random neuron misfires

Well, its a good thing that Vice President Cheney is not a member of the Executive Branch of government any longer. He’s decided to absolve himself of that responsibility.

This means that if President George W. Bush meets an unfortunate or untimely end, Dick Cheney (as a non-member of the Executive Branch) does not automatically become President of the United States.

Whew!

Because a man (and I use that term very loosely in this case) who can shoot a man in the face and get that same man to apologize for the “pain and suffering he caused Cheney and his family”, or who has man-sized safes in his office for the purposes of hiding/destroying more “secret” material, shouldn’t be allowed to go NEAR the government’s inner workings.

We’re heading down a fast slippery slope here… and so I’ll lay out the same prediction I’ve been stating for the last 3+ years. Originally I thought we’d have a civil war when Bush stole the seat of President in the 2004 election, but the American public just sat back and let it happen; content to watch American Idol, wear their Nike shoes and drink their Pepsi colas.

This time, I don’t think it is going to go down so lightly. People who are this entrenched in Government, this wrapped in their own mindless games for power, do not just walk away when their term is up.

Prediction Follows:

George W. Bush is going to “temporarily suspend” (read: permanently) the 2008 elections, because of the “War in Iran” (note: not Iraq). Martial Law will be implemented shortly after, to try to calm people from creating a general uprising.

Those that refuse to be “calmed” (read: controlled, suppressed), will be added to the list of those being illegally wiretapped by the NSA. This wiretapping has been happening in our country for over 5 years before it became public. You can bet they’re building a list right now of the “dissidents” who might cause problems in 2008 for their stealing of the elections.

We can’t have those “un-American peoples” rising up against their government, now can we?

Let’s also not forget that Michael Hayden directly misrepresented the 4th Amendment in a press conference. It is very clear, this Administration doesn’t understand what they’re doing, they’re a direct threat to the Freedom and Democracy of this country and others, and they should be replaced immediately, by those more-suited to handling this country’s issues and problems.

End Prediction

We CAN, and we should rise up against the government when they are a threat to our own way of life. They’re not called “un-Americans”, they’re called Patriots, and this administration (and the next), better get used to hearing and seeing that term more and more.

I recently purchased a WATTS-UP Pro power analyzer/data logger from SMARTHOME in an effort to try to ascertain how much power my home and office equipment was consuming on a monthly basis.

We’re currently paying roughly $180/month for the power we use. At 0.12kWh, that’s a lot of power we’re consuming SOMEWHERE. Where is it?

What is taking up the most power?

Is it the computers?

Is it the appliances?

Is it something else?

We’ve already replaced every conventional incandescent bulb with compact fluorescent lamps, which are saving about 80% of the power right off the top from the bulbs we were using before. But it isn’t enough to bring the monthly bill down to make a difference.

I started testing my office, various appliances, outlets, other things. What I found, was shocking and surprising. Here’s a small sample:

My Gateway FPD2485W 24″ LCD monitor consumes 90 watts(!!) of power while turned on. It was the single-highest power eater I tested so far.

This monitor is plugged into a 16-outlet strip, which also includes an AMD64/4600+ machine with 4gb RAM, several USB gadgets, bluetooth adapters, phone charger, flatbed scanner, rechargeable battery charger, landline phone extension and several other things.

The total consumption of all of those devices, is 282W total. The LCD is eating 30% of everything else. The AMD64 machine itself consumes 100W.

The TV/DVR/Stereo takes 140W, and is on 24×7.

A 3-speed fan in my office takes 250W on the fastest setting.

The dehumidifier I use in my office is a 600W device, and after spinning up, it eats 687W. Unfortunately, the dehumidifier is a necessary device in the office, otherwise I’d have my own weather system in there in 3 days. I pull about 3 gallons of water out of the air every day in the office.

The toaster oven in the kitchen cooking 2 slices of toast on the “Toast” setting: 1300 WATTS!!!

I’ve only had it for a few hours, but the results are quite shocking and surprising so far. I’m going to start testing under load, over longer periods and on the bigger usage appliances (washer, dryer, refridgerator and such).

My wife and I have amassed a very large collection of music over the years from our CDs. I’ve painstakingly ripped all of the CDs to Ogg Vorbis format and mp3 format. There’s rougly 10,000 files on the Music slice of the FreeBSD media array I’ve built for this purpose. It’s big.

She has a 20″ iMac that I bought for her last Christmas and I have several Linux machines and one Windows machine. The Windows machine runs iTunes, while the Linux machines all run AmaroK (which blows iTunes out of the water in functionality and intuitive features).

The Windows machine has an M:\ drive mapped to the Music share on the FreeBSD server via Samba. From here, I can load iTunes and drag all of the albums into iTunes. About an hour of importing, fetching album artwork and conversion later, I have a fully populated library of music in iTunes to work with.

Almost.

The first problems began when I realized that iTunes doesn’t like having the “My Documents” folder stored on a network share (My Documents → My Music → iTunes is where iTunes stores its Music Library). if iTunes tries to launch at login time, it will barf and truncate the existing music library to create a new, empty, default music library. This means I have to reimport all 10,000 music files again.

Once I realized that, I made sure the My Documents folder was opened (initiating the network mapping) before iTunes attempts to load. Now that part works… but it is still an iTunes bug.

The second problem I found, was that iTunes doesn’t like Samba locking. The music files we have are shared on a tightly locked-down Samba share. This share looks like the following:

[Music]
        comment         = Music
        path            = /usr/local/array/Media/Music/
        case sensitive  = yes
        writeable       = yes
        guest ok        = no
        browseable      = yes
        locking         = yes
        public          = no
        write list      = @gnu
        hide files      = /.DS_Store/

Note the Bolded portion. If I have locking enabled on the Music share, iTunes won’t allow me to edit the id3v2 tags in the mp3 files. If I disable locking (NOT recommended for a multi-user share like this), then I can edit the mp3 tags, metadata and other pieces.

Why?!

Thirdly, I tried importing ALL of our music into the iTunes copy running on Windows, and then using the iTunes Sharing option to share that entire music library on the LAN, so my wife’s Mac could see and use it.

They got that wrong too.

When you share one iTunes Library, you basically create a “streaming radio station”, nothing more. This means my wife can’t plug in her iPod and pull music from the shared library to her iPod and load it up. She can only click on music and listen to it while she sits at her Mac.

No iPod functionality with iTunes music sharing. Lovely.

AmaroK 2.0 and KDE4 is soon to be released for Windows and OS X. The sooner that is done, the sooner I can be rid of this broken piece of software called iTunes on the Windows machine and on the Mac. Once we’re all on AmaroK, things will work much better.

There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.

Our failing system of democracy was dealt another blow today.. The only way to prove you were affected by the NSA wiretapping is to be affected. The fact you were affected is something you can’t prove even when you are affected because the fact that you were affected is now to remain a state secret.

Nice.

Why is it that the same exact laws the Federal Government passed when Nixon was accused of wiretapping one office are now ignored, when it comes to the unsupervised wiretapping of 280 million US Citizens?

First, Bush and the NSA denied there was any wiretapping going on. When they were caught in a lie, they immediately claimed that any information related to the non-existant wiretapping program, were state secrets.

From the article:

A divided three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled today that the lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of journalists, lawyers and academics, be sent back to a district court judge to be dismissed.

In August 2006, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled the NSA program, which monitored telephone and Internet communications without court-ordered warrants, was illegal.

It is at this point, I must requote the definition of Liberalism:

Broadly speaking, liberalism emphasizes individual rights and equality of opportunity. A liberal society is characterized by freedom of thought for individuals, limitations on power, the rule of law, the free exchange of ideas, a market economy, free private enterprise, and a transparent system of government in which the rights of all citizens are protected.

And from a post on Slashdot discussing this travesty:

The government no longer answers to the citizens, according the the system we set up to run it. It’s a very short, swift step from where we are to where ordinary citizens disappear in the night (non-Muslims, that is).

We won’t know exactly when that moment arrives, because we won’t be told, because no one in the government obeys or enforces the law anymore.

Another random snippet discussing this ruling:

“This stuff is so super secret that we can’t even show 8 members of Congress with top level security clearances what we are doing. The fact that we are legally mandated to advise them & we can only perform these operations under their oversight is irrelevant.”

There seems to be this misconception in the current government that they make up the laws that we follow, and they tell us what to do, and we do them. When we don’t obey, we’re seen as traitors or terrorists, and scared into submission (or those held captive, uncharged, in Guantanamo).

Let me restate, as I have many times before… this Government can, and will be replaced. There are 280 million of us, and not nearly as many of you. We’re armed, we’re strong, and when the cause it right, we WILL unite and fight for what is right.

Are you hearing this? WE are the Government, not you, and if you are not representing what WE believe to be OUR best interests, you will be voted out. If you rig the voting system (as has been done in the last two “elections”), we’ll replace you by other means.

Well, thanks to IBM telling us that they were no longer funding our department… I’m out of a job, and actively looking to replace it with another… SOON!

There was a burst of job offers that looked promising over the last couple of weeks, but they slowly they fell through the ice. One of the most-promising ones was sabotaged by the recruiter. The others were either too far away, or were offering insulting compensation.

On Connecticut Unemployment, I’m making roughly 25% of my regular salary… a 75% reduction in salary.

Sigh.

So I’m still looking.

If anyone has leads, feel free to contact me and let me know so I can follow up on them. My resume is online as well.

If you’re like me, moving to the latest 64-bit hardware has made an ENORMOUS difference in my productivity. I’ve moved all of my personal machines and servers to AMD64/4600+ machines with a minimum of 4gb of RAM.

The problem is that not everything moves over so seamlessly; case in point: prc-tools. The problem with prc-tools not functioning on AMD64 has nothing to do with John Marshall, the maintainer of prc-tools… John is a great person, once you get used to how he works and how he expects bug reports and submissions <ducking from johnm’s swing>

I use prc-tools in several-dozen hourly cron jobs to build Palm software for projects like Plucker and several others, and I wanted to decommission the existing AMD32 machine that was doing those builds up to this point to migrate everything to the faster, less power-hungry AMD64 machines.

I didn’t really want to have to move everything to the new AMD64 machines EXCEPT this one AMD32 machine powered up @400W 24×7 just to build Palm software. That would cost me too much money each month in power costs for a server which isn’t really being used for anything other than cranking out hourly builds of Palm software.

prc-tools is a series of patches to the mainline gcc compiler that we’re all used to using on Linux and other POSIX systems like BSD and Solaris. The problem is that the prc-tools patches are mated to gcc-2.95, which was released back in July 31 of 1999. 64-bitness didn’t even exist back in 1999, 8 years ago.

I’m also not the only one with this problem.

I started patching up gcc’s configuration files to detect 64-bit procs a bit better, but it dead-ended quite early. The autoconfiscation process doesn’t even detect the architecture via config.guess. Dropping in a more-recent config.guess and rewrapping configure.ac helped a little bit, but it died further on in the process. Iterative fixes got it quite far, but eventually I had to dive into gcc itself to patch it, and that’s an area I leave to more-seasoned experts than myself.

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I love gadgets. I have lots of them.

My role as pilot-link maintainer has me thinking about devices, data, synchronization and plenty of other things on a daily basis. Not a day goes by when I’m not trying to mentally redesign some portion of the datapath between devices.

That being said, the iPhone has created a lot of buzz in the industry. It’s a neat looking device, and has plenty of eye-candy to please the masses, for a short while. I’m sure it’ll do great as a device in the industry.

But the iPhone is absolutely useless to me and to anyone but the ENTRY LEVEL Apple customer and userbase. Before you reach for that tomato to throw at me, hear me out…

1. It has less storage for music than an iPod, and is twice as large.
2. It does not sync to anything BUT an Apple OS X machine and onboard applications. Can I sync this with Linux? No. Windows? No. FreeBSD? No.
3. It doesn’t upgrade any existing device (i.e. getting data into it is manual re-entry, which is prone to lots of errors and mistakes
4. It has a VERY fragile face. Can you stick this in your pocket with your bluetooth headset and keys? Not likely. Can you put it in your bag and not have it scratched/crushed/cracked? No.
5. Can I share data on it with a non-iPhone user by “beaming” business cards or other datafiles back and forth? No.
6. Can it run another operating system, other than OS X? Can I run Linux on it? No. (at least not yet, but that doesn’t erase the issues in 1,4 and 5 above.)

While its a neat looking device, so are plenty of gadgets that went exactly nowhere. My Treo680 has more storage, more features, more functions, more stability and more flexibility with support for at least 5 separate operating systems out of the box than the iPhone.

My colleagues who know I love gadgets are asking me when I’ll be getting an iPhone (probably so they can play with it). The answer is a resounding never, until all of the above issues are addressed. This isn’t a Linux statement, this isn’t an anti-Apple statement, this is a usability statement.

My wife has a 20″ iMac that I bought her last Christmas, and she loves it. She also has a 4-gig Nano I bought her the previous Christmas. The two work great together. She also has a flip phone I bought her for Mother’s Day a few years ago.

She admits that her phone has more features than she’ll ever use, and the iPhone isn’t even interesting to her… and she has the optimum environment to use it within.

I’m not sure who they’re targeting, and without any clear, open path to development on the device, I can’t see developers being their target audience.

I think the only people who will covet and buy an iPhone are those who “Just Gotta Have One™”, without really looking at how it misses the target on almost every issue.

UPDATE:

• No replaceable battery. This IS 2007, right? (there are plenty of links describing how to replace it yourself though, but you void the warrantee by doing so.)
• It has a camera, but can’t record video (my Treos have all done both)
• Custom headphone jack; can’t use your normal headphones with it.
• Stereo bluetooth ONLY with the Apple-branded headset(s)
• AT&T’s “unlimited” plan is not unlimited (read the fine print; you’re limited to 5 gigabytes per-month)
• Requires switching to an alternate keyboard to get things like commas and other meta keys. By contrast, my Treo has a series of ‘shift’ keys that do the same thing, depending on whether you want numbers, letters, punctuation and so on. MUCH faster with the meta keys than popping up an alternate keyboard.
• No Flash support (but there is a way around that)
• No support for non-iPhone headphones (those expensive studio earphones you have? Forget it.)
• No support for memory expansion cards (SD/MicroSD/CF), when it takes nearly no space to implement it
• No non-Safari SDK available
• Capacitive touchscreen, not resistive; no using it with gloves on in colder climates. (Treo wins again here)

And the list goes on. While I think lots of “Must Have It” gadget people will love the device, for real productive or business users, its a lemon.

I’ve upgraded my Treo 650 to a Treo 680 fairly recently, thanks in part to cracking my very first Palm screen by dropping my phone on a hard, concrete airport floor. Oops!

I’ve been using Cingular (now AT&T) for my mobile service for several years, and their coverage is stellar. Previously, my wife and I had Verizon, and their coverage is a joke. We’d get dropped calls dozens of times per-day, with full signal and towers nearby, and then we’d go hours without any signal, for no reason. Avoid Verizon if you can.

I had a $5.99/month “Insuranace” plan on my phone for a few years, to protect me in the case where something was damaged or my phone was stolen. As it turns out, Cingular doesn’t support the Insurance plan for “PDA Phones” like the Treo. After some heated arguing with them, they back-credited me about 3 years of $5.99/month charges, which I then applied to upgrade my 650 to the 680.

Shortly after using it, I realized the battery life was HORRIBLE on the device, with the standard 1200mAh battery (shown here):

There are a few tricks to fixing this however! The first thing to do is reduce the amount of power being consumed.

1. Disable Bluetooth if you aren’t using a Bluetooth headset or synchronizing over Bluetooth
2. Turn off the screen during phone calls using an application called Phone Technician
3. Disable the keyboard lights with an application called KBLightsOff from LilApps.

Check your Power settings:

1. Navigate to Prefs -> Power
2. Set your brightness down to the bottom 10-20% of the scale (left-most side of the slider)
3. Set “Auto-off after” to 15 seconds
4. Set “On a call, dim backlight after..” to 1 minute
5. Set “Beam Receive” to OFF

Install the latest Treo 680 firmware update. As I type this, the update is v1.09. The list of fixes is shown to be:

• Improved power management for better battery life.
• Camera update for improved battery life (available previously as a standalone update).
• Helps correct distorted characters that can occur in the title bar of the Phone application.
• Helps fix device “freezing” that may occur under certain conditions.
• System Lockout improvement for increased security.
• Support for the new Daylight Saving Time legislation (available previously as a standalone update).
• Provides better support for networks unique to some Caribbean, Latin American, and Asian countries.
• Updates Cingular branding, replacing it with the new AT&T branding.

The next thing to do is “power-reset” your Treo battery. To do this, do the following:

1. Connect your Treo to the standard wall charger (NOT the usb charging cable).
2. Remove the battery from the back of the Treo and wait for three full minutes.
3. Remove the SIM card from the device and wait for another full minute.
4. Put the battery back into the Treo (without the SIM card) then let your Treo charge until completely full (about 6 hours).
   • Do NOT press any keys on your Treo after reinserting the battery.
   • Do NOT switch your TREO ON or OFF, just leave it alone.
   • Do NOT enter the SIM card PIN if prompted to do so, just wait!
5. Once your Treo is fully charged, you may reinsert the SIM card in the back and replace the battery. You should now see proper battery utilization from your Treo.

Another option is the Seidio 2400mAh “Extended Life” battery. I bought one of these for my 680, and I couldn’t be happier.

The best part about the extended battery, is the extended battery cover that comes with it. I still have my Treo 650 and its larger battery, and with the Seidio cover, I can now use that older battery in my 680 as well, giving me 3 full batteries to work with!

I also purchased the Multi-function Charger from Seidio as well. This charger works on AC power as well as over USB if you were on the road. Since I now have 2x2400mAh batteries and 1x1200mAh battery, I needed a way to rotate the charging across all three of them. While I’m using one battery in my Treo, I’m charging another, and it works out perfectly.

If you don’t want the “bump-out” cover making your Treo ugly, you can also get the 1300mAh battery that is 7-8% more capacity than the stock 1200mAh battery, and fits in the same physical slot, using the same OEM cover. A few of these and the multi-function charger, and you’re good for several days of offline-talk time.

After combining these techniques, the battery life on my Treo 680 is much more tolerable than it was when I first received it. I almost sent it back, it was so bad, and now I can’t imagine parting with it.

I have an Amazon/CHASE credit card with a decent credit limit. I use it when I need to make higher-dollar purchases, or risky purchases where I might need to return the item (damaged goods) or dispute the charges (online purchases).

For this “service”, I get a $25.00 Amazon.com gift certificate for each $500 I charge on the card, as well as accrue “points” which add up to miles and other pseudo-gifts.

I was knocking down that balance recently via their web interface and tracking all of my expenditures in Microsoft Money 2007, and wanted to use the new “Budgeting” feature of the software to track my budget.

As I was filling out my bank information for this particular card in the system, it asked what my APR was. I had no idea, so I called Chase Bank to find out. When I reached an English-speaking operator, she said that my APR on the card balance was 29.24% (NOT a typo!)

I asked if they could lower that APR, and they said no… they don’t offer any lower rates. How can you possibly NOT offer a lower rate than 29.24%?!

Since they would not lower my APR, I asked if they could increase my credit limit to keep my existing balance under 30% of the total limit on the card. This is recommended to achieve a high credit score. The operator said they’d submit my request to raise my credit limit, but it may take a few days before I receive a response.

A few days later, I receive a letter declining my request to raise my credit limit on the card, which I immediately put in my “Credit Reports” file in my office. My history on that card has been strong, and every payment I’ve made has been 6-10x what the normal payment was supposed to be. Not only did they raise my rates to an astronomical amount, but they wouldn’t increase my limit to keep my balance under 30% of the total.

I check my credit score almost every month, depending on my level of activity. I bury it in the “cost of doing business”, and it helps. When I first started checking it, I noticed a LOT of erroneous activity and charges, which I immediately wiped out. My credit is now pristine, clean and rising up fast, as it should be. I highly recommend anyone who doesn’t check their credit at least 2-3 times a year, to get on the ball and start.

If I was in financial hard-times, wouldn’t it be counter-intuitive to raise my credit limit like this? If I already can’t keep the balance low, won’t raising my interest rate only make it harder and harder to pay it off? So instead of lowering my rate, increasing the chances I’ll pay it off, they raise it, increasing the chances I’ll default on the card balance or claim bankruptcy. In either case, Chase Bank loses. Luckily for me, I’m not in financial hard times, and I can pay this balance down quickly.

I don’t understand the logic here though, other than a money-grab for them.

I immediately decided to initiate a balance transfer of the entire Amazon/CHASE card balance to my Bank of America credit card at 1.99% APR, bringing the Chase card to $0.00 balance. Now I’m paying 1.99% on the Chase balance through B of A, and 13.99% on the remaining balance ($62).

I won’t close the credit card because closing $0.00 balance cards is VERY BAD for your credit score, but I will be cutting it up and not using it until I receive a new card via the renewal process in a year or two.

I can’t say enough about Bank of America and how amazing their customer service, hardware, policies and flexibility is. At one point when paying for my daughter’s daycare electronically via the B of A website interface, the check that daycare was supposed to receive, went missing.

Not only did B of A offer to send out a new check, they also offered to eat the cost of the Stop Payment fee AND the daycare late payment fees. They also assigned a human being to follow the process through until it was fixed. That person called the daycare here in CT and sorted out all of the issues, and it turns out the check was mis-directed to the wrong daycare building by mistake.

I can’t speak highly enough about B of A. They are simply amazing, and they should be the model by which other banks look up to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about power and power-consumption over the last six months to a year or so. I have already replaced every single bulb in the house and office with CFLs. We went from 60W and 70W bulbs in the house to 11W, 13W and 23W bulbs inside and outside (our exterior spotlights were 100W+, and are now brighter, whiter, 23W bulbs).

I’ve replaced my ageing servers with AMD64 dual-core machines and their PSUs with Antec NeoHE 550W power supplies, and I’m very conscious about turning off bulbs in rooms I’m not in when I’m not there.

My last post touched on some power consumption issues, and I just found this Slashdot article, which talks about making the s3 suspend/wakeup work better on on all machines… and then I stumbled upon this email from Bill Gates (marked as Plaintiff’s Exhibit 3020 in Comes v. Microsoft). It states:

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even though they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

This was penned on Sunday, January 24, 1999 at 8:41am. I can’t believe the gall of Bill Gates, to even suggest such a thing, given our already-stressed power grid.

I’m going to get a Watt’s Up power meter to measure the consumption of some key devices in the house and office, or one of the Kill-a-Watt products that do the same thing.

I’m so happy I continue to run Linux, for so many reasons other than the Freedom it affords me (liberty as well as financial). Windows just can’t even come close anymore, even with Bill Gates actively trying to stifle our ability to evolve.