based database coupled with an efficient size that works well in embedded devices. It was designed with this in mind. State could be maintained in a temporary table, as an example. OpenWrt has some fine conceptual design features but lacks sufficient scalability in many areas.

When Open Source software systems become more bloated and less scalable, it forces people to ask themselves, "Why don't I just cave and use Windows? Or MacOS?" Which leads me to the final issue...

Issue 4: Bugs & Egos

Bugs are a fact of any software system, particularly those that become larger and more complex. It is how the bugs are addressed where Open Source software projects are becoming more and more troublesome. While it is true that having the source code means you can fix the bug yourself, where you can't in a commercial (closed-source) model, being able to actually fix the bug requires a particular level of expertise. If you're dealing with issues 1 through 3 that I outlined above, that level of necessary expertise becomes less and less available, even to people who are experienced software developers. In addition, if you find the bug, and are skilled enough to fix it, you'll ultimately want your hard work to be incorporated "upstream" into the next release of that software. If you can't fix it yourself, then you need to report the bug upstream as well.

Now having worked on several software projects in my day, I realize there are frivolous and even incorrect bug reports and patch suggestions. However, the developers on many Open Source projects have begun to have an inflated sense of their ability to both produce good code and bug-free code such that they frequently place such stringent demands on people reporting bugs as to discourage participation. Without naming specific projects, I have submitted bugs with a high enough level of detail that the core development group should have been able to reproduce the bug without lots of additional detail. However, they require so much additional detail that it frequently takes me longer to report the bug than it did to fix it (when I can). Seriously, many projects simply outright refuse to acknowledge your bug report unless you provide massive amounts of debugging output and precise details on how to reproduce the bug. Some bugs cannot be easily reproduced without being exercised in a specific environment that can't be trimmed down to a small sample case. I have also had instances where some projects rejected my bug report simply by refusing to acknowledge the behavior as a bug, or by refusing to address the issue, generally asserting that the problem won't occur in a typical environment. This is a more of a problem of ego than of failing software, and is becoming more and more common as more and more people utilize Open Source software. I genuinely value people's time and understand that these projects are being run in a volunteer capacity, but if a project is to be taken seriously it can't be so inaccessible that only a few elite can be trusted to address problems in that software.

The other ego issue is code that is so badly written that, while it works, it is hardly maintainable or expandable. Most software projects won't allow the code to be rewritten, or if they do, it won't be without a large amount of supporting evidence. In many cases, what constitutes badly-written code is in the eyes of the programmer, but I've seen some utter crap in my travels that make you wonder how any computerized device in existence today actually works at all. Again, without mentioning a specific project, there is a well-known Open Source developer that wrote some C code with two arrays. That developer depended on the C compiler allocating space for the two arrays such that they were adjacent to each other, and proceeded to access part of the first array by providing a negative array index in the second array (editor's note: I believe it was actually worse than this, that this was being used to compensate for the case where the index became negative and the programmer was too lazy to address that case). Not only is this blatantly bad coding practice, it was sufficiently non-portable that the code simply failed when used on a different operating system. Happily, this specific issue has since been fixed...but what possesses a person to write code like this and assert it is correct?

Commercial software companies employ FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about Open Source software to convince people that using it is risky. If, as Open Source advocates and project developers, we don't address some of the issues noted here, we are likely to be playing-into that FUD. Larger Open Source projects depend on businesses using this software and supporting development through allowing employees to work on the software to make the software viable. Further, without keeping enough interest and active participation in a project, there will not be enough continued development and support to keep the various projects going. While I am, and will likely continue to be, a strong Open Source advocate, I am beginning to see these issues as an unraveling of some of what I admire about Open Source. I understand that my criticisms here are likely to gnaw at some people, but at the same time I'm also hoping that these criticisms will cause some thought that will ultimately lead to better software.

Finally, I want to emphasize, again, that the specific projects I mention here have many positive points despite the fact I have not commented on them. The reason I mentioned them here was because I was interested enough in the project that I wanted to learn more or wanted to participate. If you're reading this and are part of one of these projects, understand that what I am saying here is meant as a means to make the project better...not to trash it.

How Government Finance Works

2011-07-11T13:39:00.000-05:00

I have said many times that there 's "no such thing as a free lunch." What I've neglected to do is explain how government finance works -- that is, how does government get the money to spend it on programs and so on. Note that this is somewhat of a simplification, and I am not an expert on this subject, but I believe what I am saying here is true. If anyone has any better first-hand knowledge, please pass it along!

Let's start with a simple example of how you would handle things in your own household. Let's say you want to buy something - a big screen TV for example. You have several options:

If you have the cash, and it is not earmarked for some other expense, you simply pay for it. You're done. The other options below mean you don't have the cash available, so you need to get the money some other way.
Charge it on your credit card. Doing this means you get the TV, but you will be paying much more for the TV since you will need to pay back the credit card company with interest. Paying minimum payments on your credit card means that the TV you purchased will cost more than twice as much as you paid.
Borrow money from a family member. Family generally doesn't charge as much (if any) interest, but not paying the amount back in a reasonable amount of time means that you will not be on good speaking terms any longer with your family (and they could sue you in court).
Sell something of value you already own and don't use. There's eBay, amazon.com, and even pawn shops.
Perhaps you live with someone and you could both pool resources and share the TV. This doesn't happen too much anymore.
Don't purchase the TV now, and save for it.
Steal the money. No, I don't recommend this option, and it really isn't an option, although people do it.

If you were fiscally-responsible, you would first think about whether the TV is something you really needed at this time, and consider whether it was necessary to finance it or simply wait until you had the money to pay for it. A TV is typically a discretionary expense, meaning you can live without it (it is something you'd just like to have).

Likewise with something more important and much more expensive, like a house. Most people have no other alternative than to take a mortgage (a loan) to buy a home, which tends to be not quite as discretionary (how large/small and expensive of a house is, though). That money does come with a large cost, though. A $100,000 house with a 10% down payment at 5% interest goes a little like this: You'll need about $15,300 at closing, you will owe $90,000 and pay around $800/month (principal+interest+taxes+insurance). After you pay the house off in 30 years, the $100,000 home you purchased will really have cost you $183,930.21. Consider also that if you don't stay in the home for the full 30 years, be aware that the way compound interest works is that you end up paying more interest than principal at the beginning of the loan (in order to keep a consistent payment throughout the loan's lifetime). I know this because I have a handy spreadsheet around for just this kind of thing.

Some of you already know all this, and I'm sorry I had to explain this in detail. However, there are some people who miss the fine points of personal finance, which is a prerequisite to understanding municipal and federal finance.

In government finance there is income and expenses, just like in personal finance. Unlike personal finance, government does not have the means to earn money (they could print money arbitrarily, but that would cause the money to become worthless). If a government wants to build a bridge, for example, that costs $10,000,000 to make, it needs to do one of the following:

If there are funds in reserve -- that is, money in the government's savings account -- and enough to build the bridge, then the government procures a contractor and construction begins. Because people in government don't seem to understand finance too well, they don't have money in reserve these days...
It can raise taxes proportional to the amount of the bridge in order to raise funding. This is a problem, though, because the properties of inflation means that the bridge will likely cost more by the time enough money is raised through taxes to build the bridge. Also, if the bridge is needed right away, waiting until enough tax revenue is raised may be too long. Also, assuming that the bridge would be built using 1 year's worth of taxes, it is very likely that this would become an unreasonably large tax burden for most people.
It can sell a bond to acquire the funds to build the bridge (doing this at the municipal level generally requires an election). This is the usual way that governments obtain funding for a project.
It can steal the money. I don't recommend that government steal money either, but in some instances this actually does happen, sadly enough.

A bond is where the "national debt" comes from. Remember "savings bonds?" This is an example of a government bond. The government sells bonds with a promise to pay back the principal and a certain amount of interest when the bond matures, or comes due for payment. At that time, whoever holds the bond can cash it in and the government pays the holder (principal+interest). In essence, the government is borrowing money from its own people, foreign interests, and so on, just like you would if you borrowed on a credit card or took out a mortgage. Only in this case, whoever the bond holder is (maybe even you) is the one extending credit.

How does the government get the money to pay the holder of the bond? They get that through levying taxes. Generally bonds take 10 years or more to mature, so the principal and interest can be divided up over 10 years, so that taxes won't need to be raised so high that the cost of the bridge would represent an undue tax burden. In short, the government takes out a loan for the bridge, and we, the people, pay back that loan.

What happens if the government can't pay on their debt? Well, then, we're in a bit of a pickle, aren't we? See, the government doesn't earn money, and they don't have stuff they can sell-off on eBay or at a pawn shop. Worse still, the people who mismanaged the funds to begin with (our elected representatives) are generally long gone, or if not, they're not going to own-up to the fact that they screwed-up. Or, maybe they haven't screwed-up, but perhaps something cost more than they expected. Much more. Either way, the government has to pay on their debt or they default on their loans and go bankrupt. Since we, the people, are technically the government, that's not a good situation for us.

So what the government usually ends up doing is taking out a new loan to pay the other loans. Since the government is typically a pretty good "customer," they usually don't have any trouble finding a new entity willing to loan them money. Remember, though, that just like your own finances, if you pay one loan with another loan you not only pay interest on the original amount, but now you're paying interest on the outstanding balance of the loan plus the interest. Over time and enough screw-ups, that comes out to a boatload of interest. The other problem is that governments who have a reputation of being like Bernie Madoff really can't sell bonds after a while, if the prospective bond holders don't think the government can pay it back. So at some point, funding though tax revenues does have to happen or eventually they'll be so "upside-down" on their loans they won't be able to get more!

This is the reason why there is no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, every government program or expenditure requires that we, the people, pay it back.

Senator John Cornyn was recently quoted as saying that 51% of American households pay no income tax. Let me repeat that: 51% of households in the United States of America are not paying income tax. When people start bellyaching about the rich not paying their fair share of taxes, I would like you to consider this number. If the 51% of American households that didn't pay income taxes received no benefit from the programs and infrastructure that the government procured, then perhaps I would feel better about this. However, what this really means is that 49% of us - that is, the rest of us - are paying for all the stuff that the government did and are doing for all of us that hasn't been paid for yet. That figure is both astounding and distressing. While I am in agreement that corporate tax loopholes need to be closed, I also feel that this is a good time to start considering a flat tax. People cannot be asking for and consuming resources without paying for them, and that is exactly what is happening now. Municipal governments are increasingly in crisis trying to pay their debts. The U.S. federal debt is now over 10 trillion dollars, and has no end in sight. In fact, this is what raising the debt ceiling is all about. It's not just about what the federal government is spending, but really more about how much they've borrowed and how much they haven't yet paid back.

This is the reason why I tend toward being fiscally conservative (no, not Republican, I mean fiscally conservative, or even better, fiscally responsible). As a society, we need to start understanding the cost of what we want, and carefully consider that cost against the benefit we receive. If this were your own household, and you were at least half-way financially responsible, you would not keep spending and spending and increasing your debt while having no way to pay it back. That is what the government has done, and with the financial climate as it is right now, the implications of our debtors asking for their money and government not having anyone to sell bonds to makes this even more dire.

I don't want to pay higher taxes, but even more so, I don't want to pay higher taxes while more and more people who consume more of the resources the government provides pay none. Not only is that not fair, it is, in my opinion, criminal. Yes, I agree that there are issues with health care and so on, but consider what will happen if you tax the doctors and health care providers right the heck out of this country. Then what? What happens when all the people who are innovating and making something for themselves leave the United States because they pay so much in taxes that their efforts are no longer fruitful? I'm not sure you want to think about that.

Again, I am not in favor of "tax cuts for the wealthy," but I'm also not in favor of 51% paying no taxes. I'm not in favor of someone with 3 kids, a big house, a big shiny new car, and all the crap they buy for themselves and their kids, telling me how they ~~want~~ need a tax cut and asking why the rich are getting a tax cut. How they want this program and that program to be funded by "the government." We don't have any more money, and we can't afford to be giving tax cuts to the people who use the stuff the government (really us) pays for. We have to start being responsible, and if we don't, there soon won't be any government-funded programs and infrastructure. At all. Maybe not even a government.

Bye WNR3500L -- Hello WNDR3700

2011-07-03T12:13:00.000-05:00

Back in March of 2010 I posted comments about my experiences with the Netgear WNR3500L wireless router. At the time, I had some very positive things to say, but this update is the result of some greater wisdom I have obtained through experience since then. What I was trying to do is move my IPv6 tunnel and iptables/ip6tables firewall to the WNR3500L and use it as a router as well as a wireless access point and Ethernet switch (I have my own way of setting up a firewall thankyouverymuch, and don't really feel like adapting to what others force me to do).

The Real WNR3500L Story

Netgear markets the WNR3500L wireless router as an "Open Source Router" and implies that the hardware can be customized as desired (see this article at "my open router" (www.myopenrouter.com). This is not entirely true because neither Netgear nor Broadcom (the manufacturer of the chipset and reference design) have provided sufficient documentation or source code for the hardware. In the case of the switching chip (BCM53115S), the only information available online is a marketing announcement, and nobody has been successful at obtaining technical information directly from Broadcom. Having the proper configuration of this chip is essential to the correct operation of the router, particularly if it is to be used for anything greater than the software Netgear provides.

After literally hours of going through Google and any Broadcom/Netgear source code I could find (and stomach), I discovered several things:

Broadcom effectively keeps most of the key device drivers for their wireless processor and switch chips as closed-source, despite what is claimed by Netgear (it isn't an "open source router" if the source isn't available).
The person who wrote these drivers thought they were being clever by implementing a nvram-based configuration "registry" and then integrating these with the device drivers (who in their right mind puts userland type functionality into device drivers?!).
Everyone I have seen who tried to do what I did came to the same conclusion: that you could only get so far without having to do some serious reverse-engineering of the Broadcom drivers.
In addition to point #2, Broadcom also embedded the same registry access in the CFE bootloader for the WNR3500L, and if you screw around with that registry too much, you can effectively "brick" your router. No, the CFE sources for the WNR3500L aren't available.

It looks like Broadcom hired some students to write the embedded code for this router, since it has all the makings of an inexperienced programmer with clever ideas. Don't get me wrong, I was one of those people at one time too, and maybe still do the same thing from time-to-time, but I know something that doesn't inter-operate with other code well and is implemented haphazardly when I see it, and this is it.

I can no longer recommend this router unless you're 100% happy with the original Netgear firmware.

The only reason that Netgear can still call this an "Open Source Router" is that they do release the Open Source code that was used in the software design of the router. Looking at the code they release, it seems apparent to me that Netgear has attempted to keep their end of the bargain, but only provides binary stubs for much of the hardware drivers and utilities due to them being proprietary to Broadcom and other entities.

What about DD-WRT?

Have you ever looked at the DD-WRT source code? No, seriously, have you? If you have any question about what I am about to say, do it and come back here and then read this...

While DD-WRT does boot and kind of work on the WNR3500L, it doesn't work well. To those who have put the effort into this project, I feel your pain, and I appreciate the hard work you did, but bottom line is that getting something to work and getting to work well are two different things. Every single time I tried to use DD-WRT on the WNR3500L the switching functions seemed to work poorly (it would drop packets randomly on my MythTV systems so video would randomly pixelate). This didn't happen on the factory firmware from Netgear.

To make a long story short, the people at DD-WRT basically appeared to take the mantra, "If you can't beat 'em, then join 'em," and proceeded to work around the weird registry-based tangle of userland/kernel code by just accepting and using it too, since they had no other choice but use many of the Broadcom binary-only device drivers. However, the problem is that Broadcom's do-it-all userland router service ("acos") pokes some funky values into the switching chip before and after the driver is loaded and I don't believe that DD-WRT is doing that right. What are they not doing right? Hell if I know. I couldn't follow the DD-WRT source code for my life. I couldn't tell what parts were appropriate for the WNR3500L and what was for other routers...which were binary-only (proprietary) and which were things I could look at and change. There were pieces of code clearly marked as Broadcom proprietary that I'm not really sure was current for the router. It is a bloody mess. No real offense to the DD-WRT folks, because what they've done overall is pretty impressive, but that source code organization requires some serious drugs to understand! Since I'm staying away from those, that pretty much put an end to my idea of fixing DD-WRT on this platform.

By this point, I decided that the only thing the WNR3500L was good for was exactly how it was sold, with the original Netgear firmware. If that's what you want, it's a nice router. If it isn't, then you'll do what I do, and give it to someone else who has a need for a router like this.

Discovering OpenWrt

During my frustration with DD-WRT and trying to decipher the ungodly source code that Netgear provided, I started looking seriously again at OpenWrt. OpenWrt on the surface is another open source firmware alternative for common wireless routers. My first experiences with it were not too good, and so I kind of wrote them off and forgot about it. However, my second look uncovered a real gold mine of technical wizardry and a lot of people who really seemed to understand what they were doing. Now granted, they and I may disagree on some implementation issues, but the difference between OpenWrt and DD-WRT is that the OpenWrt folks basically give you serious tools for customizing things the way you want. Unlike DD-WRT, the source code has the flavor of the FreeBSD ports system. It is mostly a well-organized and very logical embedded systems development environment. After looking at OpenWrt for a while, I started to see that this was more than just a tool for improving consumer-grade wireless routers, but could definitely be the basis for other embedded design projects.

One good OpenWrt tool is their wiki. I don't usually like wikis because they're organized horribly and using "search" comes with the same problems as any other search engine (you end up with hundreds of results and never the one you're looking for). The OpenWrt wiki is mostly different in that it does have some organization to it, and the answers are mostly there. Software/hardware developers don't like to write documentation, and it was clear from the OpenWrt docs that this is no exception. However, it does look like the OpenWrt people are trying, in good faith, to get some stuff documented. In particular, their supported devices list is extremely comprehensive with photos of the inside of hardware, pros and cons, and everything in between. I really liked this, and it was where I started my search for a new wireless router.

Enter Netgear WNDR3700

After a lot of thought and looking through the OpenWrt hardware list, I decided to purchase the Netgear WNDR3700 wireless router. Frankly, I couldn't explain the low-level hardware much better than the OpenWrt people, so you can see that at http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wndr3700. A higher-level feature list is:

Dual-band wireless "N" (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) [note that I don't think I have any 5 GHz stuff, but it is nice to have available]
4-port Gigabit Switch (like the WNR3500L)
Gigabit WAN port (also like the WNR3500L). However, the WAN port goes directly to the CPU and not to the switching chip, so it should not be used as a pass-thru bridged port unless you're willing to have the CPU as a choke-point!
USB port (for external storage)
Chipset is Atheros (CPU/wireless) and Realtek (switch) based -- No more problems with it being Broadcom-proprietary.
Around 6W power usage (as measured by my Kill-a-Watt)! WOW!

The case is kind of hokey in some ways, and the stock antennas are a joke. However, there are a few modifications that people have documented to replace the antennas. At the same time I make fun of the hokey antennas, I will also say that (at least for 2.4 GHz) the range is comparable to anything else I've used. So I'm not sure it's worth complaining about.

Also interesting is that the "stock" Netgear firmware is actually a modified older version of OpenWrt. The user interface is a typical Netgear-branded interface very typical of their other products, but underneath was OpenWrt. Cool. I never really did anything with the original firmware before going to a newer release of OpenWrt.

WNDR3700 Bad Things

Now for the bad and ugly... The older WNDR3700 had issues with the 2.4 GHz wireless radio that would simply stop working after a while. The newer WNDR3700 (marked on the side of the box as WNDR3700v2) doesn't have that problem, but also isn't supported by OpenWrt except at the development release. No big deal, since it seems to work OK. Except...

There is something wrong with the open source access point software hostapd. This daemon handles the access point operations, such as radio frequency/channel adjustment, linking/unlinking from clients, and most importantly, handling the WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption/decryption. It works mostly, except that my wireless camera no longer works with it. In debugging mode, after the device is mostly linked-up, I get the message "WPA: received EAPOL-Key 2/2 Group with unexpected replay counter" and I cannot communicate with the camera (even though it appears to be connected).

After hours of work, I think I know what is wrong with hostapd, but am not able to fix it. Basically, my camera's configuration has a single check-box to enable WPA/WPA2 and a place to enter the pre-shared key (PSK). When I reconfigured my router to accept WPA only or WPA+WPA2 (I think), the camera linked to the router just fine, but not when I enabled WPA2 only. It looks like the hostapd software is either interpreting the WPA2 specification too literally and not allowing for some poetic license when it comes to the spec, or...and this is more likely...that the camera is trying WPA and WPA2 kind of at the same time, and confuses hostapd. The problem is that it works with any other wireless router I could throw at it, so something is clearly buggy with this. Some people are accusing the Atheros chipset, but I suspect that it is more likely a weird bug in hostapd. It, too, has source code that is convoluted (to say the least) like just about every piece of software that implements cryptography. I have been trying to understand what is wrong, and am still doing so. However, this kind of complicates things a bit since I would really like to have my camera work yet!

Unfortunately, I didn't try the original Netgear software to see if that also had trouble, being based on OpenWrt.

All this being said, I still think that the router was a good purchase so far. We'll see what happens when I start throwing more complicated stuff at it!

Why Not A Dedicated Router?

I was faced with a dilemma when I started this project: Should I try to make better use of my wireless router hardware, or just buy a small, low-power computer like the Dreamplug from Globalscale Technologies? This would have been easier in the short-term because I could have kept the wireless issues and routing issues separate. However, in the longer term, I didn't like the idea of putting another underutilized power-using (albeit low-power) device on the network, and having to maintain yet another OS/platform. In addition, the Dreamplug (with console/JTAG adapter) is around $200 with shipping, and I really couldn't justify spending another $200 for a system that would just sit on the network routing/firewalling packets. On the other hand, my time has some value too.

In the end, I decided on replacing the wireless router because I figured that the long-term issues I had with a separate device outweighed what I could learn by implementing a router on a less-expensive hardware platform. In the end, I could use these low-cost, low-power routers as cheap embedded controllers for a number of applications (and at work, we have some situations like this). I will feel much more satisfied with my decision after solving the wireless camera vs. hostapd problem.

Final Words For Broadcom/Netgear

What would be the motivation for Broadcom or Netgear to make hardware information open? Well, there are a lot of computer enthusiasts out here who are not hardware designers that would love to buy these products, take them apart (so to speak), and make them do things beyond what the average consumer would want. We want to implement every last function that the device is capable of. In addition, we're writing the software for free, and making it available for everyone to use. That's functionality that Broadcom and Netgear can leverage for future product designs or more enhanced firmware features. Nobody really loses here.

1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1-1+1+1+1+1+1+1x0

2011-06-14T23:29:00.001-05:00

I'm starting to wonder if Idiocracy is actually coming true. In facebook, there was a question posted:

1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1-1+1+1+1+1+1+1x0 = ?

As of this writing, 2,285,885 people have answered. The breakdown:
1,129,160 say the answer is 0
858,938 say the answer is 14
249,918 say the answer is 16
47,869 say the answer is 17

Now, I can understand the people who said 16 because they probably missed the subtraction symbol when counting-up the ones. The answer that gets me is the zero, and the reason it bothers me so much is that people who have long since gotten through grade school mathematics have insisted that their answer is correct, "because anything times zero is zero." That's true except that evaluating this requires that you adhere to order-of-operations, which makes an expression like this non-ambiguous. If anyone had any question whatsoever about this, then the first thing they could do is put the whole expression into a short computer program and see what the answer is. My guess is that those who insist it is zero pumped it into a $3 calculator and forgot that calculators don't follow order-of-operations, and most simply subtotal as each operator is pressed. It is amazing that the overwhelming majority of the people got this wrong.

I started thinking about it in terms of religion, and coupled it with Bionicdance's mantra of, "Don't run on automatic...Think!" Now I understand how people can actually believe the fairy tale known as religion and be able to support it so vehemently. Even though people had the opportunity to see the overwhelming evidence that the mathematical expression above does not evaluate to zero, I'm sure many effectively ran on automatic as soon as they saw the number of people who actually did answer zero. Religion is the same thing. While there is no proof of a god, and there is significant scientific evidence that leads us away from a god's existence, and that none of the gods have ever taken time out of their busy schedule to make their presence clear and give us the ability to understand them, the overwhelming majority of people still believe in a god. Does that mean they're right anyway? Not even close.

This also shows why the United States is not a pure democracy and why the founders didn't intend for rule of the country to be by the majority. The majority is not always right. Having a representative government was supposed to overcome this situation by having the people elect educated, intelligent representatives who had our own best interests in mind to make governmental decisions on our behalf. Some of those decisions may not be ones that were popular, but they were intelligent ones, and in the end we knew they were what was best for the long haul. What we have now is an utter mess in politics driven by special interests that seriously don't have anyone's best interests in mind except their own.

Rule by bureaucracy, belief in fairy tales, being too lazy to look-up what order-of-operations is in mathematics. If this isn't running on automatic, I don't know what is...

PS: I'm going to admit that it took me a long time and several iterations of searching every reference I could find to make absolutely sure that 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1-1+1+1+1+1+1+1x0 was not zero. When I answered "14" and discovered that I was going against the decisions of over a million people, I was really wondering what I wasn't seeing that they were. In the end, I felt based on the evidence I gathered that I was, indeed, correct, along with another 850,000 people. Now I understand how it is for people who are on the fence about belief in a god, but can't seem to break free from that majority...

School Prayer

2011-06-04T15:07:00.001-05:00

The only reason I'm getting involved in the debate over prayer in school -- or, more precisely, prayer at graduation -- is because, being atheist, the fallout is directly affecting me. So with that being said, I will present my opinion.

First, it is important to realize that the Constitution of the United States of America, first amendment, says the following:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The text of this amendment is key to what I am about to say. I will also add that in the U.S. Constitution and its amendments, in no other place does it mention anything with regard to religion, a god (including God), Jesus, or Christ. In fact, the only place where the word lord is used is at the end, in reference to the date:

...in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven...

At the time, it was customary to present the date as such, and is not a reference, in any way, to a religious preference in the Constitution.

For those people who claim that the United States was established as a Christian Nation, I say that they need to read the Constitution sometime. The fact is that the people who founded this nation had already suffered sufficient religious persecution due to the fact that they came from a country that had established an official religion, and gave preference to those of that religion. While the founders were likely to be predominantly Christian, they were careful to not establish a state religion, and clearly wanted the free exercise of religion in the United States, regardless of the religion (or lack of it, yes, that's what the establishment clause is all about). Is the United States a Christian Nation? No. If you think so, then find me something in the Constitution indicating such (PS: referencing the Declaration of Independence is not a suitable defense, as even here there is no reference to a Christian god, simply of "Nature's God" or "Divine Providence," that is purposefully neutral).

It is clear, Constitutionally, that the United States and its government has been purposefully established without a religious preference, in the hopes that all its citizens may be able to practice as they choose, without government imposing a specific religion's values, rules, or customs upon the people, regardless of majority or predominant religion.

How does this affect public school?

Public schools were established by our state governments in order to make a basic education available to all of its citizens. This basic education is the kind of education that, at the time, could not be obtained reasonably at home: Reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and so on. The education would be taught by teachers, proficient in the subject they were to teach, who's job it was to effectively pass on this knowledge to the students. Remember, when the public school system was established there wasn't an Internet and many people could not read. Books were expensive. A public school system allowed the United States to give its citizens a higher level of competency, and to pursue their talents and occupations, regardless of income. The school system was also a very efficient use of funds such that a teacher's salary could be distributed among multiple students as opposed to a teacher teaching only one or two students at a time, as would happen with a private tutor. It is important to understand this in the context of a discussion of religion in schools because this sets the tone for why schools were established to begin with. Clearly, a religious education was already available through the church of a person's choice, even before the establishment of a public school system. It was not the charter of the public schools to teach religious education. A good discussion of this is available at http://www.servintfree.net/~aidmn-ejournal/publications/2001-11/PublicEducationInTheUnitedStates.html.

When is the public school system crossing the line into the arena of establishing an official religion, that could be construed as a state establishment of religion? When is "saying a prayer" no longer appropriate? How much religious-oriented speech is too much?

In the context of a graduation ceremony: If a prayer is made part of the ceremony itself, and if it isn't sufficiently broad as to encompass all possible faiths and beliefs, then that is violation of the establishment clause in the Constitution, in my opinion. This is because it has purposely been made a part of the ceremony, as part of the official educational process, by those who's job it is to educate students and respect the law as outlined in the Constitution. The best bet would be to keep gods out of the ceremony and stick to words of encouragement that involve the students' or teachers' hard work and other accomplishments. After all, regardless of whether those accomplishments were simply the result of learning or there was divine intervention, it is still the students who ultimately did the hard work.

If a student wants to thank a deity or son-of-a-deity for some part of their education as part of a speech, then those words of thanks should be permitted speech. There is nothing official about this, and the student isn't requesting the involvement of the audience. However, to make a request of the audience or other students as part of that speech that involves a religious practice, whether done explicitly or implicitly by encouraging the audience to join the student in a prayer, is where I draw the line. Why? Well, a student making reference to the god of their choice, for example, "I want to thank Jesus Christ for guiding me on the right path during my 13 years of school," is okay. Do we all agree with the student? Probably not. However, there is nothing about that statement that requires involvement by anyone else, and the student isn't proselytizing. However, if a student says, "I would like you to all join me in a prayer blessing me and my fellow students," or, "I am going to say a short prayer for me and my fellow students," that is not acceptable for the student's speech. Both of these are effectively encouraging the audience to participate in a religious ceremony rather than the graduation ceremony, regardless of how the student feels about their religion's involvement in their education. Such prayers should be reserved for church, the home, or a private party or such after the ceremony. Furthermore, it is not the purpose of the graduation ceremony to request divine help and guidance for the graduating class. It is, again, a time for celebrating the hard work and accomplishments of the students, and to wish them well in their future endeavors. As a government-sponsored, secular, institution, it is neither the time nor the place for divine involvement.

The question of the legality of whether, during a student speech, a student chooses to lead those gathering in a prayer is subject to debate. A student's speech is protected, and does not appear to be covered under the establishment clause, as they are not speaking on behalf of the school itself. However, given that student speech can be coerced by those in charge (and is frequently regulated for appropriateness - for example, a valedictorian speech can't be about thoughts of dismembering a teacher, as it would be grotesque and inappropriate), it is probably not a good idea for a student to lead the group in prayer, as it would raise questions about the criteria the school staff uses for student speeches.

This example provides a good foundation for the remainder of religious behavior in school, which I will keep brief:

Call for prayer over the loudspeaker during homeroom - Not permitted. Pray with your family before school. It is not the purpose of the school to promote a moment of silence or of prayer. There is typically ample time between the end of announcements and the start of class for any student to bow their head and silently pray.
Teaching about the historical significance of various religions in history class - Permitted, provided it sticks to factual and informative accounts as they relate to history. History is full of events that were the result of religious decisions or practices, and without an understanding of the Roman/Greek gods, Christ, etc. it would be very difficult to describe the reason for various significant events in history.
Teaching about creationism (Intelligent Design) in science class - Not permitted. Divine creation of the universe is not a scientifically established theory, nor is it a hypothesis that has any factual basis that can be shown to be true or false. While it is possible for Intelligent Design to be true (although it is extremely doubtful), it is not an example of something that can be proved scientifically, and, therefore, is not appropriate for a science class. If you want ID education, then enroll your child in a religious school through your church, and they will not get an appropriately adequate science education.
Students gathering during lunch/study hall for prayer - Permitted, provided there is not any pressure that other students need to join, nor does it affect, in any way, any student who wishes not to join. For example, you can't establish a prayer group for study hall and leave the non-religious student to sit in the hallway, or say that the student cannot speak with another non-religious student at the same time. In other words, provided it is strictly at the student's discretion, run by the students, for the students only, then it's OK.
The Holy Bible as literature - Not permitted, although this one is on shaky ground. Given the violence and clear religious orientation of this work, it is clearly religious teaching and not that of a literature class (particularly given the school's tendency to avoid other controversial works, such as Catcher In The Rye). However, there probably could be some amount of literary significance to it (thank goodness that I never was forced to read it!).

These are some examples I could think of just off the top of my head. However, the common thread here is that the public schools are not for teaching religious beliefs. Regardless of your belief or the predominant belief of the community, it is not the school's purpose to teach religious beliefs or to proselytize. The school's primary purpose is to provide a secular education - the kind of skills needed in order to become a productive and functioning part of American society. If your opinion of that includes religion, that is perfectly okay, but as the Constitution clearly points-out, it is not the government's position to establish an education system to that end. You may freely practice your religion in your place of worship, at home, etc., but it is not something that is appropriate to teach in a public school with the government's approval, or to force others to believe as you do.

MIA

2011-05-25T22:50:00.000-05:00

I'm sure some of you have probably noticed the lack of anything here lately. Even more so, the lack of anything personal.

I have been writing about some technical subjects because I think they may be useful to others, and while blowing-off steam about my personal frustrations can occasionally be therapeutic, it seems to be doing little to bring about positive change. The technical information, on the other hand, is actually somewhat useful to people.

For those who have missed some of the personal stuff: This one's for you.

For the past few months - and more seriously the past several weeks - work has been a nightmare. Suffice to say that there have been a lot of bad decisions made on the basis of politics rather than technical or practical merit. Anyone who's been there knows what I'm talking about. Those who haven't can probably use their imagination and you'll probably get it mostly right. When these decisions don't affect my immediate work environment, I generally try to ignore them as a way of preserving my sanity. The latest ones do affect me, and has been draining me of a lot of mental energy.

Work, for me, for better or worse, is what provides me with a sense of purpose, or, better put, a sense of accomplishment. When things start to go awry it impacts my entire life, and my personal well-being starts to unravel as well. So anything I would have to say in here would be mostly negative, and I was supposed to stop doing that all the time (right, Judy?).

Looking at my personal life I realized that it is also a bit of a mess. I'm back to that place again where I don't feel a sense of belonging anywhere. This isn't necessarily anyone's fault, it just is. The lack of fault doesn't make that any better, though. I have a lot of people who I know care about me and who I do things with from time-to-time. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's a deep sense of belonging, where I feel I can share many of the things I'm passionate about. The computer/networking community has become very fragmented as of late, and for other things I'm interested in I'm generally too involved for the people casually interested and not involved enough for the die-hard fans. I'm also not really interested in getting involved in lots of large groups. When all the smoke clears, it's kind of like I really don't want to do much of anything at all anymore.

If that isn't bad enough, consider that I now have friends who are out-of-work, the world in general is becoming more of a crazy place, the people running this country seem to have forgotten what they learned in their grade school history class (you know, like how the United States Constitution got written and why), there have been numerous natural disasters (and the only way people are coping is through religion, good grief!), etc, etc, etc. So I know I can't do anything about many of these, but that doesn't make me feel any better about it all, and I fundamentally harbor a great deal of empathy (I know you all may not think so, but I do).

Nobody really wants to read about how this all has led to a rather deep funk that makes me glad I have a cat around the house again.

I'm physically and mentally drained, and finding it more and more difficult to get filled-up again (I believe the word is fulfilled).

One can only hope that this phase will pass, and things will steadily get better. I don't know. Perhaps the end of the world is upon us, it's just not the "end" we were thinking of (more like R.E.M.'s version, except that I don't feel fine).

Anyway, that's what's been happening, generally speaking.

To end on a somewhat positive note... I would like to mention that the spelling checker being used in the browser is actually quite useful. I always thought I was a pretty good speller, but more and more often I'm finding that my spelling is definitely in need of improvement. I have discovered words I have misspelled for years that I am now spelling correctly. Yay for spell checkers!

Is IPv6 Another Y2K-like Effort?

2011-05-08T03:34:00.000-05:00

This weekend I spent a significant amount of time enabling my personal server systems for IPv6. IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol (IP) system with the most visible change being a new style network address.

For those unaware, a (very) brief background (since you can search online and get much more details): Right now you use addresses that look something like 192.168.1.1 (4 sets of number separated by dots). Each computer that speaks IP - the "language" of the Internet - has one of these addresses. When you type something like www.google.com, the name you type gets translated to one of these addresses. When the system was rolled-out in the early 1980s, nobody expected that the Internet would grow to what it is now. At this point, the number of systems exceed the useful capability of that addressing system, and we have run out of addresses. This system was called IP version 4 (IPv4).

A new addressing system was developed as part of IPv6 that expands that address significantly. IPv4's address is 32 bits long, whereas IPv6 has a 128 bit address. IPv4 has 4 numbers from 0 to 255 separated by dots, and IPv6 has 8 sets of 4 hexadecimal numbers separated by colons (as in 0123:4567:89ab:cdef:0123:4567:89ab:cdef). This address space is, for all reasonable purposes, effectively unlimited, and provides ample growth for the current Internet and what is expected in the future. Again, this is a simplification of IPv4 vs. IPv6 and there are additional improvements, but the most significant change is the addressing.

The problem: The IPv4 and IPv6 addressing systems are not compatible. This has been the biggest obstacle to moving the Internet as a whole to IPv6 over the past 15+ years that the topic has been discussed and implementation done. We have been using some tricks (NAT, for example) to extend the IPv4 space to avoid the eventual IPv6 adoption...but we have now reached the exhaustion of the IPv4 space and the conversion to IPv6 is inevitable.

This problem is much like the Y2K problem that peaked 11 years ago: Most computer programs prior to 2000 were written with the idea that they wouldn't last until the year 2000 and beyond. When the mid-1990s approached and it was clear that people would still be using this software in the year 2000 ("Y2K"), an extensive (and expensive) effort was undertaken to convert all the older software the function properly when the calendar advanced to the year 2000. This magnitude of effort will be necessary for the IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Much of the software we use is not currently capable of supporting the new IPv6 addressing, and fixing some of it will be a major undertaking.

As I mentioned previously, I decided to proceed with updating my personal server systems to support IPv6 and connect them to the IPv6-enabled Internet backbone via a tunnel provided by Hurricane Electric (http://www.he.com/). These are Linux-based systems that support an e-mail, web, time, and secure shell services. One server is my home server that also handles some of my web browsing and other home management services. Getting the IPv6 tunnel working was very easy thanks to Hurricane Electric's excellent documentation and sign-up process. Getting the tunnel going really was the easy part, though. Here are some things I didn't initially think about that had to be done:

Firewall - My Linux-based iptables-based firewall had to be set-up to filter the IPv6 traffic as I have been doing with IPv4. Thankfully, Linux provides ip6tables with the more recent kernels that allows this to be easily done. Most of the rules I used for IPv4 were applicable to IPv6. However, be aware that there is no firewalling by default, even when iptables has been used for IPv4. So setting up an IPv6 firewall should be done prior to bringing-up IPv6 on your system.
sendmail - My sendmail configuration is somewhat complex, with a custom-designed milter interface to spamassassin. Unfortunately, there were portions of the milter that were not written to handle IPv6 addresses (and needed to do so), so a small part of that C code needed to be rewritten. That small part took about 3 hours to re-code and test. Furthermore, it was not straightforward to get sendmail to listen to both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. The following (non-obvious) sendmail.mc configuration was necessary:

FEATURE(`no_default_msa', `dnl')dnl
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=submission, M=Ea, Name=MSA, Family=inet6')dnl
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Name=MTA, Family=inet6')dnl

It seems that sendmail automatically listens on the IPv4 interfaces as well as IPv6 when IPv6 is enabled...but that also wasn't readily apparent.

I also had a perl-based procmail script that went into an infinite loop when it encountered IPv6 addresses in one of the headers, which took about an hour or so to locate (I kept blaming sendmail). Also don't forget about things like the accessdb that may have hard-coded IP addresses in it (you may also need to include IPv6 addresses in there!).
DNS/bind - AAAA records needed to be set-up for the new IPv6 addresses...but what took the most amount of time (something like 2 hours) was trying to get the localhost records coded correctly. I would document my work here, but I'm still not convinced I have it working correctly yet. I also had to explicitly tell named to listen on IPv6 addresses using the following line in the options section:

listen-on-v6 { any; };

Again, obvious, but not the default, and leaving it out means the nameserver won't answer requests from IPv6 hosts.
web server - I use lighttpd as my web server software (not apache) on my Internet-facing server. Again, what seemed like it should have been obvious took an obscure configuration option. To make the web server listen on the IPv6 interfaces, I had to add the following to the lighttpd.conf file:

$SERVER["socket"] == "[::]:80" { } # bind to IPv6 also!

This line forces the server to listen to the "zero" (meaning any) IPv6 address as is done with IPv4.

While I have gotten a good deal accomplished, I still have a number of things to do on my non-Internet-facing server. There, I have MySQL, the apache web server, Asterisk PBX, and MythTV, among other things, to IPv6-enable, if even possible. What worked perfectly right away was the Firefox web browser. Note that to go directly to an IPv6 address directly (instead of by name) in Firefox, you need to enclose the address in brackets, as in:

http://[1234:5768::1]/

Otherwise, it thinks you're trying to go to a weird symbolic name of some kind.

I think it is definitely time to start moving to IPv6...and in order to do that, we need people who have expertise in doing so. My suggestion to network and system administrators is to use your home systems as test cases now so you understand some of the pitfalls of IPv6 implementation on a smaller scale. Doing a more large-scale enterprise is going to require a more substantial effort, and if you don't have the basics mastered the effort will be much more difficult. IPv6 conversion is not forgiving at all. However, preparing for the transition of the global Internet to IPv6 needs to happen, and once the task is complete, it will quietly fade into the background as yet another major effort in computing history (just like Y2K).

Using Amazon Kindle reader under Wine on Linux

2011-04-20T14:55:00.001-05:00

(updated ... see below)

In an effort to expand my interests outside of plain old computers, I have decided to see what it would be like to try reading some books again. I was thinking of buying a Kindle from Amazon.com, but I already have a netbook (eee PC 900A running Gentoo Linux) and really don't want to have another portable device that may or may not get used.

Amazon.com unfortunately doesn't have a Kindle for Linux, so the best I figured I could do was to install the Kindle for PC (which really should be named Kindle for Microsoft Windows...because PCs can run other operating systems) using Wine, which is an open source software package that allows some Windows applications to run natively on Linux (or other UNIX-like operating systems). I quickly discovered that this was a bit more difficult than it needed to be due to some documentation issues.

So here's how to get this done, as of April, 2011:

Download the Kindle for PC installer from www.amazon.com
On whatever flavor of Linux you like, install wine - be sure that it is at least version 1.3.0. I am using 1.3.9 and it is working well. Since version 1.3.9 is not the accepted stable version on Gentoo yet, you will need to edit your /etc/portage/package.keywords file to contain this line prior to doing an "emerge wine":

=app-emulation/wine-1.3.9 ~amd64 ~x86

This tells portage to allow this version of wine to install, even though it isn't the tested stable version. Additionally, I used the following "use flags" in package.use (you may wish to use others, but this is what works for me):

app-emulation/wine alsa jpeg truetype

The one that is likely important for you will be "truetype" as an earlier attempt got wingding fonts in some places (yuck!).
Configure your wine set-up, if you haven't already using winecfg. Other people say you need to emulate Windows 98 when you're running the Kindle application, but I have not found this to be necessary anymore.
Place the Kindle installer file (KindleForPC-installer.exe) into the wine drive_c directory.
Run the installer (wine 'c:\KindleForPC-installer.exe'). Once you're finished installing the Kindle software, then you can remove the installer.
Using winefile, you can navigate down to the location of the Kindle software and run it. This is at C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\Kindle For PC\KindleForPC.exe
. I'm sure there is a way to create a shortcut for this, I just haven't done anything with it yet.

I registered fine with my Amazon account, and was able to read the sample books it included. I haven't tried anything else yet, but I will soon.

Those who are running other distributions of Linux, such as Ubuntu, should simply be sure that they are running a 1.3.x release of wine. It doesn't work on 1.2.x, I have tried it. So don't waste your time doing that. You can still run the beta Kindle reader with 1.2.x (if you can find the beta), but that isn't a really good long-term solution.

It would be better if Amazon would simply supply a statically-linked (so it'll work on any distribution and/or version of Linux) Kindle reader binary for Linux. Even better would be to make it open source, but, as I understand it, the problem here has to do with digital rights management and copyright issues for the books, and they feel this is the only way to deal with that for now.

Happy reading!

Update 1: wine version 1.3.2 does not work, so don't use that one either. Version 1.3.9 doesn't work on my eee PC with an Intel Atom N270 processor (it does work on other platforms, including my laptop with a Celeron-M processor).

wine version 1.3.6 works on my eee PC, so that's the version I now recommend using. I will continue testing and update the rest of the text with this information if it continues to work.

Craziness

2011-04-10T00:12:00.001-05:00

(courtesy of ABC TV/Jeopardy)

Those who know me know I have this uncanny ability to find information online about people...but sometimes I feel like I've crossed the line and am a bit sorry I did so. Such as the case with the ultra-cute & smart Jeopardy contestant from Friday, who I searched for in Google. I was wondering why I kept trying to follow the Google links into Linkedin. and it kept coming back empty. Then I finally searched on the company in the cache links and it came back with:

Private
at Hill & Woodard, L.L.P.
Location Dallas/Fort Worth Area
Industry Legal Services

I probably wasn't the only one who found her attractive/intelligent
I also wasn't the only one who did a Google search on her
Too many people a lot creepier than I am probably decided to contact her and she kind of had enough.

In reality, just to set the record straight here ... a lot of times, I like to do this when I see someone interesting on TV because I'm interested in what they're into and what they're like in real life. No harm or creepiness is meant by my curiosity. One day, y'never know ... perhaps, I may run into someone who shares the same interests as I do.

It's a shame Kimberly didn't actually win at Jeopardy because she clearly had a wealth of knowledge. She was shut-out by the reigning champion, unfortunately, and got the final Jeopardy question wrong (actually they all did). It was a hard question, to be sure, and the current champion (Christopher Short) played a really good game again and could not be caught.

Several other things have happened over the past few days that are less interesting and more worldly that require some commentary...

Just like most of you, I don't like to admit when I'm wrong but I'm afraid I need to do so. I previously penned two comments in this blog - one of them back in September, 2010 titled An Old-Fashioned Book Burning, and another in October, 2010 titled American Muslims. Both of these were meant to show some sensitivity toward those of the Muslim faith and I have been forced to think about what I wrote in a different light. To defend myself, I still feel many of my basic sentiments are valid and stand behind them, but I have been forced to re-think my opposition to burning copies of the Quran. A YouTube video done by Thunderf00t titled Burning Half a Million Korans (which I invite you to view) took the recent burning of the book by a pastor here in the USA and showed the reaction it caused. His question, in a nutshell, is whether the world should be held hostage by a group of people who are willing to resort to violence in response to the burning of a copy of their holy book. I realized Thunderf00t was exactly right. The US troops in the middle east are fighting, in part, to ensure people have the freedom to believe as they do. While I am sure there are are followers of Islam who are not quite as fundamentalist as others, I cannot condone a belief system (even in an attempt to be sensitive to some believers) that would react in such a violent way to the burning of a copy of a book.

After Thunderf00t's video and the latest 20/20 episode about the teachings in some IFB (Independent Fundamental Baptist) churches, I am further convinced that religion (and particularly organized religion) is nothing more than a cult. For every person it has comforted, for every charitable good it has achieved, it seems to produce some of the most atrocious abuses known to mankind. Makes me proud to be atheist.

Finally, it is time for me to write briefly about finances, budgets, taxes, and what it means to everyone, including corporations. A week or so ago, 60 Minutes did a segment on how US corporations are moving their corporate offices to foreign countries to avoid paying US corporate income taxes. The complaint from companies like Cisco Systems (don't even get me started about them!) was that they would pay 30% income tax in the USA, while paying half that amount in other countries, like Ireland. So, Cisco, you think paying 30% corporate income tax is high? How much do you think the rest of us have to pay? Did it ever occur to you that these other countries fund these lower corporate taxes by taxing the hell out of its own citizens? There are days that I'll defend corporations just like I'll defend the "little guy," but here is a clear abuse that must stop. If you're a US company, then pay your fair share. If you leave the USA, then it's time that we somehow send a message to these companies that we won't tolerate this behavior. Again, this goes back to the same discussion of penalizing US companies for outsourcing jobs, which I think needs to be done if we're to level the playing field again.

At the same time, I am sick and tired of people complaining about what the government should be spending money on, when they no longer have the money. "The rich are getting tax breaks - just tax the rich more!" Would someone please define for me what "rich" is? Let me help you a bit, "rich" is probably (in your eyes) defined as anyone who is making more money than you are. My next door neighbor defined rich today as any household making more than $200,000/year. He was shocked when I suggested that there are people who feel that rich is a household that makes half that amount. Taxing the "rich" isn't the way to fix the troubles here. I discovered recently that someone felt that "tax breaks for the rich" were defined as people making more money than they were getting the same tax breaks that they were. Uhhhh...yeah, well, why would you expect anything else? I recently suggested a flat tax on Facebook and got summarily booed off the stage (or, should I say, I got played off by Keyboard Cat?). I've grown more and more tired of listening to the tirades of people who have chosen to have children all of a sudden finding that the lifestyle actually costs a significant amount of money, then expecting that I have an obligation to give more of my salary to their lifestyle choice.

Here's a suggestion: If you have a favorite government social or other spending program that you wish to fund with money from someone else, why not start by giving-up your own money to that program. I am dead serious -- if you really feel the schools need more money, then take your own money and donate it to your local school district. What? You don't have any disposable cash to donate? Well, neither does anyone else. We're all tightening our belts and cutting discretionary spending because the cost of everything is going up, and most of us are lucky to see a salary increase at all (and definitely not one that is covering cost-of-living increases). Our savings are not earning any significant amount of interest, and our biggest investment (our homes) are dropping in value in many areas. That's what happens when the economy goes all to hell like it has been. I am all for making sure that we have the money to pay teachers and to fund education, but it is clear to me that what parents want is an education system that includes lots of extras that we cannot afford any longer. We all need to tighten our belts, the schools and other government spending included. "The Government" is not this god-like entity that magically can make funding appear from thin air and pay for things that you wouldn't, in your right mind, pay for on your own. For every government project or stimulus being funded, you and me and everyone else ends up paying for it. You know, "no such thing as a free lunch."

I mention this because I'm kind of tired of being robbed by this invisible bandit called "government" who steals from me at the direction of people who bitch about having no money for things because they have kids, or
want to save the world but don't have any money to do it.

In my case, I was frugal with my spending and anticipated a potential economic disaster (having experienced a layoff in my younger years). So don't get mad at me if I don't feel like giving-up my hard-earned income to your favorite project. Yeah, I'm doing okay, but I don't anticipate being that way forever, and would like to retire sometime. I also don't see government as a terribly efficient way to fund some of the ideas you have, and further don't feel like some of these ideas are grounded in any kind of reality, no matter how humanitarian you may seem to feel it is. So seriously, if you feel it is money well-spent, then go ahead and spend your money. You and the several other people you can find that have disposable income...

I'd like kids to take their iPhones, iPads, and other trendy computerized gadgets that they feel they need to have and actually do something productive with them (rather than send text messages to their friends) and learn how to create a budget and then teach their parents and government how to do the same. Yeahbut that'd be too practical...

Funny Netflix Recommendations

2011-04-05T23:34:00.003-05:00

You may think somehow my sense of humor got destroyed by my leg injury and cold. Well, you'd be wrong. Now presenting: Funny Netflix Recommendations

Recommended: Dogs Decoded: Nova (a PBS documentary)
Why: "Because you enjoyed: Wallace & Gromit: Three Amazing Adventures, Lie to Me: Season 2"
(unfortunately, there isn't a "Cats Decoded" episode of Nova or I would have been interested in that, but not because I enjoyed "Lie to Me: Season 2")

Recommended: Life Of Birds (a BBC documentary)
Why: "Because you enjoyed: Coupling: Season 1"
(hahaha ... how in the WORLD did they come up with that one?! Do they really think everything on BBC is a documentary?!)

Recommended: Invader Zim (a children's cartoon series on Nickelodeon)

Why: "Because you enjoyed: South Park: Season 1, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, The Nightmare Before Christmas"

(obviously the recommendation staff at Netflix has never seen South Park :-)

Last-minute edit:
Recommendation: Vicodin and a cane
Why: Because your right leg hurts like a sonofabitch and looks like it could fall off at any time, and because you're a wiz at what you do and have an attitude to go with it, and because you enjoyed "House" (the TV series)

Yes, I made this last one up, but I am actually taking at least part of the recommendation. The cane will need to wait...and I'm a lot more compassionate and empathetic than Dr. House (but then again, he got Dr. Cuddy!)

Asleep

2011-03-27T22:16:00.000-05:00

I was just thinking (as I sit here listening to Pandora)... Aside from irony, I wonder what it would mean if I fell asleep at the wheel while listening to the group, "Asleep At The Wheel." Sounds like a good question for philosoraptor.

Today I was able to watch the person who introduced me to Blogger a few years ago - Speck of Texas - get married. It was a small wedding but very nicely done. I think she should post the wedding vows on her blog, because she mentioned how difficult they were to write. In the end, they were perfect, and I feel that they were really meaningful. It's amazing how so many people go through the motions of what are in the standard vows, and that she really took the time to think about what she was really committing to. Anyhow, one of many things that was good about the wedding. I don't like the dressing-up part of weddings. In spite of the dressing-up stuff, this was a good wedding in that it brought people together to share in celebrating two people committing to sharing their lives with one another with good food and conversation in a beautiful venue. It beats the heck out of the usual weddings that I have come to dislike with the loud music, obnoxious DJ, and .. well .. let me just not think about it...

OUCH! Well, I experienced an extreme pain yesterday in the calf of my right leg that seems, as near as I can tell, torn calf muscle. In point of fact, I have never felt pain so bad in my life. It happened as I stepped-up on a short brick retaining wall around a garden trying to go around the irrigation (sprinkler) heads I was adjusting on the system in my yard. That put a complete finish on any yard work. I now need to see the doctor for advice, to make sure it isn't something worse. Argh. Thanks to about.com, there's a great article explaining what happened and what needs to be done at http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/legpainandinjuries/a/calf-strain.htm. I need to stop thinking about this as I start to feel worse when I think more about it. Just last week, I had a lesser injury to the calf of my left leg...at least I think it was that one. I can't catch a damn break.

Anyhow, time for bed. I need some sleep. I'm tired. It has been a big weekend.

Note to Blogger

2011-03-20T22:29:00.000-05:00

Okay, I do have one more thing to say... I saw a message that Blogger (who does a fine job of hosting this blog) is planning to revamp the user interface.

Please, oh, please, do not force this on us... Please. I beg you.

What I see quite plainly on your sample "original version" screens is a landscape display with the entire web browser filling the screen and lots of empty space in the left and right margins. That IS NOT the way my screen looks! I don't fill my entire display with my web browser, and the screen resolution (on my larger laptop) is 1024x768. If you force this new format on me, then I will be constantly using horizontal scrollbars to get to the right side of the browser window (where the useful content is, in your examples).

THIS CONSTANT FORCING OF PEOPLE TO FILL THEIR ENTIRE SCREEN WITH A WEB BROWSER IS WRONG, WRONG, and ENTIRELY WRONG!

How many Javascript wizards are we going to need to hunt down to rid ourselves of this nonsense? I already am running a browser plug-in to get rid of Google's idiotic left-hand margin nonsense area so I don't have to keep scrolling to the right hand side of the browser content.

Seriously. Stop it. Cut it out. I like having a terminal window open to my e-mail display and/or whatever else I'm working on, and keeping other non-web applications open simultaneously. I don't want my whole screen to be a browser. Give me that option.

Really, why on Earth would I want my picture and my name and everything on THE LEFT HAND MARGIN OF MY BROWSER when I already know what I look like and don't need to reference it all the time.

Sigh. I guess I'm doomed to live life annoyed constantly by this. What a depressing thought right before heading off to sleep...

It Comes and Goes

2011-03-20T22:10:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I completed another year of experience in life. Like many things these days, it was good (as in, I survived it), it was real, but I'm not sure it was really good. In fact, in some ways the past year downright sucked.

I've wanted to write and, believe it or not, I have written a fair amount...but it was a fair amount I decided not to publish. In point of fact, in the past 4 weeks I wrote 4 entries that I never finished and never published. The content was too controversial and there wasn't an easy way to keep it down to length that would enable someone to read it. However, most of all, I got tired of writing what I felt was me providing opinions that I felt would never be corroborated. That may be what turning 48 has meant to me - another year has past, and another year that I feel like an outsider and completely misunderstood.

Unlike some people, I don't hold differing opinions just to play "devil's advocate" or to seek attention. I feel that I'm able to see the world from a slightly different perspective than the popular one...and I can't really say exactly why. I have always been this way, and it has always kept me dealing with life on my own. Lately, though, I do wonder where I'm headed next. I keep remembering the immortal words of Yukon Cornelius when he said to King Moonraiser, the leader of the Island of Unwanted Toys, "Even among misfits you're misfits!" Sometimes my opinions are spot-on, at other times they're just a spot (aka. blemish)...but I do feel we don't get anywhere by doing the same wrong things and expecting everything to just get better. I seem to find that happening a lot, too.

So here are some things to think about, if not do...based on my "out there" ideas...

I just got done seeing the movie "Fat Head," a documentary that takes-on Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me." I strongly recommend seeing this movie (Fat Head, that is...). First, it is absolutely funny. Really, it is, and it is funny without lots of shock value. Second, it really does take Spurlock to task on his documentary, with some very interesting results. Finally, what it does is encourage people to stop acting as though they're stupid. See this movie. I strongly recommend it. You will like it much better if you've already seen "Super Size Me" and it convinced you that McDonald's is the evil empire.
I just heard that at&t has purchased T-Mobile (okay, in point of fact, the purchase has begun but will take some time and regulatory approval to complete). ARGH! I really, really hate at&t. I hate T-Mobile also, in a way, but I was happy not to have to deal with at&t. I'm wondering if CB radios could somehow come back into style again... Hmmm... (note: in case it wasn't abundantly clear, my mobile phone provider is T-Mobile)
An update on Cisco and the incredible 3750-X switch's malfunctioning port status LEDs: Latest is that the IOS release that will allegedly fix this problem has been delayed to an April release instead of March. Why doesn't this surprise me? I think that Cisco is too far gone to ever recover from what they've become, I'm sad to say. I can only hope that someone else can push the obese remains of this networking technology giant out of the way so we can have quality and innovation again. Cisco is no longer an innovator.
Speaking of bad technology... My evaluation of Juniper Networks' equipment has begun, and I was horrified to discover that their built-in web-based switch management heavily uses Flash. Thankfully, I never use these web-based tools anyway, having a strong preference for the command-line interface (CLI). However, it leaves me a bit sad in that people still haven't discovered that Flash is an abomination that must go away and get replaced by open standards if we are ever to move forward.
Speaking of Adobe (who owns Flash technology, by the way)... I wanted to download the Adobe Reader for Windows 7 so I could look at some PDF documents. You can't download Adobe Reader anymore without Adobe tainting your browser with their plug-in. No more just downloading the application and installing it... After about 15 minutes of trying to find some way of downloading just the reader, I decided to just install the Cygwin X server (which includes the open source xpdf reader) and just viewed the documents that way. Shame again on Adobe... I hate that company with a passion.

You may be wondering what's happening with Emmy (my cat). Well, I'm delighted to report that she and I are coming to a bit more of an understanding as of late. I suspect that she was a bit younger than she was reported to be, and was still getting out some of that kitten mischief that anyone who has owned a kitten knows all-too-well. It is clear that she's starting to appreciate my serious side, and I'm appreciating some of her rebellious side. Given that me and humans can't seem to grok each other, it's good to have a cat around the house who at least somewhat "gets" me.

I'm not sure where this "blog" is headed next. I realize that it was resurrected from the dead last year after I all but signed its funeral papers. There is a part of me that feels this needs to happen again, only permanently. There's another part of me that feels compelled to keep writing. There will be some information I'm sure I can provide about Juniper's EX series of switches after I'm finished evaluating them that could probably be a big help to those who need to manage them. I wonder, though, just how useful that will be, and it really isn't something I want to do with my spare time... We'll see how things go...

le road rage

2011-03-01T08:51:00.000-06:00

Dear City of Austin:

I recently noticed the new bus stop you put just before the entrance to the J.J. Pickle Research Center restricted entrance.

WHAT IN THE FSCK WERE YOU PEOPLE SMOKING WHEN YOU CAME UP WITH THIS CRAP?

DID YOU EVER STOP TO THINK THAT WHEN PEOPLE NOW STOP HERE (BUSSES, SHITHEADS WITH ENTITLEMENT COMPLEXES LETTING PASSENGERS OFF) THAT THIS COULD VERY POSSIBLY BE A SERIOUS SAFETY HAZARD? NEVER MIND THE INCONVENIENCE OF HAVING TO WAIT BEHIND A BUS LETTING PEOPLE OFF/ON AT THAT STOP WHILE WE'RE TRYING TO MAKE A RIGHT-HAND TURN INTO "PRC" IN ORDER TO GET TO OUR JOB!

DO YOU MORONS ACTUALLY DRIVE ON THESE ROADS WITH MOTOR VEHICLES LIKE MOST OF US HAVE TO DO (BECAUSE WE DON'T LIVE IN A FAIRY TALE WORLD WHERE THE BUS ACTUALLY COMES WITHIN A REASONABLE DISTANCE OF OUR HOMES AND CAN TAKE US TO WORK IN LESS THAN TWICE THE TIME IT WOULD TAKE TO DRIVE)? I BET YOU PEOPLE DON'T USE BRAKER LANE EXCEPT TO SHOP AT THE DOMAIN (ANOTHER OF YOUR MORONIC DECISIONS).

It is hard enough to get around in this city. I know that you pot-smoking, bicycle-obsessed, tie-die hippie, green-dreaming pig fsckers (thank you, South Park) think that if you can succeed in making the roads we paid (and are still paying) for so inconvenient to use for driving cars that we'll all stop driving and ride a bicycle to work. Well, pardon me for taking fscking exception to your Utopian, impossible, impractical dream. I purchased a low-emission, gas-saving vehicle and moved close to where I work so that I could help achieve the lofty goals of trying to be kind to the environment while still having the convenience and practicality of having air conditioning while commuting 5 miles each way to work in 90+ degree weather. Now, my car no longer is very efficient since you put (and are continuing to put) obstacles like frequent, mis-sequenced traffic lights, skinny unsafe lanes due to restriping the roads for bike lanes, and POORLY PLACED BUS STOPS as additional obstacles on the road.

Before you think about making any further idiotic changes to the roadways, please consider that the roads are already difficult enough to drive on. People are already driving around with their head up their ass. I try my best to be considerate and careful on the roads. However, as the number of idiots and the number of idiotic road design decisions increase, that causes more and more frustration for those people like myself who do try to be considerate and who do have a place we need to be. You know, work. That thing that I need in order to pay the taxes that pays your salaries.

Sincerely,

The Mad Computer Scientist
(today, just a bit madder)

A special thanks goes out to icanhascheezburger.com ... not only for helping me maintain my sanity when my day starts off with a moronic driver blocking a three-lane busy road (and the entrance to where I work) in order to let someone off at a bus stop, but also for providing the fun graphics for this rant (see also Memebase, part of the "cheezburger network," for much of the inspiration for this)

It All Came Crashing Down

2011-02-19T12:42:00.000-06:00

The past few months have seemed, for lack of a better word, surreal. I'm not really sure if anyone is really reading this anymore. I've lost a lot of the motivation to post. Some of that motivation is lost due to the apparent futility of writing about things and never really feel like a difference was made. Some of the motivation has been lost due to medications prescribed to cure some of the things that ail me, but in truth only complicate things more. Sometimes I've just stopped writing because I've discovered others who are so much better at expressing their ideas than me. Either way, a lot has happened, and it all seems kind of weird in a way...

Internet Changes

You're probably saying, "Seriously, dude, what could you possibly be doing with your Internet connection again?!" Seriously, I went back to Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner again. Yes, you read that correctly. DSL from at&t was seriously slow. Unnecessarily slow. Inexplicably slow.

About the best speed I could get from the fastest DSL I could buy (6 Mbits/sec down, 768 Kbits/sec up) was around 4.8 Mbits/sec down and 630 Kbits/sec up. This wasn't a limitation of the local loop. According to the loop information, the attainable speed exceeded my provisioned rate. For several days, I had problems accessing one of the sites that serve icanhascheezburger.com (the wp.com base site). Let me tell you, I'm not very happy when I have to struggle to get to the LOLcats! I do believe that at&t has truly reached new lows when it comes to being able to provide quality Internet service. Where do I begin? If you're really interested, let me know and I'll review them in more detail.

It seems that I finally, no thanks to Time Warner Cable in Austin, figured out why I had problems with my Internet service a few months ago. The underground service cable between my house and the pedestal in the neighbor's back yard had a splice in it. The splice was starting to corrode, and the center conductor was heavily oxidized. Instead of repeatedly bugging me about my inside wiring (how many times can you take a 50' piece of wire and put new connectors on it? Huh?) this is where they should have concentrated their efforts.

To prevent the old cable line from ever being used again, I cut it. I then installed 1/2" gray PVC electrical conduit from the cable "demarc" box on the side of the house to the property line about 2' from the cable company's pedestal. This required a trench to be dug through the back yard (I buried the conduit between 6" and 1' deep, as my back yard has a tendency to slope). Yes, I dug it with a shovel by hand. Yes, there were large chunks of limestone about 4-5" below the surface of the lawn. Yes, it was a pain in the ass to dig (in fact, said ass and left leg are still in pain...). When the cable company installs a new service cable, they typically just use a shovel to pull back the lawn and bury the cable about 3" or so below the surface of the lawn. I understand why they do this, but this is why the cable tends to get damaged easily whenever gardening or other yard work is done.

Fast-forward about a week and here's what resulted. Note the trench is filled-in. If you look at the gray boxes on the side of the house, the one all the way on the right with the smaller (and slightly crooked) conduit going into the ground is my new cable service. I have a friend (thanks Jack!) who has a spool of direct-burial Commscope F660BEF cable that fell off the back of a cable installer's truck (almost literally) that I easily pushed through the conduit. I left about 3' at the demarc end (inside the box on the house) and about 10' just on the other side of the fence in my neighbor's yard. There are no splices, the cable is in perfect condition (not just like new but really new!), and all that is needed is for the cable company to come out, pull the cable 2' to their pedestal, put connectors on the ends, and install my RoadRunner service. Cool.

That's not the coolest part though. First, even though I canceled my service in December, I was able to sign-up online, get a promotional price of $29.95/month for 12 months, and free installation. But wait -- there's more! Since December, they increased the speed of standard RoadRunner from 7 Mbits/sec down and 512 Kbits/sec to now be 10 Mbits/sec down and 1 Mbit/sec up (and it really does attain the "down"-direction speed and better)! Very cool. Finally, I thought I was going to need to provide a "clue" to the installer when he came to my house to hook up the cable. I was wrong - the installer actually liked what I did and was nothing but positive the whole time. So when all was said and done, I had fast Internet service again that will hopefully be reliable. If nothing else, if there's a problem now, it will NEED to be in the neighborhood cabling (or a bad cable modem) because all mine is good and protected.

This is what I keep saying about Time Warner Cable. I know there are people there who give a damn about providing good service, but sometimes you need to pull the hair out of your head to find them.

Cat From Hell

Remember my new cat Emmy? The "sweet" tortoiseshell that is so affectionate and is great with people? Well, it turns out that aside from those positive attributes, Emmy has a dark side.

Emmy wants 100% of my attention, finding new and creative ways to punish me for not doing so. For example, I now have two netbook power cables and one laptop power cable with tooth-marks in them from being attacked by the cat. One cable was shorted-out and temporarily damaged the netbook. She also is chewing at the edges of the carpet and pulling out the fibers. These are only a couple of her favorite ways to drive me up the wall. All reasonable methods of controlling her psychotic behavior has failed so far. I finally looked for help from my fellow volunteers and the staff at the Humane Society. I am trying my best not to return her because I really like this cat, but if what she really needs is more humans around and a more active household, then I may need to do that. My goal here is to do what's best for the cat, in addition to maintaining my own sanity and protecting my property.

I did take Emmy for a ride in the car with the idea that (if I do keep her) I'd like to bring her with me when I visit my parents. She is extremely well-behaved in the car. As soon as I am in the right mental condition to take a long drive again, I will see how Emmy handles being in the car for several hours.

The Thinking Atheist

I need to send a positive "shout out" to Seth a.k.a. The Thinking Atheist who is active on facebook and YouTube. With the world (not just my world) going all to hell in a hand-basket, Seth's videos, podcasts, and other discussions have been a breath of fresh air among a sea of stupidity I so frequently encounter. While Seth and I don't always agree 100% on everything (thank the lord ;-), what I think makes him different is his ability to truly think before speaking. Seth's attitude is one I have been able to look-up to. He'll discuss something controversial, but at the end if he disagrees with someone he'll truly agree to disagree, and say "hey, now let's get a cup of coffee and chat about something else." I can tell in his writing, too, that he genuinely means it. I know from my own personality that once someone says something that gets under my skin, it's hard to let go even though it's the right thing to do sometimes.

Looking at the facebook discussions and some of the feedback Seth gets from theists, I have to wonder about the sanity of the world around me. On the subject of religion, I see no reasonable attempt on the part of those who are religious to consider the idea that the belief system they have chosen may not have any validity. Now I can understand why that would be hard to swallow if that is the basis for a lot of the activity in your life, but sometimes a serious examination of why you believe what you do is necessary if you're really interested in how things really, truly are. Instead, both theists and atheists (the former more than the latter) beat Seth up for allegedly "attacking God." The videos and other discussion on The Thinking Atheist is not an attack against god. It is an attack against a group of people who feel that everyone must believe as they do, and those who don't are evil. It is an attempt to counter religious groups who, through government legislation, force people to believe as they do. Seth's videos use parody in order to demonstrate how unreasonable and silly some of the customs practiced by theists look to atheists. Instead of participating in a debate, these people lash-out and attack Seth and his work. There is no debate. There is no rational discussion.

Worse still was a recent discussion Seth had about global warming a.k.a. global climate change on facebook. Seth initiated the discussion because a lot of people were making an assumption that atheists all shared the same (usually far left-leaning) political ideologies, and using The Thinking Atheist facebook page as a soapbox. Seth said he was skeptical about global warming, presented his reasons for being skeptical, and was looking for some discussion about the topic. There were several people who simply attacked Seth's integrity for even suggesting that global warming may not be "real" and left his facebook page. That kind of attitude is the exact same attitude that theists have when it comes to discussion with atheists, making me wonder myself if global warming is not just another religious belief. The only thing that made me have something more than a facepalm moment was that there were actually some people who "got it" and had a truly educational discussion/debate. I remember when I took-on this same topic in this blog (see Global Whining from December, 2009) and wondered how many people wanted to rip my head off afterward. Amazing. Imagine what would happen if Seth brought-up the topic of abortion?!

In any case, I'd be happy to get coffee with Seth sometime if he ever ends up in Austin, Texas. We need more people like him around.

Cisco Sucks (again)

Oh, my, where do I begin? We recently purchased 4 Catalyst 3750X network switches at $7,000 (academic discount) each that were announced by Cisco about a year ago. Our motivation for buying this hardware was that we needed a production-quality, high-performance, high-availability switch with dual power supplies and the capability to upgrade the uplink to the switch to 10 Gigabit Ethernet at some later date. So far, so good.

When we went to hook-up the switches, we noticed that the front panel link status LED indicators (you know, the lights that show that you have an active network connection when you plug a network cable into a port) were behaving unpredictably. By unpredictably, I mean that they sometimes just never wanted to come on or stay on. Now I don't know about you, but wouldn't you think that this kind of functionality is something that should be pretty well-established and you'd just expect it to work right? We know it isn't hardware-related, because we have 3 other switches that behave the same way. It's a software (firmware) problem.

So we report the problem to Cisco (we couldn't find a bug). Turns out that there was a bug report, it's just that Cisco considers this problem "cosmetic" and therefore we didn't see it in our search. Never mind that, what we really want to know is when the dang problem is going to be fixed. Answer: Within a few months. Upon further examination, I discovered that there has not been a single IOS (software) release for this switch in the past year that did not have this bug. That's right, a $7,000 switch that has front panel status LEDs that have never worked properly. What in the world has happened to Cisco's quality assurance people?

Cisco's response: Well, this is a low priority item and most people don't use the status LEDs anymore.

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! Talk about a facepalm moment.

In the end, it looks like they may have a fixed version of IOS out in March sometime, but we may not be waiting that long. Frankly, if a major network equipment company can't put out a product with working port status LEDs, then I have to question my confidence in the product in general. If it's up to me, I'm going to pursue sending the crap back from whence it came. I just don't know who's product to replace it with...yet... Yeah, sometimes even being a network administrator can have its share of unnecessary stress. My favorite was when the rep from Cisco compared the IOS software development process (and amount of bugs) to Windows Vista. I could see his face turn red when I told him, "That's why I use Linux instead of Windows."

So my request to everyone -- please go out and search for a copy of Rick Dees' "Disco Duck" from the 1970s and see if we can't get a parody written called "Cisco Sucks." If someone is brave enough to write it and post it, I'll see if it's possible to get Rick Dees himself to put the words to music (again). I think it really needs to be done. Hmmm...maybe I should STFW and see if someone has already done this...

Speaking Of Cisco and Windows...

Did you know that software is fragile and can permanently break? I kid you not.

The netbook from my employer I have at home that I use for work-related things runs Windows 7 and I use the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client to access the network at work. I did something kind of dumb the other day (not including running Windows 7) when I got my new Internet connection. I was VPNed into work through my Linux server (which also acts as a firewall/gateway/NAT) with the netbook and I forgot this fact when I pulled the Ethernet cable off my DSL modem and plugged it into the cable modem. Oops.

"Oops," is right, because from that moment forward, I could no longer use the VPN to access work through my server. I could not make Windows 7 forget the characteristics of that network, and I couldn't get the VPN client to forget that that the rug was pulled out from underneath it when connected through my server.

I tried uninstalling/reinstalling the VPN client (together with a reboot between), removing any file or directory or registry entry that had the word "cisco" in it, as well as more than a dozen other possible fixes (yes, I did STFW this time). I tried removing and replacing the Ethernet driver. I still got the "repairing VPN connection" message from AnyConnect and 30 seconds later saying it couldn't connect to the VPN server and that there was a problem with the VPN adapter.

How in the world can one irreversibly break software in this manner? Cisco had a document that outlined what to do if this message came up. The first two things didn't work, and the third was to (basically) reinstall Windows 7 on the platform.

ARGH!

Did I mention that my brilliant management and Windows admin guys decided that minimum 12-character passwords and having to re-enter your password for any administrative action would be the new policy? Oh, yeah, after typing that password for the 100th time, one's ability to restrain one's self from throwing said netbook through the wall becomes very difficult.

So while writing this entry, I've been reloading Windows 7 on my netbook and taking a snapshot of the installation when the system is pristine and working fine so that I can get this working again.

I know what you're thinking. "Why not just use Linux you open source zealot?" I would, really, except that there are applications that only run on Windows that I need to do some of my job. I can run Windows 7 in a virtual machine at the office, but on a netbook that really isn't an option.

I think it's finally time to retire.

On that comment... Even though I have a lot more frustration to vent, I need to actually accomplish something today. If nothing else, I need to find out what my cat has decided to chew next... I will try to get back to a more regular schedule of posting here...

Bye Bye Pogo

2011-02-09T21:51:00.000-06:00

I realize I haven't said much here lately, and I have mixed emotions about this. This is partially because I have had some personal issues to deal with, and partially because I simply haven't had much to say, in general.

So my apologies in advance for this completely negative comment after a long period of silence.

POGO.COM - WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

I tried to go on and use First Class Solitaire this evening and they are now requiring Flash to use it, and as you all know, I refuse to put Flash on my computer (it is extremely unsafe, proprietary, and entirely up to Adobe as to what platforms they support). Pogo's solitaire game as well as several others were Java-based and easily run on any OS I could throw at it.

I'm growing more and more sick of this inability for web application developers to use open standards in their designs, or at least a language (such as Java) that can be compiled on just about any platform. While I am not usually one to wish harm upon people, I hope deep in my heart that Adobe does something so incredibly horrific with Flash that it causes people to finally open their eyes to the dangers of trusting a single company's proprietary software with such a large share of web presentation (particularly when there are open standards out there for a reason).

Bye bye Pogo. Fsck you. Byte my ascii.

STFU About Tuscon

2011-01-13T13:17:00.000-06:00

I've been listening for the past several days about the senseless shooting in Tuscon by a psychotic whack-job and the mud-slinging and the pointless finger-pointing and irrelevant meaning assigned to it by talking heads.

Would you people just STFU! PLEASE!

Why is it that a tragedy having no political context at all suddenly results in a political debate over the deep-rooted meaning it has and what liberties we should be prepared to give-up so it never happens again? There is no deep-rooted meaning here. There is no political agenda at work. As much as I think Sarah Palin is an asshole, I see no connection between anything she said and the actions of a psychotic whack-job. It isn't a call for gun control. It isn't a call for hating the truly mentally ill. It isn't a time for President Obama to pump himself up or whip-up guilt with his snake-oil salesman-style rhetoric.

It is a call to take a moment and feel for those who have loved-ones who were killed or injured in the shooting. It is a time to say to those who were injured (directly or indirectly), "I'm sorry." That's because most of us truly are sorry. There's not much more we can say. Criminal activity occurs every day. The feeling of entitlement gives people who are already mentally unstable and have a tendency toward violence the potential to be that much more dangerous. This particular incident happened during a political event, but the shooting itself was the act of a person who (I hope) is not representative of any substantial faction of the people in the United States. He's as much of a whack-job as Joseph Stack.

So to that, I will say, I truly am sorry for those who were killed or injured and their families and friends. You're all important -- both young and adult. It is a shame and a travesty that something like this should ever happen. Unfortunately, there are people who have little regard for others and we have to live among them. I wish we didn't.

I'd like for the public to take a moment to consider the behavior of those who are using this event to further their own careers or political agenda. To me this is the ultimate form of insensitivity. To those who really think that gun control would somehow magically fix this kind of event from happening -- please understand that you're not thinking enough like a psychotic nut-job to understand their motivation. Any kind of legislation involving guns will only be countered by a different kind of weapon, or an illegally-obtained gun. Political discourse also did not cause this to happen. This nation was built on the concept of being able to question what our government does (or doesn't do). Our president asking us to silence ourselves for fear of inciting a nut-job is contrary to the foundation of the United States. While I am calling for those people (including Obama) to STFU, I understand that they are fully within their right to make an ass of themselves. When I hear all this politically-charged banter, that's what I'm thinking.

When my mother told me about what happened in Tuscon a few days ago, she said, "I was shocked." I said that while it may sound insensitive, I'm unfortunately not shocked. Listening to the news, I hear about stuff like this all the time. I feel bad for the victims, and at the same time I have to wonder what causes people to be so filled with hate that they're willing to kill innocent people like this, and why it seems to be happening so much lately. My mother took a moment, then said, "Actually, you're right." I wasn't really trying to be.

Entering Twenty Eleven

2011-01-06T13:16:00.000-06:00

As I watch the year 2010 become part of history I have the urge to say something along the lines of, "It's been good, it's been real, but it hasn't been real good." Then I think about it, and I'm not sure it was good or real either. It just was. As I look back at the past 12 months of what I wrote that my life, like much of civilization as we knew it, was falling apart. I lost my feline pal of 19 years. I said "bye" to cable TV, cable Internet, and the TiVo. We had Joseph Stack and the destruction of an office building because he was pissed off at the IRS. We watched Steven Slater slide down the airplane escape to the destruction of his career. There was Jessi "Slaughter" Leonhardt and her father having a meltdown on YouTube. The radical Middle-Eastern groups are trying to blow-up anything that flies in the United States. The United States government is continuing the destruction of the economy by spending money we no longer have.

Somehow I seem surprised that I'm a bit stressed-out.

On the plus side, I have a new feline friend, I finally did the drive to NY, I discovered that I actually can live without cable TV, and learned some interesting computer-related things in the process. My life is still somewhat of a mess, and the world isn't getting any better, but at least I can talk to my cat.

For 2011, the world needs to get their crap together and start facing reality: The society that has evolved over the past 100 years is unsustainable (forget "green" for a second, and focus on our behavior and fiscal sense). People need to stop believing the fairy tales they call "religion" and realize that the only life we have here is this one, and the only one who can make things better is us. Instead of people reproducing like rabbits, we need to be cognizant of how people not only have a "carbon footprint" but also an "economic footprint." Without sufficient jobs for the population to make a living, society as we know it is going to sink deeper into belief in fairy tales and crime. I recently heard that municipalities across the U.S. are falling into bankruptcy. This will lead to yet another economic disaster. We no longer have the luxury of living a life of waste and excess, and that goes for more than just material things. If you think you're immune to this because you're doing well, then think again. If everything falls apart around you, no amount of money or physical possessions will keep you safe. For everyone else, it's time to look at making things work with what we have rather than our unrealistic expectations of more and more and more all the time. Burying one's head in the sand and praying that some fairy tale character (or government) is going to make everything all better is not only a waste of one's time and potential, but it is also unrealistic and unproductive.

We are all capable of so much more than to be constantly tethered to our portable communications devices spending all of our time trying to out-do the guy next door and watching violence on TV (while being offended by sex, good grief). For heaven's sake, do something that makes sense. Who in hell cares if homosexuals are in the military or get married? What difference does it make if a mosque is built in NYC? These things aren't important when you consider that we're teetering on financial ruin, our common sense is no longer common, and people don't give a crap if they kill someone because they were driving drunk or while texting in their car.

People -- wake up! To me, 2010 was a warning: If we don't do something different in 2011, then things are going to start getting a heck of a lot worse. Yes, it can...

Meet Emmy

2010-12-24T13:44:00.000-06:00

Meet Emmy, the new feline in my life -- adopted from the Austin Humane Society this past Sunday. Emmy is just over 3 years old and is a domestic short-hair with tortoiseshell coloring.

So far, she's doing very well in her new environment, and got a clean bill-of-health at the vet's office yesterday morning.

I didn't have too many specific requirements for a cat -- but the following traits were desirable:

No litterbox issues (pretty important)
Reasonably good with other cats (in case I happen to end up in a relationship with someone who already has cats)
Has a good "motor" (purrs a lot)
Will be be able to hold a conversation well (in other words, "talks"...cat people know what I mean)
Friendly around other people (in addition to me)

Emmy actually meets all of these, in addition to traveling OK in the car and handles being at the vet's office very well.

I wanted to wait until after this first vet visit before actually saying much here because things could have possibly changed if she had some serious health problem (one never wants to think about this, but vet care for some illnesses can easily cost several thousand dollars). I have also been a bit recalling some of the sadness for the loss of Smokey a few months ago.

Anyway, expect to hear more about Emmy as time goes on. If she keeps doing well in the car, I may have a feline companion on my next big car trip!

Good News and Bad News

2010-12-21T13:57:00.000-06:00

The good news first: I adopted a cat this weekend from the local humane society, and there is a cat back in my life again. I will report more on this in an upcoming posting. I would like to get past the first vet visit on Thursday before writing more. I was very surprised when I finally got the new cat home, and all the bad memories of what my previous cat went through were dredged-up. I'm having a little bit of emotional issues as a result. I'm sure things will get better.

The bad news is more a reflection on some bad news. I have been receiving police updates via our neighborhood association, and have had an opportunity to spend more time hearing the news. More and more I have been hearing of burglaries around the area, and that, too, has dredged-up some emotional baggage from several years ago when my house was burglarized. The M.O. of said burglars are that they knock on the door, and if nobody answers, they kick-in the door, ransack the home (taking with them whatever they want), and leave behind a sense of being violated and not safe in your own home. It never seems to end. Law enforcement calls this a "property crime," but I don't agree. The crime may be burglary, but this doesn't begin to address the emotional stress that the resident(s) of the home endure.

At what point do people feel entitled to inflict this kind of pain on another person? I can understand where some folks who have been out of work for a long time may feel a sense of futility where crime appears to be the only option to make a living. I can't understand how someone in this position can justify harming another person in this way as a means toward that end. If this truly is the rationale for the increase in so-called "property crimes," then my sympathy toward those who are struggling to find work is starting to diminish.

I often hear the excuse, "Well, the victim will just collect the insurance." That isn't entirely true. I don't expect that any want-to-be criminals are reading this, but keep in mind that between deductibles, items that are more expensive than the insurance company feels they should be, and items that are either heirlooms or simply difficult to replace for whatever reason, the insurance doesn't really make one "whole." It simply helps lessen the financial burden inflicted by the crime, and doesn't do anything to lessen the emotional burden of feeling violated. It isn't just the stuff that's gone, but the safety and security in one's home along with the memories that went with the stuff that was taken or destroyed.

I don't really care if the home being burglarized is that of someone who earns $100 per year or $100,000 per year - all of us are working hard to get and keep what we have, despite what criminals may think. To make a prerequisite of living comfortably be a home secured like Fort Knox seems ridiculous. It seems ridiculous, but lately it may be the only way to provide some guarantee of security in one's home.

I try to remain surprised when I hear about these thefts, but I so often hear about both legal and illegal ways to effectively steal from people that I start to (completely) lose my faith in humanity. It isn't putting a dollar in the Salvation Army collection pot during the holidays that defines humanity. Sometimes humanity is recognizing that it is wrong to inflict pain on someone else either because you are in pain or because you somehow feel justified in doing so due to your circumstances or some ill-placed sense of entitlement. "Peace on Earth - Good will toward man." This is what this holiday season is really all about. It doesn't mean you are guaranteed it, it means that you are the one who needs to make it happen. It doesn't mean that people should give what they have to someone else, or someone should take what they feel is just from someone else. It means that we recognize that the way we get support from others is by giving support in some way as we're able. Burglarizing someone's house is a violent, extreme form of greed...and if it is accepted as "typical," then I have to question where humanity is headed...

More about the D-Link DSL-520B

2010-12-15T14:11:00.001-06:00

NOTE: This is an update of my previous posting on December 6 titled "at&t Elite DSL and the D-Link DSL-520B"

(Revised Dec. 15 @ 11:18pm)

I have some updated information about the DSL-520B that I would like to share.

Using ddclient with the DSL-520B

I discovered the magic setting that allows this DSL modem to "bridge" the IP acquired during PPPoE to the host using DHCP. However, it is riddled with problems (see below) and so I am not recommending this method.

Therefore, I needed a way to reliably acquire the IP address from the DSL modem in a way that ddclient (most common Dynamic DNS update client for UNIX-like operating systems) could understand. The way to do this (in the ddclient.conf file) is to set-up the following as the method for obtaining the IP address:

use=fw

fw=192.168.1.1/wancfg.cmd?action=view

fw-skip=PPPoE

fw-login=admin, fw-password={your-modem's-admin-password}

That's it. What this does is cause ddclient to log-into the DSL modem, grab a copy of the HTML that contains the status of the WAN configuration (which contains the PPPoE-obtained IP address), then looks for an IP address that follows the word PPPoE. Thanks much to the information in the Sourceforge forums for ddclient for this info.

Bridging The PPPoE-obtained IP

I hesitate to actually include this here because it functioned so badly that it had me scratching my head trying to figure out what in heck was happening. The magic option is under Advanced Setup -> WAN, then edit the WAN interface configuration. Keep pressing Next until you reach the page that says PPP Username and Password. There, you will see a check-box that says "PPP IP extension". Check this box. This will also cause the "Enable NAT" and "Enable Firewall" on the next couple of pages to be grayed-out, since the device is unable to do so effectively (not really, see below).

What I found when I enabled this option is that it would sometimes work. I'm a computer guy, and I don't like anything that sometimes works. This usually means there's a bug, but since I have no way of effectively getting access to the inner workings of the DSL modem, I can't really figure out or fix what the trouble is. That being said, my guess is that this is due to the use of the bridge (br0) interface which is known to have trouble with DHCP under Linux. Why they use br0 in the first place is a mystery to me, but whatever the case, they're using it wrong, because DHCP sometimes doesn't work and almost always crashes the DHCP client (dhcpcd) on my machine when the modem is power-cycled. Ugly ugly ugly.

Security Ugliness

Speaking of ugly, I must mention a bit of ugliness that could only be left in a production device by someone with a screw loose. When I was looking through the iptables configuration inside the DSL-520B, I found two interesting DNAT mappings: One mapped port 2525 to port 25 (telnet), and the other mapped port 8080 to port 80 (http), on 192.168.1.1. What does this mean? Well it means that anyone could, from outside my LAN, connect to the IP externally visible to the world on port 2525 or 8080 and get my DSL modem's telnet or web server respectively. WTF?! Now surely you changed all your passwords from the default, didn't you? Never mind that...what about someone accessing the DSL modem and exploiting some latent bug that turns up a few months from now?

At NO TIME should there EVER be external access granted to a device like this by default.

Needless to say, I removed those entries manually, and am looking to see if there's any way that they can be turned-off permanently through the web-based configuration menus. I will update this as soon as I figure it out...

Update: This actually isn't quite as bad as it originally seemed. It seems that this is a "feature" of being in "IP Extension" mode. Since I am now back in NAT mode, I am not seeing this problem.

No Speed Issues...with the DSL modem at least

The problems with my DSL speeds not being what I expect are not due to the DSL modem, and the DSL-520B appears to be working the way it should. It turns out that my DSL provider (at&t/SBC) has not yet deployed ADSL2 in my neighborhood and I'm still running on G.dmt (the older ADSL standard). I was able to connect my old Adtran DSL modem (only a bridge) and connect that to a Netgear router with PPPoE capability. I ran my speed tests on dslreports.com again, and they came out identically to the ones done with the D-Link DSL modem by itself.

The speed problems are due to something within at&t...and I will need to call them about that.

Updated Conclusions about the DSL-520B

While I do plan on continuing to use the D-Link DSL-520B, it will be with some caution. My Adtran DSL modem maintains no statistics to speak of, and only supports G.dmt. While the DSL-520B hardware seems solid, the firmware in this modem is clunky and really needs an update and some bugfixes. There is some discussion about OpenWRT being released for the BCM-63xx hardware, and that would theoretically make it usable on the DSL-520B (which is really a 96338 board with 2M flash and 8M of memory). However, I am concerned about destroying my DSL modem - especially with no way of backing-up the old image (yet).

Is it better than the Motorola DSL modem that self-destructs over time? Yes and no. I don't think that the DSL-520B is on a self-destruct course, but the Motorola modem that at&t sells is definitely easier to configure and less problematic firmware-wise (although I may be able to find some holes in that platform also, given some time...).

Where The Net Is Going

2010-12-13T11:18:00.000-06:00

While going through some old files on my computer, I found something I wrote back in October of 1995 regarding what we saw the Internet becoming. It seems as applicable today as it was then, and I think it bears repeating...

As I said in the discussion group, I think that there is a danger in people allowing another group of people - either government or private industry - to take control of what looks to be the most innovative form of electronic communication since the telephone. Looking ahead, I can see an integrated communications pipeline that allows us access to what we currently know as telephone, television, video entertainment, and Internetworking (computer communications). Is [sic] seems the natural progression as this new technology has the capability to integrate all these together. As the pioneers of this technology, we need to see to it that it never becomes the wasteland that television has become, the "charged-by-time-and-distance" that the telephone has become, and the regulated medium that radio has become. We, the pioneers of this new technology, need to police ourselves and lay the framework so that future generations of "netizens" can freely express themselves, and at the same time provide protection to those that may rightfully be offended by some of that expression. It's easy to use without ever putting something back. Let's make the net something that the next generation will be proud of us for.

If I knew then what I know now...

at&t Elite DSL and the D-Link DSL-520B

2010-12-06T09:46:00.000-06:00

As promised, I had my DSL service activated a few days ago (on Friday). Having returned to DSL and getting a chance to use it, I have made some interesting observations. I also have some comments about the D-Link DSL-520B DSL modem I purchased.

The DSL service I purchased from at&t is the DSL Elite package - advertised as 6 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up. According to my DSL modem's DSL statistics, my line is capable of supporting 9.504 Mbps down and 1.228 Mbps up, and is provisioned as 6.016 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up (as it should be). In actuality, according to speed tests to several sites on dslreports.com I am getting about 4.8 Mbps down and 680 Kbps up. The first number is rather disappointing. It is showing at least 1.2 Mbps less than the advertised speed. While this is within at&t's "fine print" speed range, it starts giving credence to Time Warner's (smear) advertising campaign that DSL is slow. Compared to the measured rates I got on my cable modem (when it works), DSL is slow. It would be advantageous to at&t to start giving customers a more realistic idea of what they should expect as far as bandwidth is concerned. Giving 4.8 Mbps on a 6 Mbps line and calling it "within the range of service" is kind of like the auto industry's MPG ratings that bear no resemblance to reality. When cable (when it works) is giving 7 Mbps (and I can really attain that speed) bursting to around 14 Mbps (I've measured this speed), 4.8 Mbps (best I can do) on DSL is pitiful. No, I don't have Uverse available in my neighborhood.

That being said, while the performance of my DSL service is kind of lackluster, it appears to be reliable as I remember it. The at&t technician called me before doing the installation and stopped by my house after he connected it to confirm that I had service. Given that I did a "self installation," having someone check with me to make sure my service was working was a good thing.

The most irritating thing about the DSL installation was the account set-up. If I must emphasize one thing to at&t, it is that they must not restrict service to ONLY Windows and MacOS users! I'm not asking for you to give me OS support - I'm asking you to stop restricting me from registering my DSL service. I was able to find some third-party solution to skipping the "unsupported OS" message but I should never have had to do this. How much did Microsoft pay you guys at at&t to screw us Linux users? Argh.

As I have said in the past, it is always a challenge to choose the lesser of two evils: at&t or Time Warner. Poor administrative support and slow speeds vs. we don't give a damn if your service works consistently or not. Choose one or the other.

Instead of paying at&t for the Motorola (aka. speedstream) DSL modem for $65 or $69, I purchased my own DSL modem from Fry's Electronics for $50. I purchased the D-Link DSL-520B DSL modem. The device is fairly good and most definitely running Linux under-the-hood. They pretty much use the Broadcom reference design (96338 board) for the BCM6338 system-on-a-chip (SOC) MIPS-based controller with ADSL2+ support. The web pages are a bit cryptic in some places, and I am still not sure about some of the configuration parameters I chose, but the defaults (in most cases) seem to do the right thing. After getting used to the modem, I was able to do some more advanced configuration. The one thing I would like to do, and for whatever reason I can't, is to allow the PPPoE IP from at&t to be bridged to the Ethernet port and provided to me via DHCP. Instead, you can only NAT, and the modem is the only device that is privy to your real IP address. This means that if I run my own firewall and gateway, I need to double-NAT outgoing traffic, which seems stupid to me. While the firewall in the DSL-520B is just Linux iptables, the web interface doesn't allow me to to do the fine-grained control I do on my own Linux box. Also, while the DSL-520B has a dynamic DNS update client (for dyndns.com), I don't know how well it works or not and whether it renews my IP registration in 28 days as dyndns.com requires. I would rather continue to run my own update client, which is kind of impossible to do reliably and efficiently when I don't have direct access to the real IP I am given.

All this being said, for the casual user, the device should work just fine. In fact, if all you have are wired devices, you can connect the DSL-520B to a switch and let the built-in DHCP server, NAT, and firewall do all the work of a separate "router." That could be useful for some users.

For those "l33t ha><0r" techie types, the DSL-520B gives you access to the underlying Linux OS and you can do a lot of very cool things. If you telnet to the unit, you can get to a Linux shell prompt by:

$ telnet 192.168.1.1
Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
Login: admin
Password:
> sh

BusyBox v1.00 (2010.08.18-23:32+0000) Built-in shell (msh)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

#

Now, you are able to execute all the iptables commands directly as well as adjust adsl parameters, get all sorts of statistics, and otherwise control the entire box as you wish. What I have not yet figured out is how to just bypass the dang web interface entirely and simply execute my own commands. I bet given some time and thought, I could probably make some changes to overcome the bridging issue I mentioned previously. Note that the OS and utilities all appear to be Broadcom's reference stuff, and that D-Link simply put their own web interface on it. I'm not faulting D-Link here at all, it's just that (like many of these devices), the chipset can do really cool things but the OS implementation cripples some of the most innovative features.

I was debating whether to just return the DSL modem to Fry's and buy the Motorola modem (notorious for burning up in a few months to a year) or Actiontec or one of those...but given what I can see with the D-Link modem, I think I'll keep it and see if I can unleash some of its pent-up power (hopefully without bricking the unit).

I will try to keep everyone up-to-date on this subject should anything new and exciting surface while I experiment more.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

2010-12-02T14:06:00.002-06:00

It has been a while since I have been on and passing along my brand of cynical wit. There has been a lot of stuff going on and it hasn't amounted to much, in many ways.

Today's topic concerns the beginning of the end of my business relationship with Time Warner Cable in Austin. A year ago I got rid of my cable TV service because, even when I gave them a month to fix the problem, they could not resolve the reception issues in my neighborhood. Macro-blocking and audio cutting out in the middle of programs is not what I consider usable service. When I turned off my TV service, I told TW that my Internet service was working well, but if it started to function like the TV service I would not be giving them a month to resolve the problem. I was hoping to never need to make good on that threat.

Right before I went on my trip to NY a month ago, my RoadRunner (cable-based Internet) service started to drop-out at various times for a minute or so. If all you do is web browsing, this isn't too bad because the traffic is bursty and you may never notice. However, if you're streaming audio or video or doing interactive terminal sessions or online games, as I am, then these interruptions cause whatever you're doing to just terminate. When I got back from NY, I gave it a week or two to resolve (and replaced my cable modem) and finally decided to call TW to report a problem. I could see the problems on the cable modem's error log, and I could see the same problems on my neighbor's cable modem. I agreed to have TW send a technician to my house.

So the TW technician comes over and proceeds to snip the connectors off the cable lines in my house and re-terminate them, even though his test equipment reported no problems with the wiring. In fact, my signal strength was too high. So instead of installing a splitter to attenuate the signal in the wiring outside my jack, he removed the wall plate, snipped the already short coax cable down, and put the splitter behind the wall, insuring that to do anything else, I will need to remove that wall plate. Wonderful (said with sarcasm). Then he goes out to the outside box where all the neighbors are connected to the cable system, puts his equipment on there, and says, "Oh, here's the trouble. This is definitely a line problem. I will need to call my manager and have a line technician come out here because it's something in the neighborhood cabling." Duh. Isn't this what I've been saying? Technician then says that the line techs should have the problem resolved within 2 days. Fine.

Five days and 18 service interruptions later, I decide to call TW to find out what in heck is taking so much time to fix. I find that the problem was never referred to the line techs, and now TW wants to send another technician to my house. WTF!? I explain again what the previous technician found and did, that it was not in my house, so it made no sense to send a technician to my house wasting my time and their's only to determine that it was an issue with the lines in the neighborhood, and that it would be a lot more efficient for them and me for them to start with their own wiring before coming to my house. But, no, they can't do that...and I'm certainly not allowing yet another technician to visit my house.

This is the exact same sequence of events that I had when I told TW I was canceling my cable TV service a year ago.

As much as I despise at&t, I realized it was time, after five years of fairly good Internet service with Time Warner, to go back to at&t and get DSL again. I say this with a lot of trepidation because I have been singing the praises of my Internet service for a while, but I know deep down that this is going to be an ongoing problem. The fact is that there is something wrong with the cable TV infrastructure in this neighborhood, and TW would rather deny there is a problem than to fix it. I'm tired of dealing with incompetence in this area. I'm a network administrator responsible for a large network consisting of many routers, switches, and various servers. If my infrastructure worked like this they'd fire me on the spot, with good reason. Despite my issues with at&t's administrative BS, the DSL service they provided to me worked pretty well most of the time.

Truth be told: If you have good cable infrastructure in your neighborhood, RoadRunner is a good deal, for all the reasons I've mentioned in my previous postings. On the flip side, Time Warner Austin has no desire to properly fix infrastructure that has problems, and would rather bellyache about declining cable subscriptions and people who allegedly use "disproportionate" Internet bandwidth on RoadRunner. If you're in one of the areas with bad infrastructure, chances are that it will never get fixed, and you'll either need to tolerate crappy service or go with someone else.

Oh, and if any of you Time Warner people are reading this: Please go to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass "Go." Do not collect $200. You had more than ample opportunity to keep my business. Instead, you treated me like just another annoying customer. I warned you repeatedly about the consequences of this behavior, and you decided to ignore me. It's too late to make amends. Good bye.

(last minute update)
A co-worker forwarded this to me, and I thought it was entirely apropos. I suspect that if I called TW and said "shibboleet" they would send the padded wagon instead of forward me to a l33t t3ch...
http://xkcd.com/806/

If you're not with us...

2010-10-22T07:27:00.000-05:00

This morning I saw a bumper sticker:

Aren't you glad that your mother
was pro life?

This logic is about the same kind of logic is "If you're not with us you're against us." Neither makes sense. In fact, the bumper sticker is false - my mother is "pro choice."

People who are not anti-abortion (note the double-negative there) are not baby killing savages who are out having sex just to go through the abortion process (which is not pleasant, by the way). They are people who believe in a woman's right to choose that method of birth control should it be necessary...and the key word here is "necessary." Nobody really wants to have an abortion.

The key here is that my mother (and father) made a conscious decision to have a family. They didn't do so for reasons of family or religious pressure, but because they wanted children and were prepared to raise a family. My parents weren't wealthy. There were times during my childhood where our family did struggle a bit financially, but my parents put aside the expensive cars and other luxuries at that time to make sure that we had a good childhood. My father would work overtime at his job for the extra money.

So to all you pro-lifers out there, please get one. I'm not with you, but I'm not against you either. Abortion, while not a pleasant alternative, is sometimes the only one. A child born into a family that can't take care of him or her is a far greater "crime" than abortion will ever be. I realize that may go against the religious beliefs of some of you, but then we're not supposed to be basing our legal system on your religious beliefs. However, in a majority of cases, even those who are pro-choice are generally looking to bring their pregnancy to term. They want a family, and they have made their choice...which happens to be the same as your's.

Roku Second Impressions

2010-10-21T09:46:00.000-05:00

Here's an update to my article on Roku First Impressions posted the other day.

To recap, I had issues with audio on the Revision3 videos on the Roku briefly "cutting out" periodically. I feel I must post Roku's response. Note that this is a perfect example of incredibly bad technical support (no sarcasm, names the same to embarrass the guilty, highlighting is mine):

Thank you for contacting ROKU Customer Service. My Name is Sunil and I will be helping you with your query.
We apologize for the inconvenience and delay in responding to your valuable query.
I suggest you to try streaming Revision 3 content on your computer.
Kindly go through the following instructions.
1.Turn off the Modem, Router, and the Roku player.
2.Plug the Modem back in, give it some time to settle down.
3.Plug the router back in and when ready, turn on the Roku player.
If you have a cable modem, kindly unscrew the co-axial cable, wait for 30 seconds and then plug it back in.
Please feel free to email us for further queries.
Thank you for providing us with an opportunity to assist you and thank you for choosing ROKU.
Best Regards,
Sunil
Roku Customer Service.

Why is this a bad response?

I indicated in my "valuable query" that other content worked fine. This should have immediately caused the question to drop into "oh, something may be wrong with that provider's content."
If I wanted to stream content on my computer, I wouldn't have purchased the Roku player.
I'm not sure that the cable company would like the idea of people being asked to remove the coax cable from the cable modem. I can imagine "Joe User" doing this and then not being able to get anything working again!
As I have come to expect from companies these days, they always redirect any fault from themselves to someone else. In this case, the customer service rep clearly feels it is a problem with the cable company.

A good response would have offered more than one possible solution, and an opportunity to follow-up to see if the problem was corrected. This response was clearly a cut-and-paste response, with the exception of one line.

Paying attention to customer issues is important because it can identify underlying problems with the product that can be corrected, resulting in more satisfied current and future customers. The customer feels they are being heard, and the product gets better. It's a win-win situation.

What I will need to do now is further troubleshoot the problem on my own and contact Revision3 to see if they can find anything in their own Roku application that may be causing the difficulty. I have to hope that someone there actually can take responsibility for the issue and possibly contact Roku with more information.

My other options is, as a Roku application "developer," post my problem to the forum and see if someone at Roku will listen and possibly take a look at the player's source code. I'm very afraid of the response I would get if I told them about the YouTube problem in that last posting.

I will reiterate that Roku is getting increasing competition in this area, and if they don't take these kinds of issues seriously and work to resolve them, they will soon find themselves out-of-business.

PS: Yes, last night I did have problems with my cable Internet service, but that was not happening when the Revision3 streaming problem happened... Actually, our whole area experienced problems...and we may be still, I'm not entirely sure...

TiVo's Revenge

2010-10-20T22:03:00.000-05:00

As if someone from TiVo was reading this blog, all of a sudden today they announced that Pandora was now available on the series 3 TiVos, including the TiVo HD. In addition, I was first told this by "Interceptor" (yes, I do remember who you are) in a comment and Susan D. in a private e-mail. I'm sure I will continue to hear this for the next couple of weeks, but I do thank y'all for letting me know about it. To add insult to injury, TiVo also put a message on my TiVo HD that Pandora was now available for the Premere, even though I was not on a Premere and it really did work on my TiVo HD.

Ugh.

Does this change my opinion of TiVo? Unfortunately, no. The damage has kind of been done already.

On that note, I found a cartoon from The Oatmeal titled Why I'd Rather Be Punched In The Testicles Than Call Customer Service that I think is appropriate here...

Also, my RoadRunner service has been failing intermittently all evening long. It seems I have somehow evoked bad Karma from somewhere...

Roku First Impressions

2010-10-19T22:14:00.000-05:00

I received my Roku XDS media player on Saturday (two days after ordering it). That, in itself, is amazing. I have to say that both Roku and the US Postal Service did a great job in getting the player to me with hardly a thought.

The XDS is a very nice tiny unit in appearance - measuring about half the size of a hard cover book. There is a single power light on the front that Roku dimmed down to almost completely invisible. Is that a problem? In this case, no. I am sick and tired of blinding blue LEDs shining out of every piece of equipment I have purchased lately. This light does nothing but tell you that the unit has power, so there is no need to have it bright and always visible. The only time you'll really need to see it if the media player stops working -- if that happens you'll get up and look at it close-up anyhow!

Set-up was a piece of cake, but be prepared with a computer close-by before you start. Despite the effort by Roku to try to make you feel like you'll never need to use your computer once you have this device, it is clear that this is not the case. To activate the unit and have it upgrade its software you will need to register it with Roku's web site, which involves entering an activation code to the web site that displays on the screen. Roku calls this their Rendezvous registration process, and you will find yourself doing this often. Even though there are a lot of free Internet services you can access on the Roku platform, many services (like Pandora) link to your existing account, and this is the way that Roku saves people lots of keystrokes or using "Ouija board" typing with the remote. It's not a pain if you have a laptop handy near the TV, but if you don't you should probably somehow bring the Roku player near a computer while you set-up programming from the "channel store" or you'll find yourself running back and forth between the TV and computer. Aside from the computer, about all you need to do to set-up this box is plug it in.

I mentioned in my earlier postings a concern about advertising and that I didn't think there was any. I now know that there are most definitely ads on the screen, specifically on the main screen. It isn't terribly intrusive (not like TiVo, where they almost trick you into selecting them), but nonetheless they are there. It looks to me like they really want me to use Amazon's video-on-demand service. I actually would like some way to say, "Please leave me alone, I was thinking about it anyway." I would really appreciate it if they would keep this to a minimum.

Most of the main user interface is modeled after the modern iPod and Windows Media Center graphic displays that flip items back and forth using the left and right arrow keys on the remote. While this does make it so that an idiot can use the XDS, I don't feel that this scales well and I find it a little annoying. I think I would like an option where I could either categorize my channels or put them in a list format of some kind. As the number of channels available increase and the number of channels I have in my subscription list increase it will become more cumbersome to flip through all the choices all the time. Think of it like having a stack of CDs to play -- when you have 10 or so CDs it isn't bad to flip through them all to find the one you want. Once you have more than that, you alphabetize them and/or organize them by genre or the like. On the plus side, the configuration screens are very intuitive and function well. They ship the device with a short diagram on how to hook the thing up (I laughed when I opened the box and staring me in the face was a card with only the word "Hi!" printed on it). Really, that's about all you need.

Since I have a Netflix account already, that was the first thing I tried. I tested it by watching an episode of Tripping The Rift that was in my instant queue, and was disappointed that the audio and video became horribly out-of-sync as the show continued, and the video was mediorcre. Knowing that I have had this experience with some Netflix online movies before with the TiVo I tried watching Outsourced and fast-forwarded into the middle of the movie. Not only was the audio OK now, but the video itself was impressive. I also tried to view a program that didn't work correctly on the TiVo, and it messed-up in the same spot on the Roku player. So the problem is Netflix, not either player. Unlike the TiVo, you can do searches for movies on Netflix right from the Roku player. If the Amazon video-on-demand service works as well as Netflix (or better) then this is going to be pretty cool.

The next thing I tried was Pandora...of course. That worked without a single problem. Having seen the Flash (yuck) version of Pandora on occasion, I do miss some of the features that they support there and would like to see those on the Roku version. Otherwise it worked just like I wanted when I contacted Pandora over a year ago. If I had to make one complaint, it would be that they somehow punch the volume way up on the music to the point where I have to remember to turn my home theater amp's volume way down before playing that channel. The interface for Pandora on Roku is very nicely done for HDTV, in that it just looks really good. I wish that Pandora for a browser was done in Java instead of Flash. Sigh.

There are two issues that I had with channels and these are a bit annoying. On Revision3's programs, the audio occasionally cuts out for a second during the program. I think this may be because they drop a few bits in the audio stream for whatever reason, and my home theater amp takes a second or so to figure out what kind of digital audio it is receiving and then start playing it. I feel this is a bug in the home theater system, but in any case it is annoying. The other one is much worse and I don't know what to do about it: I tried watching newer episodes of Is It A Good Idea To Microwave This? using a third-party YouTube application, and my Sony HDTV barfed on the video stream (it said it was receiving video in an "unsupported format"). It is hard to tell whether this is a limitation of my TV, a problem with the third-party application, or a bug in the Roku player's firmware. I contacted Roku about the first problem and have yet to get a response, which is a bit disappointing.

Today I joined Roku's developer program, which allows one to write applications to use with the Roku media players. I can't say much about it yet since, well, I just joined. However, I am impressed with what looks like a very open development platform. Seeing the documentation that Roku provided makes me respect the engineering that went into making Roku's players and how much thought went into the hardware and software. In any case, Roku applications are written in a language called BrightScript, which seems like a cross between BASIC and Javascript.

A few other random things worthy of mention...

There is not any local disk storage...so anything you watch is streamed (not stored), although there does appear to be plenty of memory for buffering.
Only port 80 and 443 seem to need to be open outbound in your firewall for things to work (it is not necessary for any inbound connections)
When they say that you should not locate the unit near a source of heat (like home theater receiver) they aren't kidding. The bottom of the XDS gets fairly warm by itself despite the excellent ventilation on top.
The remote control has no volume control (it is a very basic remote without learning capabilities).
...also, the remote control has no power button as the Roku players are not meant to be turned off.
The XDS pulls between 5-6 watts of power no matter what it seems to be doing, according to my Kill-a-Watt.
I have not tried the wireless capabilities yet, but will soon...

Given the $100 price tag for the XDS, I'm not sure if this was a good buy yet. I'm clearly not disappointed with the player, but at the same time I'm not overwhelmingly impressed yet. Given that some Blu-Ray players are now doing similar things while being able to play Blu-Ray disks at the same time, I think that Roku's survival is going to depend on how well they can attract content providers and to provide a pleasant user experience. The open development platform seems like a good first step in attracting content providers, but their draconian legal agreements are kind of intimidating. As far as improving the user experience - again, the user interface needs to scale better for increased programming. No ads would be nice too. Good customer support is a must.

I will try to write more about this as I get more of a chance to use it. I am trying to get a really good idea how I feel about it while still in the 30-day money back guarantee period.

ExiTiVo

2010-10-14T20:30:00.000-05:00

I have made my decision: The TiVo is going away. I have thought a lot about this, and feel that there is no reason to continue with TiVo.

In addition to the issues I have with TiVo (explained in the previous posting), I found out something about the TiVo Premere that, if true, is equally disturbing. Woot was selling a refurbished TiVo Premere and there was some talk about the device on Woot's discussion forum. Coming into question was the stability of the unit, and that TiVo had disabled one of the CPUs due to stability issues. The disabling of the CPU caused the unit to be sluggish. It sounds like an all-around bad deal in general.

Here's my plan that has already begun to be implemented:

Add a signal distribution amplifier to the antenna (the reason will be understood in #2) - I have purchased and installed a Channel Master 3414 (aka PCT model PCT-MA2-4P) 4-port antenna distribution amplifier. This is a good-quality distribution amplifier that provides 4 outputs with 8dB gain per port. I also purchased a power injector so that I could provide power to the amp from inside the house where the UPS-protected power is located. I installed this today and it works great. The signal quality has remained constant as measured on my TV sets, but I am receiving a few more channels and adding additional splitters has not degraded the signal (exactly what I was looking to do). Remember that an amplifier does not improve signal quality - if you have a bad signal, it will only amplify the same bad signal.
Purchase a SiliconDust HDHomeRun dual TV tuner - The HDHomeRun is a network-based TV tuner. That is, there are two coax antenna connections coming in, and a network connection going out. I have heard good things about this tuner from other people, and SiliconDust has kept the network protocol used to access the HDHomeRun non-proprietary. There is software for Windows, Mac, and Linux alike, and great support for all three platforms. Better still, having the TV tuner as a network device means no weird TV cards installed into the computer that require special drivers. I will write more about this when I get to play with it a little. I was very impressed with what I saw. The fact that there are two coax inputs (one for each tuner) means I will need to use a splitter to provide two antenna connections. This is the reason I bought the distribution amp. Finally, having the tuner as a network device means that I can access the tuner from any of the computers on my network. This will be useful while I'm testing.
Implement MythTV as the DVR replacement for the TiVo. MythTV is an open source TiVo-like DVR program that runs on a Linux-based PC. Because it is open source, I have the source code and can modify it and fix problems if necessary. It is free, as in I don't have any software to purchase. There is a group that provides TV guide data for $20/year (yes, per year) that provides the TV schedules that you'd use to see what's on, or to program the DVR software to record a show. While MythTV looks really good, I have not looked extensively at it yet. I do plan on getting more serious about this when I come back from vacation.
Purchase a Roku XD|S box to view streaming online programming. The Roku is ordered, and I should have it before I leave for vacation (will be taking it with me to show my parents). My reservation about Roku is their terms-of-service (I also discussed this in an earlier entry). However, they are more universally compatible with streaming media services like Netflix, Amazon, and (soon) Hulu+, as well as others, than any other device. People are generally happy with what Roku provides, and while I am grumbling a bit about the price, I feel it is likely to provide satisfaction that I don't currently see with TiVo. While I see that Windows 7 and Windows Media Center could potentially fill this role, I see the Roku as being much more polished and dedicated to the task. Time will tell. I tried Windows 7 and the WMC at work and while I saw some positives, overall it felt clunky to use.
Purchase a new Netgear GS108T v1 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch with web-based management capabilities. The switch is both for the increased number of devices being connected to the network, and to help solve an unrelated problem that has recently come to my attention. I have been having spotty wireless network problems since I moved the WAP back to the "study" (aka. the mad computer science laboratory). As I was brushing my teeth the other night I realized why: The WAP is on the wall opposite the big mirror in the master bathroom. It is also behind the big flue pipe for the fireplace. That poor WAP has no chance of being able to provide good service to the side of the house where I need it most (on the other side of the mirror and fireplace flue). So the WAP will need to go back to the living room, and I would like to move to all Gigabit Ethernet-capable networking throughout the house, as much as possible. This Netgear switch also supports multiple virtual LAN (VLAN) capabilities and 802.1q trunking that I am used to using at work. There are some ideas I have been throwing around about having some of my devices on a more secure network, and this would allow me to do that.

The TV tuner and switch should arrive tomorrow, and the Roku sometime next week. The first thing is to get familiar with the hardware and make sure it will do what I want. Next will be to integrate everything together. The final phase of doing MythTV is a bit up-in-the-air at the moment. I can either move my main server back into the living room and hook it to the TV and use my server as a DVR as well, or I can purchase a small Intel Atom-based mini-system and use it as a DVR front-end at the TV (and leave the server where it is).

You may have already deduced that all this costs more than an annual TiVo subscription (and maybe even a TiVo Premere). I am not doing this to save money overall - I am doing it because TiVo is charging me money and disappointing me at the same time. What I hope to accomplish here is to regain control over my home entertainment choices, and to avoid paying for services that are clearly not providing appropriate value for their cost. I also see the TV tuner (definitely) and Roku box (questionably) as being good long-term investments with no ongoing subscription costs.

If TiVo had fulfilled its promises for the device I purchased to do all that they claimed, then most of what I am doing would be unnecessary. On the other hand, once I have all this new stuff in place and working, it could be a showcase for what could be done as an alternative to cable TV and TiVo with ongoing costs and frustrating customer support.

Message Regarding NY Trip

2010-10-10T22:09:00.000-05:00

This is a note to those people interested in seeing information about my travels on the NY trip:

I am not going to post much in the way of specifics on this blog, for two reasons:

There will be some personal information (like where I live) I don't want posted here
There will be people who will be getting the personal information about the trip that I don't want over here

Therefore, if you would like to read about my journey and how things are going, then please contact me privately (through e-mail) and I will send you the link and a password (if needed).

If you don't know my e-mail address, and I know you well enough, and you still want to view that private information, then please say so in the comments, and I will try to find a way to get in touch with you.

Ten Ten Ten

2010-10-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

I seem to remember saying something about checking to see if I were still alive if I forgot about 10/10/10. In order to avoid needless checks of my pulse, here it is. I remembered.

The idea of ridding myself of the TiVo HD is still on the table. At games night on Friday, Emil suggested that I look at Blu-Ray players that have Internet capabilities. I did, but was not terribly happy with the outcome. It seems that all these devices are not really autonomous devices accessing specific services, but rather they connect to a consolidator (for lack of a better term) that translates from the menu-driven interface on the device to the service that you wish to view (like Netflix or YouTube), and they all have varying levels of support for different services. Roku, while supporting a very large number of services, pretty much does the same thing (see below for some unpleasant surprises with that). Therefore, if one of these services goes away, then so does the ability to use your Internet-ready capabilities with this device. It also means you are at the mercy of the provider as to what is presented and how it is presented.

That brings me to my next comment: Ads. I was looking at Roku's terms-of-service and apparently they slipped in a phrase saying that they reserve the right to insert ads into the service at any time, and they also reserve the right to remove or add features as they please. This disturbs me. If the content provider chooses to place ads into their content, then while I may not like it I have to accept that this is their way of gaining revenue. However, there is no reason (technically, anyway) why a consolidator needs to do this. The reason why the company that makes the Roku provides ways to access content is so that they can sell their box. If the box can't get any content, then they wouldn't sell the hardware. I'm not sure why this concept seems so foreign to people. Now I know that Roku doesn't have ads on it right now, but then why do they have this in their terms-of-service? Stop it now. Stop it everybody. Once you charge me for a piece of equipment, that should be your revenue stream. If you feel that your product requires an ongoing service, then please bill me a reasonable amount for that service (I will not buy your product if that cost is unreasonable). Don't play these dumb games with people. Let's not even talk about the fact that they're collecting statistical information about people's viewing habits and selling that too.

This whole thing has me tired from thinking too much. I am trying to resolve a home entertainment plan that addresses my sense of ethics without preventing me from viewing potentially useful and/or entertaining content. My gut feeling tells me that the Roku is really the right way to go even with their disturbing terms-of-service clauses.

Aside from thinking about this and performing a 4-hour middle-of-the-night upgrade at work (that went very successfully, as far as I can tell) I have been trying to rest this weekend. In a couple of weeks I'll be in a Prius headed for New York. Wow.

Planned Obsolescence

2010-10-05T21:19:00.000-05:00

If you've been reading this blog for a long time, you may remember back when I purchased my TiVo HD in December, 2008. Since the beginning I have had various issues with this device...or, rather, not really with the device, but with TiVo as a company.

A few months ago, TiVo released a new DVR called the TiVo Premere. I wrote about this back in April and my fear (that I didn't write about) was that TiVo was going to fail to do any further updates to the TiVo HD that I owned. That fear appears to be coming to reality. Now I know that technology progresses quickly and all that stuff, but the features they are leaving off the TiVo HD are simply a ploy to force people to move to the new platform. I don't know about all of you, but I don't just buy a $300 piece of equipment to throw it out in two years. The proverbial knife-in-the-back from TiVo to me was the fact that they're now offering the Pandora (www.pandora.com) music service on TiVo, but only on the Premere. I wrote Pandora about a year ago suggesting that they partner with TiVo. Now, in order to use that, I need to buy a new TiVo. Well, that just sucks.

What also sucks is that I have been unable to watch episodes of Is It A Good Idea To Microwave This? on YouTube for the second half of the past season on my TiVo. There have been numerous problems with YouTube and the TiVo HD's ability to access certain programs. Has TiVo made any effort to fix this? Is there even any place for me to complain? No. In my opinion, this system, while serving me well as a DVR, has fallen short of the promises that TiVo made about it. As a customer, I feel betrayed by TiVo. In addition to paying for the DVR, I also pay a monthly service fee that totals about $130/year. Even this isn't enough for TiVo, though, since they also have advertisements on the unit as well. All this, and the best they can do is give a discount off the price of a new TiVo. I don't want a new device -- I want the one I paid for to do what it was supposed to do. I want the additional money I pay for the privilege of using their device and the revenue they get from throwing ads in my face to further the capabilities of the device I have. If that's not possible because they screwed-up and didn't properly develop the unit I have, then instead of making me pay $200 for a newer model, why not allow me to trade-in my current system, along with all the recorded programming moved from the old system to the new one, for (perhaps) a $50 fee? Why not? Because TiVo doesn't really give a damn about its customers. I should have known that from the first experience I had with their customer support department, and the fact that they didn't even compensate me for my trouble. What a crappy company.

I'm thinking that it's time to handle TiVo the same way I handled cable TV when it wasn't performing as it should. It's time to cut my losses, stop paying TiVo for their pathetic service, and go in a different direction.

My friend Mary showed me her Roku box the other day, and it was actually pretty impressive. Roku is not a DVR, it's a small Internet appliance that allows one to view various Internet-based programming (like the stuff from Revision3) and pay-for content like Netflix and Amazon On-Demand. It doesn't cost anything monthly (aside from what you'd pay Netflix or Amazon), there are no advertisements in the device, it sells for under $100, and has an open development model that allows people to create services that can be viewed with it. Is it perfect? Well, no. It has no disk storage capability, so you're limited to Internet streaming. It does do what they say it does, and many people are fairly happy with it. I think this device could probably take the place of those services TiVo promised but didn't deliver.

For DVR-type functionality...I think the best thing to do now is to look at a media center version of Microsoft Windows (yes, you actually heard me consider this!) or try getting open source MythTV to work. Either one can provide a usable DVR platform for over-the-air broadcasts.

I'm about to go on vacation in a couple of weeks. When I get back, I'm going to make my decision. At the moment, though, I have reached the limits of my patience with TiVo. I can't see giving them another cent of my money if they can't deliver on the TiVo HD platform what they said they would deliver. I don't have any confidence that will change in a month's time, and so prepare for the next change in my home entertainment plans. It's going to be a wild ride!

American Muslims

2010-10-02T15:47:00.001-05:00

I was trying to stay out of the controversy surrounding the construction of a mosque near the former World Trade Center site. I was trying to stay away from that discussion because I'm certainly not religious, and really don't have any business being for or against construction of any religious house of worship. I did a good job of staying out of the debate. Today I am breaking my silence.

The reason I am speaking out is because I just saw the ABC News episode of 20/20 from last night discussing the truths and misconceptions about Muslims and Islam. I realized that these people and atheists have something in common: We are both feared and discriminated against for our beliefs (or lack thereof). Something else touched me: At one point in the program, there even was the revelation that Muslim belief is that all people should be united together, including atheists. When I heard what the people on the program were saying, I saw sincerity. I then realized how bigoted a large portion of the American population has become. It is no different than it was when I was in high school -- If you're different, you're worthy of ridicule and people are to fear and loathe you.

Such as the case with the mosque at the so-called "ground zero" site. First and foremost, it is not on the site of the former World Trade Center. How close is too close? Why does it matter? The only people who are concerned about things being close to their "shrines" are, well, Christians. Timothy McVeigh is Christian. Should we prohibit a church from being built near the site of the Oklahoma City bombing because a Christian performed that act? Oh, wait. There is a church right next to that site. Were they involved? Should we be suspicious of Christians in Oklahoma City because they may be potential terrorists? Of course not. In reality, McVeigh's motivations were political, not religious, even if he were to say was his actions were in the name of some deity. Same for those people who orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon buildings on September 11, 2001. They were not representative of the Muslim faith, but of an extremist group with a beef against the United States that used a radical interpretation of the Islamic faith to justify their actions. These people are no more representative of Islam than McVeigh is representative of Christianity (although sometimes I do wonder about what some Christians are trying to legislate...).

The second important distinction about what is being proposed by the Muslim community is the purpose of their structure. They have been holding religious services in that building for a while now. It already is a mosque. The controversy is over a Muslim community center with recreational facilities. You know, like a YMCA. In case you didn't know, YMCA means Young Men's Christian Association...it isn't just a song by The Village People. In reality, the "Y" is the same kind of thing that the Muslim people plan to build on that site. It's not a mosque, because the mosque is already there. That's right Pamela Geller, you ignorant bigoted bitch. Since a principle tenet of Islam is to help the poor, as with Christianity, and effectively to help thy neighbor, the community center is open to anyone. The only problem here, really, is that the people who are against the center being built will have a problem sitting next to someone who is Muslim. That's bigotry folks.

I'm not saying I have any belief in Islam or am a closet Muslim. I'm an atheist...or as I like to say, a "free thinker." I like the latter because it describes my belief system - I am willing to listen to what people say, and then make a decision based on my ability to sort through the details and think about them. I don't believe in blind faith. I have been saying from the very beginning that this "war on terror" is really a war against a specific group of radical extremists who are against our meddling in a culture that isn't ours. It is a political war, fueled by hate, and justified by extremist religious belief. To further assert my disagreement with Pamela Geller, Muslims in the United States, even if they were trying to spread their belief system, are no different than a Christian mission going to some other country giving aid and spreading "the word." If you ask me, Pamela Geller is an extremist and a terrorist and should be put in jail. Look at the damage she has already done.

Prior to this whole mosque debate America was in debate over the Latino (Hispanic) community and how we should be "tolerant" of those different from us. There was (and still is) debate over what constitutes illegal immigration from Mexico and whether we should give leniency to those who have illegally come to America and are now living "productive" lives. In return, a vocal group of these people have forced their own culture and language down our throats and continue to assert how their culture doesn't matter to us. It doesn't matter to me. This is America. We have a culture. Embrace it, add to it, help to refine it, make it better, but don't shove your own beliefs and language down my throat. I bet that most Mexican immigrants ultimately feel this way, but look at how a vocal group of people with an inferiority complex can shake-up things and cause a chasm between people. We don't need more polarization. If this country is going to succeed at being United, then we need to come together as Americans and show the world that our way is better. Americans are Christians, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, and so on. We're white, black, and brown. We're men and women, gay and straight. All of us should be afforded the freedom to live here peacefully and united as Americans so long as we follow the laws of this country. The minute we discriminate against a group because they're of a different ethnicity, religion, or sex, then we undermine what America is about.

The people who destroyed the World Trade Center do not agree with our culture, are against our economic and political system, and feel that we need to be punished for our beliefs. If we start wrongly holding a specific religious group responsible for that action, we are guilty of the same injustice as those who performed those horrific acts. In fact, because we claim to profess otherwise, we may even be worse.

Another One Rides The Bus

2010-10-01T19:54:00.000-05:00

Today I had to go to do something I loathe: Go to the ophthalmologist (try spelling that one without a dictionary).

My optometrist again thought that I may have a hole in my retina, and wanted me to go back and get checked by a specialist again. Of course he first had to dilate my eyes, which is always a pain in the ... eyes ... for me. As if this process weren't annoying enough, he poked on my eye with an instrument while looking into my eye with a scope trying to determine how the gel-like fluid in the eye called the vitreous was interacting with my retina.

The good news: I don't have a hole in my retina. The "spot" is still a thin spot of my retina. The bad news: Apparently the vitreous in my right eye sometimes does something to the retina where it sticks to it kind of like tape and then pulls on it (as best I can understand it). The danger here is that, over time, the retina could be pulled loose, or worse, could tear (as in rip). The doctor suggested a laser surgery to fuse the retina to the eye in the place where the retina is being pulled in order to reinforce it (turns out to be in a place in my far peripheral vision). Now I know some of you are saying, "Cool! Lasers!" For me, not so cool. I mean, lasers are cool, but shooting them in my eye isn't. Oh, and did I mention that the doctor said, "Before we start the procedure we use a needle to numb the eye in a couple of places so that the process won't hurt so much?" Uhhhh...put a what in my where? As in, "Cross my heart and hope to die?" Needless to say, this is one surgical procedure that I'm going to think about and get a second opinion first, and hope to heck that they give me some serious drugs that'll put my mind into a "special place" while they perform a procedure that resembles medieval torture (or, perhaps, something from Guantanamo Bay). Thankfully the situation right now isn't urgent...and hopefully will remain that way while I weigh my options.

A new experience that was a lot more pleasant was my travels getting down to the doctor's office. There is a CapMetro (short for Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority) bus stop right outside the building where I work. Looking at Google Maps showed that there was a bus stop right outside my ophthalmologist's office. Since I had to be there for an 8am appointment, I didn't much feel like driving down to the medical center area in rush-hour traffic, looking for parking, that I would have to pay for. Then I would also need to drive to work afterward with my eyes dilated, which isn't the safest condition to be driving in (although I have successfully done this before). It turns out that there was a bus route that ran from where I work to where I needed to be, and my job allows me to ride the city bus for free, sweetening the deal. So I figured, "Let's try the bus." I never really used Austin's public transportation system before.

It was actually a pleasant experience. The bus arrived at the bus stop on-time at around 7:04am as scheduled, and arrived at the stop right outside the doctor's office building at 7:30am (also as scheduled). The ride was comfortable and stressless (minus the anxiety over pulling the "stop cord" at the right time to signal a stop at the place I wanted to go). Likewise, when I finished my appointment, I got to the return bus stop across the street right as the bus arrived, and ended up across the street from where I work. No fuss, no grumbling at stupid drivers, no driving with dilated eyes, no finding and paying for parking in the med center area of Austin. Now that's cool.

Unfortunately, Austin really isn't set-up well for a mass transit system that everyone can ditch their car for, like the ones in Manhattan or Washington, DC. I should also add that the weather was beautiful outside today - not 98 degrees in sweltering heat or pouring down rain. In this case the bus probably wouldn't have felt so convenient, and to me this demonstrates two of the less important reasons why Austin, TX isn't really the kind of city where you can give-up driving. Additionally, Austin is less of a large city and more of a small city with a very large and sprawling suburbia. This is the reason I am against the idea of a rail system in Austin. I'm not against public rail transportation, but I don't see where it will work well in Austin. A bus system, on the other hand, is a reasonable solution since routes can be modified as population and transportation trends change. While it is still hard to modify bus routes, it is much harder to move train tracks. Suburban sprawl and gentrification kind of by definition causes these kinds of changes. In any case, the bus system here works, and it seems as though it gets plenty of use. Even if it weren't free for me, I think the normal $1 each way to avoid the hassles of driving to my appointment would have been well worth the money.

So there you have it. I have been agonizing over this appointment now for the past couple of weeks, which is why I haven't been writing much. I have been busy at work too, which is another situation entirely. Stay tuned: The Great NY Road Trip is on again...and this time, it's seriously looking to be happening.

Social Networking

2010-09-12T13:22:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I spent most...okay, all... of the day bumming around the house. I had some specific things I needed to do, but ultimately ended up detoured around in various places on the Internet. Ultimately I ended up purchasing some mp3s from amazon.com.

It is what I bought from amazon.com that started my mind on the subject of social networking. As you all know, I'm not really a facebook kind of guy. However, there are a couple of things I've been doing that actually brings a positive light to some of this. Among these is the idea that I stumbled upon two musical artists simply by messing with my TiVo and looking on YouTube. One of these people I mentioned before, and that was Sayaka Alessandra. The other person, who I hadn't mentioned until now, was Stephanie Strand, who performed two songs I have come to like a lot: Gutters & Drains and New Friend (I also like her animated short, Battle of the Media). Now, not knowing anything about this person, I wrote her on facebook a while ago because I was interested in knowing how she did a few things in her animated video and got a nice response. I happened to look at some of the things she was talking about and her interests and that made me take some pause, as there were a number of things we had in common. Being over 20 years her senior, I figured that the idea of further contact was probably going to seem a bit creepy these days, and so I left things as they were, and walked away saying, "Hmmmm. There actually are some people who would probably 'get' me."

Get this at amazon.com

Fast-forward to yesterday when I noticed, quite by mistake, that both Sayaka and Stephanie have some of their music for sale as mp3s on amazon.com. That's when I realized that these social networks actually did have a positive result, and they weren't just places for people to post their every move as if we were all interested in it. If it weren't for my stumbling upon these two young ladies on YouTube with my TiVo, there were two talented people who's work I would never have known about. Without their being on YouTube or similar, probably nobody else would have either. Here are two people armed with talent and a computer, and who were brave enough to share their artistry with the rest of the world, who touched my life as well as many others. While I had already converted Gutters & Drains into a mp3 from the YouTube video, I thought to myself, "For 99 cents, I really need to buy the mp3 and support her efforts." I remember buying 45RPM records in high school and college for a buck with the knowledge that the artist was some person who I would never know at all, never mind have any other connection with whatsoever. Wow. Things have definitely changed.

I'm not sure that this has given me any reason to bring my brand of opinion to facebook, nor am I going to pretend that now I'm somehow hip and that I'm into all the stuff the kids are into. Nah, I'm still the grumpy old mad computer scientist that I always have been. What is different is that I can see that among all the frivolous use of the Internet and social networking that there is something more that is serious in a good way. All artists like to say that it's all about the art, and not about the money. Now, without the need for expensive publishing and distribution, it actually can be all about the art. Most artists won't be able to quit their day jobs, but if it really is all about the art, then at least they can share their work without breaking the bank. That is a good thing. Art (including music and literature) is a reflection of ourselves and the culture we live in. It is our entertainment. It allows people to express themselves and share their ideas with others. While science and technology are critically important, art is what allows expression of our humanity. It is artists like Sayaka Alessandra and Stephanie Strand that give me hope that there is still significant humanity left in humans and things are not all going to hell in a hand-basket.

An Old-Fashioned Book Burning

2010-09-10T14:38:00.001-05:00

So it seems the pastor of a Gainesville, Florida church, Reverend Terry Jones, has decided (or not) to burn copies of the Quran (the Muslim holy book) tomorrow, September 11, 2010, as a "reprisal for Islamist terrorism." Well, that's sure an example of Christian forgiveness in action (said thick in sarcasm). Additionally, he's taking a political issue and turning it into a religious issue.

Now I really don't give a damn about pissing off a religious group generally. Listening to the rhetoric they spew never places my belief system (or lack thereof) in a positive light, and frankly I'm kind of tired of paying my share of their tax breaks. If I could get some entertainment from them once in a while, it would kind of be money well spent, I suppose.

The difference in this particular event has to do with a war...a war where there's real American troops in a country where a sizable part of the population is Muslim and wrongfully (I think) feels that America is somehow anti-Islam. The events that took place on 9/11/2001 were politically-motivated actions by a group of Islamic extremists who justified what they did based on what they perceived as American aggression and meddling in their culture. To further antagonize these extremists would be to put our own citizens at risk, including those serving in the Middle Eastern countries. It would also demonstrate to potential sympathizers with those extremists that America is, indeed, anti-Islam as they thought. While burning the Muslim "good book" may be within America's concept of free speech, it is free speech in the same form as shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater - dangerous, reckless, and serves no useful purpose except to put innocent people in harm's way.

"But...but...but...they did it to our Bible and nobody made a big deal about it! This is just a further demonstration of how the world is anti-Christian." NO IT ISN'T! Gee, people, get a grip! This sounds like something a five-year-old child would say: "Well, he burned my book so now I'm gonna burn his book. Na na na naaah na." Would you idiots please GROW THE HELL UP! The reason why "nobody" (and it wasn't nobody, believe me) here made a big deal of the burning of your "good book" or other antagonistic action by certain groups protesting is because there wasn't the strong possibility of a violent retaliatory action against our own citizens because of that action. That should be enough to cause you to take a step back and find some maturity. If it isn't, just think about how this kind of behavior is clearly non-Christian, and, Rev. Jones, no, Jesus Christ would not have condoned this kind of behavior. If you've found some kind of justification for believing he would, then somehow I've misunderstood some of the tenets of Christianity along the way...and I think maybe you have too. Burning the Quran is not the way to "spread the good word of the Lord." Argh. I have a moral problem even typing that phrase.

Then this morning I was listening to our morning talk radio program where I heard that the Westboro Baptist Church (you know, Fred Phelps' "God Hates Fags"...and-everyone-else-who-isn't-us religious cult) is planning on performing the Quran burning if Jones calls-off his book burning. Attention world: Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church (his merry band of bigots) absolutely, positively, does not reflect the actual views and opinions of the American public in general, and most of us would be happy if they just left the U.S. and found another place to take their hate.

...and that actually brings me to my final comment. Before anyone somehow justifies burning the Quran because they somehow equate the mosque in NYC and the 9/11 terror attacks with some kind of overall "Islamic invasion" that requires some action....before anyone even THINKS about this, think about fundamentalist and extremist Christian groups like the WBC. Most of the time these people stop just short of "terrorism" (and I say "most of the time" because killing doctors and bombing abortion clinics in the name of religion is a terrorist activity). Before you people get on your holy high-horse and make sweeping judgments about followers of Islam, perhaps you should clean-up your own act. Seriously, I'm sure most Muslims are normal folk who really just do what the rest of us do, but have a somewhat different religious belief. Nothing more. The followers of fundamentalist/extremist Islam are really no different from fundamentalist/extremist Christianity and those are the same as any other extreme nut-job out there.

Aside from the scientific reasoning and my own personal feelings about the lack of belief in any religion (a god, so to speak), this kind of conflict is yet another reason I feel happy about not being a "person of faith." As I've said before, if I'm wrong, I'm sure that I'll be rewarded in the afterlife for not getting involved in all this superstitious nonsense.

PS: My heartfelt sympathy goes out to everyone who lost someone in the Sept. 11 attacks. In my opinion, we should be honoring those who lost their lives through an understanding of what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. Burning the Quran is not any way to honor these people, and it won't provide any understanding nor will it prevent future attacks. Think about it...

Eye Witness News

2010-09-10T00:58:00.000-05:00

I'm up late tonight trying to make some sense of my eye doctor appointment today that turned-up the replay of the potential of a small hole in the retina in the far lower left area of my right eye. My optometrist also feels there is a possibility of a trace amount of fluid that has gotten between my retina and eye. This coming from the Optomap scan of my eye. So now I am going to end up having to go back to a retina specialist to make sure my retina is not in danger of detaching. If there is a problem, there is a possibility that I will need to have the area around the hole sealed-off using laser surgery. This is not something I am looking forward to, as I'm a fair amount squeamish about eye stuff.

While I was waiting for the doctor, I was looking through the rack of magazines. In almost every magazine, I observed that the head-shot on the front cover partially obscures the name of the magazine. This included Sports Illustrated, People, Marie Claire, and Texas. The only magazine where I could see the name was Popular Science. Why do magazines do this? I would think that they would like to be proud of the name of their magazine, and the trademark recognition that it provides. I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out what magazine "Mar{head}ire" was (FYI: that was Marie Claire, and I was only able to tell by looking at the spine). People magazine doesn't have a spine.

I always like browsing through Popular Science and/or Popular Mechanics when I find them in the waiting room where I happen to be. My parents subscribed to these magazines at various times throughout my childhood, and I found them to be fascinating. That feeling still hasn't gone away...and maybe it's time to get an old school magazine subscription again. It's nice to see that they don't have a need to cover up the name of their periodical.

Time once again to make a comment about Time Warner Cable's stupid RoadRunner TV commercials. They have been claiming again (paraphrasing) that their service is so much faster than DSL service using slow, antiquated phone lines. Puhleeze...give me a break. My wireless networking is faster than their Internet service, and it is using even older, "slower" radio signals. Bottom line is that any of these technologies have progressed far beyond what they had been able to do in the past, and in most cases (especially cable and DSL) the speed is artificially limited by the carrier, not by the technology. If I were the phone company, I'd show a clip of a snowy TV picture full of interference (or a modern one full of macro-blocking) and say, "Are you ready to get your Internet service from the same people who give you this kind of TV picture?!" Just cut it out. If you're going to attack each other, then please do so without the lies and half-truths. Good grief.

By the way, in the name of full disclosure, I get my Internet service from the local cable company. I did have DSL at one time as well, and it was fast and reliable. The only reason I switched is because at&t's customer service sucks worse than Time Warner Cable's at this point. If Time Warner Cable wanted to make a (mostly) truthful commercial, they should just say:

We're Time Warner Cable. Hey, we know that cable and DSL Internet service are about the same speed, and almost the same price, and nearly as reliable. But problems sometimes happen, and when they do, you can call us and we'll fix it without cost to you...unlike the phone company, who tries to blame you for all the problems before they'll even send someone out (and if they do find it's "your problem," they charge you a hefty service fee). We won't lock you into a time commitment if you want a reasonable price for service. So you can try us out, experience our blazing fast speeds, and see if you like what we're selling. If not, then you can stop your service without extra charges. Try doing that with the phone company.

By the way, TWC, if you use that idea, you should give me a few months of free RoadRunner service. {insert smiley face} I suspect that their attorneys feel that blatant lies that attack the competitor's technology are a lot easier to defend in court than making the claims I just did...

I went forward with converting the Gentoo Linux OS on my system at work to 64-bit (again, effectively involving a complete OS rebuild). So far, so good.

Well, it seems I have procrastinated bedtime long enough. If I don't get to sleep soon, it is unlikely I'll be awake for work in the morning, never mind awake enough to host "games night."

64 Bit Update

2010-09-03T21:10:00.000-05:00

Well, it has been a week, and a week it has been. I did follow-through with the Gentoo Linux OS update, and it is finally finished and working. Here are some lessons learned:

32 Bit Emulation

You may remember my last entry where I cursed the wine interface software and was grumbling about how it didn't compile. Well, I also noticed that my chroot trick that I used to compile software for my laptop, netbook, and VPS wasn't working anymore either (the kernel refused to execute any 32-bit executables).

I couldn't believe that Windows 7 could do this and Linux couldn't, and that accidental thought turned me to looking at my kernel configuration. Wouldn't you know, the kernel has an option that allows 32-bit executables to be used, all that was needed was to check the option. This is not in a very obvious place -- it isn't under "Processor type and features" but rather "Executable file formats / Emulations" as "IA32 Emulation." On second thought, that seems rather obvious, and could probably be more attributed to operator error. In any case, the description of this option says it all:

Include code to run 32-bit programs under a 64-bit kernel. You should likely turn this on, unless you're 100% sure that you don't have any 32-bit programs left.

So be forewarned ... don't forget to configure your kernel accordingly!

That fixed, my complaints in the last entry are ~~silly~~ moot now.

VirtualBox

Before I found the magic kernel parameter above, I thought perhaps I would run a 32-bit Gentoo Linux installation in a virtual machine, like I said in my last posting. That was not the right thing to do. I started recompiling the base system as I usually do after loading the "stage 3" tarball. What normally takes no more than an hour or two on a reasonably fast system took more than 5 hours (with all 4 processor cores assigned). I say "more than" with a bit of hesitation since I never let it finish, and it didn't even recompile gcc yet. This was one of the primary motivations for finding a way to run 32-bit executables under the 64-bit kernel, because at the rate this was going I was about to wipe out my 64-bit install and revert back to the old OS build.

Most of my experience with VM software of this kind has been with VMware. The reason I wanted to abandon VMware for VirtualBox is that VMware has become rather bloated, and lately it has been hit or miss when it comes to working with new kernel and/or browser versions (don't even get my started with the newer Firefox incompatibilities). On the other hand, VMware's performance has been overall fairly good and, if you can get it working, it is generally rock solid.

VirtualBox has gotten much better since the last time I used it (which ended up being a total failure), but in my opinion still is a bit behind VMware performance-wise (not entirely, but on some things...) and the way VMs are managed is kind of hokey. With VirtualBox, your VM is basically running through a user-mode graphical application that must remain running in order for your VM to stay alive. This isn't bad if you're just planning to boot Windows for a few minutes to do a specific thing, but if you want to start working on something and run into a task that has to run for a long time (such as a Gentoo build), then you'd like to be able to shut down your GUI and let the VM run in the background. The only way to do this is to anticipate that kind of application in advance and start-up the VM using a command-line tool called VBoxHeadless. The coordination between VM and GUI (console) at that point is clunky, and if you're trying to get to the VM before the boot CD starts-up, you're out of luck. VirtualBox's virtualized disk performance is great (seemed better than VMware), and they clearly have the upper hand on virtualizing network hardware. The CPU performance, though, seemed pitiful, particularly given the number of CPU cores and RAM I gave it.

I am likely going to continue using VirtualBox rather than VMware for those times I need to implement a VM for something. The reason why is the "bloat factor." VMware seems to be catering to the Windows crowd lately, and they seem to be of the Microsoft mentality that software bloat is okay. It wouldn't surprise me if I found something to make VirtualBox run faster if I look hard enough.

64-Bit Performance

I'm not entirely sure whether I am seeing a noticeable improvement in the performance of the system or not. During compiles, my eyeball evaluation of how fast things are going tells me that going to 64-bit was a big win. However, I also replaced my disk drive as well, and the new disk has a better SATA transfer speed than the other "green" drive (yeah, my carbon footprint increased by a small fraction, yeah yeah yeah). So it was hard to tell whether it was my electricity-sucking new hard disk or the unleashing of the CPU's raw pent-up power. For average tasks, the system seems to be running much as it did before. At no time did I see a performance degradation. So I do believe this was a win overall.

My Upgrade Mantra

I have always been of the belief that a major upgrade by completely rebuilding a system is a necessary evil once in a while in order to clean up the results of lazy system management. I found loads of old bits of deprecated configuration files hanging around the system, and a few complete misconfigurations, and one or two things that I said, "What was I thinking?!" When you're forced to merge your configuration from an old OS install to a new one, you can't hide behind the "if I don't see it then it isn't there" mentality. I have a few notes to myself to make a few small changes to make ddclient (the DynDNS IP address updater script) run the way I want. The way I have been doing it is a hack, and while it does work, it is just the wrong way to do it. If I knew then what I know now...

Conclusions

Well, it has been an "interesting" project. So far, so good. While I did have some initial misgivings, I think that these were good lessons, and if anything my knowledge grew from the experience. Keeping up with computer technology is always a bit challenging. Doing it on my own system at home, where I can take a break for a bit, is better sometimes than learning while under deadlines at work.

I feel a bit more like a mad computer scientist again.

64 Bits Bytes

2010-08-30T22:06:00.000-05:00

Sad day for an idea and a couple of days of intense work.

I realized that the computer system I built about a year and a half ago had some capability that was not being used. That is, that the processor in the system was capable of running a 64-bit operating system, but I was running a 32-bit version of Gentoo Linux on it. There really are two main reasons why one would want to run a 64-bit OS: First is that the amount of memory that can be addressed can be more than 4GB (the address registers are larger). Second, there are registers and operations within the processor that can handle 64-bit-wide numbers, and this can potentially speed-up certain software. While the additional memory support would not have immediately helped me, I figured that having 64-bit operations would. I also considered the idea of turning the entire system into a host for virtual machines, so I could run several systems simultaneously, and figured that the 64-bit support in the OS would help with that.

Those who have installed a 64-bit version of the Windows operating system probably understand that going back and forth is not as easy as flicking a switch or checking a box. Because the operating system (OS) itself and all the associated programs need to be aware of the increased address space and the additional processor registers, the entire OS needs to be replaced...which means, essentially, rebuilding the OS. In the case of Gentoo Linux where everything is compiled from scratch, this is an involved operation. I was also doing this on my main computer system that is my server, Internet gateway, and orchestrates much of the home automation and network support I use.

So in the space of a couple of days, I had to analyze how my system was configured and what software needed to be recompiled, recompile all the software, copy all the configuration settings to the new configuration, and test it out. I knew this would take a few days, and I would likely run into some problems, so I also purchased a new hard disk to build everything onto (that would become the new system disk). Needless to say, this turned out to be a lot of work.

The proverbial fine print that you read over and over in your mind is that while 64-bit operating systems have great potential, there is also the potential for software that was not designed to work in a 64-bit environment to fail miserably. Windows users are familiar with this as well. Everything seemed to work fine for me until the very last application that I went to test: wine. Wine is a piece of software that allows Windows applications to run natively under Linux. I have one such application that is very important to me, and that is Quicken...an old 32-bit version of Quicken. So not only did I need to run a Windows application under Linux, and that application was 32-bit, but also wine needed to be compiled as a 32-bit application using special software libraries designed to handle the translation. This is where everything fell apart -- wine didn't even compile. Unfortunately the people who coordinate the Gentoo Linux project simply have not sufficiently tested 32-bit wine compiled on a 64-bit OS. If I compile wine to support 64-bit Windows applications, then my old 32-bit Quicken doesn't run. So after all that work, things have come to a complete standstill thanks to Quicken.

Yes, 64-bit operating systems can be a bitch. With apologies to those at hak5, I don't "trust my technolust" right now.

That all said, it is likely that I will move forward with this project, but not entirely as planned. Since almost everything works, I can essentially transition to the new operating system in a few days, if nothing else starts having problems. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to get VirtualBox (virtual machine software) running. If that works in 64-bit mode OK, and I can run a 32-bit virtual machine, then I could have a virtual machine running the old 32-bit Gentoo Linux thats sole purpose is to handle applications that won't work properly on the new operating system. Will that actually work? I don't know yet. I also could move the 32-bit applications to an older computer system until I can come-up with a new plan.

On a more positive note, I did see a performance improvement with the new OS. It was clear just from compiling the applications that the software was taking better advantage of the Intel Core2 processor's capabilities. I also found several serious configuration errors, including a bug in one of Gentoo's system initialization scripts, that I was able to correct. Unfortunately, the mad rush to get everything working has taken a mental toll and I could use a break from looking at this. So a few steps back before hopefully moving forward again.

A more detailed explanation of what a 64-bit architecture means can be obtained from this article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

Likewise this article in Wikipedia explains virtual machine technology in detail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine

West Texas Drive

2010-08-20T02:24:00.001-05:00

Click on map for a the full-size version

A few days ago, I took a 900 mile drive through West Texas to see some things I haven't seen before. I left Austin around noon on Monday the 16th, and got back home around 3am on Tuesday the 17th.

Of the people I've spoken to about this, I've gotten responses such as...

Why didn't you stop overnight?
Why did you drive out that far?
Why didn't you stop somewhere for a tour?

I'm not sure I can answer any of these without including the word "nuts" in it...

I've thought a lot about the reasons I take these drives. For me, it is like I used to do on my bicycle many years ago when I was a kid: I want to go somewhere and see some place I haven't seen before, or that I want to see again. It's a quiet journey with few annoyances or distractions that allow me to detach myself from the stresses and hustle of living in city life. I'm sure in some ways I feel I get to live in the middle of the beauty I see, if just for the moment I'm driving there. I don't really have any interest in doing lots of touristy things or interacting with people. This is an escape for me. I don't stop overnight because that takes a lot more preparation than I usually do with this... I may try that sometime in the future.

Davis Mountains in West Texas

I would love to have created an entire album of what I saw during the trip, but that seems to be beyond the scope of what this blog is all about. This photo of the Davis Mountains I took during the last part of my trip (with a new digital camera I got this past Sunday, I may add...) before turning around and heading back. Can you see how one could get lost in the scenery here? Absolutely amazing, and this is only a small fraction of what I saw on the way. The map (above) shows the path I took, the red pathway was going out and the blue path is coming back (the purplish was where I back-tracked). The blue points and green picnic tables were places I took various pictures (again, my apologies, but I can't include them all here...).

I already wrote about KOPE-FM in a previous entry. That was an interesting bit of exploration in and of itself.

I've been thinking a lot about where my life is and its value, given the fact that I no longer have a cat to care for. For most of you, this thought process is generally a pleasant one, reflecting on achievements and optimism about where your life is headed. For me, that process is a somewhat painful one, in part because I don't see my own achievements as being very significant, or because I don't get the feeling that anyone else finds the things I do significant, or because I look at the way many things are and become very frustrated and discouraged. It isn't the world I was hoping it would be. I started trying to take a friend's advice and consider a different online avenue by which to meet my female partner-in-crime, so to speak. There were questions like, "What are your particular interests in science?" "What other interests and pastimes are do you engage in?" "What are your favorite books, writers, or films?" 'What are your greatest sources of enjoyment?" So many difficult questions... Then tonight I saw the ABC Nightline mini-series, "Secrets of Your Mind: Unlocking the mysteries of why we love and how we love." That left me with more mysteries than answers, although it was an interesting program... I also watched the Hak5 program about DEFCON-18 (an intense hacker conference that happens once a year). At one time I could look at the kinds of stuff going on at one of these conferences and be able to see myself there in some ways. This time, well, not so much. They talked to a group that was hacking the microcontroller-based conference badges, and another group that was making a self-guided UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle...a model airplane on steroids in other words) that could monitor and hack into networks, and while I was fascinated by and understood what they were doing (really cool stuff), I realized that I would never have thought about these things on my own...not anymore, at least.

What has happened to the mad computer scientist in me? What are my "other interests and pastimes?" Where do I find my "greatest sources of enjoyment?" Is there really anyone out there who would share those with me, if I could figure it all out, or at least explain it? Would I be putting way too much pressure on that person, and do I want to possibly ruin someone's life in the process?

My interests in science are more or less computer technology and how that technology can help improve our lives. I am interested in how the brain works, and why people do what they do (psychology? sociology? both?). My other interests and pastimes are driving out to the middle of nowhere and admiring the landscape, before some money-grubbing developer destroys it all. I like listening to music (just listening). I like watching (apparently strange) TV programs and movies that make people make weird faces at and ask me to explain what it's about, but I can't really vocalize it. I like eating out at places. I like spending time with the cats. My greatest source of enjoyment? Argh. I don't know. I don't have a favorite book or writer...and I'm not sure I have a favorite film, but I guess my favorite genre are comedies. I'm not embarrassed to say that I watch TV, although it seems that most intellectual types see TV in the same way I see Flash (gak, that's a horrible thought).

Final question, "What characteristics do you consider important in a prospective mate or friend?" I used to think I knew the answer to this question. I'm not sure I do anymore...

I find driving 900 miles in a day allows me some time to get away from this madness, and the sights that I can see are pleasant and happy (they'd even be more happy if I didn't see them in 100+ degree weather, but that's another story entirely...). Even though this kind of trip is somewhat exhausting, in other ways it is very relaxing. This is what I was aiming for when I thought about driving to NY.

Oh well... Another day...

If I Were A Bull...

2010-08-19T18:00:00.000-05:00

I was just watching our local news that covered a story out of Northern Spain (not really local)...aptly titled, "Bull Jumps From Arena To Stands Injuring 30 People."

According to the story (and included video) during a bullfight in Northern Spain, the bull apparently got a bit...annoyed...and decided to jump the wall into the stands goring several people in its path. "At least 30 people were injured. A 10-year-old is in serious condition. One man was gored in the back."

The announcer goes on to say, "It is unclear why the bull left the bull ring..." (then, obviously recovering from reading the printed copy and understanding what she just said) "Maybe he wanted to get away!" Well, duh!

So let's think about this rationally for a second. It is the year 2010. I guess in Spain, people still gather in a stadium watching (for entertainment) while a person violently taunts a bull. Bull = 1,100-2,200 lb. animal. Same people are surprised and somewhat outraged when the taunted and abused animal fights back.

I don't think I will ever understand people.

KOPE-FM

2010-08-17T21:18:00.000-05:00

It seems the invisible forces that control the universe got wind of my blog entry titled My Musical Journey and decided to screw around with my head a little...

During my drive out to West Texas (there will be an upcoming entry about that) yesterday I decided to scan through the radio stations about when I reached Eldorado, Texas. On the dial at 88.9 MHz appeared KOPE-FM. Format: Country music, but the older stuff mixed in with a bit of newer stuff. You know, like the station that got me into country music to begin with. Better still, no commercials. Not really any talking to speak of, for that matter! They announced the time, temperature, and call sign occasionally, but that was about it. There was a small station promo I heard once. No commercials...no blabbering DJ...and pretty good music. Amazing.

I did some research hoping to find a web site where I could stream the station, or at the very least send a warm e-mail of thanks to the people who made this possible...but alas, there is no web site. In fact...

This station is kind of wrapped in a bit of broadcast mystery. According to radio-locator (http://www.radio-locator.com/) KOPE is owned by The Center For Education Nonprofit Corp.. I'm sure you, like me, are scratching your head trying to figure out just what in heck that company is. Apparently it's a DBA for the legal firm Ashley & Laird in Irving, Texas. So back to the information from radio-locator (which is really just the FCC info) the station was originally licensed as a Class A non-commercial FM station at 140 watts on December 3, 2009. They were later granted a construction permit to take the station to a Class C3 station (still non-commercial) at 17 KW on May 19, 2010. This update obviously happened because the station's coverage matches the 17 KW coverage map (according to how I received them in my car). The mystery is why The Center For Education Nonprofit Corp. would decide to go through the very expensive process of acquiring a FM radio station to play uninterrupted good country music...a format typically reserved for commercial stations? Did someone have a good deal of extra money laying around and decide to set-up a commercial-free country radio station that actually plays good music? While I wish that were the case, I remember the old saying, "If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is."

To add to the mystery, I am impressed by their library of music. A lot of what they played is hard to get nowadays, so they either got their library from some other defunct station or are somehow rebroadcasting programming from someone who does have that kind of library. It isn't just Music Choice, that's for sure...

Now I need to figure out how I'm going to receive a 17 KW FM station that's about 170 miles away as the crow flies...and that is assuming that the station is not clobbered by some other local one on the same frequency. Sigh...

What else is weird is why I am so excited about this, and it is probably another example of me showing my age. Seriously, a radio station that only plays music is kind of like having a pile of MP3s in a portable player stuck on randomize. Because I like the oldies, it isn't like I'm surprised by some new artist (although, I admit there is a lot of old stuff I haven't yet heard or forgot about that's like discovering a new song). I guess the way I see it, it's like having an anonymous friend who wants to share their music collection with you. You both bring something different to the table, some you both like, some is liked more by one than the other, and some falls into the "can we listen to something else?" category. KOPE-FM mostly fell into the first two categories, making it a pleasure to just tune-in and leave it alone.

Thank you, whoever you are, for making a few hours of my drive yesterday more interesting.

Steven Slater

2010-08-11T20:14:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid I've kind of been living in a cave for the past couple of days, and finally heard the story of flight attendant Steven Slater and his job-related meltdown on a recent Jet Blue flight after being verbally and physically assaulted by a troublesome passenger.

Reckless endangerment? Criminal mischief? Trespassing? You have to be kidding me...

Now I have to say that in the eyes of his employer, he's probably toast as far as his career, and I'm not sure I'll be able to blame Jet Blue for firing him if that's what they do. As a criminal, though, I don't think so.

There are lots of stories abound, but basically the latest one from a fairly reliable source was that there was a female passenger who had been arguing earlier with Slater and another passenger regarding getting her bags into the overhead compartment. At the end of the flight as the plane was taxiing to the terminal, the same female passenger got up (against the direction of the flight attendants) and started going for the overhead compartment. When Steven Slater asked her to sit back down and wait until the plane had stopped at the terminal, she apparently flung open the overhead bin, striking Slater in the head. When Slater demanded an apology, the woman cussed-out Slater. Slater then went up to the front of the plane, got on the intercom and gave the woman a piece of his mind, complete with his own array of cuss-words, declared he had enough, then grabbed two beers from the beverage cart, popped open the escape slide, slid off the plane, and went home...where he was later arrested.

So many people on the 'net have expressed comments on this, and so I will try to keep mine brief.

First, there was no endangerment caused by Slater except maybe to himself and definitely to his career. The criminal mischief charge is debatable ... he did deploy an emergency escape device on an active tarmac. Trespass? Give me a break... The man had a really bad day ... he just got assaulted by a passenger, lost his temper at a clearly unruly passenger, and destroyed his career in the process. Nothing will be solved by adding criminal charges to the mix.

Second, if there are any witnesses who saw the actions of the unruly woman on the plane...no, wait, not if, there were a whole plane full of witnesses... So one of you kind people please come forward and bring the unruly woman to justice. She actually did endanger the safety of those on the plane, and Slater was doing his job. The reckless endangerment charge belongs to her.

Third, I would not call Slater a hero. He isn't. He's a man who got tired of taking crap from stupid, self-righteous people with entitlement complexes. I don't blame him for losing his temper, but at the same time his actions are not those of a hero (just as Joseph Stack wasn't a hero, I must remain consistent here). The big difference between Slater and Stack is that Slater's actions only affected him and probably offended a couple of people (and probably wrecked an escape slide), while Stack's actions were violent, outwardly aggressive, caused the death of one man and himself, and the needless destruction of an office building, for a problem that was really of his own making. The only thing that died in Slater's case was his career, and given the public outcry I'm not sure that is even dead yet (hey, he'd probably do great working for Southwest Airlines!!). That all said, what Slater did do was bring to the world's attention just how nasty people can be toward people who are doing their job and providing customer support. I've had some really lousy flights and some lousy flight attendants, and I'll admit I grumbled a bit here and there. The majority of my bad experiences on airlines have been from other passengers, and the majority of my experiences with flight attendants is that they try their best to make things as pleasant as possible even when things are not going well...and Slater seemed like that kind of guy.

If anything, this incident probably made a lot of people think about flying Jet Blue.

Finally, about airlines and the passengers that fly them in general: The totally unnecessary airport security dance already puts people in a defensive posture from the start. Airlines have furthered that by nickel-and-diming passengers with ridiculous fees for luggage and so on. Never mind the late flights and outrageous charges. These things don't exactly set the mood for a pleasant and uneventful flight. Add to the mix the kind of passengers I see so often on airplanes who are inconsiderate, thoughtless, and feel they are entitled to special treatment because they bought an airline ticket. This is the reason I hate traveling anywhere by plane anymore. Take the same people I've written about here and cram them into a big tin-can with a jet engine on it and what do you think is going to happen? I'm surprised that flight attendants and passengers who are considerate and can follow instructions haven't seriously flipped out before now.

This is yet another case of an incident that is a symptom of bigger problems in this world. Maybe instead of elevating Slater to hero status or treating him like a criminal we should look around at what causes stuff like this to happen. People, look at yourselves. Slater was trying to tell y'all something. Maybe you should listen. Think about that the next time you take that airline flight.

BTW, I would really love to have heard what JC of Mental Shrapnel has to say about all this... Too bad it has been over a year since she's been around...

Smoking Rant

2010-08-11T11:29:00.005-05:00

Warning: I put the word rant in the title as full disclosure!

What in hell makes perfectly intelligent people do something as stupid as smoke cigarettes, cigars, or anything else that involves putting something burning in their mouths and sucking on it?

Case in point: I work at a university research laboratory, where a majority of the people working there are younger than I am. These people have gone through the same extensive education process as I have (if not more), and have not been living in a cave somewhere that the negative aspects of smoking have been lost upon them. Yet, I find an increasing number of young people addicted to the crap. Older people who grew-up in the 50s, well maybe I can understand that a bit... But not the younger people. Not the people who claim to be so more intelligent than everyone before them.

The reason for this rant, and the reason why I'm damn angry right now is that, like the gazillion of you who are allergic to pollens and shit, I am allergic to smoke. I end up with headaches and sinus infections. The odor itself is irritating. Some people in this damn laboratory complex where I work have decided to smoke in the courtyard between wings of the building, right below the "fresh air" intake on the roof for the air conditioning system. So as I sit in my office throughout the day, I feel increasingly more ill.

Oh, yes, I have complained about this in a rational and sane way, and that has not achieved anything. And it won't. I promise. I'm not a director or a research scientist who is supposed to be so much more intelligent (and allegedly making money for the organization, when they're not shooting-the-shit with the other nicotine addicts in the courtyard).

So people -- listen-up. Smoking is dangerous. It harms you and the people around you, who sometimes have no choice but to breathe the exhaust from your habit. You're here to work, not smoke. If you're that addicted to a chemical, then perhaps you can go through rehab like the rest of the drug addicts out there. Either way, find some way of satisfying your addiction without making me ill. I have 10 more years working here before I retire. Don't make me put that cancer stick up your god damn ass in the meantime (actually, that visual gives me some amount of guilty pleasure...cigasuppositories).

If you can't kick your smoking addiction, then don't preach to me or anyone else about how harmful drugs are or how intelligent you are. You're an asshole and a nicotine addict and I don't care if you can do FFTs in your sleep, you haven't mastered a simple thing like consideration of other people and realizing how harmful this addiction is to you and everyone around you. Go straight to hell. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

I wish that saying this made me feel better.

Edited Aug. 17, 2010:
I actually spoke with my mother about this topic today, and she brought up another stupid thing about smoking: It's expensive. I can't really say I have much sympathy for people who complain about money while they have a cigarette hanging out of their mouth...

Eight Nine Ten

2010-08-09T22:46:00.000-05:00

An old friend of mine that managed to find me via Facebook a while back reminded us all that it was 8/9/10 today. The fact that I missed that indicates the level of my burned-outedness right now. I am desperately in need of a vacation, something that I will be getting next week. If I forget October 10, please come and check to see if I'm still alive...

I guess Facebook is good for something.

A few days ago I watched the movie Mary and Max. It's an animated adult movie (not porn, adult as in those who have reached a certain level of maturity) about an eight year old Australian girl who becomes pen-pals with a middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome. More to the point, it is the story of two people who are both outcasts in their own existence coming together to help each other make it through life. It is supposed to be based on a true story, but I'm always suspect of what that means (especially after seeing Assume The Position with Mr. Wuhl...you'll know what I mean if you've seen it). Anyway, while kind of sad, it is also kind of uplifting, and I found it to be a great movie. The only negative comment I have is that the end seemed very abrupt, leaving you wondering how things really worked out. I felt the same way about Ghost World as well, and for both movies the remainder of the story is so well done that I accepted the ending for what it was.

This movie was supposed to be a comedy, and I believe that it really was, with funny parts throughout. However, for me it was kind of serious as well. While I don't believe I actually have Asperger's, my own personality and situation has some distinct similarities to the Max Horovitz character in the movie. When I receive e-mails from people lately that inadvertently cause me to recognize my own social awkwardness, I tend to have a small form of panic attack that, like Max, puts my mind into an infinite loop trying to figure out how to respond, and how to cope with the feelings that have just been brought up to the surface. I like things to be in order. I feel rules are there to be followed, not to be broken...most of the time, anyway. I have extreme sensitivities to noise and odors, which only seem to become worse with age. These situations seemed to become somewhat crippling to Max, while at the same time he saw the world as broken and not him (I also am this way).

I doubt that most of you will see Mary and Max quite the way I did, and will probably find it more entertaining than something to identify with. The animation was very well-done (fans of Wallace and Grommit will definitely enjoy this). Most certainly, not for kids. Unless you want to explain to your kids why babies come from the bottom of glasses of beer in Australia.

Finally, since my Netflix DVD queue is kind of lacking right now, I've been watching old episodes of Freaks and Geeks lately. First, one of the "extra features" on the DVD was a promo for the release-on-DVD of SCTV. Those who know what I'm talking about will be jumping for joy right now. Some people found some of the DVDs to be disappointing, thinking they weren't the SCTV they remember. I will let you know what I discover. Also from Freaks and Geeks tonight is the following quotable quote about marijuana between two of the characters on the show:

(about pot)
"It's from the Earth. It's natural. Why would it be there if you weren't supposed to smoke it?"

"Dog crap is here, and we don't smoke that."

And on that note, I will conclude my time today in 8/9/10 and get some sleep.

My Musical Journey

2010-08-09T00:12:00.000-05:00

I was checking-out Mary's changes to her ICMDb blog and just finished reading her three-part posting about her journey into country music. I realized that while I have known Mary for a few years, we never really discussed exactly how she ended up getting into country music, and why Lionel Cartwright was such a major factor. So, now I know.

In the name of full disclosure, in a previous blog entry (Uncertain Times) I mentioned (paraphrasing) that I got into country in the 1980s to avoid the garbage that was pretending it was music during that period of time. That is actually only part of the story. With Mary's detail in mind, here is my journey...and a quite different one...

WTF is on AM Radio?!

My journey starts around 1984. I was in college (a commuter student) and my second stupid car had died an untimely death - the frame cracked coming around the cloverleaf onto a highway. Alas, I was now borrowing my parents' second car to get to school and work and all they had in it was an AM radio. Most of AM radio was top-40 pop music and sports talk, which at the time I was finding to be less than satisfying (to be nice) for my tastes. The only radio station in the NY area at the time that was an alternative to all this was the country station WHN. WHN was also unique in that they not only played the newer country songs, but also older country music from the 1960s and 1970s.

As I listened to WHN I realized how many of the '50s/'60s songs that I liked were either country or had strong country influences. For example, The Everly Brothers, The Dixiebells, Johnny Rivers ... all these artists were country. Country wasn't just twangy songs about losing your truck, your girlfriend, your horse, and so on. Country music also included a cross between rock 'n' roll and the traditional country that still included losing your girlfriend, which seemed to strike a chord with me (even then). I also found that there were many crossover artists in the 1970s and 1980s including Olivia Newton-John, Juice Newton, Anne Murray, and Pure Prairie League who had very strong country influences in their work, and some could arguably be called country in their own right.

If it weren't for that blasted AM radio in my parents' car, I would have missed out on a whole genre of music.

My Reasons To Go Country

What I noticed about most country music (the stuff I enjoyed) was that it tended to be less synthetic. By that, I mean that many of the lead instruments were those of the early 1960s rock 'n' roll music that I liked rather than the electronic stuff of the disco era and beyond, which I generally didn't like. The vocals sounded pure, and were understandable. So throughout the 80s and well into the 90s, most of what I listened to was either top-40 country or "oldies" ('50s/'60s) stuff, with some '70s mixed-in for good measure.

I can say without much hesitation that I can't tell you much about the top-40 pop charts from the 1990s. To me, it just didn't exist.

Music...To Me

For me music is a soundtrack to events and periods of my life. When I hear a particular song, I am transported back to the time and place where I first heard it or when it had some kind of profound meaning to me. While I think people have a few instances like this, most music to others is more or less background or something to dance to. I have an (admittedly irrational) absolute dread of being a participant in anything dancing, and having something as "just background" is almost impossible for me.

I used to share the music I liked with others, but I found as I went further into college and into adulthood that, like much of the other things that I enjoyed, nobody else could quite understand it or appreciate it as I did. "Does it have a good beat and can you dance to it?" Well, that really wasn't my criteria for music appreciation.

Cool Country, Rock, and Blues

My first exposure to radio-by-Internet was a station called KICK-AM in Sydney, Australia with a format they called "cool country, rock, and blues" that I heard in the mid 1990s. No station I have ever encountered since then has been able to capture this format quite like KICK-AM. I never knew that country music was popular in other countries outside those in North America. Doing a Google search for KICK-AM turns up the last pieces of this rare gem in a few old web sites with broken links to a now defunct web site. Apparently I was one of the few who liked this station and format as described in the Wikipedia article about the station, which is now 2SM (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2SM).

What Now?

I'm not exactly sure how to describe how I encounter "new" music these days...and by "new" I generally mean, "it's new to me." I tend to stumble upon different songs more or less by accident. I heard "Bourgeois Shangri-La" by Miss Li on an Apple commercial. When I was listening to the Solid Gold Oldies channel on Music Choice on cable TV (when I had it) I heard a lot of songs from the '60s that I forgot about, so they seemed new to me. There have been some amateur artists on YouTube that I accidentally found and have since turned their videos to MP3s so I can listen to them other than on my computer. I found a couple of live performances on cable TV that I liked and made them into MP3s as well...although in most cases none of these were very good when I heard the studio recording, and thus were not worth looking at further. The quasi-legal MP3 site from Russia presented some opportunities to explore artists and styles of music that I would not usually have tried.

At one point I was gaining some subliminal knowledge of new country music by waking up to the country station on my clock radio. But, alas, it seems popular country music has gone the way of the music of the 1980s, and as I stated in my previous blog posting, that source of new music has quickly disappeared. Funny how things have come full-circle.

So how do I classify my musical tastes? That's hard. Eclectic, perhaps? If you look at my record collection it looks like a weird combination of 50s/60s/70s/80s pop and some country. If you look at my CD collection, it looks mostly like country, but then there's Union Underground's "An Education In Rebellion" or The Partridge Family. Where in hell did that come from? In my MP3 collection artists like The Shirelles, The Grass Roots, The Flirtations, and The Four Seasons share the same space as Quarterflash, Ferrante & Teicher, The Spice Girls, Lisa Loeb, Gordon Lightfoot, Cheyenne Kimball, Culture Club, Split Christie, and Hole.

"What's your favorite artist," you ask? The funny thing is that it's hard to give an answer to that question. I like certain songs by certain artists, and sometimes only one (for instance I find anything that Kim Wilde does to be revolting except for "Four Letter Word"). I would say that it's The Partridge Family simply by number of times I've listened to their songs by themselves for as long as I have, but that would be unfair to the Go-Gos that I listened to repeatedly for over a year while I was looking for a house. I just can't say I have a favorite.

So that's kind of my version of Mary's "My Country Music Journey." Oh, that's right, I do have one or two songs by Journey in my collection as well...

Chicken Something

2010-08-08T21:41:00.003-05:00

The other night I was trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. I had some frozen chicken breasts and some various other foodstuff, but it was all the same thing I had been eating for a while. I was thinking about my friend Mary's "Poor Person's Dirty Rice" recipe that really wasn't much more than rice in an Italian meat sauce, but it was tasty.

Looking at the stuff I had around, I took a now defrosted chicken breast and chopped it up into chunks (about half-inch) and marinaded them in a mix of soy sauce and rice vinegar (that I happened to have around for when I make tangerine chicken). I then cooked some rice using the microwave method and when that was almost done, I drained most of the marinade and fried the chicken chunks using a non-stick pan with a bit of olive oil. I then took the (now cooked) rice and put it into the frying pan and fried (stir-fried?) the rice with the chicken chunks, adding a little bit of soy sauce to the mix.

I don't know what I made, but it was actually pretty good. Chicken fried rice? Not-really-teriyaki-chicken? Let's just call it "Chicken Something...with fried rice"

I realized afterward that some green peas probably would have made this a more complete meal and added some additional flavor/texture to the mix. I will need to do that next time (I always keep some frozen peas around).

It seems that I always have a supply on hand of chicken breasts and rice, as these two things are a versatile tool of the lone bachelor who wants to eat something more interesting than a frozen dinner or a value meal from McDonald's. What I usually cook is chicken, cooked in Campbell's Cream of Chicken Soup (half can of water rather than a full can), and served over rice. Chicken Something will now be a part of my menu and yet another thing I can make easily with chicken and rice.

Update: August 9:

Well, here it is with peas... Not bad...

Uncertain Times

2010-08-06T13:20:00.002-05:00

I'm not really sure what I want to write about today.

I want to have some positive things to say but I can't think of any. I'm not certain anyone is reading this stuff anymore. If they do, does it really help?

The U.S. Economy

While I am not a big fan of government involvement in fiscal matters, since they tend to screw it up, I think I have figured out what will bring the economy back. The problem is jobs. Think of the economy as a closed system of sorts. In an extreme oversimplification: People work to make products, the products are sold to people (who buy the products), those purchases pay the people who make the products, and other products are then purchased by those people. When this cycle is broken in some way the entire system breaks down. In times when the economy is depressed, as it is now, people tend to conserve rather than spend (particularly on discretionary items) - especially if they don't have a job. This causes more unemployment and so on. So what can we do to break the downward spiral? The answer is to get more people employed again. To do that, we need more jobs.

First and foremost - people (that means us) need to realize the err of our ways. Live within your means. Don't have bunches of kids (be reasonable). By "bunches" I mean more than two. Stop being greedy and expecting to get paid more than what your job should pay based on your experience level. If you want more money, then conserve or work to move into a job that pays better (which means you'll be working harder). Stop being greedy (it required repeating). Consider the impact you make on the world in your every action. You're not the only one here. All of these contribute to a stable community, which is a foundation for a stable economy.

Second, get jobs back into the United States. It's time for the government to create a dis-incentive to outsource jobs to other countries. NO, DO NOT create an INCENTIVE program to keep jobs within the U.S. -- business should be doing this anyway as good stewards to the communities they serve. It's time to make outsourcing and the imbalance of imports financially painful. If business feels the need to use cheaper foreign labor and materials (that will ultimately cost domestic workers their jobs), then this is when the government needs to create the equalizer, and then use the money to fund some (hopefully temporary) domestic public-sector projects that will keep people employed. Normally these projects could wait until the economy is in better shape and there was sufficient tax revenue. When people don't work, there isn't sufficient tax revenue, and more and more people end up sucking the system dry. Businesses that outsource to foreign labor contribute to that problem. So make them pay the price. Otherwise, leave business alone and let them thrive doing what they do best. They don't need a government hand-out.

Finally, a good economic system is not based on rabid consumption. There are lots of things people use (consumables) in their everyday lives. We don't need to create more of them. There will always be good times and not-so-good times in any economy, but an economy built on normal consumption patterns and reasonable purchasing habits will become elastic. When times are tight or times are better an elastic economy will weather the storm. Every day isn't Christmas. A happy balance between product-producing business and service-based business is what helps make this elasticity possible.

If people live their lives and actually do something instead of worshiping the almighty dollar and measuring their own worth based on what they have or how much they spend, it is amazing how well the economy can adjust when a single bad event happens.

I just got done watching Michael Moore's movie Capitalism: A Love Story, and part of what I am writing is in response to this. Michael Moore isn't much better than all the other conspiracy theorists out there. Capitalism isn't evil - greed is evil. Greed and stabbing thy neighbor in the back happens both in capitalism and socialism. So don't tell me how a socialist utopia will be any better than what we have now. Socialism has been tried and has failed, just as absolute capitalism has. The answer lies not in absolutes, but in looking at the good attributes of both. What we need now is for people - that is, people running corporations, people running banks, people buying homes, people doing what people do - to be responsible for their actions. A corporation is a group of people. Ruthless, greedy people need to be held accountable for their actions. Greedy people include people who act as though they're always victims. We're all victims of something. Spending your life becoming a professional victim or vowing to make the victimizer pay their due is not a productive or happy life.

There, that was positive. I just fixed the economy.

Relationships

I'm done with this topic. Okay, almost done. I'm really just tired of playing these games.

We all want to be wanted, to be admired, and to be cared for by someone. Hopefully we all want to give that back in return. For whatever reason that doesn't seem to be enough anymore. While I fully admit to being a bit slow in showing how I feel, and I'm not very good expressing those feelings verbally or saying what needs to be said or doing what needs to be done at the right time, I feel I have given those feelings in some way to a number of people. I haven't seen much come in my direction. Okay, I understand that part of this is chemistry, and part of it is some feelings probably none of us can explain, but for goodness sake it feels like I'm some kind of alien from some other planet and nobody down here can figure me out. I didn't think I was that complicated. Yes, I am a bit of a curmudgeon ... alright, maybe not that extreme, maybe just a little eccentric ... but really, I'm not that hard to figure out. Surely there has to be someone out there who has a heart and soul that is marching to the same drummer.

So while I'd still be happy to entertain a happy relationship with some woman, I'm tired of playing the stupid games that seem to be part of this. Hopefully if I just be my grumpy old self, someone will see past the facade and see there's a real, feeling, human being in here.

Auto Tune

Okay, enough of the auto-tune crap. I mean it. Back in the 80s I discovered country music because I was tired of the electronic crap that made-up pop music. There are some things that don't need a computer and myriad special effects, and one of those things is music.

At first, I started hearing blatant use of auto tune in the vocals of recent country music. I thought my hearing was going bad. Seriously, it sounds like someone put their voice into a sampler and started messing with the pitch wheel. They think they're adjusting their voice so it's in tune to the music, but to my ears it's just distortion.

Then in the past month or so there comes along some of the most vile country crap I have ever put my ears on. I'm not even sure who it was or what the title of the song is, but it has finally put the stake into the heart of any interest I have in country music from here on out. Even some hardcore rap sounds better than this utter garbage. (Sugarland, among others, I think you know who you are) My clock radio has just been changed to the talk radio station. Even Rush Limbaugh is more pleasant to wake-up to than something that has been auto tuned.

So I don't care if you're trying to be funny, or if you're trying to sound like you have talent, I'm putting my foot down. Enough already. Find some talent and a set of traditional instruments and learn how to play them, and learn how to sing on-key. Otherwise go away. Please.

Anyway, I guess I did have something to say today...

Reach Out To Yourself!

2010-07-30T10:02:00.000-05:00

I want to reach out to all of you folks about the phrase "reach out," the latest corporate buzzword. It's getting to the point where when anyone says this, my brain translates it to "retch out."

Let me provide you with a couple of examples of this:

Back in November, 2008 in my blog posting "Alien" a gentleman from Time Warner Cable said, "I asked, internally, if you could be put on a list for the new tuning adapters and was told that someone would be reaching out to you." (italics are mine) This really didn't result in anything special. In fact, I don't think I ever had someone contact me regarding the adapters until they were shortly released to any subscriber who needed one (I was called in the course of obtaining service).

A representative of a very large network equipment manufacturer (guess), in talking about a ridiculous hardware maintenance issue, and my suggestion that he meet with me and my manager, said, "I will reach out with [manager's name] next week to set a time for an introduction. I look forward to it." Reach out with? I don't want someone to "reach out" to me. I want them to do their stinking job and solve my darn problem ("issue"...if you will)!

I imagine that the "reaching out" comments partly originate from at&t's old "reach out and touch someone" slogan, and partly from the concept of one person seeing another person in need of help and would reach out to that person to help (such as if I'm drowning). In the latter case, the term implies this is a charitable effort, something that is above and beyond the call of duty.

When someone in a business is providing me with customer service, they are not reaching out to me. They are doing their job. They may feel that they're giving me charitable treatment, and if they are then I really need to think again about whether I want to continue to do business with that organization. I'm not a charity case - I'm a customer for heaven's sake. Doesn't that mean anything in today's society? Provide me with quality goods and services at a fair price, and if you screw-up somewhere, then just fix it! Don't reach out to me! I'm not drowning!

This may really be a sign of the times, though. It seems like businesses are more motivated by short-term profits than long-term customer relationships. Surely profit is important, but without customers you have no profit (unless you're running a dishonest or unethical business). If I'm subscribing to cable service and it isn't working properly, and you use a lot of business buzzwords like "reaching out" to say you're trying to fix it, it is an insult to me. Properly working cable service is what your business is supposed to provide. If I contact that certain very large network equipment manufacturer (let's just call them "C") because they told me that two $100,000 routers have reached end-of-life and couldn't be covered under a maintenance agreement even though the same equipment is allegedly still for sale on their web site, then I want answers and what I can do to maintain my employer's $200,000 equipment investment. If I told you, my readers, what C's account manager finally provided as an answer to this problem your head would probably explode. They can fill my e-mail with all the business buzzwords in the world, but if they don't ultimately deliver, then those words are meaningless. The term "reaching out" has become a meaningless phrase to me at this point.

The whole idea of customer service has become a joke. Businesses don't even take it seriously as they feel it is such a secondary part of what they do that it is frequently outsourced to people in other countries. Most people groan at the idea of calling customer support, because they know that the person on the other side is generally just trained to pacify the customer and read solutions from a scripted text. I don't feel like an important customer, I feel like an irritation to the business...and frankly, I think that's what I am in their eyes.

Now to pay attention to Judy's request to say something positive. I recently had a positive experience with Hunter Douglas window coverings online customer support. The mechanism that opens and closes two of the blinds on my windows at home broke (the part that the "wand" attaches to broke because it wore out after 14 years). The part (called a tilter) didn't have a part number and all I had was a vague description of the part. Within a couple of days, someone responded to me, sent me a PDF document with a picture of the various tilters that looked like the one I described, and asked me to identify it and let them know what the part number was next to the picture. When I did respond, in a day they replied and told me they would replace the part for free. Hunter Douglas window coverings are expensive, but having a response like this is worth the expense. While I'm sure the part is only about $15 or so, I actually felt like a valued customer. I felt like these blinds were manufactured by a company that stood behind the quality of their product. This is a company I would continue to do business with.

...and Hunter Douglas didn't even need to reach out to me.

Postponed

2010-07-29T20:30:00.000-05:00

This is going to be short. I am postponing the trip to NY due to...being chicken. Seriously, though, I started thinking about the magnitude of the drive, and figured it was something that requires a smaller trip first, to see how I'd handle that kind of trip by myself. I keep forgetting that I'm getting old.

Disappointing...yes.

I do plan on taking a week of in August though, and will likely get out of town for a bit, so there should still be something to write about...

Planning a Trip to NY

2010-07-22T00:15:00.000-05:00

Well, I've almost fully convinced myself to do something that probably will fit into the "insane" category, and that's a road trip to NY to visit my parents. For those reading this without fully comprehending that statement: I am looking to drive 1,700 miles (each way), by myself, from Texas to New York (and back)...and to further the insanity, it is very likely that I won't really stop overnight anywhere along the way (perhaps coming back, I may stop and do some touristy things, who knows?).

There are a few reasons for this trip: The first is that I hate going through airport security and get treated like I'm a criminal. In fact, the entire process of getting to the airplane is unpleasant, and not a good beginning to a trip. Second, I need an adventure of a good kind. The idea of getting into a car, navigating the roads, and seeing sights I haven't seen before (or, in some cases, not in at least 20 years) seems interesting. Third, whenever I fly to visit my parents I am generally grounded in their house without a vehicle for the whole trip. Yes, I could rent a car or borrow my parents' car, but the former hardly seems worth the money and the latter has a bunch of unwritten caveats attached.

My reservations are whether my body and my car can survive the trip. The car is in good shape, and I really think that any concern about a breakdown somewhere is just my brain going through every negative scenario trying to prepare for the worst. My body, on the other hand, I'm a bit more worried about. I haven't taken a trip anywhere near this long in a very long time, and 30 hours is a long time to be continually doing the kinds of tasks that are needed to be a safe (defensive) driver. It is also going to require that I take more than just a week off from work. There's no way that I'm going to drive all that way, just to turn around and go back right away (particularly considering that one needs a day or two just to unwind from a drive of that magnitude).

Right now I've been glued to Google Maps looking at my route options. The most direct is I30/I40 going eastbound, and then I81 through the Blue Ridge Mountains going north. Alternatively, the eastbound part can be replaced by going I20 to I59, and that goes through a few additional states (the other route is mostly Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia). The other route is to use I20 eastbound, but instead go through Georgia and take I85 to I95 up the east coast. I have a close friend's family and an uncle along that route that could be a potential stopping point if I needed it. However, I95 is almost always under construction somewhere, and the tolls and traffic in the Washington, DC and Baltimore area are a hassle. I've driven that part of the route before, and I just don't like it much and it can get really boring. Going the I81 route through the mountains is more interesting, but it's through the mountains, so the road requires more attention and there are no larger cities to stop in if I get too tired.

I did find an interesting site during my research. The National Motorists Association (http://www.motorists.org/) has a great chart showing the state speed limits and some important information about the different state traffic laws. While the NMA seems like more of a driver advocacy group than informational (like AAA), I am happy to see a compilation of reputable information about state traffic laws, given that I haven't driven much outside of Texas in the past 20 years. Check out their web site sometime. They actually are doing some really sensible things.

Of course, if I decide to take the trip, I will definitely report my experiences via this blog. Looks like a good reason to invest in a new digital camera...

Google is the Government - News at 11

2010-07-20T13:26:00.000-05:00

As I sometimes do during lunch, I voluntarily submit to rotting my brain cells listening to Alex Jones spew his conspiracy theories. Why? Because while I feel that most of it is excrement, there are some bits and pieces of factual information that make you go, "Hmmm..." This posting is not about the factual information.

This posting is about, (and I'm paraphrasing here) according to Alex Jones and one of his guest cronies, indicating how Google and the government are somehow linked (it was difficult to tell whether Google was controlled by the government, or vice versa, or even both). As such, Google's acquisition of data for "street view" is really a front for collecting all sorts of data for the government about people and their communications devices. They also allege that Google manipulates search engine results based on government directives in a purposeful manner so as to distract people from what's really going on and redirect them to drivel such as Lindsay Lohan's jail sentence. They also state that YouTube videos are manipulated in various ways as well. I had enough of listening to this junk on the radio in the hot car, and came back inside where it's cool.

So my feelings? I really wish conspiracy theorists and talk show hosts, whether it's Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh or any of the other people out there, would stick to what they know and stop spewing out fear mongering comments concerning things about which they do not know. Time and time again, I've heard Alex blab out during his show about how one should go out and Google something about the government doing something dreadful to kids, and mentioning how many hits come up. So is this part of the conspiracy? Enough already. So what about Adobe, huh? At what point are you going to attack Flash, because (as everyone knows) that I would find entertaining...interesting even. Here you have a single company that has incredible proprietary control over web content now, even Alex's content, and not a single word about that. Maybe that's why he hasn't addressed that issue. It's far easier to point fingers at Google and instigate mistrust in them than to look at the crap he's using to build his own web sites and consider the possibility that there's a conspiracy in that too. Good grief. He doesn't know about computers and Internet technology. Please, for heaven's sake, talk about something you actually know about...like getting arrested trying to take pictures of police officers.

Now I won't say Google are a bunch of angels. They have their own set of skeletons in their closet, probably even ones we'd rather not know about. It also wouldn't surprise me if the US Government hired Google for their data mining expertise. That isn't because Google is in bed with the government -- that's because Google is good at data mining. You got ghosts, you call Ghostbusters. If you want to collect lots of data and figure out how to search through it efficiently, you call Google. Yeah, the government gathers lots of intelligence. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. If you look at their actions over the past, say, 20 years or so, it strikes me as a bunch of people who can't get their heads out of their butts and the only thing we need to fear is that they'll do something incredibly, unbelievably stupid and we'll suffer the consequences. Most of the time it's all with good intentions, and as we all know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's why I lean toward the government keeping their fingers out of stuff the Constitution didn't intend for them to be messing with.

In short...I should probably find something else to listen to during lunch when I'm bored. There's a lot wrong in the world today, and somehow I don't think contemplating conspiracy theories are going to help.

R.I.P. Smokey

2010-07-17T16:57:00.000-05:00

For those who don't already know, my feline pal of 19 years had to be put to sleep this past Thursday (July 15, 2010). A week prior, he decided to stop eating, which wasn't immediately alarming since he had been eating less as of late. Within a week, he was becoming depressed and more lethargic, and I could see in his actions and condition of his body that the end was near. The vet confirmed what I already knew: Basically, his kidneys had almost completely failed, his body was no longer able to take-in water (even though he was still drinking), and that he was effectively starving himself to death. I felt that it was inhumane for him to suffer like this, and made the decision to end his life...which, as in any case like this, is not one that is easy emotionally.

In the past 19 years, this little guy was a big part of my life...

I got him from a neighbor when he was just a few weeks old (the result of the same neighbor not getting their cat spayed). They brought down the kittens in a paper bag, and asked if anyone wanted one. I picked Smokey up, and he ran up my arm onto my back and wouldn't let go. I remember saying, "Well, I guess this one's mine!"
He lived in 8 different places and two cities over the course of 19 years. Yes, that's how many times I moved. Ugh.
When I got Smokey, I was doing Geographic Information System (GIS) software development at a GIS software/hardware company for a living. He was with me through my transition from that, through a layoff, and to my current career as a systems/network administrator. That is a lot less trivial than it sounds.
I've had some of my darkest moments and some of the best times during the past 19 years. He's been by my side through all of them. I sometimes wonder if he would have continued to put up with me if he hadn't been held captive...but then again, I'm sure he thought the same thing sometimes...
Smokey was, indeed, a "Native Texan." Unlike his owner...but his owner "got here as fast as he could..."
During his final years, I actually had guests over somewhat regularly and he became more well-known as the host than I did, always circulating through the group and making sure everyone was doing fine.

I'm not sure that I can say that everything I know about life I learned from my cat, but I can say that I did learn an awful lot from him.

It's cliché to say that I couldn't replace Smokey with another cat...but in this case, that is really the truth. This was a feline with great personality and a great presence. He made friends with people in just about any situation, even people who didn't like cats much. For now, I plan to set aside getting another cat so that I can take some time out from that responsibility and take care of myself a bit (something that has been neglected for a while). I still plan on volunteering down at the Humane Society (doing cat socialization), and will probably take one home eventually. While I don't enjoy the sadness that accompanies the loss of a good friend, I am trying to see the positive in all this. None of us live forever. There are a lot of cats that suffer as strays, feral cats, or cats that have cruel, irresponsible, or just plain stupid owners. Smokey had a great 19 years (even though we had some fights of our own occasionally). Not only did he have a good life, but a life longer than many cats do. This is the important thing. Yeah, I guess that's another thing I learned from my cat...

Consequences Will Never Be The Same

2010-07-17T16:14:00.000-05:00

I'm really not that up on the whole Internet culture thing these days, except for when I can somehow grok it through my own old-school glasses. Every once in a while, though, I accidentally stumble upon a piece of that culture, and after I finish laughing, it kind of makes me go, "Hmmmm...." Or, maybe, "Epic Fail."

Such as the case of Jessi Slaughter aka. KerliGirl13 aka. Jessica Leonhardt (per Know Your Meme). In short, this 11-year-old girl got on the Internet and kind of pushed the envelope looking for attention while affiliating herself with music groups and cultures that are, to be kind, "way out there." The graphic in this text is taken from her piczo page (which may or may not exist by the time you read this). In any case, apparently she got razzed by some people on YouTube and she played the tough gal and inadvertently attracted further razzing. Along comes Dad, sees his daughter all upset, and decides he's going to make an example of these punks. He gets onto a video with Jessica crying and starts yelling into the video with such comments as that he's "backtraced" the people who did this and they've been reported to the "cyber police and the state police" and that if they go after his daughter "the consequences will never be the same." Uhhh....okay. Dad, let me give you a bit of a lesson from an old-school Internet nerd who got mercilessly teased in school before there even was a such thing as the Internet: You just made matters worse. No, really, you did, for several reasons:

In the old days, you could say such comments and the kids would run past your house and mock you. Today, kids take the video of your full-of-rage rant and mix it to music (or otherwise parody it), then put it back on the Internet for the whole world to see. You'd be surprised how many people see it, too.
It's understandable why you'd be a bit upset to see your daughter crying because a bunch of kids made fun of her...BUT...did you realize you just threatened a bunch of people who you don't know. You don't really know what these people are capable of. You made the same mistake your daughter did, except you're expected to know better. Worse, though, imagine one of the kids you just threatened ends up dead somewhere, and they "backtrace" only to find that this kid was somehow associated with teasing your daughter. Do you understand how quickly your ass will land in jail? I'm sure you only got online to teach the "little pricks" a lesson by scaring them a little, but in the eyes of the law these days, understand you're guilty until proven innocent in this kind of situation.
Most importantly, you reacted without looking at the kind of stuff your daughter was putting out there on the Internet. You didn't supervise her use of the Internet (an adult resource, by the way). You didn't take any time to understand the music groups and the culture your daughter was affiliating herself with. You were not being a parent.

To Jessica... Hey, there... Do you actually have any idea what half of the terms you have in that graphic I included really mean? You think you're so grown-up and really have a belief system that is so much more real than what everyone else is and does. Surprise. Maybe you should consider the meaning of the words you profess to be what you believe. Why? Well, in your father's words, because "the consequences will never be the same." Or something like that...

For a further chuckle, see the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvAZKbkVvMg ("Play Jessi Slaughter's Family Off Keyboard Cat")

DYSCLAIMER: I don't agree with anything in that graphic with Jessica's comments above. I just included it for reference...

PS: Yes, I know I spelled "disclaimer" wrong... That was on purpose.