davidwatson.org: generalist, miminalist, pragmatist

2003

Wed, 17 Dec 2003

San Antonio Shoe Gives Workers Xmas Bonus

While a lot of companies in the US have been laying off workers and offshoring their jobs, San Antonio Shoe quietly gave it's Pitsfield, Maine workers a whopping Christmas bonus - $1000 for every year of service. That meant nearly $40,000 for some married workers with 19 years at the company. Let's hope that San Antonio Shoe has better luck than Malden Mills.

Posted at: 08:45 | permalink

Tue, 16 Dec 2003

Hallelujah Brother!

It's about time they put these morons in prison.

Posted at: 17:04 | permalink

Sun, 14 Dec 2003

The Brookings Institution On Pennsylvania

I caught the live broadcast of the Brookings Institution's report on Pennsylvania on NPR this morning while I was out driving around in the second near-blizzard of the season. The state takes some hard knocks in terms of what the data suggests. Nothing particularly new here, but I find the brutality of the message refreshing.

Posted at: 16:44 | permalink

Sat, 06 Dec 2003

The First Blizzard of The Winter Season

The snow started coming late thursday night and it's been coming down ever since. We're at about 8 inches now and likely to pass into the foot range by tomorrow. My wife's car is entirely covered and it's under the car port. That's a testament to just how brutal the wind has been. If local residents weren't convinced they needed a 4x4 by last year's winter, they're probably headed to the local jeep dealer now.

My german shorthaired pointer is quite happy with this state of affairs. She'd be even happier if she could keep from losing her frisbee in the deep drifts!

Posted at: 19:43 | permalink

Sat, 15 Nov 2003

Brain-Gain vs. Brain-Drain Cities

No surprises here. Indeed, halfway into it when I wondered when they'd start quoting Richard Florida, they quoted Richard Florida. The major comparison is between Cleveland and Seattle, an interesting contrast between turn of the century leading cities. They put Pittsburgh on the brain-drain list. No surprise there either.

Going the entrepreneurial route myself, I can attest to the difficulties encountered in a place like this, where just finding an audience that can comprehend what you are talking about is difficult, let alone the relative advantage or disadvantage from a hiring standpoint.

Around here, when you tell somebody that you are doing your own thing, a startup or something like that, you get the distinct feeling from the looks on their faces that they think you are an insane man. When I lived in Seattle or Boston, that was more a cause for high fives and congratulations.

That intangible cultural aspect is the biggest challenge that all of these rust belt incubators face. It's not really that there aren't fundable ideas, or people; it's that getting a critical mass of them together in one place, and having them all be part of the same risk-taking soup is nearly impossible. They were pickled in the wrong juice, and changing the pickling formula takes decades.

And it goes to the core of the culture. When I take my dog outside at 10 PM, there's not a light on in my entire neighborhood. If I go out to find something to eat at 10 PM, more than half the restaurants are either closed or stopped serving food. They're smart business people. Very few people here eat at that hour.

In Seattle, if you go out at 10 PM looking for food, you'll find a host of places ready to serve you, and they're bustling with folks that just came out of work. But why would anybody work that late unless they were heavily invested in the business?

Posted at: 11:20 | permalink

Fri, 07 Nov 2003

Linuxant DriverLoader Bugs

Well, taking the good with the bad, it turns out that the linuxant driverloader that I mentioned a couple days ago has bugs. No suprise there. The fact that it works at all is a small miracle. The bugs go like this... When I installed it, I had an eth0 and eth1 interfaces on the box. It created it's own eth0, destroying the 100 Mbit device that was there in the process. Linuxant tech support did finally respond and say yeah, that's a problem. Mark Boucher from Linuxant responds:

The problem with eth0 vs eth1 isn't driverloader-specific but a consequence of how network devices are registered and their names allocated under linux. Basically the instance number isn't persistent but set according to the order in which the devices are initialized. So a newly installed device which ends up being started before an existing one might be assigned the latter's slot by the kernel, which is what happened on your system. We would very much appreciate if you could correct the text on your website since it unfairly blames DriverLoader for this problem. When searching Google for "linuxant driverloader" your site comes up quite early and new users or potential customers could misinterpret your comments. Btw in version 1.25 we have added the --netdevname option to dldrconfig so that the "eth" prefix can be changed to something else in order to avoid any collisions with existing ethernet devices. We cannot use another name by default since some distributions and tools only recognize "eth" devices.

Also, I wrote to them last night to ask them exactly what you're supposed to do when you upgrade kernels, which isn't exactly clear, since the device has to be compiled against the current kernel and the driverloader configuration was not migrated when I updated kernels last night.

Mark Boucher of Linuxant responds:

After booting a new kernel just run "dldrconfig --kernel" (optionally with --auto to make the process automatic). This question is answered in our FAQ at http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/faq.php#17

Posted at: 11:24 | permalink

Thu, 06 Nov 2003

Fedora Via Bittorrent

I decided to give bittorrent a try with the new Fedora Core release this morning and indeed, I'm getting sustained download speeds of nearly 150KB/sec! That's only 4 hours and change for the entire 1.8 GB fileset. Bittorrent only gets better with more users and it seems that this fedora core download has attracted just enough to make it compelling. My previous attempts with bittorrent were hideously slow, under 10 KB/sec. Join the torrent, it's easy!

Posted at: 12:04 | permalink

Tue, 04 Nov 2003

Russert Misses the Fatal Rumsfeld Question

I watched Tim Russert Interview Don Rumsfeld on Meet the Press on Sunday. You could say that Russert took it far too easy on Rumsfeld. People must be feeling sorry for him. The interview really caught my attention when it reached this juncture:

Russert: Time magazine reports this today, that this question was asked in the closed briefing with senators, "'What troop levels do we expect to have in Iraq a year from now?,' asked Senator Bill Frist, the Republican leader. And with that, the Pentagon chief began to tap dance." Do you believe that you have an obligation to tell our leaders in Congress what your best estimate is for troop levels in Iraq a year from now? Rumsfeld: You know, since -- any war, when it starts, the questions are obvious. The questions are: How long is it going to last? How many casualties will there be? And, How many troops will it take? Now, those questions can't be answered. Every time someone has answered those questions, they've been wrong. They have been embarrassingly wrong. I'll use another word: They have "misinformed." By believing they knew the answers to those questions, they've misinformed and misled the American people. I made a conscious decision at the outset of these conflicts to not pretend I knew something I didn't know. And what I have said is just that. I have said it is not knowable.

What's amazing is that Rumsfeld continues talking and a moment later says:

Now, the answer as to how many U.S. forces will be there a year from now depends entirely on what happens in the security situation on the ground, first and foremost. Second, it depends on how fast we are able to build up the Iraqi forces. What's happening is the total number of security forces in that country have been going up steadily. We've come down from 150,- to 130,000 troops. The coalition troops of about 30,000 have stayed about level. And what's changed is the Iraqi troops have come up from zero to 100,000, heading towards over 200,000 next year.

And Russert failed to deliver the follow-up question that I'd like to see Rumsfeld answer: If you can predict the number of Iraqi troops involved next year, why can't you predict the number of American troops? Are you misinforming and misleading the American people by stating the number of Iraqi Troops?

Posted at: 12:47 | permalink

Sun, 19 Oct 2003

Pope Beatifies Mother Teresa

I'm not catholic, so I guess I can get away with this, but it appears that CBS news thinks that the pope beautified Mother Teresa. Here it is. And journalists are trying to convince me that my blog needs an editor to make mistakes like this?

Posted at: 09:55 | permalink

Sat, 18 Oct 2003

Linuxant DriverLoader for Broadcom 802.11g Works With Emachines M5310 and Fedora Kernel 2.4.22-1.2088.nptl (Athlon)

Well, after a little work (which I suspected yesterday) I was able to get the linuxant driver loader to work on my EMachines M5310 running Fedora and the latestkernel. Linuxant is to be credited for their RPM install and webconfig, which are among the best I've seen anywhere.

I determined that my Linux and Kernel version were unsupported and so thoughtfully, Linuxant provides an RPM download of their driver. When I rpmed it, I was told I needed kernel source. I then did "yum install kernel-source" and let yum take care of the details. Once that was complete, I proceeded to rpm -ivh on the linuxant rpm and indeed it built the driver as part of the RPM install. When it finished, it told me to go to port 18020 on my localhost with my browser. Once there, I was prompted to login as root, then stepped through a series of configuration questions wizard-style.

The toughest part is finding the proper INF and SYS files from the windows drivers. These are not on the driver CD-ROMs provided by emachines. Sigh. I found them on the Windows partition under C:\Program Files\WLAN\PCI. I copied those to a network share, rebooted and then copied them into my linux partition, went to 18020 webconfig again, and went through the install just fine. I was afraid that linuxant's license was going to be a nightmare but they connect right through from the driver config and since I hadn't disabled my trusty orinoco, I had the required internet access. Once the license was installed and the MAC address interrogated, the driver was configured.

I then proceeded to Redhat's System Settings/Network utility and indeed, the linuxant driverloader had appeared as eth2 under the hardware tab. I added an eth2 for it and this is where I ran into a problem. which was a couple messages about bad parameters when I tried to activate the new eth2. I found a note on the internet about the bad parameters, which appeared to be related to the ESSID. So I set the ESSID manually and it worked! I'm assuming that's a bug with my particular setup, but it was a minor workaround and it's a joy to not have to worry abou the damn orinoco card sticking out the side of the machine anymore.

I've started a bunch of massive ISO downloads just to stress the thing while I'm out this afternoon but I remain hopeful. Assuming it works reliably, it's definitely worth whatever small price linuxant asks for it after the trial period is up.

Posted at: 13:48 | permalink

Fri, 17 Oct 2003

Broadcom 802.11g Wireless Drivers For Linux

Well, miracle of miracles I see a message come across the emachines laptop group on Yahoo this morning mentioning that Linuxant has a linux driver of sorts for the Broadcom 802.11g chipset that's built into my Emachines M5310 laptop. This has been the one major sticking point in running linux on this machine, although I've managed to limp along with the reliable orinoco 802.11b card in the meantime. So, these folks have some sort of architecture whereby they're wrapping the windows driver and allowing linux to speak to it, throught it, something like that. I'm not sure that I understand it fully. Anyhow, I mailed the support folks at linuxant as per their instructions and asked them whether they support the variant of the broadcom chipset that appears in this machine which lspci identifies as BCM94306 rev 02. I'm gonna wait till I hear from them before proceeding with the install as it could be a bit of work that I don't want to waste if it's hopeless. But there is hope, which was better than the situation previously where it seemed that Broadcom would never release a linux driver.

Posted at: 16:15 | permalink

Sun, 12 Oct 2003

Pat Metheny Trio at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild

So the wife and I managed to see Pat Metheny Trio at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild this afternoon. The current trio consists of Pat on guitars, Christian McBride on bass, and Antonio Sanchez on drums.

The show started with Metheny solo on the stage playing selections from his solo album for baritone guitar. He covered the baritone, as well as the nylon string and pikasso 42-string guitar. The sound and performance were superb. My favorite part of this segment was when he covered a medley of Metheny favorites on the nylong string including portions of Minuano and First Circle.

About halfway through the show, Pat was joined by the other members of the trio, and they went through some of Metheny's more traditional material and standards, stretching from Freddy Freeloader to Lone Jack.

At one point Christian McBride soloed on the upright bass with the bow which was just amazing - a highlight of the show resulting in thunderous applause.

Lone Jack in particular, was cookin' beyond any reasonable speed bordering on the ridiculous, reminiscent of some of the Jack Dejohnette stuff from years ago. This tune really showed Antonio Sanchez' considerable prowess on the drumkit.

As always Metheny continues to grow and impress us beyond any imaginable ticket price. I can't wait to see what he's got up his sleeve with the next PMG album.

Posted at: 22:36 | permalink

Wed, 08 Oct 2003

How do you browse?

I got to thinking about my use of the browser today. I was running ephiphany on linux and I thought how nice it was that they had removed all the cruft. And then I saw the go button after the address bar and I thought, "Has anyone ever clicked the go button in the history of the web?"

Posted at: 16:28 | permalink

Fri, 03 Oct 2003

Opthamological Bliss

I went to the eye doctor today to get my eyes examined. I had been having some difficulty reading small print, and though I don't have corrective lenses for that condition, I was afraid that I might require bifocals. I was relieved when the doctor told me that indeed, my prescription was too strong and proved to me that when I removed my glasses, I could actually read book print better. This was a pleasant surprise. The largest surprise though came when she said that she couldn't tell that I was diabetic from looking at my retina, which is saying something considering that I've had diabetes for almost 30 years, and that eye doctors have remarked previously that they could tell I was diabetic from studying my retina. It's fairly typical to see small retinal hemorrhages in diabetic eyes. I was also thrilled to find that I could get rimless eyeglasses with magnetic clip-ons now. What will they think of next?

Posted at: 19:11 | permalink

Wed, 01 Oct 2003

Dunlop D220's And The SV650 Inspection

So, I went and had the bike inspected today. It needed an inspection and tires. Put Dunlop D220's on front and back. They're pretty slick, quite literally. I should heed all the warnings about the first 100 miles. When I pulled out of the dealership, I turned right and twisted the throttle pretty hard to get up to speed in traffic, and indeed, the back end slipped so I looked like one of those lunatics on the ice track for a split second. No worries.

Posted at: 20:57 | permalink

Mon, 29 Sep 2003

Please Update Your Aggregator Subscriptions

In the process of moving from Movable Type to blosxom over the weekend, I've irreparably broken all of my xml syndication. Please update your aggregator subscriptions accordingly. If you subscribed to my index.xml, index.rdf, rss.xml, or index-full.xml, you'll need to point your aggregator to...

http://www.davidwatson.org/index.cgi/index.rss

Thanks! I promise to make this a permanent change. If you notice any errors or problems please let me know.

Posted at: 23:28 | permalink

Uptown Rhythm n Brass

We went to see Uptown Rhythm n Brass with several friends friday night. They were playing at the Brick House in Butler, and while I'm not particularly fond of the food, it's comforting to the extent that you don't feel like you're in Butler anymore after you're in there, save for the strange people on the dance floor.

Anyhow, Eric was singing and playing harmonica. I say that sorta nonchalantly, but my reaction on Friday was more like, "Holy Shit! I didn't think anybody could cover David Clayton Thomas like that!" It stands as a testament to the talent in this band that Eric and several others in the band are barely out of their mid 20's.

Eric's harmonica work was only icing on the cake after he killed Lucretia Mac Evil. Eric and the band definitely have "the sound" down. If you're into 70's horn music, you've got to see this band, and oh yeah, I really appreciated that they covered stuff like Peter Gabriel and Santana in addition to the usual BS&T and Chicago standards.

Posted at: 22:22 | permalink

Two Interesting Pieces From the Post Gazette

Teller on Teller

Real Rain Man Touches Hearts In Butler

Posted at: 21:32 | permalink

Sat, 27 Sep 2003

I Have Seen The Future

of Linux Desktops, and it's called XFCE. This is XFCE 4.0 running on Fedora 0.94 on my Emachines M5310 latpop at 1280x800.

While a full-fledged menu system such as that found in KDE or Gnome seems lacking, most of the other dektop features are there. And it's fast. No bloat. And has all the coolish Mac OSX Aqua stylings.

Posted at: 16:37 | permalink

Wed, 24 Sep 2003

Shaming The Perpetrator

An innovative sentence in a deadly collision that killed one parent, put the other in a coma, and left the child parentless. I taught at the school where the father worked. Most would say the perpetrator got off easy.

Posted at: 09:08 | permalink

Fri, 19 Sep 2003

Outsourcing

Thinking about outsourcing part of your business to India?

Think again.

Posted at: 07:26 | permalink

Tue, 16 Sep 2003

Canon Rebel 300D

Wow! I'm dying to know how Nikon or Fuji are going to respond to the new Canon Rebel 300D is for digital. If I didn't have so damn much money tied up in Nikkor lenses, I might just buy the Canon. I've had a quixotic relationship between Nikon and Canon over the years, why should the future be any different?

Posted at: 11:53 | permalink

Redhat Partnership

Redhat:

We are excited to announce that we are working on an alliance with another well-known provider of Red-Hat compatible packages.

Who the well-known provider of Red-Hat compatible packages is remains a mystery, at least to me. Also, the nature of the alliance remains a mystery.

Anybody know what's going on? I've looked in the usual places and come up empty.

Posted at: 11:26 | permalink

Mon, 15 Sep 2003

Ark Linux Ships 9.1 Alpha

I was on IRC this morning with the ark linux developers and discovered that my timing was quite good - they put out their 9.1 alpha today - the first update since july or so. Not all the mirrors are synched yet, but oregon state was first.

Watch this space for my review of Ark Linux 9.1 alpha later this week.

Posted at: 23:22 | permalink

Mon, 08 Sep 2003

DiahRIAA

DWAYNE FATHERREE in Tuscaloosa News:

If I were to start collecting data from online users without their knowledge, compile it and use it to extort money from them, I would be a criminal. The RIAA has managed to do the same thing, except it was aided and abetted by legislators, courts and even the White House.

On the other hand, you might be a spammer. The RIAA and spammers have the same goal - to jam inferior products down the throats of the unwilling. And the RIAA gets about as much respect from consumers as spammers.

If the whole music industry fell off the face of the earth tomorrow, I'd cry no tears, and I'm a musician! The problem began when we started referring to music as an industry and will end when the two words are seen as being at odds. For some musicians, the art is so important that it comes before eating, sleeping, and shelter in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's the music that I want to hear.

Posted at: 08:29 | permalink

Fri, 05 Sep 2003

Washington Post Spears Bush

Referring to W's involvement in the pre-NFL rock concert on the mall in Washington, DC:

He also said pro football "celebrates the values that make our country so strong." Like what, violence and greed?

Later, referring to the use of Orff's Carmina Burana in the commercials, the Post says...

When Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini included a bit of "Carmina Burana" in his borderline-obscene film "Salo," he explained he did so because he considered it "fascist music." We just note that in passing.

It's one of the funniest pieces I've seen in a while. Here, judge for yourself.

Posted at: 21:57 | permalink

Tue, 02 Sep 2003

Appreciating Bronson

How you can appreciate Charles Bronson without mentioning The Evil That Men Do is beyond me.

Posted at: 07:01 | permalink

Thu, 28 Aug 2003

US Republican Party Outsources Fundraising to India

The Inquirer says:

We do hope and trust here at the INQUIRER that the irony of underpaid people in Harayana helping robots to call possibly out of work Americans because of a widespread policy of corporate outsourcing is not lost on our readers.

I, for one, am endorsing Charlie Crystle for US Senate in 2004. I'm about as apolitical as you can get, and I'm not even sure if I can vote for Charlie, but I find most of his writing resonates with me and the fact that he's a Washington outsider and admits to having worked as a musician, waiter, and software executive fascinating.

Charlie clearly gets the technology aspect of evolving political campaigns as he managed to help me discover him by linking to my blog. I'm curious as to what caused him to make the link in the first place, but regardless, I'm glad to know there's somebody running for office who looks better than this.

Posted at: 23:13 | permalink

Sat, 23 Aug 2003

Redhat Severn Beta On Emachines M5310

Redhat released the Severn Beta (9.0.93) about a month ago and I started looking at it last night to see how well it was going to solve some of my laptop woes, most of which stem from the disjointed ACPI support in linux.

The install is reaching a very mature stage, I didn't really have any issues there.

After install, as with Mandrake 9.1, I had to edit the XF86Config for my widescreen monitor which runs at 1280x800. However, I no longer needed to disable the acceleration for the ATI Radeon IGP. Acceleration appears to work across the board.

Unfortunately, ACPI still appears to be very broken. Redhat makes some commentary on the ACPI detection at install time in their beta doc, but it remains a black art as far as I can tell. My box came up with the ACPI daemon installed, but there didn't appear to be any acpi=on line in the grub.conf. In addition, the gnome and KDE batt-stat applets were in various stages of disrepair. The KDE one ran, but didn't see the battery and gave an interesting message saying that ACPI was partially installed. The gnome applet crashed on load, and produced the same results on successive attempts. The lack of ACPI support, at least without a kernel rebuild, means that the machine runs full tilt (read hot) with the fan going, which in turn means that battery life is necessarily short ~ 1 hour.

The new boot graphical boot process is nice-looking, but there must be some technical hurdles to be overcome in the boot. The machine boots into grub with graphics, then goes into text mode for a few seconds, then switches to the graphical boot mode, then goes back into text mode for the login prompt, then switches back into graphical mode as it enters runlevel 5. It would be nice if the boot was unified, more like the mandrake one.

Right now, I've got my USB card reader and PCMCIA orinoco wireless card working. I haven't tried the firewire port but the ohci1394 driver loaded without complaint.

The system does appear to be very stable and the desktop fit and finish is reaching near-Teutonic levels of quality. I'm still hoping for the day when ACPI works fully.

Posted at: 10:02 | permalink

Fri, 22 Aug 2003

Ernie Ball Drops Microsoft

Microsoft gets a taste of it's own FUD campaigns. This has to worry the folks in Redmond.

Posted at: 21:33 | permalink

The End Of The Cam As We Know It

Variable valve timing and lift was just a stepping stone on the road to the complete replacement of mechanical valve systems in internal combustion engines with electronic valve actuating systems.

Posted at: 07:01 | permalink

Tue, 19 Aug 2003

Triumph Introduces 2300 cc Motorcycle

British bike-maker Triumph became the first manufacturer to introduce a 2300 cc motorcycle. The new bike has 140 hp and 147 lb ft of torque. I'm not normally wowed by sheer displacement (my bike's a 650), but maybe cruisers aren't so bad after all?

Posted at: 06:26 | permalink

Mon, 18 Aug 2003

Former Software Execs Slugging Coffee At Starbucks

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazzette:

Now he vacillates between praising the Starbucks job -- it offers health insurance and a chance to meet people who might be a link to another career -- and voicing a certain queasiness, not unlike a ballet dancer forced to dance for tips in a strip joint.

I feel very lucky to have a great job in technology - or any job for that matter.

Posted at: 05:47 | permalink

Sun, 17 Aug 2003

Pat Metheny Trio At Manchester Craftsmen's Guild

Pat Metheny Trio is playing Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in Pittsburgh on October 10, 11, 12. I'll finally get to see Antonio Sanchez live. I've seen Pat dozens of times, but I've been dying to catch his new drummer. Cool.

Posted at: 23:15 | permalink

Motorcycle Safety Program Yields License

I finished the last of the four sessions at the motorcycle safety foundation class today. The last hour was a test which I passed resulting in my learner's permit being promoted to a full Class M license. Now I can carry passengers and ride at night legally. Woo Hoo!

Posted at: 01:14 | permalink

Abandoning Blog Abandonment

I've come to the conlusion that my recent foray into alternative blog systems was going to eat my life and went back to using movable type. I am going to simplify the whole thing significantly but not tonight.

Posted at: 01:10 | permalink

Tue, 22 Jul 2003

Big Blue Sends Tech Jobs Afar

Many would think of IBM as being as quintessentially American as apple pie. Think again.

One thing that the article fails to mention is that software companies must address the commoditization of software via open source. Open source is an inherently global undertaking with virtually zero engineering costs. Moving technology jobs overseas will likely help IBM compete with other products having high dollar engineering costs, and co-opting the products doesn't hurt, but in the end, it's probably a losing battle. It begs the question of whether technology companies will demand more or less H1B visas in light of this offshoring.

One thing's for certain, if you're a US citizen looking for a technology job now, your chances of finding one, without creating it yourself, are going down by the day. You'd probably get farther selling oil filters at a parts counter. That's what a lot of those displaced steel workers are doing since the stunning machine of globalization flattened their industry twenty years ago.

Taken another way, if your goal was to terrorize the US and you have lots of money - that's easy. Fund international companies targeting vertical markets in the US whose sole purpose is to offshore the jobs within that vertical. Why stop with the technology industry? Why not do the same thing to healthcare, finance, etc. When you've mastered the five top verticals, set your sights on offshoring the US government. Service levels may actually improve.

Oh well, there's always Canada.

Posted at: 11:09 | permalink

Sun, 20 Jul 2003

Clark (Dis) Connect Linux

I've been running clark connect linux for years now, since the pre-1.0 release. I've come to depend on it in a milk and cookies sort of way. So imagine my excitement when they finally started building the redhat 9-based ClarkConnect 2.0 and released a beta. I decided to skip the beta and wait to test on a release candidate. This week they released an RC1. I downloaded the ISO and started installing it on a venerable old PII-333, 640 MB, 2x 8 GB disks. I had read that the list of outstanding issues, but they seemed mostly cosmetic. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The trouble began with the installer which ran extremely slowly and crashed with an "unable to read glib-blah-blah" error. And yes, I had tested the disk with the checksum thingy. I sensed that the old cirrus logic agp video card might be part of the problem so I swapped in a spare fire gl 1000 pro. That got me past the crash. When the installer had finished, it had taken 6 hours to install the single 300 MB CD-ROM!

The slowness didn't stop there. The machine took multiple restarts to boot and when booted correctly (?), the entire boot process took ~ 20 minutes! Once it booted, the web config interface barely worked taking minutes to load a single page with some pages failing on a timeout. Running top indicated that mrtg appeared to be eating CPU so I did, "pkill mrtg" but it came back to life and I couldn't quite find the startup script to really kill it.

After a day or so of this disappointing experience, I decided to try and document my experience on the clark connect forums. That too was hopeless as I couldn't remember my login and when I created a new login, never received the confirmation mail, even after 3 days - so I blogged it.

I'm hoping that clark connect gets the issues straightened out and refrains from calling something barely beta quality a release candidate in the future. I used to think those guys walked on water.

Posted at: 08:33 | permalink

Tue, 15 Jul 2003

Don't Need A Motorcycle Helmet?

Keep an eye on that passenger.

Posted at: 13:56 | permalink

Wed, 09 Jul 2003

Engineers Are From Mars

HR people are from Venus. Dave Copeland shoots and scores with one of the funniest blogs I've read in eons. It might not be so funny if the reactions of the HR people weren't so damn revealing. Unfortunately, I've had more than a few conversations like this on the phone.

Posted at: 08:52 | permalink

Close Encounters Of The Bear Kind

I was on my usual daily run with the dog today at Moraine State Park when I was crossing the entrance road to the first boat launch on the north shore when a black bear appeared in the trail about a hundred feet ahead.

Fortunately, the dog didn't see the bear so I started sprinting for the boat launch where there were at least a few more people around. The bear seemed to hurry off as soon as he saw me. I stood talking to the tour boat operator for a few minutes and then headed back to the trail since I needed to get through there to get to my car and the remainder of the area is heavily wooded. I got about 50 feet down the trail before I discovered that the bear was still foraging around in the deep vegetation at the trail's edge. Heart palpitations set in when I heard the unmistakable sound that the bear made while rushing through the underbrush.

For the second time, I turned and started sprinting back toward the boat launch, all the while realizing that I couldn't possibly outrun the bear. The bear had retreated a second time when I decided to take the road back which is a long way around after running that far in all that heat and humidity but the tour boat operator was nice enough to follow along in his car and make sure I made it out of the vicinity in one piece. Thanks to the kindness of strangers.

I understand that black bear attacks are rare but it's still a frightening experience due to the sheer size of the animal. Now I'm just debating what, if anything, I should do on my future excursions through the park. Ironically, the section of the park I was running yesterday is one of the most heavily trafficked and I usually take the most unused and remote trail I can find. One things for sure, the reports of bear sightings in previously uncharted territory for bears are true.

Posted at: 07:28 | permalink

Sat, 05 Jul 2003

MIT Launches Government Watch

The Inquirer: "It is a chillingly Orwellian departure."

Posted at: 06:43 | permalink

Died On The Fourth Of July

RIP Barry White, a huge loss to the music world.

Posted at: 06:38 | permalink

Fri, 04 Jul 2003

Oh Say Can You See

what's happening to our liberty?

Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette hits one out of the park.

Posted at: 07:32 | permalink

Thu, 03 Jul 2003

Times They Are A Changin'

Just as the near-ubiquity of cell phones changed the vernacular in the US in recent history, expect the now dominant growth of laptop sales to do the same in the next five years.

Posted at: 08:42 | permalink

Fri, 27 Jun 2003

RIAA Sues Downloaders

Cary Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America said, "There's no such thing as a fee lunch."

Did he really say that or am I seeing things? The irony is not lost on me. Anyhow, here's the original article and a screenshot. I'm sure they'll fix the brain-dead editing before long.

Posted at: 10:16 | permalink

Tue, 24 Jun 2003

Motorcyclist Survives Deadly Accident

I've ridden route 322 from Franklin to Clarion occasionally. I often wonder about the randomness involved in accidents. Somehow, the surival of this motorcyclist doesn't quite seem random.

Posted at: 07:02 | permalink

Wed, 18 Jun 2003

Funk In A Nutshell

I've been watching all this talk about funk on Sam Ruby's weblog and while it's catchy, I thought it might be useful to explain the somewhat intuitive, but elusive nature of the word funk. Of course, I am a musician. You would expect me to say something like this. Worse, I am a drummer. That makes me a weird musician. So here goes:

When we look up funk in the dictionary, what we find isn't exactly elucidating.

An earthy quality appreciated in music such as jazz or soul.

Uhh, yeah. No words could adequately explain what 30 seconds of George Clinton would hammer home. So what is it that makes funk, or makes music funky, or so special and different from any other music?

The essence of funk lies in the art of surprise. When we say that something is funky we're really saying that it's surprising - in an odd, paradoxical sort of way. Funk music does this with patterns.

We have a strong psycho-acoustic tendency to expect a pattern to repeat. A drummer creates funk by introducing a pattern - a bar of music - something as simple as...

boom thwack boom thwack

and then introducing a variation in the pattern:

boom thwack boom thwack boom thwack boom (space) TWHACK (space) boom thwack boom thwack boom thwack boom (fill) (REPEAT)

It's that space, the resultant displacement of the beat, and the recapitulation of the original beat, that makes it funky - surprising, titillating. The mind begins wondering what the next surprise is going to be. The mind feeds off of these surprises. The better the drummer, the funkier the variations, the greater the effect.

This has been taken to extremes by practitioners such as Dave Weckl with Chick Corea's band. Dave developed a system of displacing beats such that it sounded as if the meter had changed but the reality was that Dave was playing his own psychotic boom thwack against the band while they were still a half beat or so behind him. This created some really wacky funk, comprehensible mostly by people who are into jazz fusion. Dave would then shift back the time in a few bars and the listener's mind would go "AH HA! I get it."

That's not the whole story. The very timing of beats within funk music is also very important. That is, if the time is constant, as if set by a metronome, each player in the band is not playing to exactly the same metronome. Rather, there are extremely slight variations in the placement of each player's relative time that cause the music to sound the way it does. This becomes very important in the relationship between the bass and the drums. Musicians refer to this as the pocket or being in the pocket or having a deep pocket. Similar effects can be observed listening to Ringo Starr play with the Beatles.

In this way, virtually any music can be funky by introducing the art of surprise and some tricky timing. So there you have it, the essence of funk in one easy lesson. If it were only that easy to do!

Posted at: 12:05 | permalink

Tue, 17 Jun 2003

Brain Salad Surgery

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Pennsylvania's senate voted to repeal the motorcycle helmet law and the bill moved to the house. I've always enjoyed the sight of spilled monkey brains on the road so I'm looking forward to the house's rubber stamp. So, how long before we roll back seat belt laws? No matter, Darwin has a way of prevailing.

Through the miracle of google, we can see where this leads before it even starts. Note, the search includes only four terms: motorcycle not wearing helmet. There is no tom-foolery going on here. Google knows that semantically, "not wearing helmet" and "death" are related. Also, keep in mind that there are nearly 100 matches on this search in the last month alone!

Yesterday, I was out on the SV making a left turn across a fork in the road. Two Harley riders were coming toward me in the opposite direction from the fork. The one closest to the middle proceeded to turn his head exorcist-style, while still moving and drift through the stop sign while crossing the double yellow line into my lane. I swerved to the edge of the road to avoid him. Had I been driving my car, he'd be in the hospital. Without a helmet, he'd likely have a fairly severe head injury. That maneuver was a case study in bad motorcycle technique. 1) Failing to stop for a stop sign. 2) Turning head without keeping wheel straight. 3) Riding into oncoming traffic. 4) Both riders were wearing half-helmets and no protective gear. But he lived to impale himself another day. Maybe he'll get lucky and be able to do it without his helmet.

Mike Seate of the Pittsburgh Trib-Review has a good article on the subject.

Update: Mike Seate's got another piece on the subject and Michael Miller has one too - both from the Trib-Review.

Dress for the fall, not for the ride.

Posted at: 07:51 | permalink

Fri, 13 Jun 2003

The Number of the Beast

If these politicians are really serious about eradicating roads that bear the numbers 666 they're going to have to work harder because a few thousand miles from the southwest, we've got this one and I'm willing to bet it's not unique.

Posted at: 07:53 | permalink

Wed, 11 Jun 2003

Zoning The Amish Into Extinction

There are probably more psychotic maggot zoning boards across the country than there are horses.

Posted at: 16:11 | permalink

The Long Slow Decline

It'll be curious to see whether trends in US unemployment lead to the same place that the Japanese have gone. [Fortune and MSNBC, respectively]

Posted at: 08:46 | permalink

Tue, 10 Jun 2003

I'm No Mechanic

So when the PCMCIA bus on my venerable Inspiron broke a couple months ago, I resigned myself to being without a laptop until I found a good deal on a new one. Well, for some strange reason, I decided to disassemble the Inspiron this morning. After I got the myriad of odd-sized screws out of the bottom of the case and got the keyboard detached from the front, it became apparent that the PCMCIA male bus connector had simply dislodged itself from the female side. After correcting that disconnection and reassembling the purple wonder, I'm happily back on the couch typing with the Orinoco wireless intact.

Woo Hoo!

Posted at: 10:50 | permalink

Sun, 08 Jun 2003

Long Time No Blog

It all started with a filesystem crash about a month ago. I'm one of those people that classifies sysadmin like a special form of addiction such as smoking or drinking. I can look all this sysadmin work straight in the eye and it feels destructive, wasteful, unfulfilling; yet, at the same time, it's intoxicating because each new problem breeds a solution that creates new problems. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The filesystem crash occurred on an old Micron box that I had been playing hot potato with for a while. I always liked Micron for the "bragging rights at the bar, I've got the baddest computer in the land" effect but this experience with the only Micron I've ever owned has taught me a lesson or two. After watching the machine crash in very strange ways under virtually every OS I ever installed on it, I concluded it was some deep down bug in the BIOS, condemned it, and gutted it for parts. So I've got a spare disk in the Toshiba, and an extra burner and DVD-ROM.

I'd been putting off fixing the damn situation because when it crashed, I had a backup box that easily swapped in minus a month or so worth of blog entries and email. Yikes. That'll inspire all manner of violence from the wife.

So, I've been waiting for the ClarkConnect folks to release a 2.0 beta based on Redhat 9 and in the meantime I had grown tired of dealing with their slightly out of date release and subsequent apt-get massive attack.

I basically jerk around with 3 linux distros - redhat, mandrake, and clarkconnect. Each of them inspires a love-hate relationship.

I love redhat for it's sensibility but hate it for the lack of the GUI bits that mandrake provides like the ip masquerading proxy wizard. I love mandrake for the wonderful wizards, but can't quite get everything to work because it's not quite ubiquitous and there just aren't as enough eyeballs trying some really strange stuff like trying to run ASP.net on top of Apache 2. And then there's clarkconnect - the headless linux server for the home. It's a great idea whose time has come - run linux on an old box and use it as your proxy/gateway. It's a pretty common idiom these days. But I inevitably run into those situations that require the linux box to have a head. Did you ever try to install Image Magick headless? Run certain Swing stuff? Oh yeah, sure, the docs say it works great. Not on my hardware.

This weekend I installed Mandrake 9.1 and wrestled with configuring all the server bits that I require (arguably a lot more work than clarkconnect). But I've got most of it working tonight. I'm gonna take a look at the clarkconnect 2.0 beta this week and I reserve the right to go back to clarkconnect if it looks compelling.

I have managed to get out on the SV a few times a week despite the horrendous rain. I thought when I left Seattle, that situation would improve. Heh. On friday, I got back up to Tionesta via route 62 which is one of PA's unusually smooth snaking 2 lane made-for-motorcycle roads. It runs comfortably around 60 MPH though I did manage to find a variety of slow moving vehicles which I've learned to pass with the following protocol: click down one gear, apply throttle, swerve into oncoming traffic, swerve back into proper lane, cut throttle. Elapsed time? 5 seconds. My arms feel like Freddie Kruger after one of those sessions.

I'll leave you with this morbid mystery. I was working with mono's C# compiler, mcs 0.24, this morning. After all of the evolution that these compilers have been through, I can cast an assigment to an enum type beyond the values specified in the enum's declaration. Oh sure, you can argue that the compiler falls back on the underlying type of the enum for it's range checking but surely this isn't what they meant when they said, strict typing. Hmm...


using System;
class Hello
{
  enum morality
  {
    bad,
    good
  }
  static void Main()
  {
    morality m = morality.bad;
    m = (morality)27;
    Console.WriteLine(m);
  }
}


Posted at: 21:58 | permalink

Wed, 16 Apr 2003

Ask Yourself

If the job market in Pittsburgh is so strong, why does it remain one of the few large metropolitan areas losing population?

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette Article:

Zylstra said the chief challenge in the tech arena is attracting and retaining talented workers.

As one of the few large region's of the country losing population, he said, Pittsburgh "must attract talent from all over the world."

Posted at: 06:41 | permalink

Sun, 13 Apr 2003

Creating Jobs vs. Finding Jobs

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette has an interesting article on the dilemma facing the unemployed in a city that's struggled to retain it's best and brightest. The article quotes Charlie Beck, director of Priority Two, a nonprofit employment assistance group:

"The people today have skills. They are highly trained, educated, the kind of people that Pittsburgh is crying for, and they are available right now,'' he said. "I'm talking about senior people. There are more people who made $100,000 in their last job unemployed today than there ever have been in the history of Pittsburgh. It's pretty amazing."

What's really curious to me is how the article doesn't mention self-employment, the creation of new jobs, or the startup culture even once. If you went back five years, that rhetoric was all the rage in this town. Now, it's all but dead. This trend is endemic to the region.

Oh sure, PA's got programs like SEA, but these appear to be far more of a placeholder than producing substantive change in the economy or culture. In the end, people will go where the work is, unless they are able to ceate work for themselves. This region has tremendous difficulty with new business creation and that remains a limiting factor to it's population stabilization and growth.

Posted at: 11:08 | permalink

Sat, 12 Apr 2003

Is there a more revolting crime?

Than hitting a van full of handicapped kids head on? One thing's for certain, this professor sure is a PR nightmare for CMU.

One can only hope that the legal system doesn't screw up his incarceration as badly as they horked up his bond posting despite the protestations of his neighbors.

Posted at: 00:15 | permalink

Fri, 11 Apr 2003

One Year Ago Today: Google SOAP VBScript

My blog was invisible (unlinked) until I wrote this. A year later, we've seen a lot of interesting prototypes, but nothing that really changed the world the way we'd hoped. This year hasn't really seen any announcements that have garnered quite as much press as this one. I hope that changes soon.

Posted at: 16:17 | permalink

Mon, 07 Apr 2003

The Investigator

Is that what you call it? The description is rather frightening for a number of reasons.

free enneagram test

Posted at: 16:00 | permalink

Why Not?

The Jeff's have some good points and a general feeling that resonates with me. I have a thousand unique visitors a day, but it's rare that any of it provides meaning. Note to self: re-read Victor Frankl.

Why is it that everybody I know right now, whether young or old, rocket scientist or mill worker, is trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up and why they spend so much time on things that are seemingly meaningless. It's a bizarre kind of shared entropy. Sigh.

Posted at: 15:49 | permalink

Mysterious Disappearances

I always wondered whether this happened to anybody. I guess it has.

Posted at: 14:23 | permalink

Sun, 06 Apr 2003

Required Reading For DC Policy Makers

I try not to make much noise with regard to politics as it's a subject that I'm generally not particularly passionate about, but this article from the Seattle Times should be required reading for decision makers in DC.

Posted at: 23:09 | permalink

Fri, 04 Apr 2003

Bill Moyers on Media Consolidation

I managed to catch Bill Moyers piece on US media consolidation tonight on PBS and it was compelling. I knew Clear Channel sucked before seeing this program, but I didn't know it was that bad. Of particular interest was the partisanship surrounding the administration of the FCC. This article paints a very grim picture for the present and future of big media journalism and it's relationship to the US government.

What it doesn't explain is that the situation with commercial scheduling software is arguably headed for similar levels of monopolization. Should we then be surprised when the average American is reduced to lemming status receiving the same messages from the same publishers running the same commercial scheduling software paid for by the same advertisers on the wings of a rubber stamp commission?

Posted at: 22:34 | permalink

Thu, 27 Mar 2003

Steven Johnson on iPhoto

So tonight I discovered that Steven Johnson has a blog. I have at least one of Steven's books and really dig it. Anyhow, he's written an article that points out the interface innovation in Apple's iPhoto, but the article doesn't really explain where the zoomable UI concept originates. I believe a fair bit of the research (and subsequent implementation) on zoomable UI was done by Ben Bederson's group at the University of Maryland HCI Lab. Check out photomesa. It was really slow when I first looked at it, but the conceptual approach to bringing meaning to large numbers of image objects was certainly novel at the time.

Posted at: 23:43 | permalink

Tue, 25 Mar 2003

Janitor Where Art Thou?

Do janitors really search for jobs on the web? If so, do they have resumes? If they have resumes, do employers like this pay to relocate janitors? Offer signing bonuses? Stock options? Stop the insanity!

Posted at: 21:10 | permalink

Mon, 24 Mar 2003

Free At Last, Free At Last

Well, folks... I finally joined the legions of unemployed today. No blame placed, no sympathy required. Let's just say I'm glad to be moving on and leave it at that. Anyhow, I've put the resumé link back on the header bar, updated the resumé in 3 forms and started calling my friends in low places. If you have work, I'm all ears.

In the meantime, I think I'll get back to eating right, exercising regularly, and taking in the sunshine. Who knows how long that'll last.

Posted at: 15:49 | permalink

Mon, 17 Mar 2003

Bone Marrow Yields Insulin Producing Cells

In a breakthrough study, the Seattle Post Intelligencer (via Google News) reports that researchers at NYU have discovered an insulin producing property in the bone marrow cells of mice. The implications for diabetes cures are not yet known.

Posted at: 11:17 | permalink

Sun, 16 Mar 2003

Routalicious - Riding Western PA routes 308, 322, 68

Did my first 100+ mile day on the bike today. Discovered a wonderful route, some of which I had ridden in other forms, some of which was new to me. The route goes like this:

1. From route 8 in Butler, PA head north on route 308. Route 8 intersects with 308 north at the north end of Clearview Mall.
2. Follow 308 north all the way to Franklin, PA. 308 crosses under route 8 at Pearl. Do not enter route 8 there, follow 308 all the way to it's end where it joins route 8 just south of Franklin.
3. Make a left and follow route 8 north into Franklin. Once on the main street, go straight until Route 322 east, which will be a left turn.
4. Follow 322 east to Clarion.
5. In Clarion, make a right onto route 68 west and follow 68 west to Butler.

The whole trip took about 3 hours and came out to about 120 miles on my odometer. Each of the three routes, 308, 322, and 68 has some amazingly fun rolling hills and curves. In the early morning hours that I rode it, it was virtually deserted save for route 68 which arguably had more Harleys than cars.

Tomorrow, the joys of commuting by bike with a high of 68 degrees!

Posted at: 21:01 | permalink

Fri, 14 Mar 2003

Google Has Growing Pains

This is not a condemnation of Google, but rather just an investigation of empirical evidence coming out of Google's search product. Bryan reports that he's experienced some google errors. Transient errors are nothing new on the web, but Google has been incredibly stable to this point.

It gets worse. I noticed Google referring some traffic to my site this morning via a simple search, vb mono linux. At the time of this screenshot my article is the #1 entry for this particular search.

This raises two interesting issues: 1) How or why is my site ranked above the mono site itself in Google's ranking algorithm? 2) Notice the URL of my article:

http://davidwatson.org/archives/000746.html

That's the wrong URL.

If you visit the site, www.davidwatson.org redirects to davidwatson.org:8086 and that article is linked as

http://www.davidwatson.org/archives/000746.html

in every instance that I can find.

Google's parser handles this correctly for the vast majority of links, including a simple search on david watson. However, there appears to be a bug in the parse of this particular link, because that link never occurs without the trip dub prefix or the 8086 port on my site. I'll report this bug to google later today.

The timing of all this is interesting given that Bryan and I are going to see Marissa Mayer speak at CMU next week. Hmm...

Update: Russell Beattie weighs in on a similar subject here.

Posted at: 11:30 | permalink

NESBA at BeaveRun

I just registered for the free NESBA introductory course at BeaveRun. This is a great deal. I get to attend the beginner classroom training and have a couple 15 minute runs around the track for free. I'm excited. The track looks like a lot of fun and maybe I'll learn something.

To NESBA's credit, the entire registration is online, as it should be. That's more than I can say for the MSF course. I've gotten a busy signal everytime I've tried to call and register. People would be a lot safer if they could actually register for the course successfully.

Posted at: 00:12 | permalink

Thu, 13 Mar 2003

Slashdot on Motorized Bicycles

From slashdot: Is that a motorbike or what? 80 MPG at 30 MPH... seems like that could provide a cheap, efficient commuting alternative for a lot of people.

Posted at: 21:58 | permalink

Wed, 12 Mar 2003

Scary Stunts at Daytona

If you go to Bike Week at Daytona and happen to be watching a certain stunt rider do tricks for the audience, don't volunteer. It could cost you the family jewels.

Posted at: 07:52 | permalink

Tue, 11 Mar 2003

moRaSS Sneak Preview

I've demonstrated previously that I was able to parse RSS with current mono implementations. I've now begun taking baby steps to wrap that RSS parse in a gtksharp GUI. It's hideous, and it borrows heavily from the work of Kristian Rietveld, and it needs to be modded to use libgtkhtml to show it's markup, but it runs and demonstrates further what's possible with current mono implementations on linux. I'm running version 0.23.

View The Screenshot

More later, after the motorcycle ride. I've got priorities. :-/

Posted at: 15:29 | permalink

Sun, 09 Mar 2003

Chilly Vanilly

So maybe commuting on two wheels year round requires more thought. Despite my wife's protestations, I headed out on the bike this morning to go off and teach a lesson to one of my students. I got a mile from the house before I decided that 19 degrees with winds running 15-30 MPH was inviting pre-demise rigor mortis. It was kinda fun watching people drive by going, "Oh my god, that man's on a motorcycle". It wasn't that my torso wasn't prepared. It's the extremities that are problematic. Note to self: better gloves and a balaclava. Someday I'll learn that the wife is never wrong. Period.

Anyhow, I did manage to take a few pics in bright sunlight, so if you're searching the web for high resolution pics of a 2002 Suzuki SV650 in yellow or a KBC VR-1 helmet in yellow, you've come to the right place.

Posted at: 13:32 | permalink

Sat, 08 Mar 2003

Picking Up The Pieces

Of my shattered former self, I wonder why anybody drives a car? Come to think of it, would you like to buy my Quattro? If it weren't for all of the ice and snow that we have around here this time of year, there'd be no reason for these four wheeled friends. Of course, there are people who think that two wheels can handle anything.

I am referring to my indoctrination into motorcycle-holics anonymous this afternoon. I got to the shop around 2:30, just as the weather was peaking at 58 degrees with light winds. The sun had ducked behind a steady layer of clouds but precipitation wouldn't come till this evening. My mother gave me a ride to the shop and I kindly asked her if she would follow me home so that I wouldn't have any scary people driving up my muffler. She agreed and we set out from the shop at about 3 o'clock. I chose a particarly circuitous route over the 30 miles or so from the shop to my house. I managed to construct the route entirely from rural 2 lanes and quite happily I might add that you'd be hard pressed to find a straight road in this part of Pennsylvania.

This is where I begin raving about the bike. I mentioned in the previous post that I bought a 2002 Suzuki SV650. I have piles of european motorcycle magazines laying here saying how wonderful it is but all of that paid professional banter doesn't adequately describe just how good the bike is, especially for beginners.

One problem that seems to haunt beginner bikes is that they rarely have enough power and charm to keep pleasing their owners past the neophyte stage. The SV has armies of people defending it as a top notch canyon carver or race bike, but I've seen quite a few articles stating that it may not be an appropriate bike for novices. And I heartily disagree. What do you want from a novice bike? Ease of use? It's there in spades, evidenced by the fact that I only stalled the bike once, and I haven't been on a bike in at least 15 years. The gear box, throttle, brakes, and switches are all in easy reach and all work smoothly without the typical false neutrals, locked up brakes, etc.

Another thing that's improved dramatically in 20 years is helmet technology. I recall the old motorcycle helmets from the 70s being rather unfashionable, uncomfortable, and (most likely) unsafe. The KBC VR-1 model that I bought is comfortable, highly visible, and affordable. I was rather amazed as I zipped down the road at what a serene experience that this helmet provides. I am not alone in this opinion.

After the initial nervous feeling wore off in the first 5 minutes, I rode the bike so much that the low fuel light came on. As I was gassing up, the gentleman next to me asked about the bike and mentioned that he and the wife were both motorcycle riders. That friendly camaraderie gives me a warm fuzzy. The other warm fuzzy comes from the kind of zen state required to successfully pilot a motorcycle without getting killed. There's nothing like it.

I'm hoping that the weather improves as I'd like to get out and ride some more but I believe the high tomorrow is supposed to be 30 degrees. I'll at least try and get some pictures if the sun's out. There wasn't enough daylight left by the time I came home tonight.

Posted at: 23:26 | permalink

Spring is Sprung

At least for today, the weather is looking very spring-like in western PA. I decided to pick up my new motorcycle today. That's it exactly - a 2002 Suzuki SV650. I was feeling a little nervous about it, having not ridden a motorcycle in a long time, until I saw this. Note the domain. Things like this have an incredible calming and inspiring effect on me. I thought to myself, if this guy can ride a motorcycle with a prosthesis, I can ride one with all my limbs intact. I'm sure it'll be an experience. More on that later and hopefully a few pics if I have enough daylight left.

Posted at: 11:01 | permalink

Fri, 07 Mar 2003

SCO Sues IBM For Devaluing Unix

In what can only be described as one of the strangest lawsuits in years, the Register reports that SCO is suing IBM for devaluing Unix.

Posted at: 07:32 | permalink

Thu, 06 Mar 2003

Tom Ridge Kills Model Rocketry

I enjoyed building and launching model rockets as a boy. Now an entire generation may be prohibited from such enjoyment. Should we be surprised if some kid blows himself up in the backyard trying to launch one of these things with a homemade concoction in place of a proper solid fuel rocket engine? I guess I won't be suprised if it looks like a scene out of October Sky. Sigh.

Posted at: 21:34 | permalink

Mon, 03 Mar 2003

RSS - bearer of bad fruit

Dave Winer's quoting Jeremy Allaire talking about some of the bad stuff that could happen with RSS. Connecting the dots... Philip Fibiger is talking about some really bad stuff that he's prototyped in RSS. Yikes.

Posted at: 23:44 | permalink

XMLRPC on Mono - NYet

That's short for Not Yet. I've been working on building Charles Cook's XMLRPC.net library on Mono 0.21 on Redhat 8. I've got the DLL built, but running a client application against a perl XML-RPC server using XMLRPC::Lite and the following C# client code:

using CookComputing.XmlRpc;
using System.Net;
using System;

public class dave
{
[XmlRpcUrl("http://localhost:8080/")]
interface Demo
{
[XmlRpcMethod("hi")]
string hi();
}

static void Main(string [] args)
{
Demo proxy = (Demo)XmlRpcProxyGen.Create(typeof(Demo));
Console.WriteLine(proxy.hi());
}
}

I get the following call stack:

# mono StateName.exe

Unhandled Exception: System.ObjectDisposedException: The object was used after being disposed
in <0x000af> 00 System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream:CheckDisposed ()
in <0x0001d> 00 System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream:Read (byte[],int,int)
in <0x00142> 00 System.Net.HttpWebResponse:ReadHttpLine (System.IO.Stream)
in <0x0021c> 00 System.Net.HttpWebResponse:.ctor (System.Uri,string,System.IO.Stream)
in <0x001eb> 00 System.Net.HttpWebRequest:GetResponseInternal ()
in <0x00060> 01 System.MulticastDelegate:invoke_WebResponse ()

Exception Rethrown at:
in (unmanaged) 03 System.MulticastDelegate:end_invoke_WebResponse_IAsyncResult (System.IAsyncResult)
in <0x00004> 03 System.MulticastDelegate:end_invoke_WebResponse_IAsyncResult (System.IAsyncResult)
in <0x0011c> 00 System.Net.HttpWebRequest:EndGetResponse (System.IAsyncResult)
in <0x000e4> 00 System.Net.HttpWebRequest:GetResponse ()
in <0x00087> 00 System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebClientProtocol:GetWebResponse (System.Net.WebRequest)
in <0x0031e> 00 CookComputing.XmlRpc.XmlRpcClientProtocol:Invoke (object,string,object[])
in <0x0001e> 00 CookComputing.XmlRpc.XmlRpcClientProtocol:Invoke (string,object[])
in <0x00048> 00 .XmlRpcProxyd13f5f04-0d7c-4d7f-b39d-4d57dd98bf00:hi ()
in <0x00066> 00 .dave:Main (string[])

This is consistent with the results that Charles reported to me by email. I'm assuming for now that there are some bits and pieces of the FCL missing that XMLRPC.net requires. I'm hopeful that they'll be there soon. Now that I have the library building cleanly on Mono, I'll keep it lying around and retest with new builds of Mono and report my results here.

Posted at: 19:39 | permalink

Fri, 28 Feb 2003

Mono ASP.net Works On Apache Linux With mod_mono

As I was saying in my previous post, I had read that ASP.net was working on linux via mod_mono. So I downloaded and installed the RPMs and ran the samples. I'm pleased to say that the samples work on Redhat 8. The temperature sample looks like this.

Screenshot of ASPX Temperature sample running on Redhat 8 Linux

Again, this team is doing fantastic work. I'd like to join the development team and help write some tests or doc or something. Hmm... Now, if I could just get SOAP or Charles Cook's XML-RPC.net working, I'd be on my way to nirvana. ;->

Posted at: 01:20 | permalink

Mono 0.21 Brings VB.net To Linux

The Mono project is making great progress with the .21 release of the compiler(s) and FCL as well as a 0.8 version of GTK#.

Notably, VB.net is now compiling basic GTK GUI apps cleanly. For instance, after a quick install of the mono binaries using the RPMs on Redhat 8, this program can be compiled by typing:

mbas gtk.vb -r gtk-sharp

The executable can then be run by typing:

mono gtk.exe

which produces a single button in a parent window:

This doesn't look like much, but the required infrastructure is relatively large and it stands as a testament to the ground breakinig work that this team is doing. I'm not a fan of VB per se, but if you'd have told me five years ago that people would be writing VB code on linux, I'd have thought you were possessed by the devil.

I'm planning on looking at ASP.net next, but that'll have to wait till the weekend.

Posted at: 00:00 | permalink

Thu, 27 Feb 2003

Business Week On Linux

Business Week has an entire series of articles dedicated to Linux market trends. Some of them are quite good.

Posted at: 07:46 | permalink

Fred Rogers Dies

Fred Rogers died after a brief bout with stomach cancer at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 74. I was fond of his show as a child. At a time when the world was virtually consumed by the death of character, Rogers defined character. His show wasn't as popular with this generation as it was with mine but his contribution remains unchanged. He will be sorely missed.

Posted at: 07:18 | permalink

Tue, 25 Feb 2003

P0rn goes mainstream

From MSNBC: It's all a bit odd.

Posted at: 07:45 | permalink

Starjewel Goes Movable Type

Starjewel is converting to movable type but it's not going so well. Good luck. It takes a little time, some sysadmin, and a small cauldron. The movable type forums are fantastic, as you've probably discovered. There are enough people running movable type in this town to have you up in a flash so don't hesitate to ask. We're waiting patiently.

Posted at: 07:37 | permalink

Irrational Exuberance

Seen on a vanity license plate:

DOW 16K.

Whoops.

Posted at: 07:18 | permalink

Sun, 23 Feb 2003

Norah Jones Wins Best Pop Vocal Album

Norah Jones has won best pop vocal album at this year's Grammy's. I figure it's only a matter of time before somebody starts crying that it wasn't a pop record in the first place, which is a debatable point - Jones herself admitted to being shocked that she won the pop category. But here's a more interesting question: has a Blue Note artist ever won a pop Grammy before? If so, when?

Norah Jones Live in New Orleans DVD is out in two days!

Posted at: 21:07 | permalink

Thu, 20 Feb 2003

Fonts Matter: Anti-Aliasing Mozilla on Redhat 8

I've been running Redhat 8 as my primary desktop operating system at home since it was released. I run Redhat on my Dell Inspiron 3700. I've been generally happy with the performance and usability of this configuration with one glaring exception: fonts.

The fonts in Gnome or KDE desktop are quite nice, but unfortunately, the mozilla browser that shipped with Redhat 8 is not built with anti-aliased font support.

Fortunately, rpm-packaged versions of mozilla are available. The xft rpm builds of mozilla are available here. If you download all of the packages, you can install by uninstalling mozilla 1.0 with rpm -e --nodeps mozilla and then force the install of the 1.3a packages with rpm -i --force moz*.rpm RPM will complain about evolution relying on certain mozilla libs, but I can tell you that the aforementioned RPM hackery can be completed without breaking evolution.

Finally, the Microsoft TrueType core fonts are available here. The instructions look a little daunting at first but I can assure you that they work reliably as I've completed them on two radically different machines. These fonts help when web pages don't have sensible font maps available and previously poor substitutions were made. The end result is compelling.

In the following screenshot, you can see a big difference between Opera's handling of the fonts in this zdnet webpage and mozilla's. Notice how big a difference the anti-aliased fonts make.

Opera 6 vs. Mozilla 1.3a at 1600x1200

Posted at: 17:42 | permalink

Ashcroft Lawsuit Helps Spread Suicide Message

The numbers are very small, but it appears that the Ashcroft lawsuit against Oregon's assisted suicide law is helping spread the word, even amongst Oregonians.

Posted at: 11:13 | permalink

Pilgrim - Burton Cage Match on PPV

Kevin Burton and Mark Pilgrim are having a long and freakin' ugly argument about whether NewsMonster should honor robots.txt when downloading content from web servers.

The crux of the matter is whether NewsMonster is defined as a user agent, a bot, or both. Various parties are falling out on all sides of the argument.

I believe Kevin Burton is on the west coast. I believe Mark Pilgrim is on the east coast. I recall there being an east-west rap war of sorts back in the 90's. You can make your own conclusions about the culture, but it's quite funny to read this article while replacing the words "rap" and "rapper" with "blog" and "blogger". Actually, the real fun begins with more replacements but I don't have time for that right now. Maybe later I'll try to do that treatment and produce a derivative work.

Posted at: 10:43 | permalink

Wed, 19 Feb 2003

NewsMonster

Russell Beattie lets the cat out of the bag on NewsMonster. I installed from source, modded the script for my JDK 1.4 and to set proxy in the JVM properties and voila, it ran and generated most of it's html. I say most because the GUI stopped counting at 31/32 or some such. It is beta. But what's there looks slick and certainly has the potential to give amphetadesk a run for it's money.

I believe one of newsmonster's stated goals is to help the user discover new blogs. I discovered this blog at RIT and subscribed. I didn't know there were, like, real academics with blogs. Cool.

Posted at: 23:53 | permalink

Divine Explores Strategic Options

In what has to be described as one of the most spin-filled Chapter 11 announcements ever, Divine Interventures has gone to it's rightful resting place. The stock is trading at $0.14. I'm frankly surprised that it's above a dime.

Posted at: 14:15 | permalink

Today is Dad's Birthday

He's 62. When asked about his retirement, he gives a long and rambling dissertation about why he can't stop working right now. He has as much trouble stopping work as I have starting. If we could just switch places that would be great. Anyhow, we'll have a nice meal and talk about it. I'm envious of retired people. Happy Birthday to the elder one!

Posted at: 09:54 | permalink

Teoma Has A Lot To Learn

So Dave Winer's going on about how Teoma can bludgeon Google and I'm saying I've heard it all before. For the umpteenth time, if you think that a company that requires this kind of labarynthine and costly registration to add a site to it's crawler is going to beat Google, who has no such wacky registration, you need your head examined. I'd be willing to bet it's not the PhDs search wizards who made the decision about the wacky pay-for-crawl registration, but the marketing people. Go figure.

Posted at: 09:39 | permalink

Follow The Rules And People Die

If you're a doctor riding a Port Authority Transit bus in Pittsburgh, you might want to arm yourself with a crowbar in case the bus happens to run into somebody who needs assistance, because you're going to have to smash out a window to get out. [pittsburgh post gazette] Let's all follow the rules now, if we didn't, there'd be anarchy.

Posted at: 09:11 | permalink

Mon, 17 Feb 2003

Drug May Prevent Diabetic Retinopathy

MSNBC reports that a synthetic form of vitamin B1 used to treat nerve problems shows promise in preventing retinopathy in diabetics.

Posted at: 22:47 | permalink

Rainy Days and Mondays

You know the song. In this case, it's not raining, but it is monday. The official snowfall count in Pittsburgh is at 15 inches. My wife, who was in Jersey for the weekend, is now stranded in King of Prussia. I would normally be at work, but my car is dead in the driveway. The flatbed that was coming to pick it up went into a ditch and they had to call a tow truck to get the flatbed out of the ditch. I walked out to get the mail and discovered that the snow plow had hit my mailbox and knocked it over. It's gonna be a long day here at home. At least there's heat. The wind's howling about 30 MPH and the drifts are high enough that discerning sidewalks, driveways, and roads is quite difficult. I took some pictures but they mostly look like a vast white canvas and don't really deliver the reality of just how bad it is. Best I've seen thus far has been this picture at sajnin.net. At this rate, I'll be lucky if I get to work by wednesday.

Update: MSNBC reports that Seven Springs ski resort (within 2 hours of my house) has recorded 40 inches of snow during this storm.

Posted at: 11:40 | permalink

Sat, 15 Feb 2003

Audi A4 Ignition Coils Horribly Broken

So I get in the A4 today to take the dog trail running and find that the car is firing on only 2 or 3 cylinders and that the MIL or check engine light has begun blinking. The car sounds like a Harley V-twin - a new racket to impress my neighbors. I come back in the house and sit down at the laptop and head over to Audi World and search on "MIL".

Indeed, there's a long thread about owner experiences with ignition coil failures. I guess I'll be at the dealer monday morning picking up a loaner while they replace the coils. Sigh. It turns out that Audi has decided to issue a recall but I had not been notified.

Perhaps someone would like to explain to Audi marketing that NEVER FOLLOW™ is quite difficult to do when the car has half it's normal horsepower and torque. Caveat Emptor.

Update: It's kind of funny, even new car articles, like this one on boston.com are pointing out the problem.

Update: mylemon.com has exhaustive coverage of the 1.8T ignition coil problem.

Posted at: 18:13 | permalink

Thu, 13 Feb 2003

Divine Problems Attract Press

It's not quite Enron, but it could be. Boston.com picks up the story on Flip Filipowski and Divine Interventures. Lawsuits and losses - oh my!

Thanks to my friend Tom Green for the forward via email.

Posted at: 09:27 | permalink

Problems With Workspot Continue

So I mentioned the other day that I was having problems with my old workspot account now that they've relaunched. I'd like to report that they got it fixed, but unfortunately, it looks even more horribly broken than it was before. In short, I can login as before, but gnome is gone, replaced by a blank X desktop that doesn't respond to left click, right click, or center click.

Hmm... as I said before, it ain't worth it folks. These people need to get a clue before anybody hands their money over. If I had paid money for this, I'd be really pissed.

Posted at: 09:20 | permalink

Wed, 12 Feb 2003

Copeland Says You've Got To Visit Dixmont

Dave Copeland advises all you mambie pambie sociopathic-wannabees to get out there and visit the asylum formerly known as dixmont before Wal-Mart has it's way with the property. I, for one, am envious.

Posted at: 01:05 | permalink

Random Acts Of Software

Russell Beattie is moaning about what a pain it is to publish open source and in some regard, he's right. I feel his pain. It's the pain of somebody that obviously takes his work very seriously and has a hard time saying no. But that shouldn't stop anybody from making a contribution, even if it's a small one, to the larger community.

Most of us probably don't have the stamina to take our basement hacking exercise quite as seriously as our day jobs and so I propose a lesser class of open source - Random Acts Of Software. This phrase pretty well describes what I do, which is not an entirely organic process but rather one of synthesizing the means to an end. I'm interested in the end, not the means, and so my source sucks. It is a heinous morass of square pegs jammed into round holes but you know what? I don't give a damn. It runs - and that's a good enough standard of completion for my little hobby projects.

In just less than a year since I released swingin' google, I got exactly one request for the source code, from a college kid in South America. I spent several emails explaining to this kid that it was a horribly monolithic mess that demonstrated that it is indeed possible to write non-object-oriented code in java and that you wouldn't want to design a curriculum in GUI programming around that swing code, but it still was a joy to have somebody that was interested in anything that I do. I, being an old man, forget that these kids have access to an amazing treasure trove of code on the web that in my day in school, had to be learned from a much smaller, less educated, group of peers.

That's been a recurring theme in my work lately. This has led me to seek out tools and environments that put the joy back in code like the good ole' days of hacking personal pascal on my atari ST. In that spirit, I've been spending more and more time exploring Mono and finding it increasingly joyful. Why? Because I can guess ... er .... infer a lot of the class names or method calls that I need without even needing the doc browser. And that's saying something. In my retro-primitive vi -> mcs -> mono development cycle, being able to guess correctly saves time and makes the experience more like scripting than working with a compiler. I think that's why Petzold dedicates the preface in his book to saying how much he likes the new system.

Anyhow, getting around to the code... I've been exploring mono to see what's possible with current builds of the compiler and runtime and have been blown away by how much progress has been made by this team while maintaining a very high quality level.

In this example, I set out to implement an RSS news aggregator in the style of amphetadesk. I've used amphetadesk for quite a while but what I wanted was slightly different in that I like to be able to expose the transformed content to the world without people being able to add or remove feeds. I'm perfectly happy editing that stuff in vi, as I don't change it much once it's set. Thus, this application is driven off of a single text file called mysubs.txt that has one feed per line such as

This code works with mono 0.19 on linux. Get it here. YMMV. The original RSS parsing code originated here and the web server bits were extracted from here. I am indebted to niel bornstein and imtiaz alam for the original code which I hacked to work with mono.

You'll find the code here.

Posted at: 00:00 | permalink

Mon, 10 Feb 2003

Dude, I'm Gettin' Arrested

Maybe the dell dude should get together with Ellen Feiss. They couldn't agree on computers, but they've got something else in common.

Posted at: 22:45 | permalink

Slip Sliding Away

I found myself thinking that while I've enjoyed the winter weather this year, we hadn't quite seen a mind blowing monster of a blizzard like I used to see in Boston. That was a mistake. I left work this afternoon and things seemed a bit icy in the parking lot but just your garden variety dusting and some icy buildup, nothing particularly alarming.

By the time I got halfway home, the squalls were so severe that it was a white-out and I couldn't see virtually anything and was slowed all the way to 5-10 mph - and this from the guy who brags about driving 2x the posted speed limit all the way to work. I turned the fog lights and the 4-ways on and passed only a single truck in the 3-5 mile stretch of country road that looked like something out of an attempt on K2.

I made it home in one piece but it sure is nasty out there. Funny thing is, the intensity of the squalls here are not really reflected in any of the local forecasts that I've seen. There was a winter weather advisory for certain areas, but mine wasn't one of them. Go figure.

Posted at: 20:26 | permalink

Mellon Jazz Festival Mercy Killing

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette laments the sudden death last week of the Mellon Jazz Festival. It was really a sad state of affairs for several years. I can't remember exactly the last year that I had attended though it was somewhere around 1995 or 96. In those years, it was big enough to draw serious fusion players such as Pat Metheny and the Yellowjackets, amongst a broader list of more traditional stuff; I recall seeing Miles Davis there somewhere in the early 90's. But as long as the people doing the planning think that jazz started in 1930 and ended in 1950, there won't be much of an audience. Sigh.

Posted at: 09:16 | permalink

Sun, 09 Feb 2003

iBlog

Mac-Mike points to a new blogging app called iBlog. Very cool. Wish I had a mac to try it out.

Posted at: 13:24 | permalink

I am Palm OS

I guess I should be flattered. I admit to being a Jeff Hawkins fan.

Which OS are You?

Posted at: 09:57 | permalink

Sat, 08 Feb 2003

Workspot Is Back Online (with bugs)

Scripting News reports that workspot is back online. Being an early user of their system several years ago, that's great news! However, the news for users this time around isn't so good. They have a $9.95 per month subscription fee and worse yet, no free trial. Their marketing guru has obviously seen fit to explain their approach in the FAQ:

Why don't you have free demo accounts?

We feel that $9.95 is a reasonable fee for a month-long demonstration of an extraordinary service! If you try to make the most of it, we think you'll find it indispensable. Otherwise, you can think of it as an indirect way of supporting the Free Software movement.

Unfortunately, the words "extraordinary service" don't seem to apply to my experience using workspot his morning.

After logging in, workspot responded by throwing no less than a half dozen of these message boxes:

Then, when I tried to add a system monitor utility to the gnome toolbar, I got this crash:

So I get 5 days to figure out whether this experience is worth ten bucks a month. Let's see, that only took 5 seconds. No!

I loved the kind of triangulation that workspot provided, being able to ssh from work to my home system through the company firewall was a real boon. It beats the hell out of doing the same over an http tunnel. Also, being able to run a web browser for testing outside the firewall was equally handy. I can think of lots of reasons why workspot was just amazing.

You want me to pay, you've got to provide something worth paying for. The old service was worth a healthy 5 bucks a month. This service isn't worth 5 cents a month.

One last question, does anybody know what happened to the talk about open sourcing the workspot souce code?

Posted at: 10:23 | permalink

Fri, 07 Feb 2003

Do Your State's DOT And Roads Suck?

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Penn DOT's stream of expenses and credit cards is so ludicrous as to be laughable:

As part of the audit, Casey's Office of Special Investigations raised concerns because 588 PennDOT employees possessed 1,097 Commonwealth Purchasing Cards -- credit and charge cards tied to providers like American Express Co.

Terrific. As if it's not bad enough that we've got the worst fucking roads in the country, we now find out that while these nimrods should be out fixing the roads, they're shopping at Wal-Mart with 2 Amex cards per employee! Maybe they'd like to come over and pay for my car's wrecked suspension with one of those spare amex cards?

All this from the organization that admonishes us not to think of it as road construction but a labor of love (you'll see the signs along the turnpike - yet another bad use of taxpayer dollars). Give me a fucking break! If this was a real gig, they'd have been fired ten mistakes ago.

Posted at: 00:18 | permalink

Wed, 05 Feb 2003

There Is Hope

My rant about application server choices drew a few thoughtful responses. I'm pleased to report that the manager in question told us today that we were going to investigate our alternatives more seriously before proceeding. I was ecstatic. I'm not sure whether he reads my blog, as Mark suggests, or whether throwing such harsh thoughts into the universe has any causal effect on bringing this sort of change full circle, but regardless, it's a welcome change. The point about trust made by Winters is correct. The enhancement of trust from subordinates gained by that simple decision to further evaluate products before proceeding is immeasurable. I didn't think we'd get here, but regardless of the outcome, I'm glad to see a move in the right direction.

Posted at: 00:48 | permalink

Tue, 04 Feb 2003

Dem Dare Nucular Weapons

I wonder if our highly educated president shops walmarks too? [star tribune via daypop]

Posted at: 13:50 | permalink

Mon, 03 Feb 2003

PHP Works With Mono

Sam Ruby reports that Sterling Hughes has PHP working with Mono.

Posted at: 23:41 | permalink

Productivity Gains? What Productivity Gains?

Of all the software projects that I've worked on over the years, they can generally be categorized into two groups - those in which the toolsets were largely marketing-driven and those in which the toolsets were engineering-driven.

I have been happiest when the toolset was driven by engineering. Thus, my current state of unhappiness with being told to use a bunch of garbage.

Why do I say a bunch of garbage?

I've watched for a month now as an entire team of engineers has failed to successfully install an application server and it's portal tools on a variety of platforms. These are bright people. I've been on the periphery of it myself and can attest to the frustration level with the myriad segfaults and bizarre shit.

Just to annoy the hell out of everyone, one afternoon I decided to bring up cocoon's portal solution. It took me all of an hour to get the stuff running on my redhat 8 box at which point I sat there looking all smug and saying, "if a bunch of open source guys can get this right, why is it so hard for a big commercial outfit to do the same"?

The answer to that is complex but it's clear that big commerical product teams can learn a lot from examining the build-install-config processes of the best open source projects. One could even argue that open source projects benefit from a lack of marketing people.

But management has a variety of reasons why the app-server-installation-from-hell-is-a-character-building-exercise must go on. Yeah, I've read Crossing the Chasm.

Whatever. I have a strong feeling that the gains in productivity as a result of technology that have been described by economists are entirely consumed by poor decision making at an executive level.

An unencumbered team would have coded the thing from scratch by now.

Mark Pilgrim's no clock piece resonates with me. Thank you and good night.

Posted at: 23:37 | permalink

Walking In A Winter Wonderland

Not sure why, but this looks fun to me.

Posted at: 00:09 | permalink

Sat, 01 Feb 2003

Trust-Worthless Computing

Bill pushes tablets while Redmond burns. Wa ha ha ha!

Posted at: 10:59 | permalink

Space Shuttle Columbia Breaks Up Over Texas

All of the major news outlets are reporting that the space shuttle columbia has broken up over Texas.

Posted at: 10:46 | permalink

Telecoms Sell Distraction

Russell Beattie has an interesting piece on US vs. European cell phone usage. The perception seems to be that US telecoms and for that matter, consumers, just don't get the wonderfulness of cheap cell and ubiquitous 3G.

I haven't been to europe so I'll take Russ' word for it since the story's been repeated so pervasively. The larger issue that I see here is the death of attention. Stepping back from it, if I had a child, would I want that child's attention drawn away from whatever it is (s)he's doing when there are already 8000 things to distract my child? Isn't that a disturbing trend when we've pumped all the kids up on ritalin to keep them from being distracted?

In a sense, isn't that what the telecoms are really selling - distraction? Have you listened to what the average teenager says in a cell conversation or an SMS message? I'm obviously way too old to get it, but if I have the option of reading a good book or having meanless conversation on my cell phone (or in person for that matter), I'll take the book, thanks.

So the question remains - have any of these enthusiastic cell users in europe stepped back from it long enough to look at the long term effects on their children?

Posted at: 10:44 | permalink

Thu, 30 Jan 2003

Health Care Sucks

Dave Winer's been talking about the importance of the US healthcare system for a while and I tend to agree. I've had insulin dependent diabetes for most of my life so I have considerable experience with the healthcare system.

Tonight, my wife and I stopped by the local pharmacy to get our prescriptions refilled. We were very clear with the girl at the counter, and she wrote down our instructions, which were correct - I watched her write them down. We came back, paid our money, 2x$20 copays and headed home. I virtually always check the bag at the store but for some reason I didn't do that. That was a mistake.

The girl had informed me that my insulin, which is one of the most used brands and types on the market, was out. Now, the typical experience is, "oh, we're short a bottle" (I get 3/month). But this was literally, "we don't have any of your insulin. We'll get it tomorrow after 4." Fortunately, I don't wait till the last minute to get this stuff or I'd be headed for the emergency room, where it's always in stock.

If that was the end of our troubles it would be merely amusing. It wasn't.

My wife's medication should have been 30mg, the bottle she was given contained 40mg. On top of that, my other script wasn't filled at all and no excuse was given at the store.

Needless to say, I'll have a few choice words for the manager of this place in the morning. Hell, 16 year old crack addicts run McDonald's more smoothly. It really pisses me off when something as absolutely life-and-death critical as pharmaceuticals receives less care and attention than the feeding of my dog. I have a right to be pissed off. If I don't get insulin, I become ketoacidotic and die relatively quickly.

I have less-than-zero sympathy for these places when they get the shit sued out of them by a skilled attorney. In many cases, they've brought such wrath on themselves. It's not the healthcare victim's (or consumer's) fault that these morons can't do their jobs correctly.

This is the state of the healthcare system in the US. We pay more than ever and yet the service sucks in every conceivable way from my experience at the pharmacy to trying to make an appointment at the endocrinologist. And it's not getting better, it's getting worse. Do I think George W can fix this mess? When elephants roost in trees.

I pay in excess of $300 per month for the piss-poor HMO that my employer thinks I should be thrilled about. They just dropped the other major local choice from the menu prior to christmas, citing rising costs. That one could cost as much as $500 to over $1000 / month for family coverage. These are the costs to the employee after the employer paid it's share.

And what's the fundamental problem? Endless demand - as long as our need for healthcare is unbounded, the costs will continue to skyrocket. Sure, there are a bunch of odd complexities visited on this situation by government and the health care industry but does that change the fundamentals? I don't think so.

I am fortunate to be able to afford such ridiculous rates, many are less fortunate. Where this is all headed is unclear to me, but it's not something that inspires a warm fuzzy.

Posted at: 00:50 | permalink

Wed, 29 Jan 2003

Please Wear Your Seatbelt

Or you'll be hanging on by a very thin thread.

Posted at: 07:47 | permalink

Tue, 28 Jan 2003

Miguel De Icaza's In The Spotlight

MSNBC reports on the progress made by Miguel de Icaza's Ximian team working on Mono, the open source implementation of microsoft.net. Could Ximian finally be headed for the mainstream? It's an interesting question. I'm not sure how much progress will be made until a massive educational effort is made with regard to helping the movers and shakers comprehend what it means to use, if not embrace and extend, GPL'ed software. I hear conversations on a daily basis in which decision makers make ill-informed and costly strategic blunders based on misinformation about the technology licensing implications. That's unfortunate, but it's going to remain a limiting factor for free software (particularly going beyond the installed hacker base) until an effective campaign is developed.

Posted at: 22:36 | permalink

Cocoon Portal For Imbeciles

If you're new to Cocoon, you'll find a comprehensive description here. I've been using Cocoon off and on since 1999 and have all of the appropriate battle scars from trying to get it running back in it's early days. Suffice it to say that the install and config for cocoon have come along way since the 1.x release. I've been researching portal technology for a project at work and came across Matthew Langham and Carsten Ziegler's article about the Cocoon Portal technology.

I decided to dive in and give it a try and I'm happy to report that using Java, Jetty, Cocoon, and the Cocoon Portal technology, I was able to get it running in about an hour. If you'd like to give it a try, follow the instructions below. I did this experiment on Redhat Linux 8. If you're on another platform YMMV. Of course, this assumes that you're an imbecile that knows how to do sysadmin on your target platform and has some level of comfort with Java. ;->

1. Download and install the latest JDK for your platform
2. Download and install the latest version of Jetty
   Installation shoul consist of expanding the zip and setting JETTY_HOME and JAVA_HOME appropriately. Test installation by issuing /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.1_01/bin/java -jar start.jar and load http://localhost:8080/ in your browser. You should see something like this.
3. Put this file in JETTY_HOME/etc.
4. Download the latest version of Cocoon
   I chose cocoon-2.0.4-vm14-bin.tar.gz. Unzip into the default directory. Create a cocoon directory in JETTY_HOME/webapps and copy cocoon.war from the root of the cocoon distribution to the newly created cocoon directory. Issue the following command in the newly created cocoon directory: jar xvf cocoon.war This will expand the cocoon web archive so that jetty can parse it. The cocoon portal technology can be found in the root of the expanded cocoon.war under a directory titled sunspotdemo
5. Issue the following command to start cocoon: /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.1_01/bin/java -jar start.jar etc/cocoon.xml Wait for a message resembling the following: 18:34:14.660 EVENT Started org.mortbay.jetty.Server@1d8957f Open http://localhost:8080/cocoon/ in your browser. You should see something like this.
6. Access the portal by typing http://localhost:8080/cocoon/sunspotdemo-portal in your browser. You should see something like this.

That's it! You're now running the cocoon portal technology successfully. Phew!

Posted at: 18:06 | permalink

Curly Quotes And Apostrophes - Oh My!

Thanks to Jeff for informing me that my XML feeds were broken. It was the use of unescaped curly quotes and apostrophes in an attributed quote that killed the feed. Sorry for the inconvenience if you saw the same amphetadesk problem that Jeff did. I used to test my own stuff in amphetadesk; I guess I should go back to that plan.

Posted at: 08:35 | permalink

Random Updates

Or man, have I been asleep at the wheel lately.

Eric has an interesting article on the nature of coders.

Jeff has completely redesigned his site and the look and feel is fantastic.

And I can't resist this one, where does the other Jeff find these Czech women? Heh.

Posted at: 00:40 | permalink

Mon, 27 Jan 2003

Jaron Lanier On Phenotropic Computing

java.sun.com has an interesting conversation with Jaron Lanier concerning Jaron's current research interests, which involve finding better ways to solve complex programming problems.

Jaron's commentary on the loss of faith amongst the programming multitudes is interesting:

And at that point, there's a danger that you lose the faith that used to exist in prior generations: that computing could get better at a fundamental level. And since almost everybody in the whole profession goes through the academic world and out into the industrial world, everyone gets consumed in this way. So, I'm afraid we have lost our greater ambitions, and that deeply concerns me.

That thought really resonated with me since I've seen this occur over the dot com era to a certain extent. Attitudinally, it's like you're stuck in a coal mine in West Virginia for the rest of your life.

Finally, Sun asks Jaron whether he's got any advice for developers just starting out and he offers the following:

There's a lot I would say. If you're interested in user interfaces, there's a wonderful opportunity these days to push what a user interface can be. If a user interface gives a user some degree of power, try to figure out if you can give the user more power, while still keeping it inspiring and easy to use. Can you do it? For instance, could you design a search engine that would encourage people to do more complex searches than they can do on a service like Google today, but still do them easily? I haven't seen a really good visual interface, for instance, for setting up searches on Google. Could you do that? Could you suddenly make masses of people do much more specific and effective searches than they currently are doing just by making a better user interface?

Yep. That's the one that interests me. The rich UI interface to google. I had that goal when I wrote swingin google almost a year ago now and somehow it got lost in the painful experience of dealing with swing. I'm gonna take another stab at it with some other tools, but I need to make the tool decision first since what is possible is predicated on a tool choice. Isn't that ass-backwards? Isn't that part of the problem, that the UI that you produce is inexorably predictable from the toolset that you choose? Hmm...

Posted at: 18:29 | permalink

Sun, 26 Jan 2003

DCI Gets Pit Amplification in 2004

Drum Corps International has voted to allow amplification of the front ensemble or pit instruments in 2004. This has been a controversial point in DCI for years, and brings the activity more in line with the competitive marching band circuit. I, being an old man, would prefer to see DCI remain an acoustic activity. Of course, my wife and I stopped going to DCI shows a year or so ago when we just didn't get much out of it anymore. That's a funny predicament considering how long my wife marched drum corps. Anyhow, the comments of Cavalier's director Jeff Fiedler resonated with my own teaching in the activity over the past fifteeen years:

I think it goes against the basic nature of our activity. We don't need it in our pit. The members are taught how to play to project.

Hallelujah, brother. While I admit to being a huge fan of electronic music and I use a variety of amplification and electronics in my own work as a musician, I think there's considerable educational value to be gained from learning to be creative about making acoustic instruments speak in a variety of timbres and DCI is where that has always been a tradition. Sigh.

Posted at: 21:09 | permalink

Wed, 22 Jan 2003

Salon On Microsoft vs. Sun, C# vs. Java

Salon has a good read (I especially liked the DOJ links to the internal M$ email from the trial) on the history and evolution of the battle between Microsoft and Sun on Java and C#. It's well-written, particularly for those who may not have much experience with the technologies in question.

Posted at: 18:49 | permalink

Sat, 18 Jan 2003

Sanyo SCP-4900

After changing work locations I discovered that my cell service was getting pretty bad. After a bit of debugging, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't my cell service that sucked but my phone was getting progressively worse. Since I don't own a land line but instead use cell as my primary phone service, it's gotta work reliably.

I had used the Kyocera 6035 for a while and while it provided a plethora of features and did some things well, the things it did poorly it did very poorly. I would describe the user experience with this phone as just plain quirky.

That's kinda funny since I had seen Scott Weiss speaking on handheld usability this week at HCII. Scott's made quite a career out of condemning handheld devices. His talk was quite funny and informative. You'll find the slides from Scott's talk here.

Anyhow, I decided to replace the kyocera, and since I had good experiences with Sanyo's previous generation phone, after considerable research, I decided to go with the Sanyo SCP-4900. The primary concern in my decision making was how well the phone supported the fundamental phone functions, not all the bells and whistles that Sprint's pushing via it's 3G service. I'm pleased to report that reception (I live in a weak cellular coverage area with lots of hills and few towers) and the look and feel that I missed from the old Sanyo are fantastic and the color display really improves the readability of the screen in most lighting conditions, particularly for folks with bad eyes.

While I was primarily concerned with the phone's reception performance and usability, I have to admit that it browses this site better than my old phone.

That's about all I have time for right now, but watch this space for more on the sanyo 4900 in the future. I have to admit, I am enthusiastic about this report from Nate Carlson on using the wireless internet service with linux!

Posted at: 10:11 | permalink

Tue, 14 Jan 2003

The Radio Button vs. Checkbox Design Dilemma

While considering some UI design issues this morning, and in the midst of arguing with people about the design, I decided to document my beliefs about user interface design with regard to radio buttons and checkboxes. I use the word beliefs because 1) while garnered from years of experience, that's all they are, and 2) they contradict typical advice with regard to UI design. In short, it's an oft overlooked and undertreated area of design. A cursory google search yielded nothing particularly useful, so here's an exercise to demonstrate what I'm talking about.

An Exercise

You are given the following paper form and told to replicate the form in a web browser.

-------------------------------------------

Schedule A Attached Yes _____ No _____
Schedule B Attached Yes _____ No _____
Schedule C Attached Yes _____ No _____
Schedule D Attached Yes _____ No _____

-------------------------------------------

One school of thought is to replicate the form exactly with absolutely no changes whatsoever. I reject this approach for a number of reasons not the least of which is that it doesn't optimize the experience based on the advantages that the human computer interface offers. Instead, my approach is to try and find the optimal solution while balancing the competing design goals of correctness, clarity, usability, etc.

If we go through the typical analysis, we pause at the schedule attachments section and ponder whether it can be improved in the web design. The answer is yes, it can.

So we introduce a simple hierarchy based on the common word attachments. That is...

Attachments
Schedule A
Schedule B
Schedule C
Schedule D

This is where the problems begin.

Typical web design would just convert the yes/no choices into yes/no radio buttons but I reject that design for a number of reasons. One major reason is the resulting increase in clutter. This is a simple example but imagine a form that has 20 yes/no choices. 20 choices means 40 GUI widgets with a radio button design. That's a lot of visual clutter.

A better approach is to realize that within this hierarchy of attachments, each schedule is not mutually exclusive. If it were, you'd have one radio button per schedule. Instead what you have is a single checkbox per schedule, indicating that 0-4 schedule attachments may be chosen.

Attachments
Schedule A
Schedule B
Schedule C
Schedule D

If more designers would think about the radio button vs. checkbox dilemma in such detail, the result would be more usable web forms. And that would be a good thing.

Posted at: 10:22 | permalink

Thu, 09 Jan 2003

Affluent Teens Document Drinking Binges On The Web

In an attempt to prove that human nature doesn't separate kids in the most affluent neighborhoods from those in the poorest, Mt. Lebanon teenagers have taken to photographing their inebriation and publishing the whole affair on the web. I'm still laughing as I think of all the social climbers who live in Mt. Lebanon shuddering in their slippers as they realize that even a town with 35 police cars per square mile can't stop such gaffes.

Posted at: 06:57 | permalink

Sat, 04 Jan 2003

I'm Getting Too Old For This

I started running with the dog informally this week. I say informally because it's the dog who wills me to run, not the other way around. This is also a special form of running that involves deep snow and hiking boots and so it's quite painful for someone this out-of-shape. Of course, the dog makes it look effortless. She looks at me like, "why are you panting so hard? what's wrong with you?" The biggest trauma from the whole thing seems to be this dull ache in my achilles tendon. Not sure what to make of that though it's somewhat unique - not something I've experienced previously.

Posted at: 16:14 | permalink

Thu, 02 Jan 2003

New Year, New Leaf

Well, I noticed it was January 2 and figured I'd better start saying something or people will figure that I had expired. I've been mostly trying to mold the new pup into something resembling a dog and so I haven't taken quite as much time to write as I would have previously.

I'm just going to make a quick entry now before I run off to work. The holidays have been complete turmoil on the work front but thus far I've emerged unscathed. Basically, I've been working in B2B e-commerce since the summer of 2000 and my work there is coming to an end.

As of today, I report to the CIO and will be working on a consulting basis within the company on a variety of projects, some of which are imminent and others which are much fuzzier. My perception is that this is one of those define your own role things. I think I'll give it my best shot and see where it leads.

I'll no longer be working in the city anymore so my commute gets shorter and contains less traffic. That's a welcome change. The new location is in a rural industrial park so it may be the year that I finally break down and buy one of these. That'd certainly cut my fuel bill in half.

I'll try to post on a more regular basis this year, assuming I don't get buried in the corporate monolith. :)

Posted at: 07:27 | permalink

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