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Many thanks to all who have visited this corner of the world during 2003. The experience has been good, and I have no intention of stopping now. Maybe it's just the ego stroke, as Michael Pusateri put it last week:
People crave attention and praise more than anything else in life. More than money or possessions.
I've been reexamining my reasons for blawgin' and there's some of that. I went back and read what I said two years ago when I started with Radio and that still holds. I've also found that it helps me to order my thoughts on a range of issues that I need to talk to the children about. Above all, it's the place to send the crazy stuff I come across rather than an arbitrary mailing list created on the spur of the moment.
We wish the very best to you and yours in 2004. Happy New Year!
Among my goals for the coming year is to improve my listening skills (I can hear the snickering already!) Bill Rini's recent Project Management Roundup pointed to a really good article on the subject:
A top ten list of listening skills.
Luckily, I do number 1 pretty well and I understand and can manage number 8. On all the rest, I'm hopeless. I'm going to have to come up with some wallpaper or something to keep this in front of me for the coming year!
If you've never heard of the group of people fascinated by building machines capable of throwing innocent pumpkins nearly a mile through the air, we're here to help...
I finally understand why TV Guide has been screwed up for the last couple of weeks. Bill Bumgartner referred to Zap 2 It some time ago and I finally got around to trying it out. For our area, Adelphia has 8 separate listings and channel lineups. Ain't consolidation grand? After the third attempt, I finally got a channel line up that looked right. I believe the Agoura (rebuild) and Newbury Park (rebuild) listings are the same, but I'm not entirely certain.
By the way, I really like the way that Zap 2 It allows you to confirm the listings. It brings up the first hundred stations in a simple list and offers a yes/no type confirmation system. That's quite a bit easier than the system used by its competitors.
For TV Guide, it looks like Camarillo is the proper selection. So, after much fussing around, Watson is once again a good way to check listing for use with the EyeTV. Given the current track record, things will be broken again in about 60 days.
I've been meaning to put this up for a couple of weeks and figured that I'd better get it done before the year ends. Burn Scar from Southern California fires. Here's the original MODIS image.
David and Yuko Knight of Redtail Canyon have quickly become a favorite place to check when things happen in the world. Pictures (ground level and satellite) seem to be the focus. I don't know how they do it (nor why) but they get together a basic snapshot of what's happening (the kind of basic information you won't get in anything but an in depth article from most news sources). Perhaps it's just a focus on the basic facts (or near facts) without a lot of personal information. Without a need for a viewpoint and no editorial oversight, we get what they've got.
I originally found the article while checking local links via GeoURL. Kudos to the folks at Redtail Canyon for using ICMB meta tags on this and many other articles. At the same time, things are already getting crowded (like the geo links for the Passmoore art exhibit... if every artist and photographer did this it would be difficult to find anyone else). Perhaps we need some additional mechanisms for classification?
On a total tangent, I also found this local weather station (Woodland Hills area) via GeoURL. Location tags are popping up all over the place. I think we can reasonably expect the trend to continue. I wonder how long it will take before the search engines start to take advantage of this information (if they haven't already).
I opened up mail (been avoiding it lately) and found a couple messages about the FBI and almanacs. In light of recent news regarding Patriot Act extensions I figured someone was playing a joke of some sort (being a little paranoid as it were).
However, the The NY Times and CNN are carrying the AP report...
It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.
I hope no one tells the FBI about PDAs and portable computers.
All the work and toil, the game against Denver was in the bag and it came down to the result of the Minnesota game.
Four months of regular season games, six weeks (or so) of camp, several multi-day mini-camps and countless hours refining technique, watching films and grunting in a weight room.
I couldn't even watch anymore and wandered off to hang out with my mom. I thought it would all be for naught...
And then Arizona helped out in the biggest way possible by beating the Vikings on the very last play of the game. Had the pass from McCown to Poole failed, or the review gone the other way, I'd have been in a funk for a couple days. NFL football is a crazy damned sport at times and I'm very grateful not to be a Vikings fan right about now.
SI.com profiles the Broncos vs Packers game.
After checking the local listings via the paper (TV Guide has lost it's mind again and can't be trusted until they know what channels are available), we get to see the game tomorrow on CBS.
Ev asks why Microsoft produces Virtual PC for Mac? and Tom wonders if you can get infected.
Let's start with Tom...
Yeah, you can get infected. I normally only use VPC to peek at Project files (not very much anymore) and to look at Visio diagrams. I also occasionally use IE to look at my site to see what I might have broken. Right now the only OS installation I have is for WinMe so I can't say for sure if the RPC virii are effective against VPC, but I'd guess that they are. I run the PC from a saved state so it's up and back down in about 10 minutes most of the time when I need it.
Why Microsoft produces Virtual PC is a little more round about.
A company called Connectix (formerly at connectix.com, the domain record is now gone I guess) created Virtual PC for Mac and a did a lot of other interesting virtual machine research in the nineties (the Virtual Game Station was a pretty amazing toy to play around with). They also did some research on JVM tweaking that never saw the light of day (as far as I know) and of course, they also would up creating Virtual PC for Windows and Virtual Server.
This fluff piece about the acquisition implies a long life for VPC Mac, we'll just have to see (I need to check my 6.x registration come to think of it).
The real reason Microsoft purchased VPC is for the Windows product and Virtual Server. Here's the Microsoft blurb. From what I've picked up over the last few months, the Virtual Server technology is already rolling into server products and will be a part of Longhorn. I believe they intend to use VPC in much the same way Apple used Classic (aka the blue box) for backward compatibility. Check the Register's spin on Virtual PC 2004.
The Rocky Mountain News published a complimentary article about Favre and a bunch of other old fashioned (tough guy?) quarterbacks.
Being on vacation means having nothing to do. Not really, but I'm trying to fake it. Mostly.
Anyway, I guess I got a little carried away checking out GiggleChick, a young woman from the Jersey Shore who talks about Jersey (Belmar, fishing, the Parkway and Turnpike, yada yada), various silliness and the angst of a single woman — two out of three isn't bad. Along the way she pointed out this wonderfully silly holiday message.
Which brings me 'round to this...
Jeremy Zawodny wondered if his hometown would always feel more like home than where he lives now; yet he knows that things are changing. I believe that the feeling fades, but it never goes away. As you pile on the places, personal and professional milestones, homes, relationships, etc. you add to the situations and places where you feel comfortable for some reason or another. The more you've experienced, the easier it becomes to fit into a new [location, job, experience, home].
I left home many years ago and yet I still get homesick for New Jersey once a month or so. Outside of a couple months during the summer, no one is there any more. I'm at a loss to explain it; it just is. And every damned time I step outside by myself on the porch at the house in Bradley, my whole damned childhood starts flashing in front of my eyes. Every wave is a memory, as is just about everything else I see and hear (for instance, I just remembered swimming out to the Belmar marker buoy late one night to prove that we weren't afraid of Jaws — talk about stupid — the idea was to come back in via the Shark River).
Yet, we can never really go home. That idealized vision of home no longer exists; people move, change, marry, die and are born. Change happens. We can only go back and refresh those memories that make us who we are and make some new ones to puzzle ourselves with years from now.
C'est la vie!
Adam Kempa has a bunch of holiday music; some I'd heard, others not, but I enjoyed it.
He also has a link to SciFi Hi-Fi's Beatle's Christmas recordings which have been updated since I checked earlier (1968 and 1969 have been added). Cool!
Microsoft's new licensing announcements are stirring some controversy.
The ClearType license issue seems pretty much cut and dried. If you like what ClearType can do on LCDs and want to short circuit the process of getting there, license it from Microsoft and be done with it. There doesn't seem to be a way to accidently use it (although I can certainly see ways to possibly violate the patents).
On the other hand, the approach with FAT licensing is going to be interesting. There will be a lot of arguing.
Flash cards, memory sticks, MP3 players, et. al. have adopted FAT because there are drivers for mounting virtual FAT devices everywhere. The whole reason Microsoft has patents on long filename handling in FAT is because the file system is so old that it didn't handle reasonably long names. They added long names with what amounts to a patented meta data extension system. Without those extensions, FAT would be useless to third parties seeking a virtual file system for their devices. It was adopted because it was ubiquitous and Microsoft has basically waited until everyone was using it to decide that they didn't really mean to make it as open as it appeared to be.
It's an interesting signal for Microsoft to send as it appears to say to developers 'be wary of adopting our standards because we can and do bite'. Not exactly a surprise, but they aren't usually up front about it. This has been my biggest problem with later versions of SOAP and WS-Security; Microsoft and IBM both claim IP rights.
Finally, I don't buy the premise in this /. post:
I had a conversation with one of their licensing officers as I was afraid my 10-a-year GPS logger project was in danger. He explained this was an encouragement to have everyone implement FAT32 and LFN the same way, by using their reference design. All this to prevent incompatible implementations down the road.
1 For what it's worth, I was surprised to see Bill Bruffey's name referenced and had to check out the related patent (4,945,475) for HFS data organization (which some of us know as B*-Tree's).
The IRIS Seismic Monitor offers some interesting visualization tools.
If you use a digital camera, chances are good that you are also using rechargeable AA batteries and that you normally carry around more than one set. With a new camera, I decided to do something about the loose batteries floating around in my bag(s).
I remembered seeing something a couple years ago about battery holders and went on a hunt. I was looking for a basic plastic case with a small sliding tab of some kind that would indicate whether they were already used. I didn't find anything with an status tab, but I did find some basic cases.
First I found a basic plastic case from InAnyCase.com, but they cost $6 a piece. I think this was why I passed the first time around... that seemed pretty expensive for a plastic case (everything we buy today has injection molded throwaway casing — it should be pretty inexpensive).
However, Thomas Distributing sells the POWEREX Battery Holder. They also include a battery holder free with some of their batteries. I wound up buying 10, with shipping it worked out to $1.52 per holder.
Looking at the pictures on both sites (and having the actual case sitting on the desk next to me), they're selling the same exact same product. You decide.
Our neighbor asked if we'd like to come over and play with his Go cart back in late September.
This is the result.
I've been looking for a solution for publishing photo's for a while.
PhotoSite TimeSaviour (known as PSTS by its creator) is a reasonable solution for now. The document metaphor takes a back seat to looking like a configuration panel, but that really is the idea. The app takes some configuration details (which can include style sheets if you are creative), an input and output folder and generates a reasonable set of pages. Meta data is easily generated outside the application (although it's not in XML) if needed.
I understand the PSTS idea of documents, I can work with the modification panel and it works.
I was looking for something else and stumbled onto this request which is worth making some noise about: Star wants your '94 earthquake stories.
I've been playing around with a whole series of articles based on something Ole mentioned back in November (I can't find it just now, but it was basically a 'where were you...' for the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination). I've been trying to gather (through notes and article links I come across) a basic event timeline, general background and personal thoughts for as many important things as I can remember. As I've worked through some of these, I've been finding myself splitting things out... historical facts, basic facts as I remember them and feelings, all of which are separate. I need to find the right way to weave them together.
I'd forgotten about adding the Northridge quake. Time to go get some thoughts together on that subject.
If you lived in SoCal at the time, you have something to say about Northridge. Now is the time to get things together and do something about it.
I've decided to go out to watch the game (Adam's working, he was supposed to be home). The EyeTV is set and ready to go and Sarah is going to give me a ride.
We're a shade over 150 miles southwest of the quake today (that's the first time in a while that I've had to use the pythagorean theorem on a calculator — RPN to the rescue). We appreciate the calls but nothing much happened here. Yes, we knew there was an earthquake, but it wasn't the kind of shaking that frightens.
For future reference, I usually start at USGS Pasadena. Here's the page for the San Simeon quake.
I had the equivalent of a serious crash on my TiBook yesterday.
I ran out of disk space on the boot volume during a copy (and I honestly don't know where the last couple gigs went during the previous week or two). Everything began acting flaky, so I started poking around. I tried to kill an application and it complained of the disk being full.
Hmmm.
Running out of disk space on the boot volume under MacOS X is a bad thing. Not that anything will tell you until it's far too late. I completed the process of shutting down this and that with disk full errors popping up left and right as I killed off everything useless I could find (which wasn't much). I finally logged out and given the circumstances I restarted (it had been a couple months).
All the Apple applications (Finder, Dock, iPhoto, others) had an interesting failure mode. They completely trashed the existing preference settings rather than leave along the settings on disk which did work fine.
EyeTV also went bonkers and reset itself.
Stupid.
I came across something the other day that inspired me to refresh my memory on the Federalists. In Howard Dean for King, Douglas points to Is Howard Dean running for king? and closes with:
Dean is exactly the kind of politician our founding fathers abhorred.
Some of them certainly, but by no means all.
Washington was originally a conservative and quite willing to live with the British system as long as it was run on this continent. No more foreign rule was good enough for him; as a local aristocrat, he'd be fine. As it turned out, Washington was the master of the compromise and he helped to set the original tone of basic fairness in our government.
Hamilton and Adams were two other well known known conservatives (although Adams had quite a bit of a liberal republican streak and largely supported States rights). They supported a strong Federal government and were initially against a one man, one vote system. Hamilton pushed to create a strong central banking system, to enact taxes and form a standing army to collect them during the Whiskey Rebellion. Adams was responsible for passing (if not entirely agreeing with) the Sedition Act of 1798 which made criticizing the federal government a criminal act. These are not typical of the actions one would assume a strong supporter of individual and states rights would take.
There were those in the southern states who worried about the power of the federal government to enact laws that would restrict southern behavior but the series of compromises that resulted in our form of democracy muted their protests and those concerns were never acted upon.
Ever since we've had a surging, swirling debate on the balance between the rights of our nation state versus the rights of the individuals states that make up the republic. Among many other subjects, Adams and Jefferson continued to discuss these issues in their letters over the last years of their lives.
We've called upon our system many times to settle our differences, but the civil war was the event that sets the most obvious precedent. A grumpy union was preserved and it only took another hundred years before the issue was finally settled once and for all.
Suggested reading:
A History of the American Revolution is amazingly still in print and makes a good desk reference (although some seem to differ). I've only recently purchased Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation which comes well recommended and purports to cover the territory in a more direct fashion (with a lot less of the historical wandering).
Since I'm on a communications kick today, I should point out The Inevitability Of Big Broadband by Reed Hundt.
When Vonage goes portable discusses the interesting development of a Vonage compatible software only stack. From the comments, the windows version is already available.
Also from the December 10, 2003 DSL Prime:
"Voice over IP is like planting dynamite on a bridge," Powell says "Put the right piece in the right place, and the whole thing is coming down."
Dave Burstein goes on...
The Bells are not going to tie it up in regulation for years. Suddenly the problem is overhype — remember, only about 15% of U.S. homes have cable modems, the prime market. Qwest just demonstrated why the VOIP market is a small niche in DSL homes, with pricing to shut out competitors.
I'm not so sure about the last part, because it's only based on Qwest. I've done the numbers for myself and Verizon loses most of my service because they can't give me the same deal. They end up supplying basic POTS and are the third party vendor for my DSL service. If fiber ever happens around here, they'll lose all but one line for POTS (the nice thing about basic telephone service is that it works even when we lose power just as long as we keep an older phone around and the vendor has power).
Would you call this eBay blogging? I don't know much about eBay but that's one hell of a funny commentary on the system.
Clack has it archived just in case.
I really enjoyed reading A Criminal Waste of Space by Justice William W. Bedsworth. You'll have to go here for the first article in the series and the permalinks aren't but I don't care.
I'd never seen it before, but Doc had a link, one thing led to another and I've read everything thus far.
Keep going Beds!
Did you know that there was a price index for The 12 Days of Christmas?
The flash presentation takes this little spoof over the top. [via Samizdat]
Here are a couple of bizarre but inexplicably entertaining essays on weather. [via Waxy.org Links]
This weeks TMQ refers to Al Capp's Li'l Abner via one of its many interesting characters:
Trailing New Orleans 17-7 late in the second, Jersey/A lined up to attempt a 42-yard field goal. Block, return for a touchdown and TMQ wrote the words "game over" in his notebook. At this point, why doesn't Wellington Mara simply name Joe Btfsplk his special-teams coach and make the whole thing official?
I thought that was pretty funny. Joe Btfsplk is the character I remembered best, so I went looking for more. I found a good description at Denis Kitchen:
JOE BTFSPLK is very simply the world's biggest jinx. He walks around with a perpetually dark rain cloud a foot over his head. Once he appears on any scene, dreadfully bad luck befalls anyone in his vicinity. Though well-meaning and gentle, his reputation inevitably precedes him, so Joe is a very lonely and feared little man. He is also a character with an apparently unpronounceable name, but creator Al Capp pronounced Btfsplk with a "raspberries" sound, also known as a "Bronx cheer."
Here's a concentrated timeline for the strip and Al Capp.
Thanks to the Packers win in San Diego and the last moment heroics of Bears rookie cornerback Charles Tillman, the Packers are tied with the Vikings with two weeks left in the season.
Green Bay travels to Oakland this week for the Monday night game and hosts Denver in the last week of the season. Minnesota has to deal with Kansas City in Minneapolis this week and finishes up the season in Tempe (where the Packers managed to seriously bungle things in week three).
Now would be a great time to see the green and gold go on a winning streak. With six loses, the Pack must win both games because the Vikings have more conference wins. While hoping for a loss by Minnesota, we can also hope that Seattle (ARI, @SF), Dallas (NYG, @NO) and Carolina (Detroit, @NYG) all find ways to lose at least one game (not at all likely).
If they play well this week, anything is possible.
Update: PackerNews.com has more in 2 victories are no guarantee of a playoff berth.
Attention Yahoo! Sports.
I don't wear Hanes and no amount of MJ scaring the dickens out of me with ads that talk is going to make me do so. Another couple of days of this and I'll find some other way to satisfy my football fix.
We clear?
I noticed the Dackia Tires advertisement (which is pretty funny!) on Critical Section this morning. By this afternoon it was everywhere.
Ah well, we'll never be accused of being ahead of the curve.
Three weeks, no office, lots of time to putter around.
I have a few things on my must do list (outside of some work related activities that I've committed to), but I'm going to try to stay flexible. Time is on my side for a change.
I don't shop. More precisely, whenever possible I don't actually go to stores. When I must participate, I run in, grab what I need and bolt. Mostly, I fob it off on my dear wife.
Yesterday while the family was down at Disney's California Adventure I had one shopping task, a present for one of the kids that I'd promised to take care of.
I went around noon thinking that would be OK. How many ways can one person be wrong (as it turns out, there is a long list)? I never got past the parking lot, where people were wandering everywhere in and out of their cars. I honestly don't know how people do it. I went back about 8pm and luckily things were much more sane (I was going to have to get it done one way or another).
I still need to do some shopping for Christmas but am hopeful that being off will give me the opportunity to get some things done while most other people are at work. We'll see.
The drive towards Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been gaining steam for quite some time and companies such as Vonage are helping to make it a bigger story every day. David Isen discusses The Story Under the VoIP Story in this weeks SMART letter which boils down to: the telco's are in trouble.
What I haven't seen addressed yet is how this might shake out.
For certain kinds of customers, their phone lines are already gone, or about to go away.
My sister in law in North Carolina called me earlier in the week to discuss her plans to move to broadband. Her question was DSL or Cable? She's had a cell phone for a few years now and uses it for nearly everything; her teenaged children have cell phones too. Cell phones work just about everywhere there. Last summer I when was in NC we went out to a farm in the middle of nowhere (about 30 miles outside of Raleigh) to play in a frisbee golf tournament; cell reception was far better everywhere on that farm than in many places here in SoCal, like say, my house.
The introductory price for cable access is about $25/mo, going up to $45 (why do they do this?) after the first three months. Phone charges for a dialup line used mostly just to access the internet are just over $30/mo, likely because of a number of features (at $4 a pop) that were added at one time and are no longer needed. Dialup access is just over $20. Once we talked through everything, it became apparent that she is actually going to save about $10/mo using cable over what she pays to do dialup access today. Her phone line and dialup account are about to become revenue short falls on someone's bottom line.
I'm no longer in the category of early mover when it comes to technology but I believe I still fit into the early adopter category often times. And I'm ready to move to Vonage for my second line at home.
We've had two phone lines in our home since 1988 (we had two lines in NC when we ran a little BBS, but life and children got in the way and we scaled back) when Sarah again decided that she couldn't deal with the phone line being in use all the time. We kept the second line after moving to broadband because I needed a fallback in case it was down for some reason. Eventually, the second line became my business phone. For making any calls to people for work related reasons, I used the second line when possible.
Our current telco situation looks like this; we use Sprint for local message units and long distance and we pay Verizon for two lines with a minimum of features (line 1 is used for DSL). If Vonage works out, we'll drop the second line entirely and see if we can't save some money on the main line by moving to a basic Verizon account (nixing Sprint in the process). If cell coverage here ever gets worked out, we'll be down to a local phone to make local calls, handle DSL and receive calls from anywhere (and even that last requirement may go by the wayside).
Here's the part that makes me wonder.
Somewhere along the line, as this contraction of telco business happens, something is going to have to give in the DSL business which is currently handled by same handfull of companies. Either DSL is going to evolve somehow beyond the largess and inefficiencies of the current vendors or it'll be totally replaced by cable, wireless, fiber to the curb or something else. I'm pretty dubious about the ability to evolve here, but it will certainly be interesting to watch.
Last week I was doing some cleanup and decided to nuke a mailing list at work that had never really taken off. At first I wondered why all the words were there, but I 
read it and then I laughed. I also ended up keeping the list around after making some changes to the subscription list. Perhaps the therapy helped?
I took a screen shot because it reminded me of the really crazy error messages that the old Apple C compiler (prior to 1994 or so) for Macintosh Programmers Workshop (MPW) used to spit out. The worse the code that you were attempting to compile, the funnier it got. Yes, the messages were often useless, and waiting for the compiler would at times make you feel like tearing your hair out, but it was funny. We won't even get into the pain of launching a SADE session.
My personal favorite was:
Too many errors on one line (make fewer)
This happened as I recall if there were eight or more errors in a single logical line of code. Another one that used to delight me from time to time:
A typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program
Here's a partial list of MPW C error strings. Unfortunately, the original CSMP thread didn't have anything to add.
If someone happens along with a copy of an early 90's vintage C tool (the error strings are in the resource fork) or even better, a DeRez of the error string list resource (I believe they were in a 'STR#') I would certainly appreciate getting a copy.
I was sick on and off for most of last week, slept for most of last weekend and am still trying to wrap up as many things as possible before taking some time off.
I've got a bit over six weeks of vacation available, it's time to use some (I think my limit is around 320 hours these days... having watched a lot of vacation slide off the end of the world over the last few years my aim is to avoid that in the future). The original plan was to skip work for the month of December. I'm tired and I need some time to work out what's important for next year. I took about eight days over the Christmas holiday last year (which adds up to a couple weeks in real time). I didn't have to worry anyone else so I focused on the bigger picture and spent a lot of time tinkering which was great. It also helped me to get my head around all the things that needed doing for the year ahead.
That plan lasted about long enough for us to see some serious issues with pregnancies. Mike and Thanh were the only real standbys and both were expecting their first children this month. Mike's daughter is here now (and by next week he'll be punchy enough to agree to anything), Thanh's is in the final stages. At least we won't have any overlap. We've also got a big group meeting in January that I've been trying to get prepared for, but I'm not... not even close.
The new plan is to bail on Tuesday for the rest of the month. I've yet to work out the details.
Let's see... what else is happening?
I finally got around to deciding on my biannual birthday present and bought a new camera (upgrading from a Canon A20 to a Canon A80). I'll let everyone else fight over the A20... no more lending, just bring me the flash card. Of course, Sarah did the actual in store purchasing (I'd stopped by Best Buy a few weeks earlier and made sure the A70 felt good but couldn't make up my mind about which to buy until the last moment). Stephen forced me to finally open it last night and wandered off to play with it. I plan to get my chance this weekend (I still need some shots of the hillsides before things start growing back).
I see that I've omitted a significant geek item. I've finally obtained a replacement for the iMac DV (circa Spring of 1999?) that has served as my local server in the office (at work) since early 2001. I've been worried about this poor little box for about a year, it simply wasn't meant for this kind of lifetime of abuse. We run a number of small applications there, along with an appserver, webserver (for internal and external documentation) and whatever else comes to mind and store a whole lot of useful things there (rather than trawl all over for them). If it died, we're dead, at least for a measurable period of time. An Xserve is now running in my office as a replacement, I just need to finish a bit of configuration while in the office tomorrow so that I can finish the rest of the setup at my leisure (elsewhere). Once we get the basic stuff setup, move everything over and swap IPs, the next step is to thoroughly test performance for a number of applications and see if we might be able to use these as production servers. The hard part is the damned power supply, I just can't see how they can do a redundant PS in a 1U body. It would work if they eliminated PCI slot area, but the system we have uses a PCI slot for video (not entirely needed for setup, but useful) and the PCI/AGP slot for a second gigE NIC (which we require; we'd actually like more NIC's). I think they'd kick butt against V240 (and SunFire 280R) class systems for applications that don't require significant NFS based IO (we have a bunch of locally constrained apps like that). Anyway...
I've added a new category (diary) for these type of completely self absorbed posts. Hopefully, I won't do too many.
KayaBowl had some interesting anecdotes to add to my original Pearl Harbor post. Which is probably a good thing, because I wasn't really done.
Hopefully, I am now.
Stephen finally has his permit and took the family (all but me) out for a drive in the van. Now, he wants to drive my car. We get to do this whole driving thing all over again (because it was so much fun the first time around).
Yipes!
I've been thinking a bit today about the ill fated crews of the USS Arizona and all the other ships sunk at Pearl.
As someone who grew up in, on and around the water I've given some serious consideration to drowning. I can remember being a teenager, out in the middle of the night in a pretty big storm on a small boat, 20 miles offshore and running the odds in my head of the boat going down (low, but possible) and me not making it (way over confident, I was figuring that at near zero).
I was more or less convinced that it wasn't going to be a problem for me right up until I became part of the haze gray and underway world of the US Navy. No sooner had I come to grips with the idea that drowning was a real possibility, the Navy was kind enough to teach me that fire was far worse, and could lead to drowning in a number of cruel ways.
I'd read a lot of WWII naval history as a kid and early teen, but I still didn't get it.
Many (perhaps most) of the kids who died in the lower spaces that day never knew what was really going on. They'd stumbled into the situation blind like nearly everyone else and had a job to do, working to get those ships underway. That entailed all the normal details required to get the ship running plus splitting off damage control teams to go deal with internal structural damage, fires and of course massive flooding.
The machinery of war requires these personal sacrifices, but offers no comfort in the final moments of human life. I wonder where their thoughts turned?
Powers of Ten, a java applet, let's you zoom from beyond the edges of our galaxy (outside the Milky Way, 10 million light years from the Earth) all the way down to the sub atomic level of a carbon atom.
As Submunition Transmissions puts it, it rox. [via Localfeeds: LA]
According to Mike Penner of the LAT, we've been spared from another week of having the Raiders on with no one watching.
Bravo, Channel 2! The station's original game plan was to force-feed us a whatever-happened-to matchup between the Raiders and the Pittsburgh Steelers and its scintillating subplot: See which team's coach gets fired first!
Congratulations to Mike and Amiee on the birth of their daughter, Eve Aileen on Friday evening.
Everyone is doing fine and expected home tomorrow morning.
This silly little application (flash) is a non-traditional snow globe.
The initial temptation is just to keep shaking it and listen to the caterwauling, but as Journal of your average Junius points out, you'll miss the snowman being made (and the yodeling of the snowboarder). [via Localfeeds: Los Angeles, CA]
Adam mentioned that they were reading Macbeth at school and that reminded me of something I'd stuck in my list o' things to write about a while back. MIT offers The Complete Works of William Shakespeare online, which is very cool. I've grabbed Macbeth, now I need to read it again. It's been a long time.
I originally found the Shakespeare link from an entry on From Behind the Wall of Sleep.
Stephen (the resident coaster fanatic) has been pestering my wife and I to buy the NoLimits Rollercoaster Simulation and I've finally caved. It certainly looks interesting.
Remember Steve, you now owe me a review.
There is a new meme making the rounds in blogland and more recently, journalism in general... the tip of the hat (sometimes called a hat tip in a less than ideal short cut).
There is/was a geeky way of indicating an external reference using a [via somesite] type link or using a more direct thank you. Weblogs have been wandering back to an older concept, tipping one's hat to another person as way of saying thanks. The blog tip o' the hat seems to be a way to say something previously left unsaid (but implied).
Of course, we don't normally wear hats these days so it's no longer a common courtesy. What's been interesting is to see it leak into mainstream journalism. Not just sports articles (where the idea of tipping ones cap never left) but other areas as well. Coincidence? Perhaps.
One other thing while pondering this relatively trivial subject.
Was the hat tip originally a sign of respect? The civilian equivalent of a salute? Somehow we went from wigs and hats, to just hats and finally to uncovered heads. We haven't lost our simple signs for telling people that we're unhappy (one could argue that the list of well understood signals for displeasure are growing), but we do seem to have lost meaningful ways of to convey thanks and respect in a non verbal fashion.
Al Gunther's Egg shell Carving and Sculpting
Ping Pong, matrix style.
A fortune from Susan Kitchens
The old believe everything;
the middle aged suspect everything;
the young know everything.
That's the first time in a quite while that a fortune cookie made me laugh and I wasn't even there.
