Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Harry L. Helms 1952-2009

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:47:02 GMT

I got word the other day that Harry L. Helms W7HLH had died this past Sunday. Harry was a friend for over 20 years, and we met regularly at trade shows including the Borland conferences and ABA/BEA, just to touch base and trade ideas. He and I had a lot in common: We were both longtime hams, we both liked classic radio gear, shortwave listening, and publishing. (We were also within a few weeks of the same age.) He was the co-founder of HighText Publishing in Solana Beach, California, and the author of a lot of books worth reading, including Shortwave Listening Guidebook (1993), How to Tune the Secret Shortwave Spectrum (1981), Top Secret Tourism (2007) and Inside the Shadow Government (2003), which may be the scariest book I've ever read. He published Andrew Yoder's Pirate Radio (1996) which is best-of-breed on the history of that insane little cross-current in the mostly placid waters of the radio broadcasting industry.

His passing was nothing out of the blue: He had blogged about his struggle with cancer for several years, and displayed a species of courage in the face of imminent death that I hope I can summon when my own time comes. His last months were spent in his home town in South Carolina, with his wife and family, and his dogs and cats all around him, and if we all have to make that final leap into the unknown, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a better way to do it.

Harry had a healthy scientific mind, and while not religious, he told me he was open to the possibility that death is not the end of all things. He enjoyed uncovering the hidden and the secretive and the overlooked (see Top Secret Tourism for a travel guide to all the places the government would just as soon nobody knew about) and I have an intuition that he was looking forward to seeing "what was out there." In one of our last exchanges some months ago, I made an outrageous suggestion, about which I won't say more unless something remarkable happens.

We've got his books, and for the time being, that's remarkable enough for me. W7HLH DE K7JPD / TNKS GD LK ET 73 SK.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 4: Format Lock-In

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:51:27 GMT

Computing certainly isn't about operating systems. Nor is it really about apps. It's about files. Data is what we create, modify, store, and distribute in electronic form, and the ways that our data is stored give shape to almost everything else we do in computing. Being able to move from one platform to another thus depends almost completely on whether or not we can bring our files with us.

I've been working in front of a personal computer on an almost daily basis since May of 1979, and over the past thirty years I've accumulated thousands of made-by-hand files. Much of that is text, and I've had almost complete success bringing document files forward down the years, bouncing from one word processor to another by using various format-conversion tools. SF stories I wrote in CP/M WordStar in 1980 have passed through WordPerfect for DOS and several major releases of Microsoft Word and still live on my writing projects thumb drive. I keep a commercial Windows utility called Quick View Plus on hand to extract text from extinct file formats when necessary, which has been pretty rarely in recent years. Still, it's there if I need it.

It's a lot tougher once you get away from text. There are no conversion utilities for Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Visio, and as best I know nothing will import files created on either app. This is probably also the case for QuickBooks, and probably a great many more major applications that I've simply had no need for and no experience with.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this kind of file format lock-in is the only thing keeping some of these companies profitable, or for some of them simply in business. Computing is mature in terms of the basic mechanisms we use to manipulate data: text editing, page layout, spreadsheeting, presentation, raster drawing and vector drafting, image processing, and database query and display. Small points may be patentable, but the fundamental machinery is now older than any surviving patents. Building an app that could load and edit an InDesign layout file would take some work but no genius, and if done would be a major competitor to InDesign, not only in new projects but (crucially!) in existing projects as well. Adobe guards its file formats with its life because its file formats are its life.

Alas, my files are my life too. And when Adobe's IP rights bump up against my IP rights, who wins? Adobe, of course. Hence my hatred of activation: I don't use newer versions of InDesign because Adobe can turn them off remotely and basically hold my work hostage if they choose to, perhaps because they're too stupid to tell a RAID from a separate machine, or because they're hungry enough to want to force me to pay for an upgrade that may have no new features that I need...and maybe no new features at all.

I have no general Stallmanesque animus against commercial software. I have a fortune in boxed apps on the shelf, and have never minded paying for them, even when they were upgrades. However, upgrading must be my choice, and migration of software to newer machines as time passes must not require new licenses.

Even commercial software that doesn't require activation often demands a service and a tray icon, constantly popping up notifiers trying to upsell me to something I neither want nor need. In a mature market, there's less demand for upgrades, and people can be happy using software for a long, long time. I can understand the vendors' perspective and their need to be selling all the time to stay alive in a mature market. I think they should recognize my right to find it annoying and turn to software that doesn't yammer so much and waste my cycles.

The bottom line here is that some apps are difficult to move away from; for me, the two killers are InDesign and Visio. Yours may be different, but I think most people who do creative work at the keyboard have a few. The difficulty lies entirely in proprietary file formats, and leads me to the infuriating conclusion that Windows is necessary only to allow me access to my own files.

The good news (for small values of "good") is that there are tricks to be played. More in the next installment.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 3: Apps

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:43:35 GMT

I came down with a monster headcold the last couple of days, and whereas this entry was in the can since Sunday, the remaining entries may be a little slower in coming. Bear with me...

We don't use Windows because it's Windows. (Most of us use it because it came on the machine and, well, it's paid for.) Windows is just an operating system, and an OS is a troll living under a bridge. Applications with specific missions lean over the railing and shout orders to the troll, who (mostly) does as they say while keeping order up on the bridge. An OS is 80% facilitator and 20% bodyguard. Our real work happens in the apps. If the apps we use can be run without Windows, then Windows isn't necessary at all.

There are three ways to break free of an application's dependence on Windows:

Find a version of a Windows app that runs on your OS of choice;
Switch to a similar app that runs on your OS of choice; or
Coerce a Windows app to run somehow on the OS of your choice.

I've done all three, and for the sake of further discussion here, the OS of choice is Linux. Mac OS/X is another worthy option, and all three of these methods are available there too, but for several reasons I hesitate to give Apple my money. (We'll talk of this at some point; people who know my deep history will understand.)

There is a lot of very good free software to be had for Linux, and it can be had very easily. The Ubuntu Software Center allows easy search for apps via category browsing or keyword search, and any selected apps are downloaded from trusted repositories and installed without further intervention. The Software Center can tell you what packages are already installed, and can uninstall packages you no longer want. This is so uncharacteristic of the ancient Unix culture of pain that I still giggle sometimes when I install something. ("This is easy. Too easy...")

I was a little surprised at how many Windows apps have almost identical versions running under Linux. This is true of some commercial apps as well as free apps, but free apps are much more likely to have Linux versions. I use the following apps almost identically under both Windows and Linux:

Firefox Web browser
Thunderbird email client
Skype VOIP/IM client
Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor

This represents a good deal of what I do in front of the keyboard. (Maybe a third.) I've heard that Google Earth can be had in a Linux version but haven't tested it yet. It's not available through the Ubuntu Software Center.

Switching to a similar Linux app takes more doing, but for some sorts of work it isn't difficult. I don't use newsgroups very much anymore, but using Pan under Linux was relatively pain-free, even though it's quite different from Forte Agent in many respects. There's a very useful site called Open Source As Alternative that provides suggestions as to what free apps are reasonable alternatives to many commercial Windows apps. Definitely spend some time there if you haven't already; the real trick in open source software is often just knowing that it exists, absent pervasive ad campaigns. For example, I've known about the Gimp for ten years, but never heard of GimpShop (Gimp reworked to have a menu structure more like Photoshop's) until I read about it on OSAlt.

KOffice is probably the best of the open-source office suites, though not all the several apps are equally powerful or polished. OpenOffice is even better functionally, but it has some weirdnesses (font management first among them) that probably stem from its Java-centric design. It used to be the only one of the open source word processors I know of that will load a .docx file, but the latest Abiword will do that now. Note that OO will bog anything less muscular than a 2 GHz Pentium, so don't install it on older machines, and max your memory before you install it on anything.

For generating raw text and editing old Word 2000 files, I now use Abiword routinely. I don't do much spreadsheeting, but my fairly simple PlanetPlanner spreadsheet loads and runs on Gnumeric, and that's good enough for me.

Alas, once you get away from the most simple and widespread categories of apps (like word processors and spreadsheets) the news is mostly bad. The real problem with similar-but-not-identical apps isn't the work it takes to learn them. It's a phenomenon called file format lock-in, and in some respects is the key issue in this discussion. More about that in the next installment, probably when my nose stops dripping into my keyboard.

Odd Lots

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:56:41 GMT

There's a useful overview of the latest Ubuntu release (9.10) here. Note the cautions about the 9.10 partitioner, especially if you have more than one SATA drive in a system destined for a clean install on a shared drive. I ran into some still-unresolved difficulties with the partitioner recently, but they seem to be machine-specific and may be due to BIOS limitations. More on that as I learn it.
A similar site for Kubuntu 9.10 is here.
I'm not much into costuming (or Halloween, for that matter; my sister got that gene instead) but within the genre of one-person-pretending-to-be-two, this may well be best-of-breed.
On the other hand, this one comes close, for sheer attention to detail if nothing else.
And while we're talking tauntauns, didja see the tauntaun sleeping bag? Authentic right down to the tauntaun guts pattern on the lining. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
2009 is now #8 on the most-sunspotless-years-since-1849 hit parade. Ten more spotless days and we move into position #7. I'm laying odds that 2009 will eventually get into 6th place but no higher.
God may not like the Higgs Boson, but hey, I'm not all that fond of opera. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Here's an interesting pamphlet from 1945 on what the future of television might be. If they only knew...
Frank Glover sent a link to an article sponsored by the ESA suggesting some SF ideas that have been realized to some extent or still may have some promise in our own (and not some alternative) future. A little breezy, but has a lot of full-color SF art and classic magazine covers. (5 MB PDF.)
This may seem like a weird stunt, but it was (and may still be) a common thing on dairy farms. When I was 10 or 11, I watched Auntie Della milk a cow by hand one morning for the day's needs, and the barn cats (who kept the barn free of mice) would line up for their milk squirts. Auntie Della's aim was very good, and by all indications the cats were completely good with that.
Make Magazine published a brilliant little project: A vacuum cleaner hose trap for small parts like screws and washers. (110K PDF.) Doesn't rely on magnetism, but is more like a lobster trap, in that parts enter easily but can't leave, and rattle around tellingly when the hose pulls them in.
From the Jolly Pirate comes word of the Corsair Flash Voyager GT: A 128 GB thumb drive optimized for speed, and (according to him) capable of holding over 20,000 MP3s. $400 now...but check again in six months, heh.
Turn the Dodge Viper logo upside-down, and what you've got is Daffy Duck.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 2: Ubuntu

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:57:46 GMT

In the past two week's I've installed Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala) three times: twice as upgrades, and once as a clean install from a CD. The combo LiveCD/installer ISO came down with uTorrent in 8 minutes 5 seconds (!!) and has given me trouble only once, and that with the partitioner: I tried to install 9.10 on Carol's old HP laptop, but the partitioner could not determine the size of the existing Windows partition, and thus the resizer slider would not appear. On an SX270 with a similar size hard drive and an existing XP partition, the partioner resized XP without any trouble. (I'm wondering if there's some weirdness in the HP BIOS, but have not gone after it yet.) I've spent a great deal of time in Ubuntu in recent days, and beyond that one little glitch with the laptop, I'd say Karmic is the best one yet.

Apart from its contrarian (and purely optional) brownness, Karmic's default GNOME desktop is a great deal like Windows XP. The taskbar functionality is divided between two panels, one at the top and one at the bottom. Now that 20" displays are common, I use two lines for the Windows taskbar as well and don't begrudge GNOME the extra line--and you can put both panels at the screen bottom if you want to. The Home folder stands well for My Documents, with familiar subfolders for documents, music, pictures, video, and downloads. Nautilus looks enough like Windows Explorer to pass, especially given that most of us custom-configure Explorer after awhile and not everyone's configuration is identical. Left mouse button selects, right brings up context. In short, all the basic ideas of the Windows UI are present, in recognizable form. There's some bumping-up-against-habit in switching from one UI to another, but after even a little time exploring in GNOME you won't be lost anymore.

The Control Center is a great deal like Control Panel, with applets to manage most configurable options. One gripe about the Control Center is that there is a perfectly good applet to manage grub's boot options, but it's not installed by default and I only came across mention of it online by accident, while looking for something else. If you want it, go into the Software Center, and search for Startup-Manager. Install it, and you can specify grub's default OS, the menu time delay, a splash background, and other things. I take back the grouchiness expressed in my entry for November 7, 2009, with the exception that Startup-Manager needs to be installed by default.

I still have a gripe with Linux generally that goes back a long ways: It needs centralized font management. Unless I'm missing it (and I looked pretty hard) no such applet exists for Control Center, and installing fonts is much more fussy than it needs to be. This may not matter much if you're not a publisher or a graphic artist, but it matters a lot to me. I have a set of expensive Type 1 fonts that I bought in 2001 and use in all of my Copperwood Press books, but getting them into Linux was non-trivial, and not all apps that should recognize them do. Scribus and poor little Abiword picked them up immediately, but OpenOffice still can't see them and I still can't figure why. I know that X11 makes font management a little more complex than it is in Windows, but that's no excuse for not having a font manager in Control Center.

Beyond that, few complaints. There is now a Safely Remove Drive context menu item for thumb drive mount icons that I don't remember seeing in earlier versions. Videos that play without sound in Windows (due to obscure codec errors) play with full sound in Karmic. Bottom line: Ubuntu 9.10 implements all the fundamental GUI machinery that Windows does, and does it with enough similarity not to drive a newcomer to distraction. From that standpoint, Windows really isn't necessary at all...but alas, GUI machinery is only one small piece of the larger Windows pie. More tomorrow.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 1: Overview

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:28:22 GMT

Still dealing with neck problems here, but in the background I've been pursuing a long-term, low-intensity project aimed at discerning how necessary Windows is for my daily operations. Back in 2001 or so, Keith and I considered publishing a book called Dumping Microsoft, but after I looked closely at the Linux releases of the time, decided it would be premature. Windows 2000 was mighty good, and Linux had yet to break out of its all-hail-the-console, pain-is-good hacker culture. It may be time to reconsider the necessity of Windows (and perhaps that book) which is what my upcoming series here is about.

I've changed operating systems often enough in the last 30 years not to get too attached to any of them, and have no tribal/emotional investment in Windows 2000 or XP. An OS is just a workbench, after all: It does very little work by itself, and exists almost entirely to help applications do what they must do in the most productive way possible. Too much of modern OS versions is just gratuitous glitz, which eats machine cycles and doesn't get a page laid out any faster. My reaction to Windows Vista was pretty simple: What's in all this for me? The primary purpose of Windows Vista was to make itself harder to steal, which is something of a fetish over there--and all the glitz was tossed in to persuade people to upgrade. Furthermore, the damned thing was slow. No sale.

You've heard me say many times here that personal computing is mature. I help out people at our parish with their computers, and an astonishing number of them still use Office 97. They may use the latest IE or Firefox, but they haven't seen the need to spend more money on word processing or spreadsheets. That's because the need isn't there. Office '97 probably has 90% of everything useful in an office suite; if you want the rest, get Office 2000, which I myself have been using for almost ten years now.

It's taken Linux longer to reach parity with Win2K/XP because it's written by volunteer programmers and not highly paid engineers on continuous death-march. It's also required the vision of a consumer-oriented distro firm to package up a version of Linux amenable to non-technical people. The testing I've done over the past year (in parallel with revising my assembly language book for Linux) tells me that Canonical's Ubuntu Linux is ready for ordinary users, and if it were widely available as a preinstall would be considered no geekier than Windows. (Installing Ubuntu from CD is actually loads easier than installing Windows XP. Microsoft would be perhaps a third its current size if not for Windows preinstalls.)

What makes it urgent now is a creeping suspicion I have that Windows malware is unstoppable. I see articles on tech sites several times a week describing new and increasingly clever exploits of flaws in Microsoft and Adobe software. This is troubling on many fronts, from the technical--Why in hell do we still have buffer overflow exploits after all these years?--to the purely political: How do we know that exploits in closed-source software have really been fixed? Linux is not immune to infection (it's secure at least in part because of its rarity) but the fact is that infections are difficult and rarely seen in the wild. I want to take advantage of that security, whatever its origins.

Hence the current project. I've talked about bits and pieces of it here and there in the past year, and it may be time to present what I've learned in more detail. Stay tuned.

Odd Lots

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:01:45 GMT

Watch out when upgrading to Skype 4: The upgrade installs a Firefox/IE extension called Browser Highlighter that slows the browser down significantly, and I sure don't remember it showing me a checkbox to uncheck or in any other way refuse the install. This install-without-warning has gotten people more than a little het up. Like Skype, Browser Highlighter is owned by eBay and appears to facilitate online price comparisons. To get rid of it, execute the uninstaller via Start | Programs | Browser Highlighter. Don't just disable it in the browser; it must be uninstalled from Windows like any app or it'll just show up in your taskbar tray again when you reboot.
From the Words-I-Didn't-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: An acnestis is an itchy place that you can't reach to scratch. (Thanks to Larry Nelson for the suggestion.) I use a 24" slide rule to scratch my acnestes. Very accurate; gets to precisely the right spot!
The Arrington Crunchpad may be in trouble. Dayum. I had high hopes for this one, not so much for Web or cloud work as for an ebook reader.
Here is a fantastic archive of scanned Radio Shack catalogs, browsable page-by-page. I had a lot of these from the midlate 60s to 1980 or so, and intermittently since. (Thanks to Bernie Sidor for the link.)
From Bill Cherepy comes word of a managed PC built into a network jack. It's unclear how well this would run desktop software, but for cloud computing it could be useful, and in a cube farm setting would not be easily picked up and walked away with.
In addition to Green River and Diet Green River, there was at one time Green River Orange Soda, and Pete Albrecht reminds me that there was yet another (unrelated) Green River: The Whiskey Without a Headache. I'll believe that when I feel it. (But I can't stand whiskey, so don't wait up for me to do the experiment.)
And if "whiskey without a headache" sounds a little unlikely, then say hello to the robotic cow rectum.

Karmic Koala and Grub

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:13:21 GMT

I twisted my neck funny earlier this week, and since then have had intermittent neck pain and nearly constant back-of-the-head headaches. If you haven't heard from me here, that's mainly the reason. Things are better now, but this neck thing is a serious issue. It doesn't take much to much to set it off, and alas, flying kites and looking at the stars have both been implicated.

The pain hasn't allowed me to get much writing done this week, but I did decide to take a chance and do an early upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. I usually let new major releases of OSes cook for a few weeks so that somebody else will spot the obvious bugs and fix them before I put my own arse in the line of fire. In this case, my neck hurt so bad that my arse didn't care, and I said, Make it so, #2.

Others have complained of problems with 9.10, so I was gritting my teeth a little as the process proceeded. It took about three hours, but the install went without incident, as had upgrades to 9.04 and 8.10 previously. When nothing obvious blew up, I then spent a couple of hours just trying things: Showing videos, listening to MP3s, playing games, opening documents and spreadsheets, and so on. Having declared the upgrade good, I tried to run KGrubEditor...and realized that it was gone. Its icon was blank, and double-clicking on it did nothing. Apparently the upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic uninstalled KGrubEditor without asking me, leaving me an empty launcher on the desktop.

I thought this might have had something to do with Ubuntu's moving from Grub to Grub 2 with the 9.10 release, but that's true only for new installs: Upgrades to 9.10 leave Grub in place and only update menu.lst. So I don't know why it happened, and I remain a little annoyed. Grub should already have a GUI settings manager/applet in the Administration menu; it shouldn't be up to some guy to write an independent app to do the job. Editing menu.lst is one of the things I do so rarely that I don't get good at it, which is precisely why GUI settings editors are necessary.

KGrubEditor is nowhere in the list of apps available through the Synaptic Package Manager, and when I tried to add the KDE4 PPA repository containing KGrubEditor, Synaptic could not access it for some reason. (It may have been an old URL; I'm not an ace at such things and don't know how to be sure.) I eventually just went up and downloaded the damned thing manually and installed it, but the app can't find its OS icons and doesn't correctly set the default boot menu item. I guess I have to uninstall it and reinstall it, but I've killed enough time on it this weekend and will leave that task for later.

The takeaway is simple: As good as Ubuntu Linux is, it still has some gaping holes, and bootloader settings management is at the top of that regrettable list.

Odd Lots

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:44:01 GMT

The University of Utah has a fascinating animation demonstrating the relative sizes of very small things. Starting at the scale of a coffee bean, you can zoom down by pushing a slider past single cells, various viruses, proteins, until you reach the carbon atom. Won't take but a minute, and has plenty of wow factor, especially if you can't picture things clearly at nanoscale.
For all the beautiful weather and the fact that school was out, this year's Halloween saw no trick-or-treaters here on Stanwell Street until almost 5 PM. Summer from around the corner and her third-grade friends arrived in a mob at 6:30, and Dash got plenty of girl-attention, but that mostly exhausted the supply of local grade-schoolers. A few young teens came by between 7 and 8, but that about was it. The neighborhood has a fair number of teens, but we were told they were all having at-home parties, and we're good with that, though I have a mass of Milk Duds here that would probably go critical if placed in a single sufficiently large bowl.
Carol and I went over to our next-door neighbors later in the evening. Carol wore her footie jammies and put her hair up in huge 70s rollers. I cobbled up a Ben Franklin outfit that wasn't half bad, and I carried the small pink kite tethered to a balloon stick with about two feet of string. When we walked in, the guy down the street commented, "Lost some weight, huh Ben?" "Yup," I replied. "Low-carb and all that."
Want to haunt a house? Hire a team of scientists and an architect. Real ghosts just never show up for work when you need them.
This is the smallest packaged PC I have ever seen. Not worthwhile, given that it lacks digital audio out, is Atom-based, and stuck on Ubuntu 8.04 (!!) but it is small.
And if you'll settle for something only a little bit bigger, the AOpen MP45D will do a lot more.
I may have linked to this once years ago, but it's worth running through again: The Museum of Unworkable Devices, which is bestiary of perpetual motion machines, with careful explanations of why they don't work. Lots of links to even more of the same.
NASA has calculated the "average color of the universe"...and it's the color of my livingroom walls! (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Finally, don't forget the contest I posted yesterday once it goes down under the fold! Keep those shortie filk schticks coming!

Contest: 1-Verse Filk

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:59:09 GMT

I've had a bummer couple of weeks for many reasons, most of them relating to Global Cooling and a mild skin rash on several of my knuckles. So I need to increase the silliness factor a little, and am hereby mounting a contest, with real prizes.

The challenge: Submit a 1-verse filk; that is, a short parody song with original funny words to only one verse, what ur-filker Allan Sherman called a "schtick." It has to be a funny filk, and the contest will be judged by people who know what "funny" means. (They will not necessarily be filkers. I will have a vote.) The tune can be anything, but it has to be a tune that has some chance of being recognized by a reasonable number of people. The song should only be one verse long; brevity is the soul of damned near everything, humor not the least of it. You can send me more verses, but your chances of winning decrease with each verse submitted beyond the first.

All entries should be submitted as comments to this blog. Your choice which site, and if you feel so inclined, submit entries to both sites. Being in both places does not increase your chances, though it may increase the number of people who see your entry. The two sites, in case you only ever read one, are LiveJournal, and WordPress.

No other rules except: Use no dirty words that will get either of us into trouble. Numerous things rhyme with "duck" and even more with "wit." (Here's a rhyming dictionary, in case you get stuck.)

The winner will be judged by Thanksgiving Day, or as soon thereafter as I get at least three entries. If I don't get three entries by Christmas, we'll call it done and both entries will get prizes. The prize will consist of your choice of one from the following list:

One copy of any title from the Copperwood Press catalog.
One copy of Assembly Language Step By Step.
A variable capacitor from my collection. I'll test it for shorts before shipping.
A TO-36 auto radio power transistor from my collection. Sub a 6SN7 if you're allergic to germanium.
Anything else somebody sends me to be a prize, to be listed later.

Hey, if that don't get your mouth watering, what will? And in case you're not sure what a one-verse filk is, let me show you:

Let There Be Fleas on Earth

(To: "Let There Be Peace on Earth")

Let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away from me;

Let there be toads and snails, but not where I can see!

To love each creature's obnoxious features would drive me up a tree--

So let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away....from me!

Shirley, you can all do better than that. So get on it!

Am I Blue?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:29:14 GMT

In a word, no. And yet looking at recent operating system UIs, you'd think blue was the only color there is. Everywhere I look, I see GUIs that look like they were carved from a block of sea ice. (I guess that's why modern GUI designs are so...cool.)

I'll be doing an immersion experiment with Kubuntu 9.10 once it's out and has had a few weeks to yield up its birth booboos, since KDE deserves a second chance. (I tried version 4.0 last year and it gave me no end of trouble.) But...KDE is so damned blue. Ditto Windows 7, which I haven't seen a lot of yet but will probably be using sooner or later. And Mac OS/X as well. Now, don't tell me that these OSes can be themed in any color you want. I know that. But why is blue so pervasive in every big-time OS except Ubuntu?

Well, there's another blue distro out there, which I finally burned onto a livecd and played around with yesterday afternoon. It's Puppy Linux, which I tried in its first release years back wasn't impressed with. Puppy is now four, and much improved. It probed the SX270 graphics system and monitor here, and set itself up to use the default 1600 X 900 resolution with nary a whimper.

Puppy is unique in several ways. It's not derived from any other distro, but was created from scratch by Australian Barry Kauler and is maintained by its own community. It's a "lightweight" distro and was designed deliberately to make use of the fact that memory is much cheaper now than it used to be: It loads into memory and mostly stays there. This is true even if you install it on a disk partition (as opposed to running it "without a trace" from the livecd) and includes the major apps as well as the OS itself. When installed on the hard drive it still plays from memory, writing changes to a disk file but avoiding disk access whenever possible. This makes it feel snappy in the extreme: Click on the Abiword icon and pop! Abiword is there in front of you. Other preinstalled apps include the Gnumeric spreadsheet, the Seamonkey email client, paint and draw programs, and a lightweight browser created for Puppy Linux. (There are more; those are the major ones.)

There are some additional FOSS packages available for download from the Puppy respositories, but in truth not nearly as much as you can get for Ubuntu and other major distros. There's no apt-get; the Puppy installer format (PET) is unique, and if nobody put a FOSS package into Puppy's PET format, you have to fool with tarballs etc. and do the install manually from the console.

There is also a mechanism (which I didn't try) for repackaging changes to the Puppy system into distributable derivatives called puplets. Many of these can be had, always free. One makes Puppy look a great deal like Mac OS/X; others are tweaks to look/work well on hardware like the EeePC. Some come with a specific emphasis and preinstalled apps, like composing music or bioinformatics, of all things. In a sense, you're creating an app installer that includes the OS along with the apps, which is an interesting idea. This can be done with other distros, but the Puppy remastering mechanism makes it trivial. Puppy or its puplets can be installed on a thumbdrive and will thus run on any machine that can boot from a USB device, with configuration changes written to the thumb drive. (Ditto a rewriteable optical drive, if the session wasn't closed and there's room on the optical disk for a change file.)

On the downside, certain simple configuation items hid well: I have not yet found the way to run apps from icons with a double click instead of the default single click. Nor did I find the way to add an app shortcut icon to the desktop for newly installed apps. I admit that I didn't spend a huge amount of time with Puppy and probably won't, but such simple things should be easily findable and obvious how to use.

So on Puppy I'm lukewarm. I don't really need it for the sake of old slow hardware, but the idea of a lightweight RAM-based Linux on a bootable keychain thumb drive is fascinating, and I might download one of the puplets and try them in just that way. However, if you're just looking for an easy-to-use Windows alternative, I think Ubuntu is a much better bet.

Odd Lots

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:00:40 GMT

It was inevitable: Be the Balloon Boy for Halloween. However, as the ad says, don't get carried away... (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
I downloaded an Xubuntu 9.04 LiveCD, and (interestingly) the OS does not appear to be able to identify my Samsung 1600 X 900 display, and thus defaults to a 4:3 something too narrow and a little too high. More interestingly still, it shows a blank field for the current display resolution in the Settings dialogs. Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.04 have no trouble with the display, and I'm wondering if the xfce resolution is hardcoded. Either way, it didn't leave me with an especially good impression of Xubuntu.
There's something telling about my feeling it necessary to tell you that there's a spot on the sun! I've done screen-projection sunspot observations at, um, spotty intervals since 1970, and until quite recently, sunspots were more or less always there when you wanted to look. Not so for the last two or three years, when sunspots--and band openings--have become something of a novelty.
Heath-Zenith still exists. They make doorbells. (Thanks to Bp. Sam'l Bassett for the link.)
Use your deordorant and become a better person. (Clean the catbox, ditto.) I've sometimes wondered what odors are actually for, and whether there's an evolutionary reason that humans are so much lousier at detecting and discriminating among them than other mammals.
Oh, and you may be more productive with your shoes on. (If that's true, how the hell have I ever gotten anything done?)
Wired Magazine has a cover story on the antivaxers, and whatever your views on the issue (mine are so strong as to be essentially unprintable, so don't look for them here) it's worth reading.
The New Yorker always has clever covers, but this is the best one I've seen since the Mullahs on Segways.
Recommended Obscure Halloween Reading for 2009: Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs, which was published in 1980 but can still be had for cheap on the used book sites. The biographer of a legendary (deceased) author of children's books travels to the small Midwestern town where the author once lived and finds that fantasy is blurring into reality in some odd and very creepy ways.
Is there a more modern technical term for those jokes/inspirational/polemic notes that people email out to their entire address book, with instructions at the bottom to send this to 10 people / 20 people / everyone you know? I call them chain letters, but wonder if their email incarnation has a geekier term attached to it.

Bring Your Priest and Your Prayerbook. That's It.

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:56:52 GMT

Just the other day, Good Pope Bennie opened a door for conservative Anglicans to become Roman Catholics without completely abandoning their Anglican traditions. (Links to more discussion here.) The Roman Catholic Church will be willing to create Personal Ordinariates for converting Anglicans, which is jargon for establishing non-territorial dioceses in which members retain a distinctive liturgical style different from that of the RCC as a whole. This has been done before on a very small scale, though it's a complex business and not everybody within the RCC agrees that it's a good thing.

Basically, conservative Anglicans will be received into custom-built dioceses with their own priests and prayerbooks (what Anglicans call missals) and report directly to the Pope, rather than to an RC archbishop in a particular city. They'll be able to continue using their liturgies and occasional ceremonies pretty much as they have before. The big win for them is that they will no longer have to cope with women priests or demands for gay marriage. However, there's a downside, and I wonder if it's dawned on potential crossover Anglicans what they'll have to leave behind:

Birth control. Even conservative Anglicans in my experience have no particular issue with contraception. (Abortion is another matter entirely.) In the Roman Catholic Church, procreation is the primary reason for marriage and the only permissible reason for sexual activity or even sexual thoughts. Contraception remains a mortal sin. There's no indication that Personal Ordinariates trump Papal teachings at this level.
Divorce. This was, after all, the whole reason for Anglicanism to begin with. While divorce is treated less casually among conservative Anglicans than among liberal Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is nonetheless embraced reluctantly when necessary. Crossover Anglicans will have to agree with Rome that divorce is impossible.
Their bishops. Male Anglican/Episcopalian priests have been accepted into the RCC in the past, but married bishops are considered off the table. The problem here is that every prominent Anglican bishop I've ever heard of has been married, primarily because nearly all Anglican/Episcopalian priests are married. So crossover Anglicans will have to accept episcopal oversight from Roman Catholic appointee bishops, or bishops newly consecrated out of the ranks of (the very uncommon) unmarried priests.

I don't think this will work, and here's why: In my view, a religious culture is more than a set of prayers and ceremonies. It's a way of seeing Earth as well as a way of seeing Heaven, and in my own research the Roman Catholic and Anglican Catholic undertstandings of the physical world, the human person, sex, and marriage stand out as radically different. There's some serious question in my mind as to how many Anglicans will embrace Rome once they completely understand what Rome will demand of them--and whether those who accede will continue to be Anglicans in any honest sense of the word.

An Attempted Classmates.com Scam

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:43:52 GMT

I hope all of you know by this time not to fall for any advertising pitch from Classmates.com. Their service can be useful, as we found when we put together our 40th grade school reunion back in 2006. However, I've seen a multitude of reports that their constant email come-ons are completely fictional, and (as far as I'm concerned) fraudulent.

Today I got one that I know is a fraud, and I didn't have to sign up to find out. Ordinarily, the Classmates.com scam works like this: You get an email from Classmates that reads something like, "Someone is trying to find you! Click here to find out who!" You click and find that you have to pay to find out. Fair enough. But as many people have found, once you pay up you find that there's no one there. Nobody was looking for you. It was a lie, or, as we say when you lie to sell somebody something, fraud.

So today I get the umptieth email from Classmates since my subscription expired, asking me: "Remember Linda Cripps? Newest Class of '70 Alum!" This is half a hair better than saying that someone was trying to find me; note well that there is no imputed action on the part of Linda Cripps. However, there's a huge worm in it:

The Lane Technical High School Class of 1970 had no girls in it.

Zero. Zip. Nada. Girls were not even admitted to the school until 1971, and none were graduated from Lane until 1973. So unless we're in "boy named Sue" territory here, Classmates pulled some poor girl's name out of its subscribers (or the Chicago phone book, or Facebook, or somewhere else) and told me she was in my graduating class at Lane Tech. (I just checked: There was no one of any gender named "Cripps" in my class, nor any class listed in the 2002 Alumni Directory, nor among the multitude of people I've met or dealt with in any way in my life.)

I don't see anything online as to how the suit is going or whether it was dismissed, but I've seen enough reported sleaziness just looking to say, avoid these guys like H1N1. (The Plague is just so 1348...)

Metal-Free Photos

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:50:07 GMT

One of my shyer correspondents is shy only about my using anything like her name online; she never hesitates to needle me about certain things, and last night I got a note from her asking, "Can't you ever post a photo of something that isn't made out of metal?" I'm guessing she means computers, but 30-year-old forks, while low-tech, still quality.

So be it. And, m'dear, I will go you one better: I'll post photos of two things of recent vintage that have no metal in them at all.

First up, well, is Dash. I have to hurry: He'll be chipped in another month or so, and then will have a (small) amount of metal in him. And given his penchant for picking things up off the floor and chewing them, I can't promise that there isn't some small bit of aluminum foil working its way through him at any given moment. (Polychrome puppy poop is an occupational hazard at this stage of his life.) The photo is a couple of weeks old now, and shows him after Carol gave him his first genuine bichon cut. He's looking a lot more like an adult now, and is rapidly reaching adult size and weight. (As of yesterday afternoon, he clocked in at 11 pounds 5 ounces.)

The other is a kite I made earlier this summer, out of the translucent wax-finish "kite paper" that Waldorf schools use to make paper ornaments. (Why they don't use it to make kites is unclear.) I've made kites with metal in them here and there, but this one is all organic, and even a little retro: The string is 50-year-old cotton twine, and the glue mucilage. I don't fly kites in thunderstorms, and I generally don't put metal in them. Ben Franklin was many things, but mostly he was...lucky.

Odd Lots

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:58:55 GMT

There appears to be a new online scam that is a first cousin of scareware: Driver updaters. Drivers ride with hardware, and install with hardware, so unless your hardware changes or you do a major OS upgrade, drivers do not need to be updated. Every such updater I've researched appears at best to be adware and often much worse. Get your drivers from the hardware manufacturer (or built into the OS) and nowhere else.
While trying to determine if Chicago had ever had a radio station WYNR (it did, briefly, from 1962-1965) I ran across this exhaustive list of all broadcast radio stations that have ever operated in Chicago (both AM and FM) with brief discussions of their history.
There's a downside to modern optical drives that spin discs at 50X Not all discs can take it--and when they go, they turn into daggers. I know it took the Mythbusters guys awhile to detonate a CD by spinning it on a Dremel tool, but one wonders if a disc accumulates stress fractures over time and one day just...lets go. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Among other things that Carol and I have been using since we were married in 1976 are a Realistic STA-64 30W tuner/amp, a Rival crockpot, and a Sunbeam 16-speed blender. Admittedly, we don't use them as often as we use our flatware, but we use them regularly, and they all work basically as well as when they came out of the box, way back when I still had all my hair.
While not as old as our Rival Crockpot, I still have and use my TI-30 SLR scientific calculator, which I bought in 1983. Won't do hex, but it's handled every other piece of math I've ever thrown at it.
A nameless source in the filesharing community tells me that MP3s of every pop song that has ever charted on Billboard will fit on a single $50 500 GB hard drive. I have no way to verify this, but if true, it's a good demonstration of what the music industry is facing, and perhaps why they're as nuts as they've gotten in recent years. (I already have an external 320GB USB hard drive that slides into my shirt pocket--and disappears. For $125, I could have one containing 500GB. All of pop music hiding in one shirt pocket. Egad.)
From the Wines-To-Avoid-At-All-Costs Department: Pepperwood Grove Pinot Noir 2006. A whiff of galvanized iron is not a plus. (Dumped it.)

All The Forks That We Need

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:34:21 GMT

Carol and I have been married now for 33 years. Back in the summer of 1976 my mother threw us a bridal shower, and among the many gifts we received were two sets of Ecko Eterna Corsair stainless steel flatware, for a total of eight place settings. We still have them. In fact, we have been eating with them for all 33 of those years. (At left is a 33-year-old daily-driver fork. "Eterna" is fersure. ) They're all still in the drawer.

Well, almost all of them. Flatware eventually goes missing, like protons, though with a much shorter half-life. Over the years a couple of spoons and forks have probably followed us to potlucks and never come home. I have no better explanation. When I was a toddler I used to drop flatware down the cold air return, which I know because when I was 14 I helped my father tear out the old sheet-metal octopus that heated our house, and found most of a place setting at the bottom of the big pipe. As an adult I have no such excuse. I only know that we run out of clean forks before we run out of clean tablespoons.

I got irritated enough recently by our fork shortage to look on eBay, where I scored three Ecko Corsair forks for $10--and five spoons for $12. The forks were unused, and when I got them, washed them, and dropped them in the drawer, it struck me that there wasn't much difference in appearance between the brand-new Corsair forks and the forks that have been faithfully stabbing our steaks for 33 years now. We have a full drawer of flatware again, and all the forks that we need. Better still, if we ever need more, we know where to find them.

I had an insight when the forks arrived that Carol and I are not and will probably never again be in the market for new-build stainless steel flatware. Why should we be? Our set works perfectly, and still looks like new. Spare parts are available, cheap. This isn't good news...if you make flatware.

And I also wonder if our auto industry is in trouble at least in part because cars are lasting longer and people are trading them in far less often. I got my first car in 1970 when I started college. It was a bare-bones 1968 Chevelle 300, and even at two years old the door panels were growing significant rust spots. By 1974 the body was mostly rot and the engine disintegrating, and rather than pony up for a valve and ring job, I dumped it and bought a brand-new Honda Civic. The Civic lasted until 1982, when its brake cylinders started going out repeatedly. I had a Datsun pickup for a year and decided I didn't like pickups; I traded it for a 1984 Chrysler minivan, which I owned uneventfully until 1995. That year I traded the old minivan in on the newest version of the same minivan--and we still have it, a little tired but entirely functional. The Toyota 4Runner that we bought in 2001 will flip over 100,000 miles today or tomorrow, and has never given us a lick of trouble. No rust, no wiggles, no funny noises, no problemo nada. I expect to be driving it happily ten years from now.

Draw the curve here. Cars that used to implode after 5 years are now lasting for fifteen or more. Is it any wonder that we don't need as many cars as we used to? A great many of our economic problems today may stem from simple overcapacity: factories cranking out stuff like it's1968, simply because that's what they've always done and the spreadsheeters require it. (Publishing certainly has that problem, though for different reasons.) We are the victims of our own success, in that there is less work than there are workers, because we're making better forks...and much better cars. We may not need a Big Three for making cars. A Big Two may be sufficient. (I'll leave the eenie meenie mynie moe part to someone else, thanks.) And if that's the case, we have to be extremely careful about protectionist economics, because the export market is all that's left, once Americans have all the forks that they need.

Three and a Half Planets Tomorrow Morning

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:03:36 GMT

If you've got clear weather for the next 18 hours or so and a good eastern horizon, set the alarm a little early for tomorrow and head outside just before dawn. Mercury, Venus, and Saturn will be lined up in a vertical row, with the Moon off to one side a little toward the south. There's nothing historical or unprecedented about the conjunction (which isn't hugely close) but it's a chance to take in three planets at one tight glance, assuming you can see clear down to the horizon. Mercury never gets very high nor very bright, but it has two unmistakable pointers aiming right at it: Follow the line from Saturn toward the horizon past Venus a little more than twice the distance between Saturn and Venus, and it'll be there.

My horizons have been lousy in recent days, but, ever hopeful, I'll be out on the small deck with binoculars about 6:30 tomorrow morning. Mercury will be the first of the group to drown in the rising light, so don't wait too long!

Odd Lots

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:39:53 GMT

Gizmodo has a decent overview of the jungle of Intel CPU chip families. Core, Atom, and old reliable Pentium are compared and contrasted. Good short brushup, even if you've been following along as best you can. (I cop to not paying as close attention to Core i7 as I should have been.) My one objection: Late-build Pentiums are not nearly as bad as the author suggests.
With 225 sunspotless days, 2009 just edged past 1867 in its climb up the Most Spotless Years Since 1849 hit parade. 2009 is now in position 11. Two more spotless weeks and we'll overtake 1855 and enter the Top Ten. 2008 was a killer, now standing at #4, with 266 spotless days. Will 2009 beat that? Unlikely; there are only 77 days left in the year, and while the Sun is sleeping, the old guy isn't dead. (He throws up a few sunspecks now and then just to keep his hand in.)
An article in today's Wall Street Journal reminded me that American author/poet Stephen Vincenet Benet wrote the postarmageddon short story "By the Waters of Babylon" in 1937, before even the possibility of nuclear weapons was understood by the general public. It stands in my mind as one of the finest SF shorts of all time, and certainly one of the most prophetic. (The story's been posted on the Web and is easily Googleable, though how legal those postings are is unclear.)
Very nice summary of what we know about the second-largest asteroid Pallas here. Interestingly, Pallas has its own "death star" astrobleme, which can be found on most of the smaller bodies of the solar system, suggesting that during the solar system's formation everybody got pounded, and the biggish moons that survive just barely missed being turned to gravel. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
Google just clarified its plans (a little) for Google Editions, an ereader-agnostic ebook store that will offer ebooks in a universal format based on HTML. Books will be readable offline. One suspects that Google Gears will be involved, but what sort of DRM will be slathered onto the binaries is still an open question, and in a lot of people's minds (including my own) that's the only significant question there is.
From Michael Covington comes the suggestion (from one of his grad students) that if a coral snake were a resistor, it would have a value of 24 ohms at 20% tolerance. (Determining the snake's power dissipation we leave as an exercise for the grad student.)

SX270 Vs. SX280

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:29:58 GMT

I've had a few days to play with the Dell SX280 Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) PC that I bought on eBay for $90 some time back. It's worth describing here, in case you're looking for such a very small machine. The one I got was a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4/512 MB/40 GB system with XP Pro installed. It came with a USB keyboard and optical mouse. Both the mouse and the keyboard look brand new; the PC itself has obviously been used, but it's quite clean and has no stickum blotches on it anywhere. I'd say a pretty good deal for $90.

The SX280 field strips very easily. The photo above shows what you'll see under the side panel, with the bright blue plastic fan shroud removed.

Here are some points of difference, between the Dell SX270 and SX280 USFF machines:

The SX280 is slightly larger (see photo above) and two pounds heavier. The SX270 weighs 7 pounds 5 ounces, and the SX280 9 pounds 4 ounces.
The SX280 uses 3.5" SATA hard drives. The SX270 uses 2.5" ATA hard drives. 3.5" drives are cheaper, so that's a plus.
The SX280 hard drive is very easy to remove. You pull the power and SATA connectors and it lifts up in a tray. The SX270 internal drive uses a more fragile ATA ribbon cable and connector system.
The removable drive bay is a different spec. Removable drives are not interchangeable between the two systems.
The SX270 has a reasonable internal speaker. Not hi-fi, but if you're not listening to music it does fine for system notification sounds. The SX280 has no internal speaker at all.
The SX270 has PS/2 connectors on the back panel for mouse and keyboard. The SX280 lacks PS/2 connectors. You need to use USB peripherals, or get a PS/2-USB adapter.
The SX280 has 7 USB ports. The SX270 has 6. Remember that on the SX280, at least one of those must be devoted to keyboard and mouse.
Both systems have two internal slots for memory, but the sticks are not interchangeable between SX270s and SX280s.
Both systems have DVI video outputs only. (There's an SX260 model, which is largely identical to the SX270, only with a VGA video connector.)
As best I can tell, neither the SX270 nor the SX280 can be tweaked to add video modes like 1600 X 900. This was a big disappointment, since the SX280's Intel 910GL Express chipset was supposed to allow custom resolutions, but so far, utilities like PowerStrip can't make it work. Oddly, Linux can do 1600 X 900, but there's a custom driver for Linux. Intel's standard driver seems peculiarly limited. (Some think it's a BIOS limitation; me, I'm not sure, unless Linux ignores BIOS settings.)
Both systems have Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus DB9 serial and DB25 parallel ports.
Both systems use external power bricks. The SX280's is about 25% larger and runs a little hotter.

Given that the SX270 and SX280 can both be had in 3.2 GHz versions, the SX280 is a minor win, especially without the ability to tweak the graphics drivers for 16:9 widescreen modes. SATA drives and a newer Intel chipset is about all the SX280 has going for it, and if you can deal with the less vast and slightly more expensive hard drives, the SX270 is smaller and currently cheaper. The SX280 is going to the church office, and I think I'll be sticking with the SX270 for other uses.

More Icy Adventures

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:50:56 GMT

Maybe this weather is a fluke, and as one who's read The Little Ice Age more than once, I certainly hope that it's a fluke, but it would be no more than a fluke save for one inconvenient truth: Carol had to be on a plane to Chicago this morning at 8:30 AM. In normal October weather, we would simply have set the clock radio for 4:30 AM and gone down the hill early. After yesterday's lesson in automotive ice skating, we changed plans.

I figured that by 4:00 yesterday afternoon, enough cars would have gone down Broadmoor Bluffs to melt the black ice, so we reserved a room for Carol at the Homewood Suites on Powers and set out. People were being very careful after seeing news reports of Interstate crowd-scene crackups, and I was right: We felt no ice on the trip down, nor any on the roads eastward toward the Colorado Springs airport. Normal caution was sufficient, and the usual nutcases either stayed at home or were already in a ditch somewhere.

We checked her in about 4:45, and I hung out with her awhile, but then about 5:30 we noticed that it had begun sleeting again after a five-hour respite. So after a few goodbye kisses she shooed me home. Alas, I had waited a little too long. There was plenty of water on the streets already, and with new sleet and failing light added to the mix, things started to freeze and get ugly again. There was a minutes-old serious injury accident at Powers and Proby, and as the police waved us carefully past the scene, I saw a mashed-up Jeep Liberty lying on its roof, with the fire department trying to cut some poor guy out of it, and a nondescript minivan with one whole side caved in and two people on stretchers with paramedics bending over them. One's leg was exposed, and it was bloody.

We were being careful, but there's only so much you can do. As they taught us in driver's ed 42 years ago, bridges freeze first. Academy Boulevard at its southeast corner is more Interstate than boulevard, and it has numerous bridges. At the bridge over the BNSF tracks I felt the 4Runner start to slither, but fortunately there wasn't the usual crowd sharing the road. I saw the sedan in front of me swing a little to one side, but then he cleared the bridge and recovered. I coasted the rest of the way to solid asphalt, heart in my throat, and kept going. I felt some slippage again on the bridge over 115, but the city had put down some sand and nobody had any serious trouble. That was not true elsewhere in the city.

The sleet continued long after I went to bed. I got up to potty Dash at 2 ayem and it was still coming down, by then more snow than sleet. The light fixture on our back deck bore what looked like a half-inch coating of solid ice. At 7 this morning morning it was still overcast, but nothing was coming down. However, the driveway is now a sheet of ice, and when Carol called me from the airport a little while ago to say she was about to board, she made my intuition imperative: I was to keep my butt inside the house today until we had at least two hours of sunshine to melt things out a little. No argument there.

Currently (at 8:45 AM) there's no indication of the clouds breaking up. The newly-golden leaves of the scrub oaks in back are coated with ice, and we lost some branches. I am clearly not going to church this morning. I pity the poor squirrels: I can see pieces of pine cone stuck in the ice out on the deck, but they'll need jackhammers to free them up. Hurry sunshine!

Black Ice!

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:57:51 GMT

I feel like a swallowed a boom box. Carol and I had signed up to work at our church's craft fair today, with me coordinating the used books table, and although it was 27 degrees outside with a heavy frost, we set out about 8:30 AM. Stanwell was not especially slippery, but once we got onto Broadmoor Bluffs, I knew in seconds that I was up against black ice. We got less than a block downhill when the grade increased (and must be close to 10% in spots) and our wheels no longer held the road. Even in 4WD and going no more than 10 MPH, the 4Runner spun 180, narrowly missing a mailbox and stopping just short of slamming into the curb. We just sat there for a few minutes, until we saw a 4WD Beamer backing up Broadmoor Bluffs from further down. (There was nowhere for him to turn around.) He rolled down his window, and told us not to go any further: There were several cars stuck on the steepest part of the road, and although he hadn't gotten close, it looked like there had been some vehicle-vehicle contact.

So we called the rector and gave him our regrets, at least until the sun comes out, as it is showing absolutely no inclination to do. We crept back up Broadmoor Bluffs, and after we got home (without further incident) just sat on the couch for awhile, hearts pounding.

I ducked out on the front porch just now for a quick look, and see freezing drizzle descending. The sidewalks are now skating rinks. And our little roads are not the worst of it. This is the gnarliest driving weather we've ever seen in the six years we've lived here. The mountain views are nice, but yikes! Getting here--or getting out--can be a challenge.

Fall? Fall? QTH Fall?

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:35:59 GMT

We set a cold record for this date last night, after several days of sleet and snow. Tonight it may get down to 18 degrees here and set another record. This morning we heard that there is now 15" of snow in North Platte, Nebraska, a favorite town on our well-trodden route from here to Chicago.

I asked the local squirrels what they thought of all this. The squirrels pointed to the well-chewed pine cones all over the sidewalk and scattered across my back deck and said, "Long, cold, and early--cantcha read the signs?" Carol and I have never seen so many gnawed-on pine cones lying around; QBit has brought a few into the house to stash for later. (So much for Evo dog food.)

Summer ended early here, and fall lasted about two weeks. I'm going to try and wake our snow blower from hibernation tomorrow, as we may need it sooner than we thought. Our garage is insulated, and I'm going to try and sort out my fire alarm conflict in the next couple of weeks (before it gets too damned cold to work up in the attic) so that I can start using my attic dipole this winter. Cold nights mean good, quiet propagation on the low bands, even when there aren't any sunspots. That done, I'm gonna QSO party like it's 1974, because when I go outside, that's sure as hell what it feels like.

We're going to rent Ice Age and Ice Age II to appease the Climate Gods: Hey guys, we're sorry for claiming that we're controlling you now. Some of us know better. And...Tennessee would be that way...

Odd Lots

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:33:08 GMT

If like me you stand amazed at the precision of the English language (which is distinct from the precision of the people who use it, which is all over the map) do visit Obsolete Word of the Day. Many of the citations are old slang and many words do double duty: A slype is slang for a man who talks much about seducing women but lacks the courage to do so. Its formal use is architectural: the connection (often a covered but not enclosed passage) between the chapterhouse and the rest of a church complex. Much more there; you can sink hours on this one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Here's a gatherum of peculiar or downright gross sodas from around the world. Yogurt-flavored Pepsi, anyone? Or (urrrp) Placenta? Alas, Inca Kola is not mentioned, though it should be. (Thanks to Bob Calverley, via George Ewing.)
The title on this article is wrong (or perhaps some people understand the term "hyperdrive" differently than I do) but it describes a new twist on an interesting and mostly forgotten 1924 speculation of mathematician David Hilbert: that a stream of particles moving at greater than half the speed of light could accelerate a nearby stationary object without subjecting that object to inertial forces. That wouldn't be a true hyperdrive, but a genuine inertialess drive would almost seem like one if we limit the frame of reference to the starship. (I.e., we could go from here to sunlike star Zeta Tucanae in a week or so from our perspective, though 28 years from the universe's perspective.) This is mighty exotic physics, and if there's anything to it, we may learn more once Felber's hypothesis is tested using the LHC, or perhaps the Tevatron.
I saw a trailer on what may be an interesting new film comedy: The Boat That Rocked , which had been originally (and I think more appropriately) titled Pirate Radio. It's about the 1960's offshore radio pirates operating just outside the UK's territorial waters, something that's always fascinated me. I've been taking notes on a novel I call (or called, sigh) Pirate Radio, exploring the notion of untraceable Internet broadcasting through large-scale powerline networking, and that research brought the old UK high seas radio pirates to mind. Probably won't write the novel, but it's been a good excuse to read up on things I haven't looked at since I read them in Popular Electronics in the 1960s.
Don't miss the Steampunk Genre Fiction Generator. Stumbling through it with no malice (or anything else) aforethought, I came up with: "In a leather-clad Aztec empire, a young farm boy with dreams stumbles across a talking fish, which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots with the help of a cherubic girl with pigtails and spunk and her discomfort in formal wear, culminating in convoluted nonsense that squanders the reader's goodwill." Somebody else write it and I'll pay a quarter for that!
The ice melt across Antarctica during this past Antarctic summer (2008-2009) was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite era. I'd worry a little less about rising oceans swallowing New York City, as much as I sometimes find myself wishing for them to do so.
I used to wonder how corn mazes are made (and still do, for older mazes) but if you're doing one today, you're basically going to need a lawnmower and a GPS receiver, and a way to overlay a drawing onto a GPS-enabled map display. Oh, and a large field of corn that you're willing to seriously mess with.

Computers Are Basically Free

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:20:59 GMT

I keep the tired old PCs at our church running, and I've decided that the church office needs something new. Or at any rate, something newer, and more compact. The church office is smaller than most bedrooms I've had, and yet includes two desks at which people work, plus file cabinets and many other things. Small is better.

So I've been sniffing around for a month or so. As I've mentioned here many times, I like the tiny Dell SX270, but it doesn't support video modes suitable for the widescreen displays that have basically driven 4:3s off the market. Video is done by the mobo chipset, and there is no expansion slot into which a better graphics adapter could be plugged. I bought a newer Dell 2.8 GHz SX280 last week at auction on eBay, and I got a system minus monitor for $90. Mouse, keyboard, power supply (which is a wall brick) and reinstall disk, all for $90. Boy.

And that's a much nicer machine than the older SX270s. I checked recently completed auctions this morning, and see that a similar SX270 combo (everything but a display) went for the staggering sum of $69.50 last week, after furious last-minute bidding. (The photo above is of that system.) The PC sold at that price is exactly what I have at our condo outside Chicago: A 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. I've been meaning to drop another RAM stick into it but so far, I haven't seen the system gag on anything I've been doing, suggesting that for the time being it has all the RAM it needs.

The Dell ultra-small form factor (USFF) systems like the SX270 and SX280 are pointedly not gamer machines, but most people aren't gamers. The USFFs do static graphics superbly (Photoshop, InDesign) and play conventional videos without stuttering. I haven't tested HD video, but DVD video and the videos I take with my Canon camera of the dogs running around play just fine. Spare parts are abundant and cheap on eBay, and anybody who's ever built a system won't have trouble swapping things out. The SX280 has better graphics than the SX270 (the chipset for integrated graphics is the Intel 915G Express) and uses the SATA interface for its 2.5" internal drive. Both have gigabit Ethernet and 6 USB 2.0 ports. The adjustable-speed fans are normally silent, rising to whisper-level only when the machine is doing something intense. The SX270 (and possibly the SX280; don't know yet) doesn't require XP activation when you change a hard drive; they're BIOS-locked to a specific Dell OEM reinstallation disk--which you can get for $20 on eBay, and generally comes with the used machines.

And you can get them now for under $100.

The tech world these days is about specialty devices like smartphones and ebook readers; generic Intel computers are a glut on the market, and basically free. As Joli Ballew and I learned while researching Degunking Windows five years ago, many people send systems to the recycler for being "slow" when the real problem is Windows registry clog and spyware. Do a fresh Windows install (or just be careful not to crap up the system to begin with) and those old machines still glow in the dark. The best way to keep older computers out of our landfills is to keep using them. Saying "that box won't run Vista" is a little like saying "that petri dish won't grow a staph infection." Unless you need a staph sample for research, that doesn't strike me as much of a problem.