One Aging Geek

Pathetic

2007-05-31T20:53:00.000-05:00

It's pathetic that I haven't posted to this in months. Since the last post I've been back to Amsterdam to teach my second class there, down to Sydney, Australia to teach, over to Paris for a customer visit ("I'm from headquarters, I'm here to help...") and day after tomorrow will be on my way back to Paris to teach a class again. Four international trips in 6 months is pretty astounding. Sydney is an astounding place. End of February, late summer, is a perfect time to visit. The harbor is beautiful. Took a ferry ride out to Manly that went smack thru the middle of an entire fleet of racers. Pretty cool. Amsterdam in winter isn't bad but I'd like to get back in the spring or summer to see the trees along the canal leafed out. On both trips I dang near got creamed by bicyclists. No issues with cars or trains but those cyclists are too silent. Oh, yeah, and I've survived yet another round of layoffs at my employer. I think that's about 14 rounds now. With each laid off person matched within a couple of months by a new hire in a country where labor is cheaper. Software development and testing is the new blue collar job. It migrates to where costs are low. The famous JWZ once said that big companies don't survive by doing great things, they survive by sucking less than other big companies. Sigh.

Gadget Christmas

2007-02-06T16:57:00.000-06:00

This year was a Year of the Gadgets for Christmas. My grown daughter must have had a very good year. She and her husband bought new cars just before the end of the year. And she dropped a bunch on gadgets for the old man. One gift didn't quite work out as planned. She bought me a Samsung i730 Windows-based phone. I tried it out for a week and decided we were not a match. The phone was about like having a laptop in your pocket with Word, Excel, and whatnot. But it had several downsides. The thing weighed in at almost half a pound and was ... quite large. Since I do not get along with belt clips, it made quite a lump in my pocket. It had some other downsides like being incredibly battery hungry. And, being Windows, it locked up and had to be rebooted about once a day. Verizon has a 15-day trial period with purchases so before the time was up I did some research and swapped the Samsung out for a black Motorola Q. The Q is only a bit over 4 ounces and is thinner than a RAZR or the LG Chocolate I had. The Q is still a Windows-based device but it uses a "lesser" version of Windows Mobile. In the case of Windows, less is definitely more. I've had only a very few lock ups on the thing. Having access to my calendar and email and to-do lists on the phone has been quite useful. I've still got some stuff on the old PalmOS-based PDA but that device is destined for the dust bin. The other major gadget that the kid got me was a Logitech Harmony 550 programmable remote. The Harmony line is sweet! Plug in to a computer via USB and log in to a web application. Define your devices and "activities" (like "Watch a DVD"). The web app sorts out all the right settings and loads up the remote. So now with one press of a button all the right devices are turned on or off, set to the right mode, etc. Very sweet.

State of the world tour

2007-02-06T16:48:00.000-06:00

I am between trips on my "world tour". I ended up blowing most of my Christmas vacation catching up on a major work task. I created a class for one of the software products I've worked on for the last couple of years. That was the downside. The upside is I get to take the class on the road. I taught it to a class of 23 in Houston (home), the second week of January. Then the week before last (fourth week of January) I taught 18 people in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam class was oversold so I'm going back for an additional dozen students. I'll spend most of the next four weekends on airplanes. To and from Amsterdam, then on Friday the 23rd of February I'll be off to Sydney. I'm adding a day or two to the stay in Sydney just to see the sights. And that will probably be that. After these trips it might be a long time before I go out of the country again. My last hurrah for this class will be to team-teach it with a professional instructor. From then on the class will be a chargeable item for the company.

The current pet situation

2007-02-06T16:40:00.000-06:00

It's been a while since I've posted here. So I'll do some catching up in bits and snippets. It took the dog a month from the time we got her until she could negotiate the stairs. We could have accelerated her learning but we chose to leave the upstairs as a dog-free zone for the cat's safety. During that month we kept a close eye on the interactions between the two. By the time the dog managed the stairs we had actually over done it and she was afraid of the cat. Any time the cat came into the room, the dog would leave. For a time it was so bad that if the cat came downstairs, the dog would go upstairs or vice versa. The only neutral ground was the master bedroom at night. The cat sleeps on the bed and the dog on a blanket at one end of the room. We've now gotten things on a more even keel. The two of them have finally decided that the other is mostly harmless. So all seems to be well on this front.

After market battery genius

2006-11-25T20:35:00.000-06:00

This guy has a brilliant replacement for the instruction manual. Those things are usually written by someone for whom English is a fifth language and are damn near useless.

Right about two years ago I bought a 40GB hard-drive based iRiver MP3 player. It has a few quirks but it's been a workhorse player until recently. The battery hit end of life. First symptom was that it would suddenly power off when trying to do line-in recording. And it went downhill from there. When new the player would go a good six to eight hours on a charge. At end-of-life it was down to between 10 minutes and an hour.

I checked into buying a replacement player since technology has moved along. But to get something of equivalent capacity I was looking at nearly the same price as I paid for the iRiver. Google came thru with a pointer to a battery available on iPods99.com for $29. The confirmation email came along with a pointer to an instructional video for replacing it.

There is the brilliant concept. No indecipherable manual with about a third as many diagrams as you really need, a video. And along with the battery came a teeny phillips screwdriver and a plastic pry tool for opening up the player.

Very cool.

Upstairs pet, downstairs pet

2006-11-22T20:38:00.000-06:00

Two and a half weeks in and we're still not sure what the dog thinks of the cat.

The dog can't handle stairs, she's only been upstairs once. The weekend after we got her, I put her leash on and walked her upstairs so she could get a bath.

So the cat is staying upstairs for the most part. The cat is a complete wuss about dogs. Our previous had been trained by previous cats that cats own the house and rank higher than anyone else, including the two-legged staff members that tend to the food dish. So this cat never had to worry about the previous dog.

But this new dog has never been around cats. And the cat is pretty much the exact size and color of the lure that the dog has been chasing for the last three years.

We knew this could be an issue going in to the situation. So far we're keeping an eye on them when they do end up on the same floor. And when we're gone the dog goes in her kennel.

Last night the cat came downstairs to be adored while we watched TV. The dog kept eyeing the cat but never quite stirred out of her bed.

Googling the dog

2006-11-07T09:26:00.000-06:00

This past Sunday afternoon we added a new member to the family. We adopted a retired racing greyhound. There is a dog racing track about 15 miles down the freeway from us. When the dogs are no longer winning, they go into the adoption center. When we visited there were 17 dogs up for adoption plus a couple that won't ever be adopted out. One had snapped at a child when placed and because of that has been parked in the center for two years. Probably not his fault, greyhounds are not used to children and are not recommended for homes with small children. Fifty to eighty pound animals that stand up to 30 inches at the shoulder just don't mix with rambunctious little kids, no matter the breed.

Our dog, "Gertie" (an abbreviated version of her racing name) is a four year old female who raced for a bit over two years. She's just over 60 pounds, about average size for a female. She's "red fawn" colored, a reddish tan, with some white markings and a bit of black on her tail and ears.

Because all racing greyhounds are registered and have a unique racing name, it's possible to google for the dog's racing name. That turns up a number of racing cards and information sites. One of the result sites shows that she won a total of 10 races out of around 70. She had six siblings. Two other than her had decent racing careers, the other three ran only a handful of times.

The dogs live such a structured life, it's odd to find what they just don't know. Like stairs. Stairs are a complete mystery. Because they spend a large portion of their day in a kennel, a "crate" is mandatory equipment. They feel safe in the crate and will go there when ever things get too confusing or stressful. Gertie is crashed out in hers now having an after breakfast nap.

The most interesting thing we still have ahead of us is getting Bailey, the wussy cat, and Gertie to know each other without any bloodshed. Bailey is a flame-point siamese mix so he's nearly white... too close to the color of the lure that racers chase. Since Gertie can't handle stairs, the cat has retreated to the upstairs. I'm in no hurry to teach the dog stairs until she and the cat are safe together.

When Bailey ventures downstairs, we keep a close eye on them. A proper cat would walk up to the dog, hiss, give it a couple of quick smacks to show it who owns the house and that would be it. But Bailey is a complete wuss. He ignored our previous dog, Zoe, rather they ignored each other. Zoe had been taught by Sherlock, a previous cat, that cats rule the roost.

So far Bailey is eyeing Gertie from a distance and running upstairs if she comes out of her crate. Sunday evening Gertie made a move like she wanted to get a close look at him. We've muzzled her from some encounters but having the muzzle on and not going anywhere just confuses her. Time will tell how this works out. We have reasonable hopes since Gertie isn't showing signs of high "prey drive". We just have to convince her that Bailey is part of her pack and not lunch.

Home from "Norn Iron"

2006-10-20T18:09:00.000-05:00

Spent last week in Belfast, N. Ireland ("Norn Iron" as the locals pronounce it). It was a business trip for me and a vacation for Mrs. Aging Geek.

We stayed at the Hilton Belfast on the banks of the Lagan. It's the tallish building in the center of the picture.

You can see remnants of "The Troubles" but Belfast is a very different place from a decade ago. Not much of a tourist stop, especially in October. The weather was beautiful, sunny almost all week but after seeing the murals, the empty ground where the Titanic was built and the Botanical Garden, Mrs. Geek pretty much ran out of things to do.

We did discover that Guinness really is a completely different experience over there compared to over here. The Guinness we get in America tastes like drinking a loaf of rye bread. In the U.K. (and I'm told even more so in Dublin where it's brewed), it's a great beer.

We stayed the weekend after my business was done. Did a bus tour up to the Antrim coast and a ferry ride to Scotland.

The trip back was ... long. The concierge advised us to be at the airport "three or four" hours before the flight. We opted for three so with a 30 minute cab ride that meant waking at 6:00am to pack and make an 11:10am flight. The advice wasn't far off. We stood in a line a good 30 minutes before talking to the person who checked passports and asked the usual security questions then another 20 minutes to check the baggage. U.K. to U.S. flights still don't allow liquids and strictly limit to one carry-on. They also are doing a final random check just as you board... Mrs. Geek and I got nabbed. My backpack had all the electronics, laptop, two cell phones, MP3 player, digital video camera, digital still camera. All of them had to come out, be turned on, and the screener had to see them do something. Plus a pretty thorough pat-down and emptying out of all pockets. Sigh.

After that it was an uneventful flight to Newark. Then the delays hit. Houston had gotten up to 10 inches of rain so IAH was a complete mess. We were delayed in boarding in Newark, then pushed back and sat on the tarmac for a good half hour. The plane was routed around the weather so the flight was longer than it should have been. Finally got on the ground in Houston only to wait 45 minutes for ground traffic to unsnarl enough to get to a gate. And then every remaining step was more crowded and took a little longer than normal, slow baggage, lines for the bus to parking, lines to get out of parking.

The final straw was when we got within a mile of the house and were blocked by high water on the road. It took almost an hour to get that final mile. We detoured, detoured again and finally went a good 15 miles out the wrong way to come at the subdivision from the other side. No problems on that route and no problems in the subdivision or with the house, just that one big deep puddle that got in the way. So we finally hit home and fell into bed after a solid 24 hours after waking in Belfast.

Best meal: Dinner at the Cafe Vaudeville
Cheapest meal: 1.50GBP for bottomless Irish Stew at The Front Page
Most interesting name for a dish: Bubble and Squeak (had at the Morning Star)
Local dish I wasn't adventurous enough to eat: Black Pudding
Other pubs:
- McHugh's located in the oldest building in Belfast
- The John Hewitt, very traditional
Stuff lost on the trip:
- Nice sunglasses
- Debit Mastercard eaten by an Ulster Bank ATM
Stuff gained on the trip:
- Coworker from the U.K. gave me an old unlocked cell phone since my shiny Verizon Chocolate is CDMA so doesn't work there. For a mere 5GBP I got a U.K. SIM card for it.
- An appreciation for Guiness
- A couple of pounds (the kind around the middle) from eating potatoes and sausages too much.

Update: repost with picture scaled down a bit

Life with Chocolate

2006-09-14T10:49:00.000-05:00

Life with chocolate is better than without ... but in this case Chocolate is the new phone I acquired.

About three weeks ago my "New every two" anniversary came up. I spent a few days wading thru the horrible Verizon website to try to figure out what phones were available. I narrowed down to the Motorola RAZR V3M and the LG VX8500 Chocolate. Both are small enough to go in a pocket. Belt clips and I do not get along. Both can play music and support a microSD card. The RAZR has speakerphone capability that is missing from the Chocolate but the Chocolate plays MP3 or WMA while the RAZR is WMA only. I ended up going with the Chocolate.

Given that nothing is perfect, I'm ... reasonably happy with the result.

What this thing has done for me is reduce the number of gadgets I drag around on a regular basis. In my typical work day I use a portable MP3 player to listen to podcasts while commuting and carry a PDA from meeting to meeting primarily so my calendar is handy. The phone has replaced both of these uses.

After having the phone for a couple of days I bought the Music Essentials Kit (MEK) and a 1GB microSD card (the phone can accomodate microSD cards up to 2GB). The MEK includes a set of headphones (which suck, more below), a USB cable, and drivers for Windows. After installing the drivers and plugging the phone in, it shows up as a modem and as a COM port. Presumably one could use the phone as a method of connecting to the Internet. In addition, putting the phone into "sync music" mode causes Windows to recognize it as a "portable player" device. The thing is interfaced, not as a simple disk drive... that would be too easy, but as a Media Transfer Protocol device or in Microsoftspeak "Plays for Sure". In other words it's got a layer to help enforce Digital Restrictions Management schemes.

I've tried using Windows Media Player 10 to transfer music to the phone. It's slow, about 250KB/sec so multiple minutes per typical track. There were some odd quirks. It would randomly decide to convert some MP3s to WMA before transferring. No idea why. It would also randomly lose the tag data so the track would show up on the phone as having no artist or album.

I next tried using WinAMP. WinAMP didn't do the weird convert-to-WMA trick but also lost tags randomly and also randomly deleted tracks.

At this point I'm sticking to putting music onto the microSD card by taking the memory card out of the phone and using a flash card reader. The card came with an SD card shaped "adapter". Slide the microSD card into the adapter and then just use an SD card reader. This is still slow so perhaps that's a "feechur" of microSD cards. But so far it seems to be more ... predicable. No disappearing tags or tracks.

So moving music to and from the device isn't as convenient or quick as I could have wished. But I'm still finding the MP3 player useful. What I'm listening to is audio books. These make my commute more bearable. I plug in the headset, put in one earbud, fire up the player and listen as I drive. I have a co-worker who has given me a whole pile of audio books plus I've got several queued up from Podiobooks.com. That leaves my iRiver H-340 hard-drive MP3 player for podcast listening.

The headphones in the MEK are ... sub par. The earbuds are too big for my earholes. But for the moment I'm stuck with them. The phone has one all-purpose port, used for charging, headphones, everything. Included is an adapter for a "standard 2.5mm" headset but it will only work with four-conductor plugs (ground, left, right, microphone) and all I have is three conductor headsets (ground, single earbud, mike). So, until I can save up the nickels and dimes for a bluetooth headset the MEK phones are all I've got.

The phone is also doing decent duty as my portable calendar. The on-phone calendar is good but using BitPIM makes it truly useful. BitPIM recognizes the VX8500 when it's hooked up via USB and can manipulate most of the data on the phone. Ringtones, phonebook, wallpaper, pictures, SMS messages, memo pad, playlists, songs, and the calendar. In addition BitPIM can import my Outlook calendar. So it takes just a few clicks to get the calendar out of Outlook and onto the phone.

Let's see what other features... oh yeah, it makes, you know, phone calls. It's a good, small phone with all the stuff you'd expect on a modern cell phone. Good sound quality, good reception sensitivity. Battery life is solid even when running the MP3 player. It has a "music only" mode that turns off the phone part for use on airplanes. I ran the player for the duration of a flight to San Francisco (about 3 hours from down here on the third coast) and used about a quarter charge. Also used it as a travel alarm on that trip and have carried over to using it as my alarm at home.

Damn near back to normal

2006-08-02T20:37:00.000-05:00

Today, one month to the day since I took out the last of the kitchen cabinets, we once again have a functioning kitchen. Well, almost.

Since my last post here

The wood floors have all gone in. Bellawood Brazilian Cherry, 3/8-inch thick solid wood. The installer did a good job. Not perfect, a couple of spots where I'd have liked the boards to be fitted more tightly together, but a good job.
We've moved the furniture into the library although there's work to be done in there. That includes two wing chairs that came back from the upholstery shop last week.
We've moved what furniture we have into the living room. The big couch and big oversized huge armchair are still off at the upholstery shop.
The granite countertops went in day before yesterday. Turns out the stone place had released the slabs but they had not been sold. So the stone and tile guy was able to get them and do all the fabrication. The guy does great work. There are two angles, one on the bar and one on the main counter, where the granite is in two pieces. They did a great job of minimizing the appearance of the seams.
With the countertops in and the kitchen sink installed it was time for a plumber. So the kitchen sink and dishwasher are now functional.
I installed the powder room vanity and sink. It's a funky modern thing. Like a table with a bowl on it and a faucet that belongs in a modern art museum. I thought about plumbing that in myself but the stock PVC pieces from the local big box home improvement warehouses didn't quite handle the spacing. So that went to the plumber too. Ditto the toilet reinstall in the powder room.
The former owners had installed a whole house water softener but had never maintained it. So it was worse than useless. I had switched it to bypass the day after moving in. The plumber removed it. The owner of the plumbing company is a friend from church. Good thing, even after the discount he gave us the bill was ... surprising. We kept one of his guys occupied for the entire day but still...
The garage has been fully unpacked. Still more work to do out there. I've cut but not installed pegboard for behind the former-kitchen-now-workbench countertop. Before I put it in I'll run some surface wiring down to where we want the freezer.
The new range arrived today. Mrs. Geek called and asked "do you want the good news or the bad news". She thought the range didn't fit in its space. That touched off a flurry of phone calls (countertop guy: "can that granite come off?", cabinet person: "you put 'em too close together, you're going to have to come fix this!"). When I got home and had a look, though, it slid right in. Absolutely zero space but that's fine according to the book. There's actually a little less than an eighth of an inch on each side except for where the cabinet fronts stick out on each side. So the space is exactly to the 30-inch spec it should be.

The last biggish thing left is the tile backsplash and tile front on the fireplace. The tile and stone folks will be here tomorrow (just got off the phone with him telling him we're back "on").

From there on it's all DIY stuff. The gas range isn't hooked up and didn't come with a flex hose to do it. I've got some finishing details in the powder room. There are two spots in the kitchen where I'll do trim pieces where cabinets meet the wall (should have caught that when the installers were here but at least I have a big piece of "universal filler" that matches the cabinets). I'm on the hook to design and build shelves in the library and to box in for a window seat. After that it will be new baseboards, crown molding, and shoe molding in there. The final stuff in the garage is still on my to-do list. As is fixing some trim outside above the garage door. Mrs. Geek still has a ton of painting to do. Touch up and trim downstairs. Stairway, laundry room and master bedroom upstairs. And then there's hanging artwork and whatnot on the walls all over the place.

We're thinking about another three to four weeks and the place will be presentable.

But tomorrow, for the first time in a month, the coffeepot will be fired up down in the kitchen instead of on my bathroom counter. And I'll be able to make a capuccino! Woo hoo!

Gmail amazing shrinking spam folder

2006-07-21T09:56:00.000-05:00

I've had a gmail account for a while now and after getting acquainted with it I have moved all my personal mail to it. I have a vanity domain that I've used for several years that I configured to forward to the gmail account. I did this after gmail started offering name spoofing so that my return address would remain as my vanity domain.

Of course having a long used email address meant I immediately had a significant spam load. Gmail's spam filters worked pretty well and the 100 or so spams a day were all going to the spam folder. Like anyone with sense, as I was learning to trust Gmail, I would check on the contents of the spam folder every day or two. But I recently stopped bothering. Gmail automatically deletes spam that arrived more than 30 days ago and the spam folder contents don't count towards the space limit.

So here's the odd thing. It's been about two, maybe three months since I stopped examining and deleting the spam. For the previous several months, perhaps year, that I used gmail I was at a pretty steady diet of 100 spams a day. Plus or minus maybe ten percent. And for the first month I saw the spam box build up to around the 3,000 count that I expected. But for the last month, the total spam count sitting in the spam folder has been steadily shrinking.

Looking into the spam folder I see that a month ago there are about ... 100 spams per day. But over the last few days the number is under twenty per day.

Not that I'm complaining or anything but ... where has all the spam gone? I can think of several possible explanations:

The ecomonic model that supported spam has change sufficiently that the amount of spam on the network really is going down. Doesn't jibe with other articles I see that list total spam as the lion's share of all email on the 'net.
Gmail has instituted some global "front door" filters that stops more spam before it gets to my inbox.
Gmail learns my spam by my leaving it in the spam folder instead of deleting it and then filters more before storing it.
Lack of response from my email address is causing that address to fall off the spammers' lists.

But of course, writing about things causes me to think about them more. And there is another possibility. I used to have a "catch all" forwarder on my vanity domain. So any random email address at the domain would get forwarded to my real address. Some time back I gave that up as a bad idea and now only forward selected addresses. So I guess that's the real story. Eighty percent of the spam I was getting was being sent to addresses that were guessed or simply made up.

Semi weekly house update

2006-07-19T21:51:00.000-05:00

Been a busy few days at the geek household.

The cabinets went in last Saturday, they look gorgeous. While the cabinet installers did an entire kitchen installation I managed to fit and install the three base cabinets in the library.

Getting the kitchen cabinets in let us move the wine chiller into it's cubby (sans countertop still). Discovered that I had bunged up the back end of the chiller in the process of moving it out of the kitchen. I must have slid it off the tile and caught the whole weight on the shell instead of the feet. Cosmetic only and it will be concealed but annoying.

With the cabinets in, it was time to move all the downstairs furniture onto the tile floor (foyer, kitchen and breakfast area) so that the areas that are getting wood were clear for the installers. That involved some creative stacking. Some stuff had to go upstairs or into the garage. The plasma TV and digital cable box/DVR are offline for the duration. Man, there are a lot of commercials in TV programs!

Monday morning I escaped for a short business trip to Nashville. Total WOFTAM but getting out of the chaos had a certain appeal. I'm back now. While I was gone, Mrs. Geek dealt with details with the wood installer. Two rooms, the library and dining room have the wood installed but no trim. They also made a start on the big living room. Schedule is for all the wood and trim to be done by Friday.

Except, that is, the library. The wood and threshold will be done but no shoe molding. I couldn't match the baseboard to go across in front of the built in cabinets so I ripped it all out. New baseboards will be a DIY project. The wood guy included a hand stained cherry shoe molding in his quote so he'll leave me pieces for that room to install myself. Mrs. Geek wants crown molding in that room, too, so one big molding project is in my future.

Also in the last few days, Mrs. Geek slaved away doing the faux plaster texture and painting in the powder room. I haven't seen the results of that because we can't cross the partially installed wood floor.

Other stuff done: new dishwasher arrived and is hooked up to water supply but, since there is no sink or disposal, that's as far as it goes for now. New microwave is installed and usable. The old gas range went off to a new home courtesy of the microwave installer. I don't really care if he took it to the local flea market and sold it. We were going to push it to the curb for the sin of being the wrong color. So anything that keeps it out of a landfill is a plus for me.

Turns out the granite place released our slabs but didn't actually sell them. Our stone and tile guy came by to make measurements Monday. He took the new sink with him so the sink-shaped hole in the granite will match the sink. Probably a couple of weeks to fabricate the countertops out of the granite.

Then there will be lots of shimming and fitting to get the countertops installed. Part of the pony wall that separates the kitchen from the breakfast area was built right at the height of the cabinets. But we raised the cabinets a fraction of an inch by tiling the entire floor first and putting the cabinets on top of the tile (instead of them in on bare concrete and tiling around them). So the pony wall will have to be built up a bit. And of course it wasn't exactly level to begin with.

Probably some time this weekend we can actually start moving what furniture we have (the things that aren't at the upholstery shop) into the living room and dining room. Set up the hutch and unpack it. Kind of like moving into the house all over again.

Aside from the libary project, I also have to move the kitchen phone outlet. I keep trying to forget that. Got to get that done prior to the backsplash install!

Seems like we're only a couple of weeks or so from having all of the rooms in the house back in a usable state. If not exactly ready for the "grand opening". Still lots of painting. And the powder room to get back in working order. And the garage to deal with.

House progress

2006-07-14T12:36:00.000-05:00

There will probably come a day when my life contains more than just remodeling the house so I might post something else here... but not yet.

The tile is done. Done. Finito. All laid in the correct direction and grouting all done. It looks great!

Last night we jammed all the furniture from the study/library and dining room into the breakfast area and living room so the wood floor installers could come pour leveller into the low spots in those two rooms. When we took the carpet up in the dining a couple of weeks ago we discovered there had already been some leveling done. There is about a 1-inch hump in the dining room that was probably worse before that leveling. The wood floor guys will work to minimize it but there's just going to be a little hump there. On Monday they'll come spread the moisture barrier onto the dining room and study floors. They also want to be able to level the floor in the living room but... I don't think we can put the entire floor's worth of furniture into the breakfast area.

Saturday the new cabinets will be installed in the kitchen. That starts that room back towards normalcy. At least the kitchen contents can once again come out of boxes and go into cabinets. But the granite place released the slabs we had put on hold so we're waiting for their next shipment. The tile and counter guy will be out Monday to measure for the counters. With that info and some granite in hand it will take a couple of weeks to shape the counters. Along with the counter install will be the undermount sink install including redoing the plumbing and new garbage disposal.

The big pink couch and a giant chair left to be reupholstered today. The new couch arrived yesterday. Once all the pieces come back from being upholstered I think that takes care of furniture.

Mrs. Geek is doing a plaster texture treatment in the powder room. When she's done with that we'll either have someone install the new sink or DIY. Shouldn't be a big deal either way. I'll put the toilet back in myself.

This weekend will be consumed with assembling and installing the cabinet bases that are going in the library. We want those in before the wood... just because. They're going to be permanent so no reason to have expensive wood floors under them. Also it simplifies our life a bit if the baseboards don't have to come up and be reinstalled on top of the wood floors. If I have time I'll also rip out the sill on the end window in the library and box in the area that will be a sort of window seat. We're finding that most of the inside trim is particle board. Easy to yank out at least. And if I have more time I'll be unpacking the boxes in the garage into the cabinets out there.

We're now at two weeks without a kitchen. It's kind of like living in a motel that has no restaurant, the lobby under construction, and the maid service on strike.

The general grubbiness level is going down as we get time to clean up stuff that got coated in dust from the tile removal. But the chaos level is still pretty high.

Three steps forward, one step back

2006-07-10T15:46:00.000-05:00

The continuing saga of a house undergoing some minor remodeling...

Over the weekend, as I was installing the old kitchen cabinets in the garage, I kept looking at the kitchen tile. It wasn't laid square to the walls. There's a pony wall that separates the kitchen and living room. At one point it takes a 45 degree corner that echoes an angle in the exterior wall where the breakfast area "bays out". But a line from the corner of the pony wall to the "matching" corner of the exterior wall isn't square to the rest of the house. If the house was built a little more carefully that line probably would be square with the walls. But it isn't.

The tile had been laid with that off-square line as the baseline. So the whole floor was at about a 4 or 5 degrees to the walls. It took a couple of phone calls to the tile company owner to convince him that is how it was. It is not what he had told the crew chief. What he (and I) had wanted done was for the tile to be laid in a grid square to the walls. The last course of tiles were to be cut along a straight line snapped between the two off-kilter corners.

So today the tile in the kitchen came back up.

I'm working from the house so I can check up on it and all looks good this time around. Since the tile was only down for two days it came back up with little or no breakage. The noise around here is something. Got a guy with a grinder outside taking mortar off the back of tiles. And some occasional wet saw work as another guy fits tiles to edges and corners. Earlier there was also a little jackhammer device going that breaks the mortar loose without going into the foundation. There's four guys working on this so it's going in faster than last week when two were in the kitchen and two were in the foyer. Expecting tile laying to finish tomorrow and grout to go in on Wednesday.

Moved to the "done" column now are:

Final tiles in foyer (they had left a couple out at the door so we could get thru it if necessary).
Powder room tiled.
Old cabinets and countertop installed in garage (DIY). I've cut but not installed pegboard to form a back wall. It's going to be a nice workbench. And 9 feet of upper and lower cabinets will hold all the stuff now in boxes on the garage floor.
New kitchen sink purchased from Home Depot. This one may go back too. Lowe's has a nicer one that might work.
New kitchen faucet arrived (black, special order)
Installer has inventoried and checked the cabinets. One drawer front arrived with a big nick so he'll rush order that. Not a hold up for install, though.
Kitchen cabinet Install tentatively scheduled for Friday or Saturday depending on tile completion.
New microwave ordered. It's black. The old one was white. Wouldn't do.
Faucet for powder room purchased.

It will be nice someday to be able to walk into a hardware store without a list that comes to four to five hundred dollars.

Past the point of maximum chaos?

2006-07-07T20:23:00.000-05:00

The remodeling is proceeding well. We hit the point of maximum chaos with the entire downstairs down to bare concrete floors and the kitchen and powder room stripped of all fixtures. Plus the tile out and a layer of powdered mortar all over the downstairs. Done:

Wine chiller arrived, mail order from the Beverage Factory. It's a little noiser than we'd have preferred, hoping that shoving it into it's cubby when that's done will muffle it.
Old cabinets and fixtures removed. This was about the only DIY part of the kitchen redo. I have neither the time nor the talent to do the kind of job I want done. Most of the old cabinets will go up in the garage, some went to a neighbor, one got destroyed in the removal, stripped screw heads were stronger than the cabinet. The sink base sans it's back went to the curb but disappeared before trash pickup as did the kitchen and powder room sinks.
Gave old microwave to a friend to replace her even older microwave
Electrical changes for wine chiller and for built-ins in the study
New cabinets arrived on schedule and are sitting in garage.
Old tile in kitchen, breakfast, foyer, and powder room was taken out yesterday.
Barstools arrived
Washing machine broke. After about 26 years it was time for a replace, not repair.

In progress:

New tile is going in. Foyer is done, most of breakfast area, some of kitchen. About half I'd estimate.
Bought and returned new sink. The 150lb black porcelain over cast iron looked great but we would have had to fill the base cabinet with bracing to hold it up. We'll go with a black resin sink and black faucet.
Much more painting accomplished.
Two chairs off being reupholstered
New couch arrived, will be delivered next week
New dishwasher will be delivered next week.

Still to go:

Clean up dust from tile removal (DIY)
Finish tile install. Laying, grouting.
Kitchen Cabinet install
Template build for the granite
Granite fabrication (shape etc)
Counter install
Dishwasher install
much more painting (DIY)
Study cabinets to assemble and paint (DIY), then build shelves to ceiling (DIY)
Old cabinets install in garage (DIY)

Ugh. I wish I hadn't made that last list. It's going to be a busy weekend.

Over the edge into total chaos

2006-06-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago, Mrs. Geek and I uprooted ourselves from our home of 22 years to move about three miles. The new (to us) place is only 11 years old, we were the first owners of the old place so ... do the math.

The new place needs lots of work. With Mrs. Geek, it's just a given that every wall and ceiling in the place will get painted. And she works like a dog at doing it. Since moving in she's already done everything upstairs except the master suite. Downstairs, the study ceiling and walls have been done. Last weekend we pitched in together and did the main downstairs ceiling. The new place is an "open floor plan" so the entire downstairs except for the study is one connected ceiling. Since then she's done the dining room and foyer areas. Along with the painting has been lots of cleaning and patching the seemingly thousands of nail and screw holes the previous owners made.

So the upshot is that the household has been pretty unsettled ever since moving in. Minimal unpacking in rooms not yet painted, ladders, drop cloths and tools everywhere. That sort of thing. The carpet from the study and dining room has been ripped out so those rooms are bare concrete. The study is jam packed with displaced furniture plus the wood and associated paraphenalia for the future wood floors.

But this weekend it's going to go from unsettled over to total chaos. The major things we're doing are to replace the kitchen cabinets and countertops and to replace all the carpet and tile downstairs with wood and nicer tile or stone.

The new cabinets are due to arrive on July 6th. Between now and then I'll be taking down the existing cabinets, a DIY project that saves me about 10% of the cost of new cabinets. Then we'll have someone come in to remove the existing tile in the foyer, kitchen, and breakfast areas. Some time within a week or so after the delivery of the new cabinets the installer for those will come do his job. Then will come the new tile floor, new granite counters, new backsplashes, new sink and faucet, new dishwasher, etc. Mixed in there while the kitchen is a gutted shell will be some painting and rearranging of wiring.

Oh, and there's a downstairs powder room that will also be stripped to bare walls and re-done. Tile floor to replace ugly vinyl stick-downs, remove ugly wallpaper, paint, new sink, and new toilet.

So after the tear out we won't have a functioning kitchen or any source of running water downstairs. And 90% of the dishes will be in boxes. And the coffee pot will live in an upstairs bathroom.

I have to keep reminding myself how good it will look.

Interesting...

2006-06-27T21:20:00.000-05:00

So right after I was making a deal about my scripting skills I noticed that I hadn't gotten a TAL episode when expected.

I had been pulling files from the Complete Archive page. For some reason episodes are posted there a few days later than they are on the current year archive page.

So since I was feeling all pumped up I decided to change over the script to use the current year archive page. The links on the page (either the complete or the yearly) point to M3U playlist files. But between the last time I fiddled with this script and this time, the contents of the playlist has changed. Or I didn't look very closely before.

For some reason the playlist files each contain four entries. That would normally be four "tracks". So I guessed that they were now posting the episodes in four parts. Since the show is usually an intro followed by three "acts" that wasn't much of a surprise. I twiddled up the script a bit to read all four "parts" and put them in a directory where they'd eventually find their way onto my MP3 player.

To my surprise I didn't get four parts, I got four repetitions of the entire show.

My only guess at this point is based on each of the entries in the playlist having a different port. My guess is that this is some kind of poor man's load balancer. So I'm picking one at random. The script to get the archive page, find the first 10 playlist files referenced, extract the episode number, match the episode numbers against a log file that prevents duplicate downloads, fetch the contents of the playlist file and select a random entry from it is five lines of fairly dense bash script. The script that then fetches the episode, figures out where to store it, makes the directory if needed is longer because it isn't just a couple of pipelines, it's 25 lines and still has all the code to loop thru multiple parts. Without the looping and the directory creating logic it could be boiled down to a single call to "curl".

Learning to think in pipelines: priceless

Much to do about not much

2006-06-26T18:15:00.000-05:00

Getting stuck on a death march has kept my blog reading to ... well ... none... for about the last three weeks. So I mostly missed the uproar about This American Life on BoingBoing (and elsewhere but summarized nicely there).

It's been easily possible to automate the downloading of TAL episodes since ... well probably since the first time they were posted online.

For a long time they were posted as Real Audio which isn't quite so convenient for us MP3/OGG/WMA device owners. But even that could be converted to MP3 with a few common tools and a short bit of script.

Now that the files are in MP3, it's dead easy to grab the "complete archive page", find the first show listed, read the M3U playlist file to get the MP3 file link and fetch the file. So dead easy that I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader. It took me just over 40 lines of bash script including managing a log of previously downloaded episodes to prevent repeats.

Java good, Perforce bad

2006-05-30T21:43:00.000-05:00

I've spent the last couple of weeks at work building a hunk of J2EE code for a big new product. A few truths:

Java, the language, is pretty ho-hum but the power of the classes that make up J2EE is pretty impressive. Stuff that took a few dozen lines of C++ and a good working copy of the STL, can be thrown down in half a dozen lines reusing J2EE classes.
Perforce is possibly the worst source code management tool known to mankind. In the last 30 years of doing this stuff I've worked with more SCM systems than I can count. I've never worked with one that gives the end programmer worse confidence in having the most current source from the repository nor with one that is so prone to tangling itself up. To be fair, I'm not positive that the people in charge of this development death march have clue number one how to set up a tool for a globe-spanning development team.
Maven2 isn't ready for prime time. The second most important task of a build tool is to be able to deal with multi-timezone development. [The first is to be able to figure out dependencies.] Maven2 seems unable to do either. Or again, the yahoos who set up the source tree and build scripts are again clue-free.

Sunrise Earth

2006-05-30T20:14:00.000-05:00

We recently moved to a new (to us) home. In the process we kicked Southwestern Bell SBC AT&T DSL along with our Dish Network to the curb in favor of cable (TV and modem). One of the motivating factors was to get more HD content for the shiny "small big screen 42-inch Panasonic plasma we bought last year.

After a month with cable and a two tuner HD DVR I'm pretty happy. One of the ... odd ... programs I came across recently is Sunrise Earth. I can't decide if it's really cool or really a waste of bandwidth. It comes on at 6am here on the Third Coast so just as I'm getting up and building that double cappucino eye opener. Since the view out my windows are of the back fence and a couple of Chinese Tallow trees, I've got nothing to rival the vistas they serve up on Sunrise Earth. I've peeked in on it three times in the last couple of weeks and caught moose in Montana, birds and fish in Maine, and birds and alligators in the Everglades. The picture doesn't just sit on one scene, that would burn in on my plasma. They move between viewpoints every couple of minutes. But with the crystal clear picture I get it's a lot like having a magic window looking out at something much more scenic than the coastal plain urban landscape.

All in all, I guess it's a better use of the TV spectrum than say ... most things on the networks.

gaping void

2006-05-16T20:42:00.000-05:00

Discovered this guy's stuff recently. This one is just way too true.

Some of his drawings make me laugh, some make me wince, some I just don't get.

Tin Man Podcast

2006-05-16T10:24:00.000-05:00

I picked up a reference to the Tin Man Podcast from the PRX podcast. The first installment made me laugh out loud. I'm a kind of quiet reserved guy and don't often actually do that.

Probably not for everyone but I've queued up the rest of the episodes for listening.

Google Calendar

2006-04-28T18:46:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago I was thinking about the home remodeling project we're embarked on and decided that Mrs. Aging-Geek and I might need a shareable calendar to keep things organized.

The next thought that occurred to me, since we're both on GMail these days, is "Does Google have a calendar". Sure enough, there is one.

Just today I finally got around to wondering if the Google Calendar is old news that I forgot or ... new. Seems it's pretty new.

Thing seems pretty usable. I've got only a few events on it so far. More later and then we'll see how the sharing stuff works out.

Unfortunate phrasing

2006-04-27T21:33:00.000-05:00

The email address associated with my Netflix account just got an email about the new movie "United 93". The email starts out thus:

As someone who enjoyed 9/11, we thought you'd like to know United 93 opens Friday, April 28th in a theater near you.

So. Enjoyed 9/11. Hm...

Of course, the 9/11 they're referring to is the documentary filmed by two French filmmakers who were doing a documentary about a rookie NYC fireman and ended up filming the events of September 11, 2001. Netflix knows I "enoyed 9/11" because I rated the movie on their site.

Home from a sojourn to Sonoma

2006-04-11T19:33:00.000-05:00

Just back from an extra long weekend in Sonoma county California wine country with Mrs. Geek. We both were in need of a break. We're not sure what decade we last went somewhere as a couple that didn't involve a family gathering. I picked the place as a birthday surprise for her after listening to a couple of wine-related podcasts: Cellar Rat and Grape Radio.

We had a great time in spite of unseasonable weather. What they call rain, we down on the Third Coast call mist. And we didn't really hit much of that. Just cool temps and an occasional sprinkle.

We stayed in a B&B in Cloverdale, kind of the northern edge of the Sonoma wine country. Did an early Thursday flight to San Francisco. After arrival and nabbing the rent car, we had lunch in the Fisherman's Wharf area, made a picture taking stop at the northern end of the Golden Gate, took a short side trip thru Muir Woods to gawk up at the tall trees, then on up 101 to Cloverdale.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were mostly devoted to finding small wineries and sampling their wares. We got a nice tour from Jerry at Michelle-Schlumberger on Friday and did the Korbel tour on Sunday. Saturday also included a loop thru the county out to the coast. We managed to hit a total of 11 wineries, I think. Shipped a half case home from one place and collected a bottle or two from most of the others. We lugged 10 bottles in two cardboard carriers onto the return flight on Monday.

I can't say I have a very educated palette for wines but I am beginning to be able to distinguish among varietals a bit. Even as a wine novice, this was a very fun and very relaxing time in spite of some extra pressures in our lives at the moment.

Setor Hoteleiro overlooking Brasilia

2006-03-29T17:33:00.000-06:00

Last night here. I'm in the Hotel Bonaparte in Brasilia, Brasil.

On my way here I passed thru Sao Paulo; landed there, taxi across the city to the domestic airport. Sao Paulo struck me as crowded and run-down. Virtually every surface that I saw passing thru Sao Paulo, road signs, walls, pillars, benches, all were covered in graffiti. Twenty or so million people jammed together.

By contrast Brasilia is full of open green spaces, monuments, and a mix of government plain with graceful 60s modern architecture. The main roads have enormously wide esplanades, probably 50 to 80 yards wide. All grass and trees. Very little grafitti. Brasilia is a beautiful city. And much less crime than the larger Brazilian cities.

It's early fall here and the weather reminds me of fall in Houston but without the mosquitoes and humidity. Cool evenings, warm days and a thundershower virtually every day.

The other thing that's striking here is how fat Americans are in comparison with Brazilians. We've had some really great meals here including last night at Porcão but there was a noticeable absence of fried food. Lots of fish, lots of vegetables, lots of fresh fruit.

I'm down here on business, teaching a group of Brazilians and Chileans about the software product I work on. For the class the local company rented a room in a facility that conducts classes for people who want to get into government service. During the day when we're there it's mostly young people, high school and college age. The locals tell me these are all middle class and upper middle class kids. The women range from striking to stunning.

All in all, a very nice place to have to spend a few days.

Words to live by, though. Never, ever have a medical emergency in the Setor Hoteleiro (Hotel Sector) during rush hour. One of the students from Chile had seizures at breakfast yesterday. Seems he is on medication and traveling had caused him to forget to take it. At any rate, it took a bit over 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive from the Hospital Sector. Brasilia, you see, is a master planned city. Carved out of the jungle in the 60s to be the capital of the country. So all the hotels are in one area, hospitals in another area, etc. All so nice and neat and ... dangerous when there are 2 million people in the city. While the seizures scared the crap out of those of us with him, he recovered quickly and after a trip to the hospital and a day of rest he was back in class (and back on his meds!).

Personal email from Sir Arthur C Clarke

2006-03-16T20:22:00.001-06:00

Well, more like personalized spam. Sort of.

I've been reading Sir Arthur's stuff since about the time he moved to what was then called Ceylon. So, spam or not, it was cool to get something with his name at the bottom and mine at the top, even if it did come from a computer.

It seems that the dot-com bust, probably coupled with the voodoo science of the Bush administration, means that nobody is giving gobs of money to the SETI folks any more. So they've turned to emailing the people who have signed up for the SETI@Home project.

Being an aging science fiction reader, I absolutely believe that there is life out there. There just too much "out there" out there for it to all be a wasteland. Having recently read Manifold Space, I'm not at all sure I want to find them, though!

If I had anyone reading this I'd suggest that they send the SETI folks a few bucks.

Top-notch sci-fi podcasts

2006-03-09T22:08:00.000-06:00

There's a lot of really good stuff out there. Specifically for sci-fi, I've got three to recommend.

Escape Pod podcast: Steve Eley has the best of the bunch. Good production values, good stories, good readers. Lots of variety.
James Patrick Kelly's Free Reads podcast: Kelly's stories read by the author. Nothing fancy but recorded on good equipment so the sound is good. And the stories are excellent. Kelly also publishes some free, written reads at his website.
Cory Doctorow's podcast: Again, the author reading his own stuff. The audio quality isn't the best because Doctorow records catch-as-catch-can in cabs and hotel rooms and airports as he trots the globe. Sometimes the audio quality detracts a bit from the story but Doctorow is at the top of the field just now. Most of Doctorow's recent work has been released as freely readable/downloadable with links available at his website.

Thumbs down to Voice of Free Planet X podcast

2006-03-09T20:12:00.000-06:00

I got a recommendation to The Voice of Free Planet X podcast from ... somewhere.

So I pulled down the first few episodes. I listened to the first two episodes. Well, the first and most of the second actually. Hit fast forward before the end of the second.

Sorry, Jared, it's a miss for me. The babe in the Axelhead t-shirt on the front page is very ... um ... eye-catching. But the podcast isn't doing it for me.

Three strikes:

Audio quality: horrible, very badly clipped and/or a very poor quality mike
Presentation: yelling isn't an effective way to convey all emotions. Especially with that crappy recording quality
The stories in the first two episodes, which I've already forgotten and I just listened to them in the last couple of days, are either uninteresting or incomprehensible

I guess some may find the podcast edgy, I just find it uninteresting.

All the President's Discs

2006-02-16T17:50:00.000-06:00

This piece is funny but probably dead on. Scary, actually. Not funny a bit.

"Microsoft wants both Blu-ray and HD DVD to lose. You see, before Microsoft and Intel backed HD DVD, Toshiba was just about the only major consumer hardware brand backing HD DVD. Now, since Microsoft and Intel have hopped on to the HD DVD bandwagon and at least dragged HP part of the way there, HD DVD has become a much more viable option."

Meme spreading

2006-02-12T16:22:00.000-06:00

It seems the Million Dollar Home Page may have created a new meme. Aside from the Zero Dollar Home Page, that is.

The boys over at The Dragon Page have a "Con Travel Fund" grid. Buy a block of the grid as a contribution to their convention travel fund and put a microscopic version of your logo in it.

Wife cooks up a way to buy gear to protect troops

2006-02-12T16:04:00.000-06:00

A U.S. soldier's wife is launching real and virtual bake sales to raise money to buy body armor for troops, even though the government has promised to rush more protective gear to those on Iraq's front lines.

I guess this follows inevitably from the kids who show up on my doorstep raising money for their schools.

My final word on the Skullcandy SCE-3B headphones

2006-02-11T19:27:00.000-06:00

About a month ago I blogged about the new dual-purpose headphones I had just gotten. Since then I've had some time with them and have a final verdict: they seemed like a better idea than they are.

My primary need for a headset is to wear during my daily commute (varies between 30 minutes and an hour each way). I don't make it a habit to talk and drive but sometimes it's necessary... and sometimes I'm just bored. For that I only use one earbud. I generally listen to podcasts on airplanes and in airports and have a fairly regular need to do conference calls noisy places and in situations where I want my hands free. For most of those situations I use two earbuds.

The good.

The SCE-3Bs work. The microphone works well. The single button on the microphone module works with my phone. The phone sound is split to both headphones, nice for calls in noisy airports.

The bad.

The earbuds are too big for my ears. I own two other pairs of similarly styled earbuds for music players and the ones on this are just a couple of millimeters bigger. This causes them to not sit comfortably, they push out which reduces the sound a lot. When driving I've had to resort to holding the earbud in with my hand... which sort of defeats that whole hands-free thing.

The ugly.

These things are pretty ugly. The inline module with the microphone, volume control, button, and a clip is pretty enormous. It's about 2-inches lone by 3/4 inch wide and 1/2 inch thick. Kind of a dull green with an orange skull logo on it. I'm not sure this whole thing could be done with less wire but the amount of wire seem excessive. About 5 feet in length from either of the plugs to where the earbuds split off. The split for the two different plugs is about 16 inches from the end. Just a lot of wire to get all tangled up.

The conclusion

I've decided that, like most multifunction devices, the compromises are just too much. I'm going back to a single-purpose phone headset for the phone and will be back to my various other headsets for music and podcasts. Podcasts while driving will be back to the cassette interface. I've got no plans to go Bluetooth. Not just due to the expense, I also don't need another gadget with batteries to manage.

CNN.com - Museum visitor trips, breaks Chinese vases - Jan 30, 2006

2006-01-30T20:05:00.000-06:00

CNN.com - Museum visitor trips, breaks Chinese vases - Jan 30, 2006

Wow. This belongs on one of those Southwest Airlines "want to get away?" advertisements.

Chinese New Year: Resolutions for Google

2006-01-30T19:50:00.000-06:00

Chinese New Year: Resolutions for Google is a very well written and thoughtful piece about what Google has done and what it can do.

NASA workers pause for solemn tribute | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

2006-01-26T19:51:00.000-06:00

Thousands of NASA workers paused from their duties today in a solemn tribute to fallen astronauts from three major tragedies in the nation's quest to explore space.

It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since the Challenger blew up. At the time I was a much younger geek working as a software contractor at Johnson Space Center. My job didn't bring me in direct contact with any astronauts, just "back office" types. Some of the seven who died that day were friends of my co-workers and friends. I could still go stand where I was standing when I got this news. And I still remember the face of the guy who told me.

Every year when this anniversary comes around I'm struck by the proximity of the dates of all of the deaths in the American space program. Apollo 1 on January 27th, Challenger on January 28th, Columbia on February 1, across a span of decades but in the one six day period. Of course, these aren't all the deaths in the program, there were others. But so far as I recall who were in space vehicles when they died. The others were killed in plane crashes and ... more mundane ways.

Update: There is a mostly b.s. story on MSNBC. If you set your threshold for comments high enough to filter out the crap there's a pretty good deconstruction of the b.s. and debate about the fine points on slashdot.

Okay, do be evil: Google launches censored google.cn in China

2006-01-25T21:36:00.000-06:00

The decision was reached after what was described as an excruciating internal debate, but the company finally decided, in the words of Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy counsel, "We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China."

Um... yeah. Spinning.

This comes on the heels of a post that I can't find at the moment allegedly from a Google employee lamenting that it's gone from a great place to work to a many-headed corporate hydra.

Evil is as evil does. Doing the Google China is all about making money.

The geekiest headphones ever?

2006-01-13T21:47:00.000-06:00

I lost my phone headset on a recent business trip and had the bright idea to search out a combo headset that would work for the music player and cell phone simultaneously. Enter the Skullcandy SCE-3b. This may qualify as the geekiest thing I've owned. Not sure.

One set of earbuds. A thumb-sized thingie that carries the microphone, a button, and a volume control, oh and a skull logo thrown in. Two plugs, one 2.5mm for cell phones, on 3.5mm for music player. And way too much wire in between.

The things work. The button causes my Samsung A670 clamshell phone to answer an incoming call or activate voice dialing for outgoing call. The volume control only affects the music player.

Will have to see how this works out. Off on another business trip next week.

Catching up on podcasts

2006-01-13T21:40:00.000-06:00

For the last several months I've had way too many feeds in my podcatcher (PeaPod, btw, very well done no-frills Linux podcatcher). The consequence is that I've been listening about three weeks behind real time.

For a combination of reasons I'm catching up. I'm only a week behind now. Just goes to show you that it is possible to listen to 47 podcast feeds plus a couple of audio shows scraped off the 'net without RSS plus a couple of audio books tricked into the stream using a bit of bash script.

Of course to get that much listening time, you have to have a long commute, sleep poorly, and spend a few hours a week on a treadmill.

Review: Dark City

2006-01-10T20:59:00.000-06:00

Just finished watching Dark City.

Not everyone's cup of whatever but I liked it. It's one of the standard fantasy stories, hero with powers he doesn't know he has saves the ... um ... planet. Only this time it isn't a whole planet, just a free floating city, construct of "the Strangers".

Very cool effects. Angst-ridden hero. Couple of lovely ladies. Couple of name stars in supporting roles (Kiefer Sutherland and William Hurt). Nothing that'll tax your brain but definitely weird. Worth watching if you like dark sci-fi.

Google Unveils The Google Pack

2006-01-07T10:00:00.000-06:00

7hunderstruck writes “Google yesterday announced the release of Google Pack, a ‘free collection of essential software’. Along with Google’s own programs, such as Google Toolbar and Google Earth, Google Pack contains Firefox, Adobe Reader, a six month subscription to Norton Antivirus, and Trillian as well as other apps. Any respectable /. user should have most of this suite installed already (excluding a few things), but it will be nice to make it all widely available to the general public.”

Google has slid well down the slippery slope towards evilness with this. Their choices are questionable at best. Norton in particular has in my experience and reading been the single worst set of products I've ever had to remove from anyone's computers.

Tried out Google Earth again just yesterday. It seems to be a wonderful way to totally lock up a computer. After having to force a power-off on my WinXP laptop twice while fiddling with Google Earth, I removed it.

Google Desktop is an amazing resource hog. After a recent re-build of my laptop I was thinking about ditching Lookout. Some co-workers recommended Google Desktop. I tried it out for about three weeks. It took literally days to index my email and documents. It never found things I searched for unless they were several days old (yes, I'm old, I use search to search for things I received yesterday. Also I get a ton of email at work). And it made the laptop amazingly sluggish. Results: I'm back to Lookout.

Trillian is another questionable and surprising choice given that one of the authors of GAIM was recently employed by Google. GAIM is cross-platform (and that does not mean "runs on multiple versions of Windows").

Update: Meant to come back and fix this. There was no mention of Trillian in the Google Pack, that was purely an invention of the posting on slashdot. Teach me to not check the primary source.

AlterSlash: Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?

2006-01-07T09:46:00.000-06:00

jdfox writes “World Science is reporting on a controversial paper to be published shortly in the peer-reviewed research journal Astrophysics and Space Science, describing a strange red rain that fell in India in 2001, shortly after a meteor airburst event in the area. The authors posit that the red particles found in the raindrops may be extraterrestrial microbes. The authors’ last two papers on the subject were unpublished: this published paper is more cautious. The paper can be viewed online, and should obviously be considered in context. More info on the ‘panspermia’ hypothesis can be found at Wikipedia.”

Now this looks like a must read. Chortle.

CNN.com - 'Truthiness' is word of the year - Jan 7, 2006

2006-01-07T09:24:00.000-06:00

CNN.com - 'Truthiness' is word of the year - Jan 7, 2006

The group of linguists, editors and academics agreed the most useful word was 'podcast' -- a digital feed containing audio or video files for downloading to an MP3 player.

At some point back (yes, I'm too lazy to search my own blog and I'm too old to remember where the post was), I opined that podcast would "stick" as the term. Among the other words in the article, I got a particular chuckle from "muffin top".

Digital Transition Content Security Act

2006-01-02T19:49:00.000-06:00

Digital Transition Content Security Act

On this theme of corporate consistency I'd like to continue by looking at H.R. 4569, the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005, which proves the point I've made many times over the years, that when it comes to technology, government doesn't really know what it is doing. H.R. 4569, which was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 16th, is intended to protect the intellectual property rights of movie studios by MAKING ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERSION ILLEGAL.
I am not making this up.
Under the Act as proposed, manufacturers will have one year after passage to stop making devices that convert analog signals like music and video into digital forms unless those forms preserve some original Digital Rights Management technology present in presumably the pre-analog stage.

DIY "podcast" for This American Life

2005-12-29T15:27:00.000-06:00

If you can't afford to buy This American Life at between $4 and $13 per episode and you think that Audible is evil and you're running a relatively current Linux with MP3 and Real installed... then the script below will fetch TAL episodes. This presumes a "root" directory of $HOME/podcasts within which will be created directories named for the date (yyyy-mm-dd). Prerequisites:

mplayer
Real codecs
LAME
GNU "bc" calculator program

Setup:

In the $HOME/podcasts directory create a file named "ThisAmericanLife.log". Add one line to it with the one lower than episode number with which you wish to start.
Schedule the script to run nightly via cron

Operation:

When the script runs without any arguments it will extract the last line of ThisAmericanLife.log, add one to the value and use that as the episode number to fetch.
The RealAudio version of the episode is fetched and saved as a WAV using the mplayer program. This fetching runs in "real time" so fetching a one hour show takes an hour. Except sometimes it doesn't and downloads very quickly. No clue why. Some weirdness in mplayer.
After the WAV file is fetched it is converted to MP3 using the LAME program. The MP3 is tagged and stored in a directory named for the date and the WAV file is deleted.

Possible improvements:

Could scrape the website for the episode number. But then you'd get reruns. So it doesn't do that. If you seed the log file with the current episode number (minus one) then you'll only get new episodes with no reruns.
Could scrape the mplayer output and get the episode title.

Other features:

Just one so far. If you run the script with a numeric argument it will fetch that episode.

cd $HOME/podcasts

datedir=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

episode=$1
if [ -z $episode ] ; then
      episode=$(echo $(tail -n 1 ThisAmericanLife.log )+1|bc)
fi
echo Fetching episode $episode

/usr/bin/mplayer -playlist http://www.thislife.org/ra/$episode.ram -ao pcm:file=tal$episode.wav -vc dummy -vo null

if [ -e tal$episode.wav ] ; then

      echo $episode >>ThisAmericanLife.log
      sort -n ThisAmericanLife.logtemp
      mv    ThisAmericanLife.logtemp  ThisAmericanLife.log

      if [ ! -d $datedir ] ; then
              mkdir $datedir
      fi

      /usr/bin/lame -V -vbr-new -h --add-id3v2 --tg Speech --tt "This American Life episode $episode" --ty 2006 --ta "Ira Glass" tal$episode.wav $datedir/tal$episode.mp3

      rm tal$episode.wav

fi

Critters in the attic, the rerun

2005-12-23T14:34:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd blogged about round one with the critters in the attic but I can't seem to find it.

We've got another round of critters in the attic. Last spring for the first time in over twenty years in this house, we had some form of rodent move into the attic. I attribute this to no longer having an outdoor cat around the place. My first thought was rats but the pattern of activity didn't fit what I read about rats. We'd hear them only in the evening and at sun-up, as if they were coming in to the attic for a nice snug place to sleep and then heading out to be about their business. Regardless I bought a box of rat poison chunks and crawled up to distribute it. Saw definite signs. Crawled up a day later and found all the poison all. A few days later I found a dead squirrel outside the house. And we were critter-free for several months.

Round two started a couple of weeks ago but I've been too damn occupied to deal with it. Went up again a couple of days ago and distributed more poison. Now I'm just hoping that this round of critters had the decency to crawl outside before expiring like the last batch. I'd really hate to have rotting critter bodies in the attic with Christmas company coming over. Ugh.

Obsessing over the music collection

2005-12-23T14:05:00.000-06:00

With some time off I decided to pick the nits and fleas off my music collection. It had gotten to be a mess. The bulk of it lives on my portable player with a backup copy plus seasonal stuff off on my Windows system. At least that's how I thought it was. Truth was that the player and the Windows copy had diverged. Most of my ripping has been done using grip on Linux. For a couple of years I ripped to Ogg Vorbis format. My portable player supports Ogg. But some of the music gets used in video projects and the software we use for those doesn't support Ogg. So in a fit of stupidity I did a mass conversion of all the Ogg files to WMA using dbPowerAmp Music Converter. Without going into too many boring details, I also did some renaming and retagging and other cleanup on one or the other copy of various tracks so I ended up with a hopeless mess with tracks in MP3, WMA, Ogg, FLAC and a few WAVs.

I think I've mostly untangled the mess I made. The following tools were of immense help:

EasyTag: A great tag editor and more. Very useful for mass tag cleanup with features like the ability to convert underscores to spaces. I can't say enough good things about this tool! But I wish that WMA support was built in. I've found some links to code that will add it but haven't spent the time to do that yet.
amaroK: An amazing music collection organizer and player. But frankly I have a love/hate relationship with amaroK. When it works it's wonderful! But amaroK (or possibly the underlying GStreamer engine) doesn't get along with my portable player when the portable is mounted as a USB drive. It glitches, like a skip on an old time record, every couple of minutes when playing tracks from the portable. Tracks copied to the ginormous external USB drive plays fine. After enough glitches amaroK just freezes up.
Good ol' Unix rsync: While it isn't wart-free (rsync to a WinXP samba-mounted onto Linux seems to always think the file dates are different. Update: Doh! after a bit of rtfm I came across the --modify-window option), rsync has been a great help. In particular the "--existing" flag lets me update tracks from the main collection to the portable player without trying to jam the entire collection onto the portable.

At this point the collection is all rationalized to my satisfaction and I found some stuff I didn't recall I had.

Update: I once knew that the FAT file system (used on my player) and apparently the NTFS system (used on my WinXP system) only store timestamps to a resolution of 2 seconds. That by random chance would cause half of the files to appear out of sync. The --modify-window=1 option to rsync handles this nicely.

AOL Coaxes Google to Try Busier Ads - New York Times

2005-12-19T22:13:00.000-06:00

Users of Google's search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics. And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy, according to two executives close to the companies' negotiations.
As part of their deal, which is expected to be formally announced this afternoon, Google is providing AOL with $300 million worth of advertising on Google's Web sites, intended to use to draw Google search users to related content on AOL's sites, the executives said. That sum is on top of the $1 billion in cash that Google is to invest to buy a 5 percent stake in AOL.

Google could see just how easily people can desert it if it stays on this course.

Back to Firefox

2005-12-16T09:42:00.000-06:00

Some time ago I wrote here (at least I think I wrote it here) that I was converting from Firefox to Opera. Firefox on both my Windows and Linux systems was taking many minutes to load, longer even than IE. One of the things that helped my decision to convert was the 10th anniversary free Opera keys, shortly followed by making Opera free.

But now I've gone back to Firefox.

I like Opera. A lot. But it has some flaws that are fatal to me.

Doesn't run GMail reliably.
- There are some features that seem to just not work, like looking up contacts as you type addresses.
- There are times when Opera gets "stuck" on a screen that says "Loading...". When that happens it can sometimes be jarred loose using a bookmarklet that causes a refresh (but not by using the refresh button), sometimes by clearing the cache and reloading, and sometimes it requires restarting down the browser and logging into GMail.
Doesn't run Outlook Web Access at all
If my work (Windows) laptop isn't powered up but I want to have a look at work email, I have to use Outlook Web Access. This simply doesn't work in Opera. It works marginally in Firefox, enough to read and respond to mail.
Doesn't run Blogger
Not much to say here. Most of Blogger gets disabled when used via Opera
Frequent crashes, especially with Bloglines
Since I bounce around among several computers running multiple operating systems I've given up on deskto aggregators and am using Bloglines to track my reading. But if I get behind and there are a lot of unread items, Opera has a tendency to crash while loading the page. Other crashes in Opera aren't all that frequent but do occur often enough to be real annoying.

So the bottom line is that Opera has been once again relegated to the dustbin and I'm back on Firefox running the new 1.5 release.

Battery management, the bane of geeks everywhere

2005-11-21T18:03:00.000-06:00

I'm something of a gadget freak. But one with a limited budget. But I'm getting really annoyed with managing the charge on all my rechargeable devices.

On a daily basis I use several gadgets that have to be charged:

a laptop
a cell phone
a PDA
a portable MP3 player

Life isn't so bad when I'm in my dull boring day-to-day routine. The laptop spends most of the daytime hours in a docking station so it's charged there. I plug the cell phone and the PDA in beside my bed each night (and hope that LiON batteries really don't have a memory). The MP3 player gets about an hour or two a day of use so it only needs charging every three to five days, sometimes less frequently.

The annoyance level goes up a lot when I travel. Chargers. Grr... Since I'm on a budget and I don't travel all that frequently I don't really feel I can afford one of those all-in-one chargers. So I carry a charger for each device. And try to plug them in to the limited number of outlets in the average hotel room.

For personal travel I generally have to add the digital still camera and digital video camera, both with chargers.

I keep reading stories about fuel cell technology that's "just around the corner" so we could fill up our devices with water to recharge them. But I keep wondering just where the cell phone I carry in my pocket is going to exhaust the waste from such a process. Or isn't there any?

What am I listening to

2005-11-18T21:03:00.000-06:00

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a couple of months but lacked the time to sit and do it.

There are 32 podcast feeds in my podcatcher at the moment. There are an additional 10 in a list of feeds I no longer track. The volume of stuff means two things, I'm constantly behind real time and I have no patience for things that bore me.

I listened to Doug Kaye's IT Conversations before the word podcasting was invented, downloading the MP3s "by hand" and going thru the laborious process of transferring them thru the horrible Sony software to get them on my minidisc player. But I did that work because I have a commute of between one and two hours a day and what passes for radio in these Clear Channel days ... sucks.

So. Thirty two podcasts. I don't intend to bore myself by listing them all and the list changes as my attention span wears out so a list posted today would be out of date by this time next week.

But what I find interesting is the evolution of the types of things I'm listening to. I'm not sure what it says about me or if I'm at all like anyone else.

IT Conversations remains a staple in my podcast diet. I seldom skip a 'cast from that source. Leaving them aside I find that I have slowly dropped most independent "one person show" type of podcasts. When I started podcatching that's almost all there was available. But now fully eighteen of my feeds originate as public radio programs.

So effectively I'm TiVo-ing radio here. I have been going along feeling like I was assembling a "personal radio station" from an eclectic mix of things from around the world. But like most things we want to believe of ourselves that's only partly true. I do have music feeds from both nearby and faraway places (only one of the music 'casts I get is a radio program). And I've got a lot of geek stuff in the vein of IT Conversations, none of which would ever have enough of an audience to be on radio of any kind. My biggest portion, though, is stuff from public radio that I like but that isn't available at a time I find convenient.

I'm going to have to think on this. And figure out which public radio stations I should send money to.

Memeorandum

2005-11-18T21:00:00.000-06:00

This was mentioned on a recent Web Talk Radio program that I happened to listen to all the way through. I have to admit that although I subscribe to their podcast I don't often make it all the way thru the program. Dana is ... just too precious and Rob seems to think that Microsoft invented everything. But memeorandum looks interesting.

Catching up

2005-11-18T20:53:00.000-06:00

Life is feeling a bit less hectic. The product I've been working on for the last few months, since April to be precise, has passed "RTM" (Release to Manufacturing). So the development team, myself included, is winding down a bit. Nothing but paperwork from now to GA at the end of the month.

Since RTM fell so close to the Thanksgiving holiday most people are extending that to a week or more and nobody is getting wound up to tackle the next release (in the software business the reward for getting a product out the door is to get the chance to get the next product out the door).

So the calm between storms has let me catch up a bit on reading and research. And some blog posting.

Google-in-a-box

2005-11-18T17:43:00.000-06:00

No, not that google-in-a-box. A much bigger box.

Cringely writes:

The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Global Frequency (TV pilot)

2005-11-18T17:22:00.000-06:00

A TV version of the "graphic novel" (gee, when I was a kid we called them comic books) Global Frequency was mentioned on bOINGbOING a few months ago. I managed to find an ... ahem ... download. Then it sat on my hard drive for a months unwatched. From what I recall this is a pilot but the series hasn't been picked up.

I'm not a comic reader so had never read the "parent" of the TV show so I didn't have any particular expectations. I watched it in the hotel room on a recent business trip.

It was well done and a good story. The premise (see the link to the IMDB entry or do your own google) is perfect for a TV show. A couple of continuing characters who will show up anywhere in the world.

If this ever does get picked up and more episodes get made, I'd watch it.

Paul Graham: What Business Can Learn from Open Source

2005-11-17T19:44:00.000-06:00

This is a fascinating piece. I came across it in my listening queue from IT Conversations and only found the written version from there. I recommend the audio version if you can spend the 30 minutes to listen, Paul is an excellent speaker.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

2005-11-17T07:41:00.000-06:00

Well, got Mrs. Aging-Geek to watch the new H2G2 movie. She is a fan of the old TV show but I don't recall if she read the books.

She hated it.

Couldn't even sit through to the end.

YMMV. :)

New podcatcher, Peapod

2005-11-17T07:23:00.000-06:00

I tried out several Windows-based podcast receivers (podcatchers) before I decided that they were all too UI-intensive and that podcatching should "just happen". In other words it should be something that you do a simple bit of setup and then it disappears into the system and just works.

I thought about writing my own catcher from scratch but there were just too many fiddly bits for the amount of spare time I have. So I poked around and turned up bashpodder, a simple Unix script that I dropped onto my home Linux system. Bashpodder in the main worked pretty well but had a few warts. It fetched the feeds (not the enclosures, just the XML file that points to the enclosures) every time it was run. It fetched all sorts of enclosures including movies and pictures that weren't of any interest to me. And it was sensitive to the full URL of enclosures so when feed owners rehosted their feeds it tended to refetch everything.

Partly as an exercise to learn parts of the libraries I embarked on a piecemeal rewrite of bashpodder in Java. I had a weird hybrid of the original script with some calls out to Java programs to do parts of the job. It was evolving fairly nicely.

But then a few weeks ago the author of bashpodder, with whom I had exchanged a few emails, dropped me a line to announce his new podcatcher, Peapod (funny I had forgotten that was the name of a failed dot-com grocery delivery service until just now).

The author and I have exchanged emails quite a bit as I've tried out his code. It had some problems for what I wanted in the beginning but has come along quite nicely. At the moment I'm in the final stages of running a parallel test between my hacked up bashpodder and the version of peapod that's in the subversion repository.

Like bashpodder, peapod is designed for Unix and with help from the screen program can run from cron.

Podcasts out the wazoo

2005-11-15T20:07:00.000-06:00

Holy mother of ...! When did this happen!

NPR lists 189 podcasts!

This is bad, very bad. I'm already running between two and three weeks behind real-time in my listening queue.

Hibernate fails "rarely"... HA!

2005-11-14T12:33:00.000-06:00

In a previous post I mentioned that my work laptop had bit-rotted to the point of needing a format-and-reinstall. Since this was a company machine I at least had the advantage of an IS staff that had set up an image with all the stuff needed for the laptop. This brought me up from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.

For the most part I'm happy with XP so long as the whole activation thing is Somebody Else's Problem. There are some nice UI features, most likely stolen from Apple or someone who is innovative.

The one particular thing I was very happy about was that for the first time I had a machine that could successfully hibernate and then wake up correctly. This meant I could take the laptop to meetings instead of taking notes on paper (which I could then never find and never had time to transcribe into some searchable medium). Alas, this feature is no longer reliable.

I got a memory upgrade from 1GB to 2GB to support my extensive collection of VMWare virtual images. It seems that XP has problems hibernating if there's more than 1GB. It reserved the disk space just fine but something prevents it from actually working. I briefly thought I had found a fix for this problem but alas no. A google search for the error message I get turns up numerous people with the same problem.

Microsoft claims this happens "rarely". Which we all know means "it doesn't happen on any machine that Bill Gates uses".

So hibernate gets disabled and I'm back to having to wait for the interminable system shutdown before undocking.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

2005-11-08T22:33:00.000-06:00

OK, I enjoyed the heck out of the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2). I didn't get to see it at the theater but just got it in via NetFlix. I'll admit, though, that it's probably an acquired taste. I loved the old BBC TV miniseries which was my intro to H2G2. Since then I've read all five books in the trilogy. And reread them. And had my omnibus edition More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide: Complete & Unabridged book swiped.

One of the first few DVDs I got via NetFlix was the DVD of the TV series.

The new movie remains pretty true to the original story. As much as anything can given that the story has evolved from radio to TV to books back to radio and probably some other versions I haven't heard of. But it's not slavishly trying to recreate the original. I liked Sam Rockwell's Zaphod better than Mark Wing-Davies. But Simon Jones' befuddlement is the essence of Arthur Dent. Martin Freeman didn't try to carry that to his version of Arthur. Zooey Deschanel's Trillian was an actual character instead of set dressing intended to attract teenage boys.

All in all a very creditable job. I'll keep this one a few more days and watch it over again. And maybe I'll hum "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" at the office tomorrow.

WNYC - New York Public Radio

2005-11-07T21:40:00.000-06:00

What is Radio Lab? Radio Lab® is an investigation. Each episode is a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea. On RadioLab, science bumps into culture... information sounds like music.
Who is it for? Radio Lab is designed for listeners who demand skepticism but appreciate wonder, who are curious about the world but who also want to be moved and surprised.

The PRX podcast feed dropped in a teaser from this series that just came to the front of my MP3 player last night. The descriptions look fascinating so I've cued the series up. At my current listening rate I'll get to it sometime around Thanksgiving. Which this year will be spent in the frozen wastelands of North Dakota.

Freedom to Tinker: CD-DRM Rootkit: Repairing the Damage

2005-11-07T11:28:00.000-06:00

I own a Sony device, one of the first generation Minidisc players. It was useful for excercising back when I was doing that. I guess it's still in my dust-covered gym bag. The thing ran for over 50 hours on a single AA battery. And I had a set of about five discs with music that was good for excercising. I've tried using my hard-disk iRiver MP3 player for the same thing and have had two near disasters due to dropping it.

Luckily my player is too old to have this "improved" software that attempts to enforce DRM more tightly.

I heard Paula Le Dieu quoting Joi Ito in a podcast from IT Conversations that I listened to recently. He was speaking to a bunch of media executives and said to them about DRM: "You will win. You will convince your audiences that they are not to use your content." ([clip]).

SonyBMG and First4Internet are in the doghouse now, having been caught installing rootkit-like software on the computers of SonyBMG music customers, thereby exposing the customers to security risk. The question now is whether the companies will face up to their mistake and try to remedy it.

Updated to get correct source of quote, get quote correct, provide link to IT Conversations clip, and correct some screwed up HTML.

Updated a second time because it seems that Blogger and Opera do not cooperate.

Bitrot and wasted time

2005-10-18T13:52:00.000-05:00

My work provides me with various computers. One of them is a decent recent vintage laptop. The corporate IS geeks are always a few years behind in what they'll support so until last Friday the laptop was running Windows 2000 Professional. But it was suffering from a serious case of bitrot. One particular thing was that the Microsoft XML parser was busted. This left me unable to do a number of things I needed to do. Like file expenses for one. And being an aging geek I never would remember that I couldn't do these things until I did them and got weird failures. Then I'd remember, say a few unprintable words, and move over to a different computer to do them.

So the annoyance level of that stuff finally overcame the dread of starting from scratch. After a multiple hour long transfer of the 40-some gigabytes of "My Documents" off to another system I sent the laptop off to IS for a wipe and re-image. Forty minutes later it's back. No big deal, right. [snort] Right.

Now I'm several business days on down the road and I'm still tripping over things that needed customizing, applications I had to reinstall, and fixes to be applied.

It's an enormous and annoying waste of my time!

One strike away from the World Series...

2005-10-18T12:42:00.000-05:00

At the top of the ninth inning, the home team Astros were ahead 3 to 2. Two outs already taken care of, two strikes against the batter, David Eckstein, and Brad Lidge, the best closer in all of baseball this year, can't get that last strike. It would have clinched the Astros first ever trip to the World Series and done it on the day the team was founded 45 years ago.

Instead Eckstein gets on base, Lidge walks Edmonds and then gives Albert Pujols a fat pitch down the middle. If the roof had been open the ball would have been a couple of blocks away.

So now the team is in the same boat as this time last year. Up 3 games to 2 but headed for St. Louis where they have very few wins.

The optimism is gone from the fans. Everybody felt good about the team's chances last night. Winning it at an away game just doesn't seem as likely. We'll know in a few days.

Running from Rita: part 3 the anticlimactic ending

2005-09-26T14:27:00.000-05:00

Author's note: this series of posts is a first person account of a few days dealing with Hurricane Rita. The posts are all written after the fact but I will try not to let that ruin the story. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

Friday, September 23

Out of bed about 8:30am after lying there for quite a while. Son-in-law's father is up and has made coffee. After having a cup I brush my teeth and throw on some clothes. I'm off in search of gasoline. The fleeing multitude has sucked up almost every bit of gas to be found. All the way from Pearland to College Station we didn't see any open stations. Pumps were all bagged. Some had people parked just to take advantage of the shade, we did that at one point in our trek.

Last night as we wound around College Station I noticed that almost every Shell station was open and had gas and tried to take note of where they were. Luck is with me and I find an open station with no line about 5 minutes from the house. As soon as I get back I let the others know and they head out to fill up. We were all down a bit below a half tank so returning would be very iffy if we hadn't managed this.

Around 11am I start checking in with family to let them know that we're out and safe. Also check in with our close circle of friends. One couple has elected to stay. I was nearly in tears yesterday trying to talk them out of it and feeling positive we'd never see them again. Another couple who are close also stayed but we can't get thru to them on the phone. Both couples were boarding up and hunkering down. Other close friends who left have similar tales to ours of 2 hour drives turned into 10 hour drives in horrible traffic.

The forecast for the storm is incrementally further east and the friends who live just a few blocks from our house say they're expecting to only be in tropical storm force winds (under 70mph) but possibly for close to 24 hours. The storm has slowed and the weather people are talking about it possibly stalling out once it goes inland and dropping 25 inches of rain on east Texas.

The rest of the day passes in a blur of TV, naps, reading. We've no shortage of food or drink so we're very comfortable. My daughter has spoken to the owners of the house (on a trip to California) and while they've told us to feel free to eat or drink anything there, we've brought more than enough. We were all expecting to have to deal with power outages and closed stores for several days.

The national news is full of New Orleans today. They're getting the outer rain bands from the east side of Rita and the levees have overflowed or broken again. Some of the areas pumped out after Katrina are now filling back up. There's also the tragic story of a bus full of elderly evacuees from a nursing home. After probably spending 15 or more hours on a bus and getting near Dallas the bus caught fire. Estimates are that twenty-four people died.

By the 10pm forecast from the NHC the track has moved all the way to the Texas-Louisiana border. Relief is starting to set in. Wind forecasts for home are still lighter and the storm is losing strength even more than was forecast with sustained winds down to 120mph.

After some discussion about when to head home we all turn in around midnight. It's a little breezy in College Station but no rain yet. The tension is gone out of the house.

Saturday, September 24

Everyone is up and moving around about 8am. The storm has more or less passed. There must have been a sprinkle of rain and some minor winds because there are some wet leaves outside the back patio door. Tree tops are still swaying a bit here and there.

We've decided to get on the road early in the hopes of being on the front edge of the returning multitude. It takes us until after 11am to get loaded and clean up after ourselves. We leave our hosts some cash and a note of appreciation. I suspect they won't want the cash but what are they going to do. If they get insistent we'll tell them to donate it somewhere. Their hospitality to a bunch of complete strangers has been a great blessing.

The drive back is mostly uneventful. There is still some wind and we get a couple of light rain showers on the way. The direct route seems slow so we take an alternate that's slightly longer. A stop at grandmother's house finds them without power. But our caravan is splitting up here. Daughter and son-in-law collect their cat and head for their home. Son-in-law's father and mother (with grandmother and husband following) will go to their house. We get one last call from the friends who rode it out near our house telling us that power has been off most of the morning but is now on. The drive across Pearland is uneventful. A tree here and there down, lots of leaves and small branches, a sign down every once in a while. There have been wind storms that did worse. We arrive home about three hours after leaving College Station.

We get home to find that the top of one of our trees has snapped off and is draped across the cab of the pickup. I take some pictures in case I need to file insurance and then with the help of a neighbor and a hunk of rope pull it over and off. Damage seems to be confined to a very small dent and a few minor scratches. The house is 100% intact, no broken windows, no water blown in thru crevices, nothing. The feeling walking around the house is pretty indescribable. Not that I couldn't have picked up and gone on if the house had been flattened as we feared but... I am just very grateful not to have to do that.

The aftermath It's Monday afternoon as I type this. Since arriving home I've been filling bags with downed leaves and branches and getting good use out of my chainsaw. Also put the A/V system and the computers back together. The only problem there was that the ethernet cable I grabbed to hook up my server was bad. Gave me a bit of a turn until I swapped that out. For some unknown reason my external drive, which had seemingly semi-croaked a week ago now seems to have healed itself. But I have lost trust in it and will replace it anyway.

Saturday morning a nearby grocery store opened and was mobbed. People are still panicky. I saw people buying groceries like they thought there never would be any more food. One lady left one of her children as a placeholder in the checkout line while she filled a shopping basket absolutely full, then hopped in to line where her kid was (right in front of me as it happens). I got a few things to replace the contents of the refrigerator, just enough to get us thru a couple of days. In our certainty that this was going to be a catastrophe we turned off the power at the main breaker before leaving. Mostly out of concern for the air conditioner in case power surged or cut on and off. [Note to self: if you turn off the power it's a good idea to not leave the ice cream in the freezer on the top shelf.]

Gas is still a little hard to come by but the Honda made it back with two-thirds of a tank and the pickup is full so we're good for several days.

The rest of the neighbors are trickling back in. About two hours after we got back on Saturday we heard on the TV that local officials are calling for a staged return and that we weren't supposed to come home until Monday. Oh well. I'm not sure how they thought that people in other cities up to several hundred miles away were supposed to know that. We listened to the radio all the way home. What we heard was a mixture of "stay away" and "all is well here come on home" from different localities. About half the families on our block were home before we were so obviously they didn't get the word either.

We got together with our closest circle of friends last night and ate pizza and drank margaritas while we swapped stories.

As the saying goes, all is well that ends well. I'm not a native of these parts but aside from the monumental traffic jam I have to say that Houston officials really seemed to have their stuff together through all this. While we were spared the devastation that New Orleans saw I think there's still a contrast in what the government did. Some may say that this was due to lessons learned from Katrina but I think that was a pretty minor part. One of the officials said on TV something like: We've been working with different organizations for years so when there were problems we already knew who to call and had established relationships.

Running from Rita: part 2 the epic journey

2005-09-26T13:04:00.000-05:00

We're up at 6am without having gotten much sleep. The last forecast we have from NHC is last night at 10pm. The track is still west of a direct hit on our area but much closer. The wild card is a high pressure system that is drifting eastward. Rita will be steered along the edge of this system. So everything depends on how fast the high moves.

At 7 we get a call from our daughter. They were planning to come down from Houston to here and caravan out. Now they think that we should all congretate at the son-in-law's grandmother's house just off highway 288. They want to go as soon as possible. The news is full of how bad traffic is.

We quickly finish up, disconnecting and bagging the three week old plasma high def TV and assorted audio/video gear. The little DV camcorder and the digital cameras in their bag go with us so we'll be able to photograph the damage when we return. At 8:15 we take a last look around and load up the pets and ourselves for the short drive to the in-law's house. They're still loading and arranging. He has a generator that I help him load in the back of his Escalade.

Finally at a little after 10:00 we're on the road. It's nearly 11:00 by the time we get to grandmother's house. A short time to get organized there, check maps and we head out. We're in three vehicles. Daughter and son-in-law are in their 4Runner with grandmother and her husband. Back end full to the top with food and luggage. My wife and I have our 55-pound dog, our cat and our daughter's cat (grandmother is allergic) with our food and luggage in our Accord. Son-in-law's parents are in their Escalade with their two cats and a dog plus the generator, more food and luggage. We've all got our cell phones and full gas tanks so while we anticipate a long drive and have some worries about gas we're pretty confident we'll get where we're going without major problems.

We take some back roads across the south side of Houston. The first 20 miles or so are easy then we hit traffic on highway 6. After creeping along for a bit son-in-law takes us off on what looks like a plant entrance road. Some turns and twists later we're back on highway 6 but several miles further on and traffic is gone. Not to belabor this but we do more or less the same thing several more times.

After a couple of hours we've made good progress and are on the northwest side of Houston, probably 30 to 40 miles towards our goal. There traffic is at a stand-still. The radio says that they're opening the inbound (east) lanes of I-10 to outbound (west) traffic. After some arguing via cell phone we turn back south, back tracking probably 10 or more miles. No sign of the alleged opening. I-10 has a high-occupancy vehicle lane down the center flanked on both sides by concrete barriers. We get on, then get off, then see people dodging between barriers to use an HOV exit as a way across. We get back on but are too far along to be able to do the same thing.

This is where we spend about the next four hours. Creeping along between concrete barriers. The dog seems to sense our tension and is bouncing around in the back seat. Every time she gets close to the daughter's cat (who hates all other animals) the cat hisses, the dog panics and tries to leap between the seats into the front. I alternate elbowing the dog back with a couple of nose slaps. She finally turns herself around and faces the back corner, for all the world like a little kid sulking. About an hour further on the air conditioning gives up. No sign of the car overheating and no idiot lights, just an unhappy noise. Rather than risk breaking the serpentine belt I switch it off. It's about 100 degrees outside and moving at less than 10 miles per hour doesn't generate any appreciable breeze so it's pretty miserable. The cats quickly start looking overheated, panting, eyes down to pinpoints. We splash them with water every little while which they don't much appreciate.

The Escalade has ended up a little ahead of us and he follows an exit to highway 90A which he says is wide open. We're now in Katy. Katy was once more of a true town but now is more of a suburb of Houston even though it's quite a ways out to the west. We find a roadside burger joint and stop for a restroom break and some cold drinks. The place is out of ice and runs out of food as we're there. We're not really heading the direction we want so son-in-law leads us up some more back roads. We're in a line of cars but are moving quickly now, 60mph or more.

We eventually hook up with a road I recognize, FM 362. That takes us up past Waller, Camp Allen, and Navasota. At some little junction in the country where there's a bar a number of the locals are standing by the side of the road offering directions to the fleeing multitude. Very cool! At that junction we have to head back across to highway 6. At first 6 is moving well but about 30 miles out from College station it comes down to a creep again. It takes us almost an hour to go six miles. Then son-in-law strikes out on more back roads looping us around to the west and coming in to College Station from the southwest instead of the southeast. That makes the last 20 miles into more like 30 but we do it in about an hour.

About 15 minutes of winding thru College Station past Kyle Field where the Texas A&M is preparing to play a football game a day early brings us to the house where we can collect the key to where we're staying. Ten more minutes and we're there.

It's about 9pm, we've been on the road for almost 10 hours and covered approximately 120 miles. Most of the way up we've been listening to a radio station that simulcasts one of the TV stations audio so have had continuous news on the storm forecast. Each successive forecast has moved the projected eye track to the east. Most of the day the forecast for the eye track has been up the eastern edge of Galveston bay. It's a category 5 storm with sustained winds around 165mph. On this track our house will be in sustained hurricane force winds for about 10 to 12 hours. It looks bad but we hope for more eastward movement.

The house that's been given over to us for the weekend is a large 4 bedroom on a golf course. Very beautiful place. One bedroom has been made into an office, the other three give us beds for six. There's a big couch in the living room and another one out on a patio that has been glassed in (it would be a sun room if it wasn't surrounded by trees). So with couches nobody will be on the sleeping on the floor.

The rest of the crew wants to go eat. I announce that "I've been in a car without A/C for the last 6 hours and I'm going to be very unpleasant to sit next to if I don't get a shower". We sort out bedrooms and unload, then a quick shower and off to "the best Tex-Mex food in College Station".

Back at the house, the 10pm forecast is out and the eye track has moved eastward again, out between Galveston and Beaumont. Very bad for Beaumont but some relief for us. Sustained winds are down, which was projected but is only now happening.

Very little sleep again tonight. In a strange bed in a room with the cat and the dog. The dog remains restless. I take her outside to pee twice during the night before finally just closing her in the bathroom. The dog usually recognizes me as the alpha pack member and does anything I tell her but so far I've crammed her into a hot car several times and now into a tiny bathroom so she's very unhappy with me.

Running from Rita: part 1 preparing

2005-09-25T17:00:00.000-05:00

Author's note: this series of posts is a first person account of a few days dealing with Hurricane Rita. The posts are all written after the fact but I will try not to let that ruin the story.

Tuesday, September 20 I'm in a class all this week at work so am at our facility but not in my office. I'm still keeping track of email. Two people so far have mailed me PDFs of the Houston evacuation routes.

After class the talk is all of where to go and how soon to get out. People are in very nearly a full scale panic. At first I really think they're crazy. At this point the storm could hit literally anywhere on the Gulf coast. Just as I sit down to my desk I get a call from my daughter (grown up, married, lives and works in Houston). She has made hotel reservations in Dallas, somewhere that take pets. She and her husband have a cat, we have a cat and a dog. While I think it's overkill I agree that we should head up there. The reservations are for Friday and Saturday night.

I'm starting to think I'm the one who is crazy. Everyone around wants out of town.

Wednesday, September 21

Mrs Aging Geek and I live in a suburban community to the south of Houston. We are just off the edge of the mandatory evacuation Zone C. People in the next community to our east including a lot of our friends and our church are in Zone C and are to begin evacuating tomorrow. Hurricane Rita is just crossing the tip of Florida. The projected path from the National Hurricane Center has it making landfall at Matagorda Bay, about 90 miles southeast of us. A "miss" to our west is very bad, as bad or worse than a direct hit. The counterclockwise circulation brings the worst rain, strongest winds, and the storm surge up the east side of hurricanes in this area. They're projecting this to be a strong category 4 when it makes landfall. And of course "landfall" is something of a joke. Everyone tracks the eye and of course that's where the worst of it is but a storm of this size will have hurricane force winds up to 100 miles from the eye. With its speed that means that anyone near the path of the eye will be in those winds for many hours.

We have decided to leave. Our neighborhood is already starting to look empty as lots of others have made the same decision. I've been in this house over 20 years but never have had anything to board up the windows. And today is way too late. Last night on the way home from work I stopped in the nearby Lowe's store and there was nothing resembling plywood to be had. Today they are still getting trucks in but there is a line that stretches across the outside of the store and it looks like they're selling it straight off the truck. Not very many of our neighbors are boarding up, more are just piling themselves and their pets into a vehicle and hitting the road.

The Kroger where we buy groceries is slightly crowded and people have a strained look. Luckily they have lots of bottled water. We lay in a supply of bottled water and food that can be eaten out of the can in a pinch. Also some cleaning supplies for the aftermath.

The rest of the day is devoted to "battening down". All the outside furniture goes into the garage along with other loose items that could become missiles. Potted plants are all crammed into the corner on the side of the house with no windows, a narrow area between our house and the fence that separates our yard from our neighbor's yard.

Late in the day my daughter calls again. A co-worker who is from Bryan has relatives who are out of town and who are willing to let us stay in their house. We decide to do this for two reasons, it's a lot close than Dallas (120 miles versus about 250) and because we can leave tomorrow instead of having to wait until closer to when our reservations are. In addition to the four of us, my daughter's in-laws and two grandparents will be going. The in-laws have two cats and a dog. So our group will have a total of eight people, four cats, and two dogs.

With the time to leave changed our preparations get a little more hurried. Upstairs inside the house we deal with the computers. We have one of our own, two from my work plus a laptop and assorted gear including a 200GB USB external drive. After doing some dumping to DVD and to the laptop, the computers get disconnected and put in garbage bags. The bags go up on a couch covered with cushions. The external drive will go with us. I'm trying to figure the damage scenarios. Will the roof get torn off exposing the upstairs to rain and wind or will water rise flooding the downstairs?

We're both kind of wandering thru the house. I have this feeling that I won't see it again. Pictures from the aftermath of other hurricanes keep running through my head. People sifting through the rubble that used to be their home. As we pick out clothes to take I'm thinking not just of what I might need for the next few days away but also about what I might want with me if all I have is what I carry out tomorrow. Most of our photos are digital so are in several places, a copy on the external drive, a copy on DVD backups, some on my laptop. I go thru the photos in the living room pulling them out of their frames and stacking them. We've also gathered important papers, passports, insurance policies, bank info and the like and put it all in zip lock baggies.

We'll leave about 9:00 tomorrow morning. For the evening we sit glued to the TV compulsively watching the news and weather channel people say the same things over and over and still make them sound like something different. Very little sleep this night.

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

2005-09-19T22:44:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON, DC–Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."

I'm not sure if I'm just seeing this for the first time or if it's been so long ago that I forgot. In either case it's very very funny.

Possibly because the title quote sounds exactly like one of Dubya's usual gaffes.

Whither NOLA

2005-09-02T12:19:00.000-05:00

In skimming over news and blog postings about the destruction of New Orleans this morning I saw this vision of a possible future. It's one that's been envisioned in science fiction both good and bad.

What will the "soup bowl" where New Orleans used to be look like in a couple of years? One possibility is that it will look a lot like it does today. Full of water, toxic substances, bodies, desperate people, and criminals. Kind of like Manhattan in the movie Escape From New York.

I don't think that's a likely outcome. The thing that will salvage NOLA is the port. A lot of chemicals and oil passes (passed) through that port. There's too much money involved in rerouting.

But I don't think the city's other main industry, tourism, will ever be quite the same. Who wants to see a rebuilt version of Preservation Hall or a Disney version of Bourbon Street? Hm... maybe that's the answer. Give the French Quarter to Disney.

Dateline: Banks of the Danube, Linz Austria

2005-08-25T15:48:00.000-05:00

Sitting in my room at the Steigenberger Hotel, Linz Austria looking out at the Donau (Danube). It's evening of the last day of my first international business trip. I've traveled to Europe twice before and I've traveled on business many times but this was my first opportunity to go abroad at someone else's expense. Not like it's been a luxury journey or anything, but it has been mostly nice.

Weather in Linz has been mostly overcast but little rain and cool. In the four days we've been here the Danube has definitely been rising. CNN this morning had coverage of rains and flooding on the Danube in Germany, upstream of here. If there's flooding in Linz, which I doubt, the river seems to be well banked up with levees, I just hope it waits another full day. Our flight leaves at 6am.

Things I love about Austria:

Beautiful women. There are just a lot of lovely young women here.
Friendly people. Linz is a city of about 200,000 according to the people we're here to see. There is absolutely nothing exciting for tourists here so it's a real nice normal town. Everyone has been very nice and very tolerant of my inability to say much more than bitte and danke in German.
Clean safe place. We were tired last night and ate at the hotel. After dinner, well after dark, we made our way down to the levee and walked for about a half mile. We passed a few people. The way was clean and the walk was very nice. Not something I'd do in any American city.
Coffee, chocolate, and weissebier. What can I say. Coffee here, even at the office, is good, strong and all around excellent. I'm taking a half kilo home.

Things I dislike about Austria

Toilet paper. My aging rear doesn't like the stuff they have here. It's about the consistency of a paper shop towel or maybe medium grade sand paper. Urg. I really almost put a roll of soft American t.p. in the suitcase but I was determined to do the four day trip with only carry-on luggage. Which was a good decision. My colleagues also tried but checked in later than me. By then the ticket counter was enforcing weight limits and made them check their bags. Those bags didn't make our tight connection thru Frankfurt and they got to spend about 30 hours in the same clothes.
Jet lag. Not just Austria but I can't sleep in airplanes, not even 10 hour non stops. At least not in coach and I've never managed an upgrade on a transatlantic flight. And I can never ever manage to sleep well the first night away from home. So I went something over 48 hours without sleep and had to function in business meetings at the end of that stint. Not fun.

So anyway. I just had to get some thoughts of this down and I have a couple of euros worth of wireless access to burn thru before the night is over. Ah, which reminds me. Used Skype for the first time. Before I left I set Skype up on my wife's computer back home. We chatted earlier tonight. Quality was just as good as any domestic phone call. I'm impressed. Wonder if Google Talk will wipe them out. I already have way too many "resident" programs in my tray so I'm not sure what I'll do for a VoIP proggie. Probably stick with Skype for the moment.

Time to get some shut-eye. Hitting the shower and then the airport in about 5 hours. All in all, it's been a blast!

New Scientist News - Climate warning as Siberia melts

2005-08-20T12:43:00.000-05:00

New Scientist News - Climate warning as Siberia melts

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

Not good.

Wonder how the Bush Administration will spin this. Probably won't, probably will just ignore it.

Schneier on Security: RFID Passport Security Revisited

2005-08-10T21:19:00.000-05:00

Bruce Schneier weighs in on the proposed US Passport with RFID.

Schneier on Security: RFID Passport Security Revisited
I've written previously (including this op ed in the International Herald Tribune) about RFID chips in passports. An article in today's USA Today (the paper version has a really good graphic) summarizes the latest State Department proposal, and it looks pretty good. They're addressing privacy concerns, and they're doing it right.
The most important feature they've included is an access-control system for the RFID chip. The data on the chip is encrypted, and the key is printed on the passport. The officer swipes the passport through an optical reader to get the key, and then the RFID reader uses the key to communicate with the RFID chip. This means that the passport-holder can control who has access to the information on the chip; someone cannot skim information from the passport without first opening it up and reading the information inside. Good security.
The new design also includes a thin radio shield in the cover, protecting the chip when the passport is closed. More good security.
Assuming that the RFID passport works as advertised (a big "if," I grant you), then I am no longer opposed to the idea. And, more importantly, we have an example of an RFID identification system with good privacy safeguards. We should demand that any other RFID identification cards have similar privacy safeguards.

Dark Star

2005-07-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching the 1974 movie Dark Star (The Director's Cut). This was, according to IMDB, John Carpenter's second film. Let's just say that he got better.

The reviews I read on Netflix and IMDB led me to believe this might be an comedy gem.

Bzzt! Wrong, but thanks for playing. There were basically three "bits" in it that were stretched into a mercifully short 83 minute movie (the "director's cut" was even shorter). If I hadn't pulled out the laptop and done some catchup research while it was running I would have turned it off about the time the opening credits started.

Not recommended.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow

2005-07-28T16:53:00.000-05:00

I finished reading this about a week ago, also a freely downloadable book.

I can't do it any better so here's the author's capsule summary of the book:

Cory Doctorow: Hmm-- it's not an easy book to summarize. Alan is a serial entrepreneur who moved to Toronto to get away from his family. His father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. He has several brothers, including one who is an island, three who nest like Russian dolls, a precognitive, and a demonic savage. When he was a teenager, he murdered the latter brother, with his other brothers cooperating. And now that brother is back form the dead, stalking them all. Alan has fallen in with a gang of anarcho-info-hippies who are using dumpster-dived hardware to build meshing WiFi repeaters in a mad bid to unwire all of Toronto, or at least the bohemian Kensington Market streets. Meanwhile, his neighbors-- a student household-- contain a girl with wings and a mean-spirited guitar player/bartender, who, it appears, may be in league with the demonic brother.

This book reminded me of a Seinfeld episode. Odd but kind of interesting characters. Stuff happens. No idea how these characters came to be where they are (or even came to be). But ultimately it's a story about nothing in particular. OK, if there's some metaphor here, I missed it. Entertaining book in an odd sort of way, but not for everyone.

An exhibition of geek laziness

2005-07-28T15:57:00.000-05:00

It just occurred to me that the previous post was a true exhibition of geek laziness.

I'm reading the Stross book on my PalmOS PDA using a program called iSilo. I decided to blog about the book and I didn't want to retype the block of text I quoted. So I clipped it to the PDA clipboard and attached that as a note to a calendar entry. When I synced the PDA that entry got posted to my calendar on MS Exchange at work. From there I opened the calendar using Evolution on Linux (just because that's what I run here at home) and cut'n'pasted the text into the Blogger web UI.

Only a geek would go thru all that to avoid a little typing. :)

Accelerando by Charles Stross

2005-07-28T15:45:00.000-05:00

I'm reading the legal free download version of the book Accelerando by Charlese Stross. This book is dense with imagery of a possible near future. It reminds me of the experience of reading Neuromancer by William Gibson when that was new. Here's a very small example from an expository segment in the fifth chapter:

Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the Field Circus is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system – near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia – the sum total of H. sapiens sapiens' time on Earth.

The book consists of a number of connected stories that span several decades beginning around 2010. I've read versions of at least two of the stories before, probably in Garder Dozois' annual "Year's Best Science Fiction" series. Very highly recommended (both Accelerando and the Dozois' series)!

Escape Pod promo

2005-07-11T19:17:00.000-05:00

The promo audio for Escape Pod may be too full of in jokes to be funny to most people but I found it hilarious.

Link

HoustonChronicle.com - NASA to use unprecedented methods to monitor shuttle

2005-07-11T08:25:00.000-05:00

From 1984 to 1994 I worked for the worlds largest computer company as a contractor at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The best way to become disillusioned with the American space program as it stands now is to work in it. NASA of today is a far, far cry from the can-do engineering team that put men on the moon 35 years ago. Our only hope for a real space program is for private enterprise to move forward.

My prayers are with the astronauts who will be launched in an approximately 20-year old vehicle that has been called the most complex machine ever built.

I'm a little out of date on the status of the International Space Station but the last I heard the oxygen generation systems were barely limping along on backups. If the Discovery crew has to move in with the station crew I hope they have their own O2 along.

HoustonChronicle.com - NASA to use unprecedented methods to monitor shuttle:

The shuttle Discovery will undergo unprecedented scrutiny from cameras and other sensors as it climbs into orbit and maneuvers toward the international space station on the first such mission since the Columbia disaster.
But efforts to determine whether the spacecraft has suffered the type of external damage that caused Columbia's breakup more than two years ago could easily stretch to the midpoint of Discovery's 12-day flight, said Wayne Hale, who chairs NASA's mission management team.

HoustonChronicle.com - In cancer fight, a spice brings hope to the table

2005-07-11T08:17:00.000-05:00

Not to self: Invest in Indian restaurants for the next two months as this craze plays out.

HoustonChronicle.com - In cancer fight, a spice brings hope to the table:

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the epitome of the conventional cancer establishment, is reporting promising test results on an unconventional weapon: a common spice used in Indian cooking.
In a host of studies, M.D. Anderson researchers are showing that curcumin, the pungent yellow spice in both turmeric and curry powders, has potent anti-cancer properties. They say it may prove effective for both prevention and treatment.

Wired News: Congress Must Deal With ID Theft

2005-07-08T20:04:00.000-05:00

This article lists a series of reforms that would greatly reduce the identity theft business. But they'd also cut into the profits of banks, credit card companies and credit agencies. And so they'll never happen because those businesses have the well-paid lobbyists to ensure that grease is applied in the correct places.

Wired News: Congress Must Deal With ID Theft:

Recent high-profile data security problems at companies like ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, Bank of America and Citibank make it clear that companies are doing little to protect sensitive data, despite assurances years ago that voluntary industry guidelines they established would pre-empt the need for government regulation.
Realizing that self-regulation isn't going to work anymore, several lawmakers have proposed piecemeal solutions to address the problem of identity theft. But many of them don't go far enough.
Following are the fixes we think Congress should make:

Windows AntiSpyware Downgrades Claria Detections

2005-07-07T20:10:00.000-05:00

AlterSlash ~ the unofficial SlashDot digest:

Windows AntiSpyware Downgrades Claria Detections - by Zonk
accihap writes “A week after word leaked out that Microsoft was negotiating an acquisition deal with Claria (See recent /. coverage), spyware researchers have noticed that the Windows antispyware application has downgraded Claria’s Gator detections and changed the recommended action from ‘quarantine’ to ‘ignore.’ Screenshots of the new default settings.”

PBS | I, Cringely . June 30, 2005 - Accessories Make the Nerd

2005-06-30T20:57:00.000-05:00

Good, as usual, insights from Cringely.

PBS | I, Cringely . June 30, 2005 - Accessories Make the Nerd

The fact is, as one of my friends likes to say, this Web 2.0 blather "supposes a world where entrepreneurship is not necessary to establish a large, successful, data-driven business. Why will the people do any of this extra-laborious mark-up? They won't. There has to be something in it for them. That something has to be invented and executed, earned with capital. Don't give me the socialist vision of 'the masses will undo the monopolies.' The new monopolies will undo the monopolies, and the masses will be along for the ride, deriving lots of value from the fighting: Prices will go down, new differentiating services will be invented, etc."

Astronomy Picture of the Day - Deep Impact craft

2005-06-29T08:02:00.000-05:00

Now that's some serious Fourth of July fireworks.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

The Deep Impact spacecraft continues to close on Comet Tempel 1, a comet roughly the size of Manhattan. Early on July 3 (EDT), the Deep Impact spacecraft will separate in to two individual robotic spaceships, one called Flyby and the other called Impactor. During the next 24 hours, both Flyby and Impactor will fire rockets and undergo complex maneuvers in preparation for Impactor's planned collision with Comet Tempel 1. On July 4 (1:52 am EDT) if everything goes as scheduled, the 370-kilogram Impactor will strike Tempel 1's surface at over 14,000 kilometers per hour. Impactor will attempt to photograph the oncoming comet right up to the time of collision, while Flyby photographs the result from nearby.

Van Helsing

2005-06-28T22:01:00.000-05:00

Just watched Van Helsing. Um... not much original in the movie. Kind of an amalgam of Frankenstein, Dracula, James Bond, Batman and Robin, and Star Wars with a pretty much 100% computer graphics set.

Ok as kind of mindless entertainment, though. There were bits that were really pretty funny, but I'm not sure they were intended to be.

iTunes does podcasting... will anyone care?

2005-06-28T13:07:00.000-05:00

This has been rumored for some time now and was also rumored to be tied to a Big Corporate Partnership. ~~I don't see any such partnership just yet but maybe that's yet to come.~~ Doh! The partnership is obviously with The Mouse. Lots of ABC/Disney content.

On the one hand, this is probably good in that it will bring the term "podcast" to the lips of millions of iPod owners. That, of course, could be a double-edged sword. If any of the podcast publishers out there who are still on metered bandwidth and they suddenly get hit by a couple thousand iTunes experimenters ... could be a real problem.

On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much compelling content out there for the average pop music listener. So it may all just be a flash in the proverbial pan.

On the gripping hand, iTunes can't be much worse as a podcatching client than anything else out there. The software I've tried (all the most popular ones for Windows and Linux) has sucked. It's sucked so bad that I have been using a simplistic script called bashpodder while I slowly write my own podcatching client.

Bottom line: I don't think it can hurt but content is king and, aside from people like me who like the "geek radio" stuff that predominates the podosphere, the content is still weak.

Your ISP as Net watchdog | CNET News.com

2005-06-28T13:00:00.000-05:00

This would be double plus ungood.

Your ISP as Net watchdog | CNET News.com

The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities.
Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs--that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept.
In theory, at least, data retention could permit successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence. But privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior have caused a similar proposal to stall in Europe and could engender stiff opposition domestically.

HoustonChronicle.com - Lawmaker wants Texans safe from home seizure

2005-06-24T12:15:00.000-05:00

Back when I was in school we learned that "eminent domain" was essentially an exemption to the market economy for governments. It gave governments the ability to acquire land for "public use" without allowing the landowner to set their own price. But "public use", to my recollection, meant that the government ended up owning the land. Roads was always the example.

But in George W's "ownership society" as enforced by his pet justices, it seems that "public use" really means "someone with more money wants your land so get off it". In other words actually allowing the market economy to work is dependent on connections and pocket depth.

I'm with Justice O'Connor on this one and I applaud San Antonio Representative Corte's stance. I hope he follows through.

HoustonChronicle.com - Lawmaker wants Texans safe from home seizure

The Supreme Court ruled against a group of property owners in New London, Conn., who challenged a city plan to demolish their riverfront homes to make way for offices, a hotel and other commercial buildings.
Justice John Paul Stevens, in the majority opinion, said such projects are within the scope of a clause in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution that authorizes condemning property for "public use."
Stevens wrote that promoting economic development, the stated goal of the New London project, "is a traditional and long accepted governmental function, and there is no principled way of distinguishing it from the other public purposes the court has recognized," such as taking land for roads, parks or libraries.
In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the majority's interpretation of "public use" was so broad that "the specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

CNN.com - Buy off your 'car guilt' - Jun 21, 2005

2005-06-21T15:31:00.000-05:00

I'm shocked. Shocked and amazed. SUV drivers aren't guilt-ridden?!!? This whole thing smells like an Enron-style shell game to me.

Full disclosure: I commute 25 miles each way in a full size pickup that gets about 15mpg.

CNN.com - Buy off your 'car guilt' - Jun 21, 2005
Since car drivers are under no legal compulsion to try to compensate for their tailpipe emissions, the TerraPass will only appeal to those who feel some guilt about their driving, and want to do something about it.
Not surprisingly, few SUV drivers have been buying them. Most have gone to owners of fuel-efficient cars that produce relatively few pollutants.
That initially surprised Arnold.
"We fully expected to target SUV drivers with SUV guilt," he said. "It just doesn't exist"

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system

2005-06-21T10:01:00.000-05:00

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system: "Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system
Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features."

Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out - New York Times

2005-06-20T14:41:00.000-05:00

In contrast, it seems, to a lot of geeks I'm not a big fan of Neal Stephenson's writings. I find his stuff mostly derivative. But this bit is pretty interesting.

Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out - New York Times: "The first 'Star Wars' movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs - the purest kind of vegging-out material - to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle.
All such content - as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes - was banished in the first of the prequels ('Episode I: The Phantom Menace,' 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don't even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture."

Ed Foster's Gripelog || A Very Fishy License Agreement

2005-06-17T11:59:00.000-05:00

I want to get a EULA for my pet fish Eric... Ed Foster's Gripelog || A Very Fishy License Agreement:

'Now there are EULAs for fish,' a reader recently wrote me. 'Yes, as in the kind with fins and gills you would buy in a baggie and bring home to put in an aquarium. I stumbled across the website for GloFish, a genetically-modified form of Zebra fish that have a fluorescent glow. The license agreement there is short and sweet, but it does contain one big shocker.'

EFF Releases Legal Guide for Bloggers

2005-06-16T10:43:00.000-05:00

Whether you're a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you've been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

...

Check it out and pass the word along.

EFF Releases Legal Guide for Bloggers

Gettysburg address rendered as PowerPoint

2005-06-16T07:58:00.000-05:00

Came across this in a random troll on del.isio.us

If A. Lincoln had a copy of PowerPoint.

Very very funny!

jlassen: When Bears Growl (Or how I become the subject of a Secret Service Investigation)

2005-06-15T21:47:00.000-05:00

Very spooky story of someone coming to understand the phrase "chilling effect" up close and personal.

Someone once said “If you poke a bear with a stick, expect it to growl”. On April 20th, 2005, I poked a bear with a stick. On Tuesday, June 7th, it growled.

Discovering new music due to podcasting

2005-06-13T20:15:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me today that I've listened to more music that was new to me in the last six months than I probably have in the previous six years.

I think most of us get fixated on the music that we listened to over and over when we were in our late teens and college years. For me that meant the end of the sixties and early seventies. Led Zeppelin, Moody Blues, Rolling Stones, ELO, Uriah Heep, Traffic. A mixed bag of hard and not so hard rock and odd stuff done mixing symphonies with pop music. All on real honest to goodness records. LPs. Vinyl.

I repurchased a number of my favorites on CDs over the years. There is a slug of aging LPs still in a closet but the turntable has been relegated to the attic for at least eight years and had gone unused for quite a while before that.

So. New music. Radio has sucked down here on the Third Coast for quite a while. The last blow was the conversion of KLOL, the last rock station in the area, to Spanish. But even before the plug got pulled it had been in decline. Too many deejays who think the airwaves are for airing their personalities and not music. And I've turned into a cheap bastard in my old age. So I just can't "justify" spending twenty bucks give or take a few on a CD of someone I haven't heard on the off chance I might find a song or two I like.

So my music listening has declined down to my mostly legal collection of MP3s and Ogg files. And I guess I was slowly getting tired of the same old 5,000 tracks.

When along comes podcasting. The first music program I listened to and really enjoyed (and am still listening) is Dave Raven's "The Raven 'n' the Blues". From there I've branched out to several other blues shows recommended by Dave. And Closet Deadhead (no, I'm not a Deadhead but I did have a college roommate who was into the Dead in their "Country Dead" phase.) Also I've tried a couple of rock shows but I've been less happy with what I've found there. I think it's because the rock featured is "their" rock and not "mine". In other words it's the music that the podcasters listened to over and over when they were teenagers, mostly a decade or two later than me. Eighties hair bands and such. Ugh.

I was never into the blues when I was a kid but I sure am enjoying it now. Odd.

Updated: Gr... posted from the Blogger web UI. Would be nice if the preview had shown me that I left out all the paragraph breaks!

HIPAA penalties gutted

2005-06-08T10:51:00.000-05:00

Good article from Bruce Schneier on yet another pro-corporation, anti-individual, ruling by the current administration.

In the U.S., medical privacy is largely governed by a 1996 law called HIPAA. Among many other provisions, HIPAA regulates the privacy and security surrounding electronic medical records. HIPAA specifies civil penalties against companies that don't comply with the regulations, as well as criminal penalties against individuals and corporations who knowingly steal or misuse patient data.

The civil penalties have long been viewed as irrelevant by the health care industry. Now the criminal penalties have been gutted:

U.S. Medical Privacy Law Gutted

2005-06-06T09:54:00.000-05:00

Hm... this might actually work. But it depends on knowledgeable people actually looking at phishing emails and taking the time to act on them. There are two problems with that.

The people most likely to recognize a phishing mail for what it is have got mail filters that get rid of such messages
Making up credible information take too much time.

This is crying out for a mail program plugin. Instead of a spam filter that files or deletes phishing mails we need a phishing filter that automates the act of following the links and filling in the phisher's forms.

Seems doable if not trivial.

The Best Way to Stop These Scams Is by Drowning the Phish
06/02/05: Man Bites Phish

...

The simple way to kill phishing is by making it harder for the phisher to make money from it. Right now, a phisher sends out a million e-mails and gets back 100 replies that yield positive data. There is almost no effort involved in sending out the e-mails after the first one, and the quality of the return data is very high. No wonder this is such a popular business!

Let's change that. If you get phishing e-mail, go the web sites and enter false data. Make up everything -- name, sign-on name, password, credit card numbers, everything. Instead of one million messages yielding 100 good replies, now the phisher will have one million messages yielding 100,000 replies of which 100 are good, but WHICH 100?

This technique kills phishing two ways. It certainly increases the phishing labor requirement by about 10,000X. But even more importantly, if banks and e-commerce sites limit the number of failed sign-on attempts from a single IP address to, say, 10 per day, theft as an outcome of phishing becomes close to impossible.

...

Singularity wiki

2005-05-26T09:31:00.000-05:00

I read Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. Great book. I'm keeping an open mind about the idea of The Singularity. But I'm mostly leaning towards "ain't gonna happen, folks".

Cory Doctorow: The Singularity is the moment in human history when things go non-linear because of the ability to upload consciousness to computers. Hitching human intelligence to PC industry's growth curve will make incomprehensible transhumans out of us, rupturing history. It's a lot of fun for science fiction writers to write about.
Charlie Stross -- who is all over this year's Hugo Ballot for a ton of fiction about the Singularity and other topics -- has created a Wiki for mapping out the contours of the Singularity.
If you live through the SIngularity and you do not try UpLoading and are not rendered PostHumous by feral calculators or get eaten by GreyGoo, you may be one of the PostHumans. PostHumans are humans who are not human any more. Some of them work for the Post Office, which keeps track of the PostHumans and sees that they do not cause outbreaks of GreyGoo, but the rest of them live a leisured life, pampered and cosseted by their UtilityFog and BushRobot an' other frightful servitors. Bein' PostHumans looks wonderful from here, much like being a late 20th century Accounts Clerk or Call Center Worker would have looked for a Hungarian peasant in 1420 with the nobility trying to kill them, i.e. grey, boring, and extremely well-fed. Only it'll be more exciting than that because we'll have World of Warcraft 21.499! Or something even better to play!
PostHumans are all inhumanly handsome or pretty, live infinitely long, get free unlimited resurrections if they're killed by dire boars or feral calculators or eated by Buick-eating aliens, and they get to have magic PixieDust NanoTechnology skillz. Being PostHumans is the bizniss.
Link
Stross's Singularity wiki

Having a copy of PGP makes you guilty... ???

2005-05-26T09:05:00.000-05:00

This one is really hard to believe! It seems that the mere presence of PGP on this guy's computer was evidence that he was "up to something". I guess everyone with Windows 2000 or later is now guilty since those include an encrypting filesystem. Doesn't seem to matter if you've actually encrypted anything.

The case, although never put before a jury, could establish the precendent that the use of an encryption programme might be admitted as evidence of criminal intent, as least in Minnesota. The attitude seems to be "if you have nothing to hide why do you need secrecy tools". Therefore it follows that you should be transmitting your credit card and bank account information in clear text every time

PGP use ruled relevant in child abuse case

One Aging Geek

Pathetic

Gadget Christmas

State of the world tour

The current pet situation

After market battery genius

Upstairs pet, downstairs pet

Googling the dog

Home from "Norn Iron"

Life with Chocolate

Damn near back to normal

Gmail amazing shrinking spam folder

Semi weekly house update

House progress

Three steps forward, one step back

Past the point of maximum chaos?

Over the edge into total chaos

Interesting...

Much to do about not much

Java good, Perforce bad

Sunrise Earth

gaping void

Tin Man Podcast

Google Calendar

Unfortunate phrasing

Home from a sojourn to Sonoma

Setor Hoteleiro overlooking Brasilia

Personal email from Sir Arthur C Clarke

Top-notch sci-fi podcasts

Thumbs down to Voice of Free Planet X podcast

All the President's Discs

Meme spreading

Wife cooks up a way to buy gear to protect troops

My final word on the Skullcandy SCE-3B headphones

CNN.com - Museum visitor trips, breaks Chinese vases - Jan 30, 2006

Chinese New Year: Resolutions for Google

NASA workers pause for solemn tribute | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Okay, *do* be evil: Google launches censored google.cn in China

The geekiest headphones ever?

Catching up on podcasts

Review: Dark City

Google Unveils The Google Pack

AlterSlash: Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?

CNN.com - 'Truthiness' is word of the year - Jan 7, 2006

Digital Transition Content Security Act

DIY "podcast" for This American Life

Critters in the attic, the rerun

Obsessing over the music collection

AOL Coaxes Google to Try Busier Ads - New York Times

Back to Firefox

Battery management, the bane of geeks everywhere

What am I listening to

Memeorandum

Catching up

Google-in-a-box

Global Frequency (TV pilot)

Paul Graham: What Business Can Learn from Open Source

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

New podcatcher, Peapod

Podcasts out the wazoo

Hibernate fails "rarely"... HA!

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

WNYC - New York Public Radio

Freedom to Tinker: CD-DRM Rootkit: Repairing the Damage

Bitrot and wasted time

One strike away from the World Series...

Running from Rita: part 3 the anticlimactic ending

Running from Rita: part 2 the epic journey

Running from Rita: part 1 preparing

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

Whither NOLA

Dateline: Banks of the Danube, Linz Austria

New Scientist News - Climate warning as Siberia melts

Schneier on Security: RFID Passport Security Revisited

Dark Star

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow

An exhibition of geek laziness

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Escape Pod promo

HoustonChronicle.com - NASA to use unprecedented methods to monitor shuttle

Okay, do be evil: Google launches censored google.cn in China