Planet TriLUG

Fedora, meet OLPC. OLPC, meet Fedora.

2008-07-08T18:49:20+00:00

Did you know that the OLPC project is the largest single "customer" of Fedora in the entire world?

The rumours of OLPC's death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite some unfortunate statements by the project's erstwhile CEO, the OLPC project is still *extremely* focused on succeeding in its noble goal -- the education of the world's children -- with the use of free software as the central component of their software strategy. And they are, in fact, succeeding, even though the open source community has largely turned its collective back on that success. Which is, I think, a shame.

Let me share some numbers with you. They might surprise you. I know they surprised me when I heard them a few weeks ago at FUDCon.

OLPC has shipped over 300,000 units to kids around the world. They plan to ship at least another 50,000 more each month, and very likely more than that. It's entirely possible that by the end of 2008, there will be a million OLPC systems deployed worldwide.

Of those systems, 100% of them currently run Fedora, and 0% of them currently run Windows -- despite the press clippings you may have read.

The OLPC project is based on Fedora. The engineers at OLPC have invested thousands of person-hours in making Fedora a successful base for OLPC deployments. Fedora is now, and will continue to be, the base operating system for the OLPC project. Period.

It's time for the Fedora community to step up and represent.

* * *

There will be many opportunities for members of the Fedora community and the OLPC communities to help one another in the coming months. I intend to spend most of my time identifying those opportunities and helping to making them happen.

The first opportunities are for the Fedora packagers. This work can be done right now, today.

Understandably, the OLPC folks want to focus their efforts on the challenges that are unique to the OLPC project. Which means that they should be shedding all work that can more easily be handled by others. Package maintenance is a perfect example of this kind of work.

Here is a list of packages that are either badly needed by OLPC and are unavailable in Fedora, or are currently being maintained, poorly, by overworked OLPC engineers who can't invest enough time to do them justice. There are lots of simple issues that even novice packagers could handle. Missing or broken dependencies. Creation of dead-simple activity packages. And so on.

If there's one thing that Fedora community engineers do exceptionally well, it's package maintenance. If every current Fedora packager volunteered to own one single package that is crucial to OLPC, we would immediately free the core OLPC team for much more strategic work. It's a big, immediate win, and the entire OLPC team will be delighted to receive your help.

Fedora packagers: please consider adopting one of these packages and giving it a loving home. I will keep asking. :)

July Vacation Day Four and Five

2008-07-08T15:57:00+00:00

Well, I slacked off Saturday and Sunday. But I guess better late than never to talk about the last two days of the vacation.

Nothing much different happened on Saturday and Sunday. Did a little more kayaking with Amanda and a little more swimming in the pool. All in all just relaxed.

It rained a bit more Saturday evening but not like it had on Friday evening so it didn't really spoil any of our plans.

I tried to check my mail via Winlink on Saturday but I couldn't access N0IA via 20m as I had been doing as there was a digital contest going on and the band was saturated. I did make contact with KN6KB on 30m and 40m and was able to transfer some messages but it was slow compared to the previous days I had been utilizing N0IA on 20m.

We left around noon on Sunday to come on home. We stopped in Cape Charles, Virginia to pickup the Earthcache "Chesapeake Bay Bolide". I had never been to Cape Charles before so that was quite interesting. Might have to go back to this place one day.

Traffic wasn't too bad coming home except at the normal spots (Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel). Glad I went and can't wait to go again. What more can you say than that?

Of motorcycles and manufacturers

2008-07-08T14:28:21+00:00

Yesterday I signed up for my Motorcycle Safety Foundations Course through Durham Tech. Glass isn't for a while, they tend to fill up quickly and my class is going to eat an ENTIRE weekend but I'll suck it up and deal with it. Besides I'd like to drop a bit more weight before I get there as "the big guy", a title I'm still likely to carry at that time even if I dropped some major poundage.

What bike will I get? The Suzuki V-Strom DL1000 is the front runner at the moment though I'm likely end up with a used something-or-another come bonus time next year. Honestly, until my Chevy is paid off, I probably won't be riding a new motorcycle though there are several models I would love to swing a leg over each and every weekend.

Apple\'s Mobile Me

2008-07-08T03:10:03+00:00

MobileMe Launching on July 9th Between 6pm-12am PT - Mac Rumors

Apple has announced that it is launch the Mobile Me service on Wednesday. I’m personally looking forward to seeing how this improves the .Mac service that I’ve had for some time now…

Ken Mink: MythTV on AppleTV (June TriLUG meeting video)

2008-07-08T00:45:03+00:00

Hate it? Blame me, since I did both camera and editing. Love it? Thank our excellent presenter, Ken Mink, and the TriLUG Steering Committee, esp. Matt Frye, our chair. And with that, the video:

A Christmas Story Leg Lamp

2008-07-08T00:41:14+00:00

‘Christmas Story’ Blu-ray Double Dip Due In November | High-Def Digest

I am so glad that I didn’t re-buy the Blu-ray of A Christmas Story yet. I already own the 20th Anniversary Special Edition DVD set and I had read that the Blu-ray wasn’t much of an improvement. It sounds as if Warner is looking to remedy that and bring some new stuff to the table. No idea what yet, but I would love the chance to pick up a high-quality Blu-ray of this movie as I do love it so!

So, start dreaming of your Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle and please try to avoid saying the “F-dash-dash-dash” word

oh…and of course…

Sons of bitches! Bumpuses!

Sticker Shock

2008-07-07T16:30:10+00:00

It looks like I am going to be in Australia for the month of August.

I love Australia, and when I was there in 2004, Sydney replaced San Francisco as my favorite city. But the 15 hour flight from LAX to SYD is murderous. Seriously, I can deal with long flights but 15 hours in coach is painful. On the way back I watched Return of the King three times in a row and the flight was barely half over.

So I thought, hey, this time I’ll fly in business class. Yeah, it is more expensive, but should be worth it.

I went and looked up the price on American: over US$19000.

What? That is the price of a car. For this post I decided to just price a flight in business from LAX to SYD (versus all the way from RDU). It came to US$18700 with taxes, round trip.

If we assume that the round trip is 30 hours or so, that comes to around $623/hour. That’s outrageous. You can get over three hours of top-notch OpenNMS consulting for that. Heck, Elliot Spitzer doesn’t spend that hourly rate (well, at least for 15 hours straight).

Who pays this? I really can’t imagine doing it. Well, I mean if I was Tiger Woods and made millions, US$19K might not seem that important (and I’d probably upgrade to First for just $5K more), but from a business standpoint?

I had a friend say “well, just charge it to the client”. I did think about it, and if it was under $10K I would have even suggested it, but it was almost twice that. For the difference I figured I could fly out in coach a couple of days early, stay in the most expensive hotel room in Sydney, dine on endangered species and still come out ahead.

Sheesh. $19K for a plane flight (well, two). So I’m in coach for a fraction of the price, heading out a couple of days early (staying at the Courtyard) and the most exotic thing I’ll eat is kangaroo, but at least the client will come out ahead, which means they can buy more OpenNMS stuff.

So, am I an idiot for not charging the client? What’s the most expensive plane ticket you’ve purchased?

Back Home

2008-07-07T15:33:55+00:00

I got back into home last night after being away for most of last week and previously most of the previous week before that. I had spent the last few days in WV in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone visiting the camp where my wife is working for the summer. Cell phones don't work there and it's impossible to get cable or DSL internet so they use WildBlue satellite service. Unfortunately, they had managed to transfer more data than WildBlue allowed so they had been throttled down to a 128Kbps down/10 Kbps up connection. For 150 people. Yeah, so, not so good.

So, I was looking forward to getting home to a good cable internet connection, watching some of the Tour de France on our DVR and figuring out what I needed to do at home for the next few days. The reality, however, turned out not quite so good. Apparently, while I was gone, Time Warner Cable decided to go belly up at my house and not only did my digital cable & internet not work, the upper analog channels are fuzzy and nothing was recorded as far as the Tour de France was concerned. (Not that it would have mattered, the TWC DVR won't let me watch any recorded programs because it cannot get a signal from the mothership.) So, after calling TWC, waiting on hold for a full 30 minutes (!!!) they started to tell me that they could send a tech out this morning. However, someone had swooped in and grabbed that timeslot so they had to call over to "dispatch" and after doing that they came back and said there were "service disruptions" in my area and wouldn't schedule a service call for me. They said everything should be fine by the morning and if not to call and someone could come out today.

Well, fast forward to this morning and sure enough, nothing works. So, I call and the first thing I'm greeted with is the computer saying "you have a service call scheduled for ... Thursday"!!! W! T! F! So, after getting an operator they transfer me to the "local office" who after a while finally tells me they've scheduled someone to come out sometime today and that they will call me 30 minutes before they come (since my wife & son are in WV, there is no one to let them in during the day so I have to come back home in south Durham from my job in south Cary). We'll see if they actually call. If they don't, I'm calling the BBB and possibly whatever government body that oversees the cable companies to complain.

Customer Service and The Future of IT

2008-07-07T14:40:30+00:00

Jason Hiner wrote this blog post about IT’s changing role, Sanity check: Is IT no longer about technology? at TechRepublic. While I commend him for taking up the question of the changing role of IT, I don’t think Hiner quite understands Tom Austin’s suggestion that the word “social” will become a key part of the IT professional’s job description. I also don’t completely agree with Austin’s thinking on the next evolution of the IT professional. It’s more about customer service than social science or creativity, although those do play a part. More on that in a minute.

Hiner looks three segments into which he says IT will be divided over the next decade.

1.) Operations and infrastructure management

“They will be the blue collar workers of the IT industry…Austin’s argument doesn’t hold up very well in this category.”

Operations and infrastructure management surely are tasked with keeping systems running, but they also have to deal with customers from time to time and this interaction will increase in frequency over the next decade. Virtualization and cloud computing have (and will continue to) shorten deployment times and require less middle men. This will put the Ops teams in closer touch with customers and require them to be more socially adept and more customer service oriented.

I also don’t completely agree with the assessment of operations staff as “blue collar.” That belief is certainly prevalent in large corporations, and it is so to their detriment. Hard working, customer service oriented workers can be hired for operations work, and it shouldn’t be a dead end. The best data center operators are up-and-comers. Professional development and technical training can make data centers incubators for technical talent. Put another way, if we accept that data centers have high staff turnover, why use that churn to the company’s advantage? Use cross-training and customer service development as platforms to reverse brain drain.

2.) Solutions and project management

“Today’s developers and software engineers will morph into this category.”

To that I’d say, “Those who can write code, do. Those who cannot are project managers.” Look, there are developers and there are non-developers. There is a temperament to software engineers that makes them good at what they do. Most will tell you they don’t want to morph into social scientists. That’s ok. The best change that can happen in this category is for IT line managers to become responsible for customer service. Make customer service part of their goals and deliverables. To some extent, that means driving home the point to their directs, but mostly it means creating The Development Abstraction Layer. As Spolsky points out, “Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user.” I can’t do Spolsky’s article justice by quoting further so go read it when you’re done reading this post (only 274 more words to go).

3.) End user management

“In the future, the role of this part of the IT department will diminish, although not entirely disappear.”

The role of end user management will actually increase, not decrease over the next decade. More systems will create more users. Sure, physical systems will become virtual and so on, but the future IT professional needs to be thinking in terms of instances, not physical boxes. More instances equals more users, in one way or another.

“IT will need to relax some of its standards in order to allow more users to easily collaborate and share data and documents.”

The solution isn’t relaxed standards. The solution is writing and enforcing standards and policies that make sense to your organization and business model. There’s no point in enforcing arbitrary standards from another organization (or a past incarnation of your organization).

The IT Customer Service Equation

Like it or not, IT has customers, internal and external, and we have a duty to provide them with both technical and customer service excellence. When IT’s customers are satisfied and can do their jobs more effectively, IT gets a better reputation and isn’t so close to the chopping block at budget time (just one benefit, by the way). See Three Major Myths about IT Professionals for more on that.

IT is not going away, but IT is no longer special. Business models and organizational structures continue to change and IT needs to change with them…and do it with a smile. As the more users appear on the IT radar, the need for customer service excellence, as well as continued technical excellence, increases.

And in a fanboy moment...

2008-07-07T13:55:47+00:00

There is talk of seeing Hellboy II on Sunday evening. Chime in if you're interested in a late(r) showing (after 8:30), give a shout. I'll do a reminder on Saturday or Sunday.

And next week, Dark Knight. Hells Yeah!

Must...not...quote...The Mamas and the Papas....again

2008-07-07T13:21:49+00:00

The weekend was damn near perfect. You would think, after spending all of the prior weekend (and week) together, ursulav and I would be tired of each other. But we weren't.

Friday we woke up late and then headed to my ex-in-laws' for Big Man's Cake and Ice Cream and presents. Big man is 10. I'm still kinda wrapping my head around that. The boys were happy to see us, my in-laws were their usual outgoing selves, and a good time was had by all. it didn't hurt that we walked in and the kids ran over saying "Ursula!" and gave her big hugs.

Afterward, we headed to po_sparky's[1] house for a 4th of July pool party and cookout. There was pool vollyball with apathychild, her folks[2], her visitors from out-of-state, my folks, and the Kellys. The cookout was quite tasty, and apathychild added a twist to the shrimp that worked out well.

As the evening drew on, we headed next to jason0x21's house for *HIS* cookout. Delivered gift-art to badger, hung out some more with dollraves and dustykat, and in general we had a good time.

Saturday morning was Dim Sum with dollraves and dustykat[3] before they hit the road back to the left coast. During that I got a phone call from one of my feral cat people with an urgent plea for help, as well as some updates on projects we are working on. So, after seeing them off, it was back to Pittsboro to get stuff done. And by the time stuff was done, it was almost 9 and Ursula and I were both bone-tired. Since I had to be up at 7, we opted (sadly) to skip zarathud and sherrib's cookout[4]. A hot bath and a martini was had and TV was watched.

The beagle, bless his heart, saw fit to inform us at least twice during the night that, "no, really, that deer out back is going to attack us and you need to get up now and do something about it."[5]

Sunday started with a very good morning at gracepoint. Afterwards, Ursula and I went to lunch, did some shopping in Chapel Hill (OMG, the Southern Season sale was a dangerous place), and did some house cleaning and chilling. And then it was time for her to go to her place, and my kids to come home, so parting is bittersweet because I get my kids but won't really get to see much of her for the next week[6]. And it's quite an adjustment to be sleeping ALONE after 10 days together. [7]

Today was back to the "normal" routine. Get up, take out the dogs, get the kids up, get ready for work, pack lunches, drop the kids off, get to the office and do the job thing. And Dinners with all four of us and maybe Wall-E on Friday and a cookout Saturday. It all goes too fast and too slow, you know?

[1] Dave and Dale and Chris and Todd Kelly are all long-time family friends, and it's always good to hang out with them, even if I don't get to do it as often as I could.
[2] My uncle cpl_recoil and my aunt Betsy.
[3] And Deb & her family and a young lady who's name escapes me at the moment.
[4] And honestly, it was a hard choice. If I hadn't spent an hour and a half cleaning up cat feeding stations (something that normally takes about 30 mins), we would have made it.
[5] 2am and 4am to be precise. Nothing can try to sneak up on my house without half the neighborhood being aware of it.
[6] Which drives us both batshit crazy. But we'll fix that eventually.
[7] I know, we sicken you. Deal

One-way streets

2008-07-07T12:19:35+00:00

Looks like the A View Of The Cityblog has caught up to MT.Net on the issue of downtown’s one-way streets.

Let’s hope this issue builds some momentum and city and state leaders work together to improve downtown Raleigh’s traffic flow.

I demand a four day work week

2008-07-07T07:17:22+00:00

This past weekend was nice, very nice in fact. I could easily get used to a four day, ten hour per day work week. Could you? Think of the energy savings that could be realized by taking every commuter, or the bulk of them at the very least, off the road. A four day work week would help my bottom line.

CAN-SPAM Act Enforceability Goes into Effect Today

2008-07-07T05:00:15+00:00

Updates to the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) becomes effective today. They four main provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act for commercial emailers are: Bans false or misleading header information Prohibits Deceptive Subject Lines Requires an opt-out method Requires Commercial Email to be Identified as an Advertisement an must include the senders valid [...]

Waking Badger

2008-07-07T04:53:17+00:00

What in the crap? | ExtraLife - The Web Comic 3 days a week, Podcasts, and more!

Saw this video on ExtraLife and I have to echo his comment…what the crap?!?!

festival for the eno

2008-07-07T01:39:19+00:00

I went to the festival for the eno. I grabbed a few videos and put them up on youtube. Enjoy.

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

2008-07-06T18:10:51+00:00

I just found this site and I thought it was quite funny. I’ve put some of the blog bumper stickers below:

All were created by OnePlusYou

California this time of year

2008-07-06T12:10:54+00:00

My friend Matt sent me this link to encourage us to vacation in California.

I’ve already spent one day in choking-thick smoke. That was plenty, thank you. I don’t want to spend a week in it.

Time to throw another dart at the map and pick a new vacation destination.

A Time Machine/Capsule Workout

2008-07-06T10:01:57+00:00

My laptop is restore, though not without a bit of drama. The good news is the backup and restore did work; my laptop is running along just as it was prior to the disk crash. In that sense the Time Capsule, and for that matter Time Machine itself, was worth the purchase cost (t. capsule) and cost of the upgrade (t. machine).

Now, the weirdness: my restore never really "finished", rather it just sat locked up on a restore screen for hours. So.... I did the unthinkable and rebooted the laptop while the screen was still locked up. It was a leap a faith to be sure, but it worked. After the next bootup my screen desktop, applications and everything else was restored! Sweet!!

The only bit of weirdness was my laptop decided to back itself up to the Time Capsule. Fully. As if it was the first time it had ever backed itself up, all 50+ gigs worth of data. So that ran for a while (a LONG while). Actually it wasn't that big of a deal, I just let the backup run all night.

The good news is I'm back in business!!! I didn't much care for being laptopless and I'm glad to have my Mac back.

How Jesse Helms saved webcasting

2008-07-05T20:49:16+00:00

My friend Kevin Sonney mentioned his experience with Jesse Helms’s constituent services. It reminded me of one time I had to applaud Jesse, too.

Back in 2002, Internet radio was under attack when the evil DMCA pushed by the Recording Industry of Association of America was due to jack up royalty fees that would have effectively killed webcasting.

One such station which would have had to pull its webcast was Wake Forest’s WCPE, the outstanding classical station heard worldwide through Ibiblio’s streaming services. Helms was a regular listener of WCPE and went to bat for it and all Internet webcasters, partnering with Sen. Patrick Leahy to pass the Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002. Just when it looked like Internet radio would be killed in its crib, Helms and Leahy rode in to save the day.

Thus, on one thing at least, Jesse was right.

Ding Dongthe Witch is Dead...kinda

2008-07-05T15:00:48+00:00

So, there's been a lot of "Oh thank God, may he rot in Hell" about Senator Helms's death yesterday. As a nearly lifelong resident of NC, I can honestly say that while I hated his policies, voted against him at every turn, and disliked his politics, I did come to respect Senator Helms. For one very simple reason : For all his faults, Senator Helms always made time for his constituents, and always voted for what he felt was in the best interests of North Carolina and the people here. Right or Wrong, I cannot fault him for doing what he was supposed to do as a representative of the state of NC.

And this sounds pretty odd coming from ME. But I have, over the years, come across more and more examples where Jessie did something extraordinary for the people of NC. From the young black man who was getting screwed by a government loan mix-up that Jessie cleared up, to his support of local farmers and industry, to the people he employed with one and only one purpose : to communicate with and care for the people he represented.

The shining example of this came to me early one morning. I had called Sen. Helms office as part of my duties as Chair of TriLUG - specifically to request Sen. Helms vote against the DMCA and similar bills. His staff was patient, gracious, and very kind. They expressed that Sen. Helms would like to get our position in writing, and gave me the address to send it to. At no time were they rude or rushed.

And it was 8:55am September 11, 2001. They were being evacuated from the building, the Pentagon was on fire, and I had no idea this was going on until someone on IRC told me to turn on the news, because holy crap WTF?!?

And yet his staff made time to listen to a group in NC who had a concern for the Senator.

Jessie, we don't miss your politics. But damn if we won't miss your dedication, your service, and the passion you took in doing what you felt was right for the people of North Carolina.

Sometimes, I think we need more politicians with those values.

The mac is back

2008-07-05T14:53:47+00:00

Huzzah! The Macbook is fixed and has returned home. Good news, good news. Upon boot up I selected the "Restore from Time Machine" option and off I went - slowly. I have somewhere between five and eight hours of restoration ahead of me.

I should have dragged one of the UPS units from upstairs down and plugged the laptop and Time Capsule into that just to be on the safe side. Thunder is audible outside and my fancy new GPS/XM Weather handheld thingy is showing that I'm in for a serious case of whoop-ass in about 20 minutes. It is my hope that I do no lose power in the middle of the restoration, not even for a second! Wow, that would just suck. I would hope that upon reboot of the Time Capsule the process would simply continue on as if nothing happened. Hopefully we won't have to test that scenario out!!

Ah, just knowing my Mac is back makes me happy. Oh, and I stand corrected from an earlier post - Macbook Airs ARE on display in the Apple Store, just in a different place.

July Vacation Day Three

2008-07-05T11:33:59+00:00

- July 4th
The day started off with pancakes and a few extra friends arriving. Games were played and the pool was occupied. All in all it was a typical vacation day. Until later that evening...

From the weather reports I had downloaded it appeared that a cold front would be coming through and stalling over the Eastern Shore area. They said that thunderstorms and showers were likely on Saturday. Around 6:30P I noticed quite a bit of lightning striking the ground on the west side of the Chesapeake Bay. Cooking had already commenced on the grill which turned out to be a bad idea. The storm hit with high wind and lots of rain. One grill was knocked over and a kayak was blown a good twenty
feet. All in all, a pretty impressive display of wind. It is difficult to estimate the winds as there are few trees and "regular" objects around to estimate from but I'd guess we were nearing tropical storm force gusts.

Added to the list of things to have available in portable, waterproof cases: wireless weather station

Jesse Helms

2008-07-05T02:54:12+00:00

Senator Jesse Helms died early this morning at the age of 86. Though the Senator was wrong in nearly every stance he took, I have to admit he was one heck of a politician who did a lot for the people of North Carolina. The white, heterosexual people, anyway.

I’m reminded of my friend Wade’s bizarre brush with the late Senator back in 2005.

New 401(k) doesn’t even support QIF

2008-07-04T14:18:48+00:00

The 401(k) program we switched to this year happens to have been a step backward as far as support for exporting transactions. In talking with Alan about it, he said he’d downloaded a program to convert the CSV they export into a QIF. In looking at the QIF format, I just decided to whip up something to do the conversion for me. This converts the export from MVP Plan Administrators to QIF and imports successfully into Quicken for Mac 2007.


#!/usr/bin/perl

#based on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QIF

open(INH, "< ". $ARGV[0]);
open(OUTH, ">". $ARGV[0]. ".qif");

print OUTH '!Account
NDavid\'s New 401k
TInvst
^
!Type:Invst
';

<INH>

while (<INH>) {
        chop;
        chop;
        s/\$//g;
        @vals = split /,/;

        if ($vals[3] eq 'RECEIVABL') {
                next;
        }
        print OUTH "D" . $vals[0] . "\n";
        print OUTH "N" . $vals[5] . "\n";
        print OUTH "Y" . $vals[4] . "\n";
        print OUTH "T" . $vals[9] . "\n";
        print OUTH "I" . $vals[8] . "\n";
        print OUTH "Q" . $vals[7] . "\n";
        print OUTH "M" . $vals[6] . "\n";
        print OUTH "^\n";
}

close OUTH;

Known issues:

You still need to go through and mark Dividend transactions as such.
Doesn’t handle Sells very well, especially when these are to cover fund fees

Happy birthday, country!

2008-07-04T13:08:20+00:00

Happy birthday, America! You’re 232 years old today.

I watched American Experience’s episode on Alexander Hamilton this week. He was a far more interesting character in our history than I had thought.

Apple.. let's be friends again, ok?

2008-07-04T11:47:51+00:00

Today my Mac is off somewhere being repaired and I am stuck surfing on the couch with my work-issued T42 Thinkpad. The Thinkpad is a nice machine and the corporate-issued desktop is functional, but it's just not a Mac. When asked to compare the Mac vs PC I say that working with a Mac is like working with a computer that was designed and through through to work as in instrument to further the experience of the user. Using a PC feels like sitting in a cave, bashing away on a clay tablet with the hopes that the tablet won't break and someone may someday decipher what you were trying to say.

So, Apple, I do hope you get that hard disk thing worked out. This really should have been handled by a recall instead of just hoping that the disks wouldn't fail in record numbers. In short, the whole "disk failure" syndrome could have been managed better but that said, I just want my Mac back. Please?

July Vacation Day Two

2008-07-04T11:13:01+00:00

- July 3rd
Day two was very relaxing. The biggest event of the day was the cooking. With so many people in the house and so many different tastes everyone wants to try their hand at cooking.

Other items on the agenda were kayaking and swimming. Lots of both occurred. I waited until sunset to venture across the cove towards the Chesapeake Bay. It was really quiet. Of course half way out there I realized that the water was so shallow that I could have walked this far without getting my knees wet. Oh well, I needed to give my kayak a workout anyway. Maybe tomorrow I'll go out a little earlier and a little farther.

Oh, and for those that were wondering... there is very little cellphone signal out here. Where are all those Verizon guys when you need them? Oh well, I wanted to escape all that anyway. Thanks to Bud, N0IA, for being my Winlink relay station. Bud is in Florida and every time I need to send and receive email from my special account I just connect to his station (via HF radio) which connects into the Winlink system and I send and receive my mail! Pretty slick!

Frye? Frye? Frye?

2008-07-04T09:03:22+00:00

Yesterday I took a trip to the apple store to drop off my head macbook. I shouldn't have been so harsh on Apple. True, they picked some faulty hardware as a component of their expensive laptops but I'm sure it's biting them on the rear end right now about.

One thing was absent from the store: the Macbook Air. There were, literally, none on display. And I looked, quite hard actually. Perhaps they are going to revision two of internal hardware? Maybe. Perhaps. Who knows. Let's hope they come up with a user-changeable battery (and I'd really like to see one more USB somewhere an 10/100/1000 dongleless Ethernet port - PLEASE!). To that thought why do we have to have the long, flat USB port on the side? Why can we have long/flat and one mini-B USB connector? I'm sure there's some kind of reason but what that reason is I do not know (though I would venture to guess the mini-B USB is low power, USB 1.0 only, or something along those lines).

One more thing: Apple dropped the price of the Macbook Air with the solid-state 64 gig drive by $500.00. At over $2500.00, and close to $3k with Apple Care, the laptop is still wildly expensive, but at the same time, very cool. Plus with a solid-state drive you remove the major vulnerability of the laptop lines: weak hard drives. Still, with a solid-state drive you can now have a laptop where the only moving parts are the hinged laptop lid and keys on the keyboard. That alone is a pretty compelling argument for ownership.

Video of substation fire

2008-07-04T01:26:46+00:00

Yesterday I came across this cool video posted to YouTube from Florida Power and Light. In 2001, an electrical substation in Miami short-circuited and blew up - and all of it was caught on tape by a FPL employee. Watch as the high voltage slices through the substation, finishing itself off in a massive fireball. It reminds me of the fire at the substation at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and East Street in 2001.

What’s great about this video is the extensive commentary included with it, which explains exactly what happens when the substation melts down:

In early 2001, the Ives Dairy Substation in Miami, Florida experienced a total system failure. It started with the simple failure of a capacitor bank (a piece of equipment used to synchronize and optimize varying electrical currents “phases” coming off the main power grid before being distributed to customers).

This short circuit caused a breaker to trip open, however it malfunctioned and created an arc fault (a continuous lightning bolt that acted like an uncontrollable welding torch from hell) between the hot lead and wherever it could find a ground, thus pulling far more current then the facility was designed for.

One of the first things that the arc fault destroyed was the emergency response system that would have notified the grid dispatcher of a serious problem (who would have then cut the power to the substation to kill the arc fault). Since the emergency system fried first in the arc fault, no signal was ever sent to the dispatcher, and the substation continued to self-destruct.

The uncontrolled arc fault caused the coolant (mineral oil) inside the primary transformer to overheat to critical levels until it was boiling in a highly flammable state. This boiling caused pressure to rise inside the transformer (like a pressure cooker) until the seals finally blew. Mineral oil vapor proceeded to pour out at that point (the plume of white fog at the end) which ignited on the arc fault. The flames caused by this immediately ignited back to the source, (the boiling transformer tank), which ignited the mother load of oil inside causing the substation to explode in a giant ball of fire.

The sudden loss of all transformer coolant resulted in a simultaneous flash-meltdown of the transformers innards, which immediately caused the main high voltage fuse to overload and blow (the loud explosion at the end), finally killing the arc.

I love watching technology go bad.

July Vacation Day One

2008-07-04T01:35:55+00:00

- July 2nd
Our "summer" vacation this year was spent with Amanda's friends at a rented house in Cambridge, Maryland. On Tuesday we packed up the truck with most everything that we needed to take with us (i.e. bikes, kayaks, etc) and had our bags of groceries set up by the door so we could be on the way at 9AM Wednesday morning. Wednesday morning we woke up and put everything in the truck and left the house on time. I think this is the first time we have actually left on time.

Traffic was somewhat light as I'm guessing most people were still working so we never hit any heavy traffic. We stopped at the restaurant on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to grab a Geocache and an English Muffin. I'd like to stop by on our way back to get some pictures as this was a beautiful location in the middle of the water. Atlantic Ocean to the east and Chesapeake Bay to the west. There were lots of ships waiting to come through as well.

We made a couple other stops on the way up for caches and arrived at the house shortly after 2PM. Friends started rolling in shortly after that and we hit the pool. We are still exploring the house and the surrounding property. We were going to try to do some kayaking but the tide was low and the water was no more than eight inches deep so we would have had to have dragged the boats a distance before being able to float inside of it. Hopefully tomorrow will be better for floating.

Waking Badger

2008-07-03T23:45:02+00:00

I Watch Stuff - New ‘Hellboy II: The Slapstick Comedy’ Clip

Hellboy & Johann Krauss having an argument that goes too far and hilarity ensues

Grade 9

2008-07-03T20:28:22+00:00

Grade 9
Barenaked Ladies

I found my locker and I found my classes
Lost my lunch and I broke my glasses,
That guy is huge! That girl is wailin’!
First day of school and I’m already failing.