Marc's Public Blog - Public

Video Games Expo at the Grand Palais, Paris

2011-12-28T16:00:00Z

We happened to be around when they had a Video Games expo. We only had 45mn to go through it before it closed, but it was quite cool to see so many vintage games I used to play with way back in the day. Great trip in nostalgia land :)

ok, doesn't get older than that :)

I remember playing this

Looks like Jennifer may have played this one before :)

Arkanoid, I was good at this!

Out Run, that used to be the game I thought was so cool and pretty back then

I actually finished Super Mario 64 in 1997

Good times... See more images for Video Games Expo at the Grand Palais, Paris

Droids, they breed at night :)

2011-12-18T16:00:00Z

And the new children look bigger :)

Steve Job's Biography at the Computer History Museum

2011-12-13T16:00:00Z

This was a 'sold out' event where the members took all the spots within hours of the Email announcement. Walter Isaacson gave us a summary of the biography he wrong on Steve.

I had already read a fair amount about Steve, but I was still impressed by the details of how Steve would believe in something that seemed unachievable strongly enough that he would manage to convince his engineers that it was achievable, and they would often make it happen.

I also didn't know that all Apple devices were not upgradable, or even meant to be opened, because Steve believed they were works of art that should not be disturbed since they were perfect as is :)

I never was a Steve fanboy, but I do admire the guy for some of what he did, and all in all, it was a quite interesting evening.

Amazon Extreme Fail

2011-11-30T16:00:00Z

The Email I sent them is probably a good summary. But basically Amazon has gotten so big and corporate that you can't report fraud to them without an account and when I did they closed my account instead of the one I reported and it took hours of wasted time (and over a week of waiting) to get my account unlocked. Pathetic Amazon...

This issue started because you do not publish an Email to receive concerns or in my case a fraud report without me being logged in from my own account.
As a result, likely some underpaid overseas employee who clearly doesn't understand english closed my own account as opposed to the one I was reporting for fraud while thanking me for my report and telling me the issue was now taken care of.
A few days thereafter, I started experiencing problems with logging in, and reset my password successfully a few times, but could not log in. You guessed it: your rep had locked MY account while leaving the bad one active and worst: your login page says nothing about my account being locked.
Then after I spent >1h on the phone to explain the problem, your reps agreed it was a mistake but they told me they had no way to fix it and had to escalate to a fraud review board. Really?
They promised a reply in 48H and assured me I would get called and it'd get fixed. No one called me and no one fixed the problem.
I called again for another >1H conversation and finally your supervisor fixed it instead of throwing the hot potato to someone else. Note that I had to effectively steal the account at amazon.co.uk that used my Email adddress for him to believe me.
He was so embarrassed that he gave me a $20 certificate for my time which doesn't begin to compensate for what I went through and how you "thanked" me for my help. He promised he'd try to do better and I'd hear back for something better due to the extreme way you underperformed in this matter (at least an amazon prime membership, or more). I have yet to hear back of anything better.
Moral of the story, if someone is stealing money from you and I find security flaws in your web site (I found one of each this time), I'll make sure not to report them to you.

Oh, and you want the best part? The account I reported for fraud is still being used for fraud now and I'm still getting Emails of new purchases that are being declined. Great job Amazon!

Going to High Negative Tide at Half Moon Bay

2011-11-26T16:00:00Z

One of my coworkers told me about the forecast for We parked a bit far since I did not forsee any close parking being available that late, and we used the pocket bikes I had just bought to get to the reef. We had a nice little ride by the sea to get there:

We however got there quite late, not much before sunset:

After sunset was quite nice, forever brief it was:

We got there way too late to see crab, the few that got stranded were picked up by the many people who came that day, but there were plenty of defenseless mussels which Jennifer made sure to pick up :)

After sunset, people left quickly with the little twilight we were going to have, but I had brought my 4000 lumen firesword and made daylight out of a moonless night for us to enjoy the tidepools a bit longer:

We got a few bonus craps with the mussels we brought:

And got a nice dinner out of it:

See more images for Going to High Negative Tide at Half Moon Bay

IBM Watson talk at the Computer History Museum and Jeopardy Game

2011-11-15T16:00:00Z

The Watson team came to give a talk at the computer history museum, and it was interesting to learn about how it was planned and the challenges they faced.

After the talk, they had Watson play a game, and it kicked ass. Despite severely helping the humans (see the video below), it won by a lot.
It was also interesting to see the top choices that Watson had found and its confidence level for each answer it gave:

A few pictures and video of most of the game:

See more images for IBM Watson talk at the Computer History Museum and Jeopardy Game

Visit of the Computer History Museum 12 years later

2011-08-12T15:00:00Z

In May 1999, Dave Babcock, back when we were at SGI, was nice enough to give me a private tour of the computer history pieces other volunteers and he were able to gathered, and that were stored at Moffett/NASA back then. I had a crappy camera back in that day, but still got some pictures which are fun to see for posterity (in picture link at the bottom of this post).

Throughout the years, that collection moved to visible storage in the Computer History Museum, and through the help of many volunteers, eventually turned into the current Revolution exposition that has now been available for display for almost a year. I use the opportunity that my dad was visiting to take a good tour of it with him. Obviously it's an impressive improvement from where it was 12 years ago.

It's impossible to give it justice in just a few pictures, but if you're interested in the field, hopefully those few will wet your appetite until you can go yourself.

eh, I had one of those intel bunnies and most of those CPUs too

the real first micro computer, which was french, was the micral not the altair

plenty of european micro computers, including the Amstrad CPC 464 we used to have

They missing the MO5, but they had the TO7

I had a NeXT cube for a while

Ok, I never had a PDP-1 :)

See more images for Visit of the Computer History Museum 12 years later

Visit of Willow Garage

2011-07-21T15:00:00Z

After giving them an interview about the home automation work I did, they invited me for lunch and I got a tour after that. They do interesting work with robots, ultimately for home use, although they're still in the research phase for now.

I specifically liked the robot that can get around and when it's low on battery plug its own power cord in a wall socket it will find on its own without being told where they are:

My Experience with Windows 7

2011-04-17T15:00:00Z

While my main laptop vmware image is still windows 2000, because I can't bear the time it would take me to upgrade it, needless to say that some stuff doesn't work with w2k anymore, and now there even are things that don't work with windows XP. When you add the fact that XP is quite insecure as a default OS, it was time to look at upgrading to windows 7.

After too much time spent upgrading 2 machines, here are my impressions:

Microsoft, why do you make it so hard to get legal media from you when the software is heavily key protected anyway? You're only hiding it from your paying customers at this point... It's pretty pathetic that users can't just easily download a safe version of each release (including the enterprise one which I was after) from their website

While the newer interface is pretty nice, I have yet to find how to change display settings in file explorer (show hidden files or don't hide file extensions and stuff like that). By the way, why is it a good idea to hide file extensions again?

Junctions, really? First, Microsoft had to make bogus symlinks otherwise known as shortcuts, and when they realized that they were crap and didn't really work, they had to make junctions instead. Junctions are deep magic that is hard to create or deal with for a user, and they look exactly the same than shortcuts in explorer. Worse, you can't edit/modify any file in a directory you own if you got there through a junction and get no useful error message. In other words, they still fucked up symlinks!

It's pretty wild to see junctions with the exact same name than a file in a given directory. It makes no sense at all.

They moved things around, but 20 years later, there is still no way to know who owns a given file on the filesystem to know if it's safe to move/remove, nor is there a way to check the integrity of all files from a given software package, or the operating system (some software and the OS do their own somewhat, but no comprehensive way for the user to do that). Linux has had that for a good 15 years.

This then brings up to windows rot, or the fact that over time DLLs get corrupted, replaced by other incompatible ones, malware modifies the system, and hard drive problems or unclean shutdowns delete files. I've never ever had to re-install a single linux system because I didn't know what state it was in or how to fix it. I could always tell which files were missing, or corrupt by checking the file database and re-install necessary packages. With windows, you _still_ have to wipe and re-install the entire system. Microsoft, hello! This isn't 1995 anymore (actually linux had fixed that problem around 1995 already).

installing LJ4 printer was totally ridiculous, it took me close to 2 hours to get its drivers from microsoft update. Why? Well, if you install \\lj4\ it will allow to you click on 'get from MS update' instead of 'have disk'. When I was trying to instead install \\gargamel\lj4, it only gave me 'have disk', which I of course didn't have. Back in XP days it had ironically be much quicker to install.

speaking of MS update, it was pretty good and automated, but I eventually hit an auth loop with 'server coultermicrosoftonlinee-1.sharepoint.microsoftonline.com requires user and password in 'a program running on tihs computer is trying to display a message'. This kept popping up because of some MS office update. The problem is that when MS update runs at shutdown or reboot, it has no way to display that message and just hangs without telling you.

It took hours to realize that I had a mostly hidden auth loop in access KB979440 update and infopath KB979441 update, which I had to manually blacklist for things to go back to normal.

All in all, while W7 had plenty of niceties, some of which I'll list below, crap like the points below which I all found in just 2 or 3 days, are just showstoppers to my considering windows a serious OS still. I'm actually fairly disappointed that MS still hasn't fixed them.

On the plus side:

The new MS updates, my problem above notwithstanding, is pretty fancy.

It's nice that MS finally provides a proper anti virus/malware: microsoft security essentials. They likely didn't include it with the OS not to kill the 3rd party market out there, but it's a shame since most users will not install it as a result.

The OS is fairly pretty now. The addition of widgets is nice.

UAC and user switching are decent. You can now work as a user and more or less automatically sudo to root when required (I say 'root' since I was not able to create an administrator account since there seems to be a hidden one I wasn't able to reuse).

It's also interesting that microsoft provides software to mess with anti exploit protection bits (DEP, SEHOP, and others). EMET ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6f0a6ee-05ac-4eb6-acd0-362559fd2f04 ), however caused software problems pretty early on for me, so I had to turn it off. I'm thiking of it as grsecurity for windows. Hopefully it'll improve to be more compatible with software.

So what's my verdict?

Well, things are nicer, but I still cannot like or want to rely on a OS where I cannot track corruption and where I can't easily move a software package from one machine to another one without a full reinstall. Right now I'm supposed to spend literally >10H to re-install a bunch of garmin software and maps that I should just be able to copy over and get to run again, like I would on linux but which won't work on windows.
Sorry, but this is just not acceptable.

Playing a bit of Minigolf

2011-04-03T15:00:00Z

After kicking my butt at bowling (Jennifer kind of forgot to mention that she had been in a league in the past, I'm sure that was not a purposeful omission :) ), she thought it would make sense to show me how she played minigolf.

I haven't played minigolf in maybe 20 years, and probably not more than 10 times in my life, but suffice it to say that butt was kicked, but it wasn't mine :)

oh, so close, but close doesn't count. So sad :)

nice little jump to hit the hole in one in the middle

Plea To Caltrans: Improve Your Communication

2011-03-27T15:00:00Z

Dear Caltrans,

This post is about your work around Tahoe, and what you can do to improve. First, I need to state that Caltrans folks who clear the roads day and night in sometimes horrid conditions, have a very hard job. In my experience with Tahoe, they actually do a good job with keeping roads open in bad conditions with the resources they have.

Yet, they could definitely do better. By that, I don't mean work harder, I'm pretty sure they already work hard during the big snow storms (especially the ones we had this year), I mean by improving communication.

In a nutshell, as much as you do a good job with roads, you do quite poorly with communication. This is partly why I wrote my "Tahoe Road Info for SR88 (kirkwood), US50 (South Lake Tahoe), and I80 (North Lake Tahoe) or making caltrans road reports more liveable" page. But my page is just making the online caltrans info a bit more useful, it does not fix underlying problems with how you communicate (or don't communicate in many cases).

Why the goals below are worth following

1. By increasing the frequency and standardizing the format of online updates, Caltrans could improve road safety by redirecting travelers towards the safest roads where Caltrans has the largest crew working.

2. A good example of providing realtime updates to a time sensitive real world situation is: http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html#map. This includes visualization and real-time social updates (if you had a twitter hash tag, then some drivers would probably update this info in real time for you!).

3. Your audience increasingly uses the desktop internet and mobile devices to get information, and this peaks during winter driving times (700x growth from baseline!).

4. Improve communication and increase driver safety, as per your mission statement on http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/paffairs/about/mission.htm

5. Not that your main goal should be to have a better web site that other states like Utah, or Nevada, but being far behind them is obviously a sign that things should be better. See for example:

http://511.commuterlink.utah.gov/tats.web.report

http://www.safetravelusa.com/nv/?map=Sacramento

6. Put an end to road user frustration and anger that were avoidable.

You don't want drivers to drive 2-3H around Carson Spur because they didn't know you'd actually open Carson Spur at 07:30 after having worked on it during the night.

You don't want for one of your employees to plain forget to change the road status for 88 to show that Carson Pass had re-opened at 05:00 that morning (road change status was delayed by 3.5 hours and too late for those going to kirkwood that day, causing monetary loss to kirkwood and frustration for users who had spent hours driving to South Lake just to go to Kirkwood).

You also don't want not to tell road users you're planning to open 80 in about 1h after having closed it for 8H, causing some to drive towards 50 (a long drive around), just to close 50 at Myers for 5 hours without even making any mention of this on your road status updates (another of your employees plain forgot to update the status that day it seems): one of my friends got home 6+ hours later than necessary, exhausted, just because you didn't provide him with useful and timely information (and of course, such a driver is much more likely to get into an accident as a result, and cause one of those roads to be closed further)

So, how do you get there?

Target Goals

Let me summarize my suggestions here:
1. Report tentative/planned status changes.
2. Report actual road status changes as quickly as possible.
3. Maintain a history of status changes, in addition to current status report.
4. Standard format for status reports (i.e. computer parsable) and a graphical map with summary view.
5. A blog like page where you tell us about the challenges you're facing with your job, like why you can't plow a road because of conditions or because your equipment is tied up elsewhere (that's just for extra points)

So, let's start with my #1 suggestion:

Caltrans: you should announce tentative road changes, and report road changes as quickly as practical, and reliably

To give you credit, I've seen two instances where you did over this ski season:

Once, I've seen you display on a sign on 88 'Carson Spur will close at 7:30' but that was not available online. In the end, due to bad snow, you actually closed at 7:00 and we didn't make it. Mind you, I'm not mad, I actually want you to give out forecast info even if it turns out not to be fully right (in that case, some cars did get avalanched on and had to be dug out of the snow, not exactly Caltrans' fault).

Now, I also have to state that that same day, when we drove around to Carson Pass and their sign at 50 and 89 said 'Carson Pass closed, no ETA' when you were working on it and it opened 30mn later.

Actually another time, I remember that you posted 'Spur will close at 13:00 for avalance control'. Ok, you did actually close it at least 15mn early so we didn't get out of kirkwood as a result, but eh, at least you tried.

Now, let's look at a sample of the many instances of what you've done badly with communication:

In my Carson Pass example above, we lost $300 for a condo at kirkwood we were not able to get to (we turned back and stayed in South Lake) when Caltrans was actually working on opening the Pass and the sign gave strong impressions that your guys had gone home for the night (it was midnight and snowing hard, so it wasn't an unreasonable conclusion).

In just one 10 day period, I noted 5 different examples where the Caltrans web site failed to note some road changes, or did it very late, 4 of them were just in 3 consecutive days (!).

Sunday March 20: hwy 50 was closed about 5H at Myers for avalanche control and maybe accidents, I have a friend who was stuck there and waited the entire time. It was NEVER announced on the caltrans web site.

Thursday March 24th: 50 closed at Twin Bridges around 23:00 due to an accident and was closed for almost 2H. It took 50mn for the Caltrans website to show that traffic was being held (not as bad, but still, 50mn is pretty slow).

Friday, March 25th: Carson pass on 88 apparently opened around 05:00 but was marked closed on the Caltrans web site until 08:30 (!). This really screwed kirkwood over because people went to Heavenly thinking the road was closed, when it actually had opened a long time ago. Caltrans eventually fixed the road status after phone calls from Kirkwood trying to get you to fix it. That's pretty sad.

Saturday, March 26th: Caltrans did a great job and opened Carson Spur at 07:30, but there was no way to know you were working on it. All the people going to Kirkwood that morning were not likely to just drive to the Spur on the off chance that it might magicallly open without having Caltrans at least give a hint you were working on it (the Spur has been closed for 3 consecutive days 2 or 3 times this season, so we're unlikely to just drive to it when it's closed now).

Saturday, March 26th, still, Carson Pass actually closed around 08:30 due to 2 Subarus spinning out (I was there). It was closed for almost 90mn, and there again there never was any notice on your status web page. Quite unfortunate to say the least.

Caltrans, you work hard on keeping roads open, or re-opening them, but I beg you: you *really* need to communicate what you're doing.
Of course, you can't be everywhere all the time, use us, drivers, on roads that have cell service at least (won't help with hwy88, but at least it will for others), and use us to report up to date problems, accidents and road closures online quicker than you can when applicable.

Caltrans blog for each road

Here's my suggestion to you Caltrans: for each road you should have a blog-like page announcing what your plans are for a given road. You obviously have guys who figure out whether they're going to try and re-open Carson Spur on 88, or how long you think you'll keep it open. You also know if 50 and 80 are in such a bad shape that you had to send all your equipment there and therefore you won't be able to work on 88 anytime soon. So:
Blog it
I'm not trying to get you to go social because it's cool. I don't care much for facebook or twitter, but please find a way, any way, to let us know what your intentions are. I'm not asking that you tell us that you'll reopen the Spur at 08:22 tomorrow morning, I'm just asking for:

tell us if the road or conditions are so bad that it's unsafe for you to work.

tell us that your equipment for 88 had to be diverted towards 50 and you won't be able to reopen 88 anytime soon if that is the case (I'm assuming that's the only valid reason for 88 to be closed for 3 days in a row during a bad storm. If that's not the case, save us from assumptions, and tell us the actual reasons).

do your best to tell us that you're planning on closing 50 or 88 at a certain time for pre-emptive avalanche control when you have such a plan, or for 88/Spur, just to tell us when you think you'll be closing it for the night, or even over a day during bad storms.

tell us each time if a road is closed for snow or an accident (sometimes you do, thanks). If you have any tentative ETA, give it (you konw whether you're waiting for a snowplow or a tow truck and whether they're 30mn away or 2h away). We're not going to hate you if you get the ETA wrong, but you'll help us big time if you say "we're plowing and hope to reopen within 2H", or "two cars have to be dugged out, all tow trucks are already busy, it will take a while". Just give us all information at your fingertips and your best guess. A wrong guess is better than no info at all.

for heaven's sakes, if you got your crews up at 04:00 to reopen Carson Pass, or you have crews working through the night trying to reopen Carson Spur for the saturday morning crowd, then tell us you're doing that so that people can decide to chance a drive to the Spur and wait it out if it's not quite open yet. You close the Spur for 3 days at a time sometimes, so you can't expect that we'll just get up at 04:00 and drive up there on the off chance that you might open it if you don't tell us that you're actually planning on doing so.

Similarly if you opened Carson Pass at 05:00, don't have one person in an office not doing their job ruin it for all of us by not posting until 3h30 later (unless it's a problem where it never even got radioded to your office after it was done). Example from this case:
IS REOPENED FROM KIRKWOOD (AMADOR CO) TO 5 MI WEST OF PICKETTS JCT (ALPINE CO) AT 0828 HRS ON 3/25/11

Also, the reason why I mentioned a blog-like page, is because it's worthwhile for us to know what you've done in the last days or the last week. It's even useful when you close a road to know how long ago you closed it: for instance when you closed 50 for avalanche control as I was driving up, it was useful for me to know (through my own page, not yours), that you had closed it 1H ago and guess that it'd probably reopen 2H after it was closed, which it did.

I did that part for you by scraping your web page and keeping history for me and others, but you really should do this yourselves. See: http://marc.merlins.org/snow/roadinfo/sr88

More user friendly as well as computer parsable status reports

Another reason why I created this page http://marc.merlins.org/snow/tahoe_caltrans.shtml is because how are we supposed to know where "Peddler Hill" or "Nayak" (really Nyak) are? Telling us a road status between points that most road users don't actually know, isn't useful.
Would it be so hard to give us a graphical map like what Nevada DOT tries to do by parsing your free form text data: http://www.safetravelusa.com/nv/?map=Sacramento ?
I personally have 4 months worth of data from you, and you can tell it's free form text entered by a human. There are some patterns but really it seems to depend on the operator and it's nothing that's easy to parse for computer for any kind of automation. As result, Nevada DOT has even showed incorrect road status for California on the graphical map because they couldn't parse your data properly.

What should you do? Well, I recommend that part of your reports be made out of drop downs so that the format is guaranteed to be the same at all times, and then the operator can add free form text that is useful to humans at the end without compromoizing the computer parsable section at the beginning. As an example to others, those are examples I've seen:

IS CLOSED 1.5 MI WEST OF KYBURZ
IS CLOSED FROM TWIN BRIDGES TO MEYERS
IS CLOSED TO WESTBOUND TRAFFIC AT 4.8 MI WEST OF STRAWBERRY
IS CLOSED FROM ECHO SUMMIT TO MEYERS
IS CLOSED TO EASTBOUND TRAFFIC FROM COLFAX (PLACER) TO THE NEVADA STATE LINE

So, we have 'AT X', 'From X to Y', 'TO traffic AT X', and even 'TO traffic FROM X TO Y', and probably a few more. Then a road can be CLOSED or have 'TRAFFIC HELD', which quite frankly are the same in real life, but you seem to use one or the other depending on the road for some reason.
Also sometimes you send a 'CLOSED AT 21:22' and then replace it with 'CLOSED' 5mn later. Sometimes you never send the 'AT XX:YY', so computer algorithms can't do much with data that is randomly missing.

My point is that all this could be simplified and be made more consistent. Please do what you can there.

Conclusion

Thanks for doing a lot to keep our roads open as much as possible during bad weather. Your Tahoe staff does do pretty incredible work. But please: let us know what you're doing, and maybe even give us some insight about how you're working on the roads and what you're dealing with.

This was a busy year, especially for March

Thanks,
Marc

These are the droids you are looking for :)

2011-03-23T15:00:00Z

Thanks to Raphael, I now have a fairly nice collection, and they fit quite nicely on the Kuro :)
(yes, they're cute :) ).

Quick Visit of Computer History Museum, Revolution Expo

2011-03-02T16:00:00Z

The team I work in had an outing at the computer history museum and we got to visit the new expo. We didn't have enough time to go through all of it carefully, but what I was able to see was well worth it.

It was actually quite cool to see things like the original Merlin video game my dad had gotten us as a child, and the microcomputers

original game of pong

Eh, our Amstrad CPC 464 is there :)

The craig 1 is beautiful

[rigimg:1024:118*|]

Apple 1

Oh my, the French TO7 70

They even showed the French Minitel

See more images for Quick Visit of Computer History Museum, Revolution Expo

Thank you Dinner from Mats from Travieso Winery

2010-12-14T16:00:00Z

Jennifer has been volunteering at Travieso Winery for over a year now, and along with other regular volunteers, they apparently helped sell a lot of wine and club subscriptions at open house events (apparently Jennifer is a good salesperson when she's selling good stuff ;).

Mats, one of the two Travieso co-founders, made a fantastic dinner for us (especially considering that all he had in the winery was a microwave and a portable propane burner).

Although, while the dinner was actually really good, it was only second to the fantastic wine selection, including a 1861 Madeira (!), a very nice 1970 Port and 1981 chateau d'Yquem Sauternes and a couple of Moët & Chandon Dom Pérignon from his personal collection (not counting a nice flight of Travieso wines). It's not every day that you get to drink some of those.

A Big thank you Mats for sharing all this with us.

Mats moved some crates away and set a very nice table

Menu, and can't believe it wines

1861 Madeira, whoa!

Madeira

Mushroom Broth with foie gras

many yummy cheeses and fruits

1970 Port and 1981 chateau d'Yquem Sauterne

Mats' speech, click for video

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Angry Birds

2010-12-09T16:00:00Z

Those birds are angry, and yet strangely cute :)
Jennifer likes hers :)

Real time Caltrans road updates for Tahoe and graphical reporting points for hwy 88, 89, 50 and i80

2010-12-05T16:00:00Z

Anyone going to Tahoe and checking road status from Caltrans knows how 1980's their system is (manually entered ALL CAPS 6 BIT ASCII UPDATES, including spelling mistakes on reporting points).
I've also found it frustrating at times that there is no history of road status updates.

So, I wrote a script that keeps tracks of all status updates and sends Emails when they happen, as well maps out the reporting points that Caltrans uses for it reports.

This is all on my Tahoe Road info page.

Babylon 5

2010-11-06T15:00:00Z

So, I saw B5 back when it was showing on TV now almost 15 years ago. I remember enjoying it back then and had fond memories of it. Recently one of my coworkers was selling is DVD boxed set and I figured it would be a good idea to just pick it up and watch it all over again. Note that I'm a good public, I forget stuff quickly, so I mostly rediscovered the show after having mostly forgotten everything that happened.

After just starting 2 months ago, Jennifer and I just finished watching Babylon V, all 5 seasons and movies: that's 110 episodes and 6 movies (not counting the Crusade ones that come after the timeline as shown in this episode list). In the process I also read all the comments and episode details on the midwinter site, which definitely takes a while, but add dimention to the episodes.

Sleeping in Light, the last episode of the Series was just gut wrenching. I had seen it before but it's been 10 years so I had forgotten by now. I don't typically get emotional when watching TV/movies, but this one really got to me again.

Those who know me will probably get tired of my saying it, but I haven't seen a SciFi show that has been as good since then, and I'm not sure I'll get to see one now, as JMS mentions TV studios just make it near impossible for good writers and producers to have their way (that's apparently also why he stopped his spinoff crusade half way through). Unfortunately that's what happened to the Spinoff Crusade: JMS cancelled it after the TV network started messing with it/him too much.

It's a damn shame if you ask me, because almost all SciFi TV nowadays has been crap compared to this (Caprica, I'm talking to you, but you're not the only one).

The highlights that still make B5 the best SciFi TV show today:

While the first 1.5 seasons were a bit slow, once the arcs got going, I really loved the suspense and developing story back in the days where most other shows just reset to zero after each episode

The CGI wasn't great at the beginning because the technology was just starting to be usable then, but it got spectacular in the 3rd and 4th seasons. I still really enjoyed the beautiful battlescenes with ships, and colors and in all directions, they're just spectacular.

Chris Franke's music was and still is awesome. There isn't anything else to say about that. I have his works that came out on CD, they make great listening.

JMS's writing and planning of the show 5 years ahead was just spectacular. I remember the first episode I happened to catch on TV being the war without end #2 (i.e. when they find B4 and a lot of stuff started 3 seasons earlier all ties in together). It was a big WTF at the time, it was only later that I got to appreciate how skillful it was when I saw it in sequence later.

Anyway, I both really enjoyed this, and I'm also saddened that it's over again and that nothing close to be comparable has been shown since then (Battlestar Galactica wasn't even close in my opinion, portions of Stargate came closer, but never as good with vision years ahead and impressive cross-references. Firefly could have been good had it been given the chance, but just like Crusade it was killed by stupid studio executives as part of a power play :( Heroes was better, but it was still written mostly one season at a time).

I re-watched 'the lost tales' that came out in 2007 and according to wikipedia, even though the sales of the direct to DVD were not bad, it happened around the writers strike and then Warner Brothers just refused to put up more than a measly 2M for the next episode, and it therefore never happened (the first one had awesome CG, but you could totally tell there were no sets at all and it was all green screen due to lack of budget).

Oh well, I should instead focus on what was done, and how enjoyable it is, even if it's hard to forget how networks and executives have done a lot of damage to B5 and other shows.

Ubuntu Maverick: Plymouth Is the Worst Thing That Happened To Linux

2010-10-24T15:00:00Z

So, linux upgrades can always be a bit painful: software gets upgraded, things change (not always for the better), and there is not always a lot of (or any) QA on upgrade paths, so things do break.
There is nothing new there, I've been doing this for 15 years, so I'm used to it.

Just to say that I'm not picking on plymouth, other random things broke during my recent upgrades, and I fixed it (including Xorg switching to kernel modesetting, and requiring i915.modeset=1). Usually it's just a matter of googling for error messages and applying the answers.
(plymouth is a new 'feature' that hides all the boot messages by default, replaces them with a splash screen and tries to capture text output from the boot and log it, which it still does improperly as of today, including by dropping them if there are too many).

A few release backs, the switch to upstart was a bit painful. I can't say I was super thrilled with it, especially when at the time documentation and debugging info was sparse. This has however been fixed (the documentation that is), and while there are still bugglets here and there (statd won't start properly on my laptop), at least my boot doesn't randomly hang on networking dependencies anymore ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/499361 ). But the main part is that I'm willing to be more patient and understanding with upstart because it is a clear win for linux: it is good progress on functionality.

And this brings up to the trainwreck otherwise known as plymouth.

So, you might ask, what is so wrong with plymouth? Well, how about this:

Plymouth changes some very core parts of the system, and was rolled out by over eager people way before it was finished. If Red Hat does that on Fedora which is used for experimentation on mostly willing users, great. That canonical puts this in Long Term Support Lucid in the half baked state that it was: very lame (6 months ago, I upgraded my mythtv to lucid to pick up new mythtv packages and their dependencies. Needless to say that it didn't go so well, and that plymouth really sucked and made my life miserable then: http://marc.merlins.org/perso/linux/post_2010-04-25_Ubuntu-Lucid-and-Mythtv-0_23-Upgrade_-Please-Don_t-Become-Red-Hat.html ).

As a result, I entirely skipped lucid on my main laptop and waited for maverick with some dim hopes that it would get a bit better. Long story short: not significantly so.

Plymouth is still mostly undocumented as of today. man plymouth and man plymouthd still return nothing. Searching for 'plymouth ubuntu' or 'plymouth' on ubuntu.com does not return anything useful. What do you think I'd be wanting?

If you are going to be significantly changing all our systems, you'd better post a good rationale as to why the change is good and desirable. This was done for upstart and even mostly for network-manager (nevermind the many problems that network-manager had for 18 months after being pushed to all before it was mostly useable and stable). The cynic will point out that lack of rationale for the switch to plymouth is that said rationale is very dubious.
If you are going to be pushing a big change to all our system (hell, it's only how they boot, how they fsck drives, and how you can get to single user mode, or not), you'd better bad a page that explains how it works, how you debug it, and how you work around it if you have to. Why is it that even getting 'noplymouth' as a boot option is such a highly guarded secret apparently?
If you really need to put a multiplexer in the boot system, which is a big change, make baby steps: add it while keeping text mode booting by default for at least existing installs. Debug the hell out of it (it looks to me that as text mode booting as you can get with plymouth is a very little tested code path, unless the entire code is as buggy still as what I experienced in text mode).
Who thought that they were going to make friends with us by forcing that utterly useless "you don't need to see your boot, it might have useful debug info that might be useful to you, we can't have that". Why is it that is is so fscking hard to turn off plymouth boot message stealing? Even after turning off the graphical crap, you still get a useless one in text mode spinning around colored text dots. Really ?!?!
noplymouth INIT_VERBOSE=yes at the lilo prompt seems to do it for me right now, but where on earth is that documented?

So, that's really my beef with canonical on this one: I care much much more about having a system I can upgrade mostly safely like I can in debian, than this graphical crap that is downward hurtful to my system. I really don't care about how windows-like you can make linux look like (up to an un-debuggable and opaque boot), I'm really not interested.
Ubuntu/Canonical, stop the madness, please. Do impose some standards on your eager developers who think they came up with the last 'this is so cool' thing to add to linux, especially when it affects essential parts of the system.
I think I'm also specifically bitter about plymouth in ubuntu because its presence could have been made optional in init scripts (Red Hat even had such support in their init scripts), but in ubuntu "it's obviously good enough for everybody, so eat it and shut up".

For more details on what went wrong this time with plymouth, if you are curious:

on top of being hard to turn off, plymouth still broke my custom 'ask password from the command line' code in my initrd for cryptpart (by disconnecting stdin from my shell script it seems, thank you very much for that). I just re-opened my filed bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/665789 which was closed as invalid (sure, it's ok to break cryptsetup and it's invalid to complain about it since plymouth is obviously necessary (it's not, I'm booting without it right now); perfect, so the problem must be with me, not plymouth; and properly documented (all those people all over google searches asking how to turn it off or generally kill plymouth are probably just a statistical error).

I had a problem with /usr, apparently because the system has been rebooting without unmounting partitions cleanly (some other bug probabably). When I asked to be dropped to a prompt to debug, I got a shell where /usr was mounted and where I could't umount it (fuser -kvm did not help at that point).

some other plymouth bug stopped me from getting to real single user mode: I got both a single user console and a second process still asking me for my root password, both stealing keystrokes at the same time. End result was that I couldn't type anything.

at the next boot, while I was still trying to get a single user prompt, plymouth just answered fsck for me that it was ok to fsck -f -y /usr and scroll many pages of vital errors that I could not capture and that were lost (a few lines ended up in /var/log/boot.log, but not enough to be useful). In my book, plymouth actually caused data loss here, thank you (thankfully I have backups).

I could go on (it does go on), but that's long enough, you get the idea....

As sad as it is, and with people like Steve Langasek ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/665789 ) who are now probably understandably defensive about plymouth, likely due to many complaints like mine, instead of doing the right thing and making it really optional, writing a rationale on ubuntu.com as to why it's there and why we should love it, and especially documenting the crap out of it, I'm now dubious as to whether ubuntu/canonical will get a clue about this and whether I should just switch back to Debian where I haven't seen much insanity like this...

Backyard 'Wildlife'

2010-10-01T15:00:00Z

Ok, it's not 'real' wildlife, but it's still fun to see a few animals in your backyard.

Squirrels like to run around our fence and trees:

Then, we have little lizards everywhere (well, big and small). The small ones are easy to catch :)

grippy claws :)

And we just started seeing hummingbirds. Those are cool:

We've also heard racoons at night, and I was able to snap a couple of pictures. Thankfully they don't seem too bold and too much of a pest like we've heard they can be:

Ah, but the subject of pests brings us to gophers. Those fuckers have been making swiss cheese out of our lawn. Since repellents don't help, I've been using smokers in their tunnels, and poisnned worms they're supposed to eat. That seems to have helped with the problem, but I think we still have a couple left.

We also have these crazy birds that come attack our windows from time:

An Evening With Paul Watson from Sea Shepherd

2010-08-27T15:00:00Z

It was by total dumb luck that Paul Watson from Sea Shepherd was talking at the whale museum on the small island of San Juan between Washington State and Canada where I had flown with our local flight club the previous day (San Juan has a large population of visiting whales and established pods of Orcas).

Paul has been fighting Japanese whalers with other volunteers and the financial backing of the animal planet for which he does a show: Whale Wars. While they've had success fighting the whalers and making it less worthwhile and risky for them to do their so called "research job" (of killing countless whales), the fight is not over.
He also explained that the Japanese are in the business of killing species of tuna and other fish that they overfish and stash as gold reserves in deep freezers so that they can sell the last specimens at super high prices (some blue fin tunas have already gone on the japanese fish market for $250,000 a piece).
Japan has also gotten in trouble after the making of The Cove in Taiji where the local Japanese fisherman would just slaughter dolphins by the hundreds because they didn't want them to eat the remaining fish that they are trying to fish too: in other words they were slaughtering dolphins because they were competition. On top of that, they were also feeding some of those very mercury tainted dolphins to their own school children who were getting mercury poisoning as a result (and they were also selling tainted dolphin meat on markets pretending it was tuna).

Back to whales, he mentioned that whales have much larger brains and neocortexes than we do, and are likely more intelligent than us. From what I had learned earlier about their communication and behaviour on a kayaking and whale watch tour, Orcas were not only highly social, but each pod had their own language, and also a separate language to communicate between different pods. From what I read, there is no conclusive evidence on direct correlation between brain size and raw intelligence, but most people seem to agree that the few mammals with bigger brains than humans are pretty intelligent. Obviously, there is a moral issue with killing mammals that are from fairly to highly intelligent, even if you're not vegan.

Separately, he talked about big oil companies getting away with major spills due to the money trail ending at governments. As a result, he gave examples of them being accomplices and muffling big investigations by the EPA or other organizations where people got away with fines as opposed to jail time for extreme negligence. He did mention, and he is right, that a set of big corporations is definitely more interested in short term profits than big the big picture, be it for oil or overfishing. After all, all they care about is the next quarter's stock price, or making a good profit at the next fish market sale.

To be honest, I don't know the greenpeace folks much, but I always had an opinion of them that some were kind of non very reasonable fanatics. After having listened to Paul's 45mn presentation, I found him to be a quite reasonable guy and found him pretty convincing: most people would have issue killing and eating their cats and dogs, and they should feel the same about at least very intelligent dolphins or even more intelligent whales.
For the record, Paul doesn't think very highly of greenpeace which he left many years ago and is more into fighting any whaling in whichever ways that are still legal.

In the meantime, the more they can stop things like those, or the Danish killing dozens to hundreds of whales every year, "for fun", the better.

Hospital Prices

2010-08-22T15:00:00Z

After a totally ludicrous $4000 bill the one time I was stupid enough to go to the ER for 4 stitches, a shot, and a few bandaids, I was not optimistic on the hospital bill for my recent surgery.
At hand was: a 5H surgery with related staff and supplies, 1 night in the ICU (which I'm not quite sure I needed since I never was in a critical state, but I suppose better be safe than sorry if money is no issue), and one night in a regular hospital room (all in all I stayed a bit less than 48H).

So, what was the bill? Indeed, it was over $93,000 for just the hospital (my surgeon bills separately, and I may also get a separate anesthesiologist bill and potential lab fees).
While I realize that world class surgeons should get paid for their skill, and hospitals don't run just on good wishes and fresh water, they still cost over 5 times what I'd pay in France for similar service (minus maybe things that would be considered unnecessary).

Now the "fun" part is where the insurance has pre negotiated prices and decides that things are really worth less than what the bill says. From there it goes from $93k to $16k!
Now, $16k is not cheap, but feels not as unreasonable as the first bill. What's disheartening though is that it's likely people without insurance who get billed full price and maybe get a measly 25% discount in the end.
I don't work in a hospital, but I really do wonder how they get to quote such outlandish prices and what happens to people who don't have insurance that will refuse to pay their rate and negotiates the prices way down.

Oh, if you add "supplies", it adds up to $26k billed. I really want to see what supplies I got for $26K worth.
Even over $1650's worth of drugs is steep, but of course that starts with drug companies charging pretty ridiculous prices (which Cigna mostly fully paid).

Anyway, there is a lot of things to fix in the medical industry, but I suppose that's no news to everyone :-(

In the meantime, I can thank Cigna PPO for making this experience mostly a non event financially for me.

BestOf Old VA Pictures

2010-08-14T23:52:00Z

I went through my old pictures at VA Linux, and selected a few "best of" category.

It's a good trip in memory lane if you'd like to indulge :)

Beer Bashes:

Funny thing, I still have those two weapons in my cube:

Eh, we actually built and shipped stuff:

Oh yeah, that:

classic T-shirt:

Chris was always meant to be a penguin :)

Walt:

We're not alcoholics :)

IPO:

Can't argue with the logic:

Don Dugger, classic:

San, my man:

Getting hardware from the trash:

Allhands:

Funny slide:

new buildings:

who's the ice cream man?

Xmas:

Jeremy, you make me horny:

Steve, the master cook:

Chris Antilla/and Theresa Marie, Chili Judges:

For those who were there, our scooter and chair race around the track:

(I won the chair race by the way :) )

And in no time, Engineering was let go, Walt doing BBQ for us:

Josh, and his many hawaiin shirts:

We didn't quite come close:

Morale was high:

VA hemoraging staff:

Aaah, Leanne :)

You look good Steve:

Oh man, Brian was stoned big time

Oh, well, maybe it wasn't just him:

Hair to impress:

Jeremy, I think of you at night still, and I wish I didn't :)

Ah, our new CFO, she was cool, I liked her. Too bad she picked the wrong company:

Yes, TM, you look good too :)

Classic Linuxworld:

And that's all folks, fun memories, good times :)

The rest of BestOf is here and all the pictures are there.

My House is Sold

2010-08-01T15:00:00Z

My old house closed last thursday, and Chen-Chen Wu did an awesome job fixing up the house before selling, getting it nice and pretty, and finding the best buyers available and the best price for now.

I met the buyers today (and old retired couple downsizing from Palo Alto and getting cash out) to help them setup the phone lines via the patch panel and their DSL modem (I have DSL freqs split outside and sent in the wiring closet on a special plug, something they'd not have figured out themselves). I also gave them a primer on X10 lighting and programming, and it was a bit more tech than they were used to, but they were happy.

I know I could have kept it as an investment, but that was just more hassle than I was willing to deal with. I have enough other things that can take my time already :)

We're sorry we missed you, or overachievement at USPS

2010-07-27T15:00:00Z

I was home today, and get to to the mailbox after seeing the USPS truck. In there, I find a "we're sorry we missed you" notice from that day. I ran after the USPS truck and eventually caught it.

The guy eventually admits that he never rang the bell or went to my door to check whether I was there to sign for his registered package. He just figured no one would be there on a weekday, put the notice in my mailbox, and drove off.

Good job USPS, way to go!

Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco

2010-06-27T15:00:00Z

Well, since I happened to be in SF already, although I spent the morning at the Science Museum, I had no excuse not to join the parade mid-way. I actually managed to drive down from the Golden Gate Park and find street parking within walking distance without getting stuck in a non moving stream of cars.

I can now see how it actually takes forever since after arriving about 2H late, the parade was around group #140, and still going strong. I basically joined from the end, by civic center where everyone was ending up, and worked my way back up the parade, still in time to see some nice floats, including my coworkers from Google. Yeah!

Street Blocks filled around Civic Center

Pick your color, shape, and size :)

Most companies were present

Although Gold's Gym did win by having the best male bodies :)

My coworkers

Where's Waldo? :)

See more images for Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco

California Academy of Science in San Francisco

2010-06-27T15:00:00Z

I had a few hours to kill in San Francisco while Jennifer was volunteering at a wine event, so I went to the California Academy of Science, which was on my list of places to go one day.

To be honest, as a science museum, it's a bit undewhelming: I got through it in about 3H and that included their planetarium show which was more an Imax movie (although it was actually a good one).

For the rest, it was more a museum on animals of many kinds, which was interesting. It was however lacking on sience in general: computers, optics, genetics, medicinal sciences, math, physics, computers and so forth. On the upside their aquarium was good.

the biosphere was reasonably good

for people who don't dive, lots of nice things you'd see during dives

Anyway, it was an ok few hours, but not the best science museum I've seen in the US, I expected a bit more after having seen some in St Louis, Portland, or other places. See more images for California Academy of Science in San Francisco

My house, for sale

2010-06-14T15:00:00Z

This replaces my older post about my house going for sale. I had put it couple of years renting it. I never quite wanted to be a landlord but the 2 year wait allowed for the market badness to flush itself somewhat.
Unfortunately, even 2 years later the market has barely recovered and it's really cheap considering it used to be valued $700k, but for tax reasons and not wanting to manage/landlord a house any longer, I decided to put it for sale after my last tenants just left.

I hadn't gotten around to post pictures of my house after it had been staged, so it's done now.

Chen-Chen really did a fantastic job taking the place over and getting it ready for selling in a record time.

A few are picked here:

The virtual tour is sweet (I recommend that for as long as it's up):
http://www.tourfactory.com/623341

and the MLS listing for whatever it's up too: http://www.mlslistings.com/Default.aspx?pp=-1&pg=0&idx=1&l=19$978330$RES

But for posterity, here's the youtube video made from the virtual tour and embedded in this page (this will stay forever since it's a local copy 100% served from my server, gotta be careful with WEB 2.0 nowadays):

After the original post, 2 weeks later, we got several offers and I'm currently in contract with an old couple downgrading from a more expensive house in Palo Alto. I'm kind of relying on their house closing to happen for them to close with me, but they offered more than other folks as a way to make up for it, so I agreed to take the slightly extra risk.

New Compact High Zoom Camera: Panasonic DMC-ZS7 (TZ10) vs Sony Cybershot DSC-HX5 vs Canon PowerShot SX210 IS vs Samsung HZ35W/WB650 vs Ricoh CX3

2010-06-06T15:00:00Z

I have to replace my Panasonic DMC TZ5 camera as I need to buy a water housing, and at $300-ish, I'm not buying one for a 2 year old camera. Also, I had been wishing for a built in GPS in my camera since I am tired of having to geotag my pictures after the fact (it's not that hard, but it's time consuming, see my geotagging page.

I found out that Panasonic had fulfilled my wish and did come out with a new camera that had GPS geotagging built in a compact high zoom camera, and that a few other companies did too. I spent a lot of hours finding and reading all the reviews and deciding which camera would work for me.

Summary and ranking of each camera

Panasonic DMC TZ10 (aka ZS7 in the US) is my top pick for the good zoom that starts at 25mm, GPS geotagging with GPS fixes that are kept in the background when the camera is off, and the important diving case availability.

Sony Cybershot DSC-HX5 came as a close second: the zoom wasn't as big (only 10X), but its GPS would also log altitude and compass heading and its optics and picture processing are better than the Panasonic. Sony also finally wisened up and added SDHC support instead of their stupid memory sticks. Unfortunately, there are no underwater/diving cases for it and none planned that I could find.

Canon PowerShot SX210 IS likely was interesting with its 14X zoom, but it has a stupid pop up flash, non stellar pictures, no GPS, and no underwater/diving case available.

Samsung HZ35W/WB650 was an interesting new camera that had a 15X zoom (!), GPS support, but no diving case, bad support from Samsung, substandard picture quality, and is somehow missing an orientation sensor to tag picture orientation (!). Too bad because the bigger battery, lesser OLED screen draw and 15X zoom would have been nice.

Ricoh CX3 is last, and I guess least. It comes with a 10X zoom, no underwater/diving case availability, no manual controls and no GPS. You can't even zoom while taking a video. It likely takes fairly good pictures but its lack of features just put it last.

Raw notes gathered on each camera

Panasonic DMC TZ10 (aka ZS7 in the US)

links and quotes:

http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Panasonic_Lumix_DMC_TZ10_ZS7

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/panasonic/dmc_zs7-review

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2010/02/26/Panasonic-Lumix-DMC-TZ10/p1

http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-DMC-ZS3-Digital-Stabilized-Silver/product-reviews/B001QFZMD8/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

"I learned that Panasonic decided to include a restriction in their latest firmware version (1.2) that only allows the camera to operate with one of their $50 batteries."

http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Panasonic_Lumix_DMC_TZ7_ZS3/verdict.shtml

"Panasonic's Intelligent Auto is one of the best on the market, having an uncanny ability to figure out what you're trying to take"
"In most respects, the ZS7 is better than the ZS3 that it replaces, offering manual controls, a built-in GPS, improved image stabilization, faster autofocus, enhanced image sharpening"
"That brings us to image quality, which was kind of a let-down. If you keep the ISO low, you'll get pretty nice results from the ZS7 -- for the most part. The camera exposes photos accurately, though it tends to clip highlights easily. Colors look good, as does sharpness, especially if you've got Intelligent Resolution turned on. Purple fringing is automatically removed by the camera, and barrel distortion is removed as well"

http://avc-cs.panasonic.net/faq/1033/doc/html/dsc/en/index_dmc_tz10_zs7.html

Quick specs/notes:

diving case: YES

12X zoom: 25-300mm

GPS built in for geotagging BUT only lat and long.

fastest GPS aquisition time.

zoom during video, infinite video shooting

manual controls: yes

faulty red eye reduction?

Sony Cybershot DSC-HX5

links and quotes:

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_hx5v-review

http://cameralabs.com/reviews/Sony_Cyber-shot_DSC_HX5

"this proprietary approach means you'll be forced to buy potentially expensive accessories from Sony alone. Ultimately we'd have preferred standard USB, TV and HDMI outputs, like its rival, the Panasonic TZ10 / ZS7."

http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Panasonic_Lumix_DMC_TZ10_ZS7/verdict.shtml

"The 1080i video coupled with 10fps burst shooting gives the HX5 two key advantages over the Panasonic, and while it may not display the name of locations on-screen, it does record altitude and compass data. Depending on your requirements, these could outweigh the TZ10 / ZS7's benefits"

http://cameralabs.com/reviews/Sony_Cyber-shot_DSC_HX5/verdict.shtml

"Moving on, Sony makes a big deal about the low light capabilities of its 'Exmor R' CMOS sensor, claiming high sensitivity and low noise. Unfortunately there was little evidence of superiority in our tests though, with the HX5 suffering from the relatively high levels of noise reduction we've become used-to from Sony with smearing of fine detail. Like most compacts the best results are had below 400 ISO, and side-by-side against the Panasonic TZ10 / ZS7 in our High ISO Noise results page, there was certainly no advantage to the Sony. Sure the HX5's images contained less visible noise, but this again was due to overly aggressive (and non-adjustable) noise reduction rather than a cleaner image. That said, the HX5's unique Handheld Twilight and Anti Motion Blur modes delivered a genuine advantage over shooting in Program at higher sensitivities."

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_hx5v-review

"When you're ready to charge the HX5V's battery, just pop it into the included charger. And then be prepared to wait, as this is one of the slower chargers on the market. A typical charge takes 4.5 hours, with a full charge taking a whopping 5.5 hours. If this becomes a problem, you might want to consider buying the fast charger listed below."

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_hx5v-review/using

"If you compare these images with those from the Panasonic ZS7, you can see the different approaches taken to noise reduction. Panasonic leaves the grainy noise behind, while Sony smudges the heck out of it. I'd rather have the grain and remove the noise myself using something like NeatImage, but that's a subjective thing. Regardless, neither the DSC-HX5V nor the DMC-ZS7 produce very good photos in these situations, especially at ISO 400 and above."

Quick specs/notes:

diving case: NO

10X zoom: 25-250mm

GPS with lat, lon, altitude and compass

1080i video, zoom during video

29mn video limit

zoom during filming

very nice built in panorama compositing by swaying camera left to right

smile detection

10fps burst mode for 10 frames

does support SDHC (but not SDXC)

HDR mode which helps a bit for contrast in low light

better picture quality than TZ10:

http://cameralabs.com/reviews/Sony_Cyber-shot_DSC_HX5/sample_images.shtml
http://cameralabs.com/reviews/Panasonic_Lumix_DMC_TZ10_ZS7/sample_images.shtml
and http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_hx5v-review/using
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/panasonic/dmc_zs7-review/using

Canon PowerShot SX210 IS

links and quotes:

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/canon/powershot_sx210-review

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/news/2010/02/10/Canon-Launches-New-Compact-Cameras/p2

http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Canon_PowerShot_SX210_IS/verdict.shtml

"PowerShot SX210 IS resolving slightly finer detail than the Lumix TZ10 / ZS7, which in turn slightly out-resolves the Cyber-shot HX5"
"set the SX210 IS to its 'burst' mode of one frame every 1.4 seconds"
"Unfortunately, it also has frustrating ergonomics, a weak flash, average performance (at best), and photo quality that could be better."

Quick specs/notes:

diving case: NO

14X zoom: 28-392 mm

NO GPS

zoom during video

stupid flash that pops out for every picture

Samsung HZ35W/WB650

links and quotes:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/1001/10011903hz35whz30w.asp

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2010/06/03/Samsung-WB650/p1

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/read_opinion_text.asp?prodkey=samsung_hz35w&opinion=45152

"GPS is so slow to acquire a signal (even in wide open ground) that it makes it all but useless for giving a location to travel photos. You cannot even store the last position acquired. If I am going to have to use Flickr or Picasa to geo tag my pics I would not have spent on a useless function like GPS." "Contact with Samsung regarding the GPS and maps got no usefiull answer and obviously no interest in users comments/problems."

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-HZ35W-Digital-compact-supported/product-reviews/B0036RBEFE/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_3?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addThreeStar

"The camera has no orientation sensor to tell which way you are holding it, so you have to manually rotate all your pictures."

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2010/06/03/Samsung-WB650/p3

"At lower ISO settings it's certainly not a patch on the superb low-ISO results of the TZ10, but at 400 ISO and higher there's really not much in it. If only Samsung could sort out its image processing, Panasonic and the other manufacturers would be in real trouble."

Quick specs/notes:

diving case: NO

15X zoom: 24-360mm

GPS can show location on maps downloaded in sd card

zoom during video

no orientation sensor for pictures (!)

charges the battery in the camera over USB port

non standard USB cable

big battery and better life with AMOLED screen

Ricoh CX3

links and quotes:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2010/02/23/Ricoh-CX3/p2

"Unlike its soon-to-be arch rival the Panasonic TZ10 the CX3 has no manual exposure controls"

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2010/02/23/Ricoh-CX3/p4

Quick specs/notes:

diving case: NO

10.7x zoom: 28-300mm

no GPS

back illuminated CMOS sensor

no zoom during video

no manual controls

HDR mode which helps a bit for contrast in low light

5fps burst mode

Ubuntu Lucid and Mythtv 0.23 Upgrade, Please Don't Become Red Hat

2010-04-25T15:00:00Z

Summary from the post below, about why plymouth is the worst thing to have happend to ubuntu so far:

it can't be removed and it can't be turned off.
when booting with --verbose INIT_VERBOSE=true, plymouth still starts in text mode and writes useless progress dots on my screen that prevent me from seeing the debugging I need. Not only I can't remove it, but I can't even seem to stop it from spamming my screen :(
plymouth is not finished, it SEGVs and requires a very recent kernel with devtmpfs or the system won't boot at all (!). Many people can't just upgrade to the latest kernel, especially on servers (in this case the forced kernel upgrade forced me to upgrade lirc which is in turn broken in lucid. Some servers come with drivers that don't yet work on recent kernels; sad but still a fact of life).
like network-manager or upstart when they were added to ubuntu, there is virtually no useful debugging info on how to deal with this new system and how to remove/bypass it if it fails badly (which it does). By comparison, when RH introduced /etc/rc.d back in 1995 (yes, a while ago), they had a document explaining why it was better than rc.local, how it worked and how to debug problems.

In a nutshell, plymouth adds absolutely no functionality I need whatsoever and makes me want to stab ubuntu with something long and sharp because of how much of a pain in the ass it is and how much in the way it gets. It cost me many hours of painful and otherwise unnecessary debugging where I could hardly debug because of plymouth itself.
(upstart can be a pain for debugging too, but at least faster parallel booting is a good improvement, so I'll suck it up).

Of all things, if canonical only had 2 release requirements:

brand new shiny things should be optional and easy to remove/work without

they absolutely MUST have detailed information on how to be

debugged/worked around if they fail

bonus:

if they touch the boot system like plugging into fsck of the root

filesystem, they had better be very well tested and be stable across many configurations.

Unfortunately, canonical failed 3 times on those points with at least network-manager, upstart and now plymouth.
I'm just much more angry here because plymouth is a useless piece of crap that only prevents me from booting/debugging my systems right now :(

Original post below with more details:

So, like all failed upgrades, this started with a reasonably working system. A bit like getting a newer dd-wrt version: because it felt like a good idea at the time, I thought I'd jump from mythtv 0.21 to 0.23RC2 all at once.
I never went to 0.22, because quite frankly my mythtv box was working and I didn't see the point of mucking with it for features I didn't seem to need. But I was having some playback studdering problems with mythfrontend, they were getting annoying and they were apparently fixed in recent mythtv versions.

The problem was that 0.23 was only available for lucid and maybe karmic while I was still running jaunty on my mythtv (in hindsight, I should have compiled it myself for jaunty, but I figured upgrading the base OS from time to time couldn't be that bad). That said, I still remember the upgrade to jaunty where ubuntu pulled off some custom kernel patch where the base system didn't boot with a standard kernel.org kernel when you had the evms package (some obscure problem with mounting lvm devices more than once).

My plan was to upgrade as little of the system as necessary to get the mythtv packages working. Of course, I knew it might not be that simple due to the switch to upstart but I figured it'd be better than upgrading everything and risking to break a lot of things (including X, lirc, and sound, which can be interesting to tweak on a mythtv machine). In the end, that likely made no difference since the problem was mostly with plymouth.

Well, of course, it went about as badly as it could: machine didn't reboot for multiple reasons, one being that plymouth would SEGV in mountall (something that the average user would already be hard pressed to find).
Quite frankly, I think it sucks that ubuntu felt it was ok to require an experimental and somewhat controversial devtmpfs in a very recent kernel with no warning at upgrade time that the said kernel is required, and no dpkg dependency. If plymouth must absolutely depend on 2.6.32, it really should put out a warning at upgrade time that 2.6.32 and devtmpfs are required. And come on, it was non trivial for me to even find the problem and that it required devtmpfs to start with.

About upstart: I know ubuntu means well with upstart, but man does this thing not work well, at least on upgrades. My fully dist-upgraded karmic laptop still does not reliably boot due to a (race condition in upstart, bug 499361), and lucid turned out to be worse on my mythtv: it somehow managed to start init scripts and things that mounted all my filesystems before fscking them in mountall, which then caused mountall to silently fail without being able to give me the usual sulogin shell, likely because of plymouth.

As others have already echoed, plymouth looks like half baked still, and when it fails, it gives you a broken system that it super hard to debug :-/

Plymouth bug #1, stops boot from working, allegedly fixed.

Plymouth bug #2, requires DEVTMPFS kernel and SEGVs otherwise, stopping the boot (!).

Lucid beta2 release notes don't mention anything about kernel dependency or plymouth

Nothing about how to disable graphical boot. I don't want this crap if it stops me from debugging my system.

For debugging, I knew about --debug and nosplash, but they didn't help. Andrew told me about additional --verbose INIT_VERBOSE=true which I can't find documented anywhere and they didn't seem to do anything useful with the ubuntu kernel. Strangely enough when I switched to my kernel, I started getting stuff written on the screen although several processes were overlaying one another, it wasn't pretty...

I'm afraid to state my experience with Ubuntu lucid, upstart, and now especially plymouth:
Debugging a boot has become almost as hard as windows. Ubuntu, you're done: you've made the linux desktop as invasive as you could and almost matched windows on the "suckiness of debugging" scale.
As for dependencies ending up so broken that mountall in rcS.d runs _after_ my partitions have been mounted and therefore fails and hangs the boot with no prompt I can see due to plymouth brokenness, that's just plain bad.

The best part is that you can't even fix/debug a non booting system with init=/bin/bash so much because anything in /etc/init won't start if upstart wasn't launched as pid 1 (which is bash in this case). This "progress" really does not make debugging systems easier :(
I also hate the fact where fsck is hidden and where the boot is just looking like it's not doing anything spinning the ubuntu dots while fsck is actually doing something or has silently failed or hung somewhere else that is not necessarily visible.

Is this really an improvement from the old known good text boot?
(maybe it's supposed to work better than that, but considering how badly it's capable of failing then, I don't really care).

About the switch to fbconsole: killing X gives me an unusable flashing text console. It might be fixable, but is that really an improvement as a default: something I can't debug when it goes wrong?

For now, after rebuilding a customer kernel in the hopes that I could boot and that lirc would work (I can only boot unfortunately, no lirc yet despite new versions and module rebuilds), the system almost boots but gdm won't auto start. Upstart of course makes debugging and fixing this non fun :-
Of course, the problem here is that it's easy to just criticize other people's work without contributing. That's always been true: when you complain a piece of open source software doing something questionable or plain wrong, that's always an issue. At least, I pay my "dues" by making plenty of contributions myself (albeit not to ubuntu per se outside of the occasional detailed bug report) and I'm not making a big fuss about how my alsa sound got muted to 0 (master volume) after the upgrade: it's not hard for me to fix, even if the less technical end user all this extra polish is supposed to be for, might not fix this quickly.

Ubuntu/Canonical, I switched from Debian to you because you were just plain better. You made me reconsider this with the network-manager fiasco that just broke my networking for a whole 2 years before it got finally fixed, and after this now pretty nightmarish upgrade that burned almost a weekend on getting my mythtv server working again, I'm really starting to reconsider my decision. Please remember that less can be more, and that more wiz bang polish is just a bad idea when it's a the expense of not having a simple system to understand and debug anymore when things go wrong (and will go wrong when you give it to end users).

I was also looking at upgrading bunch of servers at work to lucid (from something much older), but now that I've seen plymouth and upstart dependencies that still don't work and are a pain in the ass to debug (hell, you never fixed/figured out why they still don't work on my laptop 6 months later, aka bug 499361), I am really reconsidering trusting servers with ubuntu karmic or newer now (aka pre/post-upstart).
(quick update, upstart has gotten some debugging docs put up now. They weren't there when I really needed them, just like NetworkManager,

Ubuntu/Canonical, I switched from Red Hat to Debian because Red Hat was focussing so much on the desktop that it started sucking on servers (at the time). You are now doing the same from where I stand: I don't really care about all that time wasted on which corner of the window the X will be, I don't even use gnome anyway, but don't lose focus on the server: this is what Linux is good at and if I can't trust Ubuntu for servers anymore (after my experience on my mythtv and broken/hard to debug upstart network dependencies that just hang boot on my laptop, I can't see myself putting lucid on servers), I am reconsidering Debian now: last I checked they still considered that for the server simpler is better.
Also, if you introduce bold new systems which quite frankly aren't going to work quite right for a while, make sure easy to find documentation on how to debug them/work around them is posted in the release notes and easy to find places on the ubuntu site (being in search indexes for "foo debugging" is of course pretty much a must too). And on the mountall/plymouth front, if it's as bad as still getting SEGVs that just stop the boot very early (as of lucid beta2), wouldn't it be wiser to make plymouth a removable non required component? Yes, it's more work but it's also the safer thing to do and better for the users for whom plymouth either doesn't work or is something they could really do without.

Now back to trying to fix lirc on my mythtv as it's been broken for a week after the upgrade (after 3 kernel recompiles and 2 upgrades of lirc userland stuff), but that's likely not ubuntu's fault but more likely the random suckiness that comes with upgrades and the fact that lirc still hasn't been deemed kernel merging worthy yet.
*update* lirc was actually broken as shipped in lucid, I filed this bug. Man, lucid was a painful upgrade for my mythtv...

Indoor Skydiving with I Fly

2010-04-19T15:00:00Z

Jennifer and I went to try Indoor Skydiving at I Fly.

It was short, but a lot of fun.
Little detail most people likely don't notice, but I checked out: their fans draw up to *half a megawatt* when they are turning at full speed. For the layman, that means at full speed they draw as much power in one hour than 500 average houses do in a year.

A video is worth a thousand words, so here is a demo from an instructor:

Lawyers Are Weird

2010-03-30T15:00:00Z

So, after spending about 5 hours testifying as a witness on what I knew about the empeg about some patent lawsuit, whatever court or neutral party paid me some $46 dollars for my time then.

As for the hours of research that I did separately for the defending lawyers to find them links and old info that helps them, they can't pay me for that because it would make me a biased witness. On one side I understand, on the other side, it sucks. The irony is that by supoena'ing me as a witness, they get my research for free...

But the best part is that the $46 check was addressed to the wrong name (typo), so when I pointed me out, they sent me another one via priority overnight for $46 check. That priority overnight may have cost $30 to $40 or so when regular mail would have been fine.

Oh well...

Five Spider

2010-03-28T15:00:00Z

This time I got a video Five chasing and eating a spider.

Ok, I had to grab the spider from the ceiling where he wouldn't get to it, but after that he did his job :)

Found some De Ruijter Muisjes in a Local Store

2010-02-15T16:00:00Z

Found this in a local chinese store. Cool :)

Rig3 Update One Page Per Post

2010-02-13T16:00:00Z

As a few already know, I use Rig3 for my blog, written by a friend and coworker of mine, Ralf. Rig3 is meant to be lightweight, work offline on your laptop and be secure by not requiring any crap like PHP. More can be found on the Rig3 site.

Anyway ralf got tired of my begging :) and nicely implemented the one page per post feature for permalinks.

Having each post on its on page allows for a certain amount of nice things:

give a link to just the one post. For big posts like our honeymoon in hawaii, they are big enough that it's a good idea to load just that post and not a monthly page with other potentially big posts.

allow loading and showing a private post in itself without sharing the rest of the posts on the same page or the entire blog.

allow adding comments for each post (comments on facebook for instance are lost to everyone else not using facebook). This feature isn't there yet, but I hope to add it soon.

allow for sharing the URL to the single post to another site, like facebook or twitter (and facebook is stupid, it'll grab any picture it finds on the post, which didn't work when I had a page with more than one post: it could take a picture from a totally unrelated post).

allow quicker loading of individual posts by RSS readers (the simple way to read a bunch of people's blogs)

I just fixed a little bug where my atom RSS feed didn't have the right links, and now everything should be good after I publish this post.

Thanks Ralf!

Some Spammers are not very bright

2010-02-10T16:00:00Z

From: Oscar Rosero <oscaroseroruiz@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Information Request

> On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 09:15:41AM -0500, Oscar Rosero wrote:
> > Hello.
> >
> > I'm trying to optimize my email marketing campaing and to do that I'm
> > testing my email by using Spamassassin.
> >
> > However the following risk appears and I don't know what is it about,
> > neither how to correct it or remove it.  Here is the Risk or Rule
> > description:
> >
> > SARE_HTML_URI_2SLASH URI: URI has additional double slash within it
> >
> >
> >
> > I'm not an expert on this issues.  Please help me solve it.
>
> You are kidding, right?

Hello Marc.

Thank you for contact me back.

The true is I'm not kidding.  I just tried to solve the issue by myself but
I did not found any information about the "SARE_HTML_URI_2SLASH URI: URI has
additional double slash within it".  Then, by checking the Spamassassin, I
found your e-mail and I decided to contact you.

Please apologize me if I bothered you in some way, it was not my intention.
Maybe I did not use the propper words in my past message.

If, in some way, you can guide me o tell me where can I find some
information to solve the issue I would be very grateful.

Best wishes,

Oscar

I need to fill in by saying that I used to be a spamassassin contributor, and am the SA-Exim author, so maybe he found me that way (he didn't say).

So, I decided to have a little fun with him:

> > If, in some way, you can guide me o tell me where can I find some > > information to solve the issue I would be very grateful. > > No, I was surprised because I thought you knew that by using spamassassin > to > test your marketing message, you triggered a booby trap inside that > cataloged your name, your IPs, and what you were trying to market so that > any mass message from you sent to other people from now on will get you > blacklisted throughout the internet, kicked out of your ISP, and any > domain/company you have listed in there will get attacked by botnets if it > ever gets sent from now on. > > Well, I guess you should have done your research first, now all I can > recommend is that you never send what you were trying to send in the first > place (even modifying it won't help since not only your message, but also > your name, IP, ISP, and Email, and domains were harvested and put on the > watchlist). > > Marc

Thank you Merlin for the valuable information and suggestions, I'll certainly take it into account.

I hope to find the way to remove the detected risk on my following messages, despite of the facto I have not even a remote idea about what URI_2SLASH is.

Best wishes,

Oscar

Sarah Palin is Still an Idiot and Why Comedy Central Rules

2010-02-09T16:00:00Z

Seen on comedy cental, good job to the person who noticed that.

Sarah Palin is still learning what she's supposed to talk about. She just reached middle school level and learned to write on her hand. Good job!

I also love how she didn't even get it right the first time and had to cross out a word.

(So, just to clear possible confusion: the pictures I real. I took them from the TV broadcast. She really did write this on her hand and looked at it in the interview later to answer question).

But it gets better. During an after speech interview, she was asked a question and actually checked her hand for the answer:

At least right now, she is worth the free entertainment value, but I really hope that we don't ever have enough idiots in this country to vote her in anything worthwhile.

Cats are not always useless

2009-12-20T16:00:00Z

I taught five to do at least one useful thing: catch and eat spiders. Sometimes I'll see him run in a corner of the room and go after something that I can see. Sometimes, it's a spider.

In this case, we helped him find it so that I could take pictures :)

Memories From The Past

2009-12-05T16:00:00Z

I was copying a bunch of files to the NAND memory of a thinkgeek gigantor picture frame and after 96 pictures linux was saying "no space left on device" when I had copied 9MB out of 960MB.

I was like WTF? and then a wiff of memory from 20 years ago or so reminded me that the crappy FAT file system has a hardcoded limitation of how many files you can have at the root of the filesystem. Directories can contain more files but the root is limited to some stupid small number.
I guess all those days with PC Tools and Norton Utilities looking at DOS filesystems with an hex editor weren't all wasted afterall :)

Drive Migrations and Fixes

2009-11-22T16:00:00Z

My thinkpad 500GB hard drive had been slowly failing (which I knew courtesy smartd, and , so I got an advanced replacement from Hitachi and copied the failing drive minus its two already failed sectors (courtesy of GNU dd_rescue).

While we're at it, I recommend that people run smartd with the following in their smartd.conf:
DEVICESCAN -R 194 -R 231 -I 9 -W 5 -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02|L/../../6/03) -m root -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner

and that you put this in your crontab for later analysis and figuring out what's being going on with your drives, even after the fact:
2 1 * * * root DIR=/var/log/smart; mkdir -p $DIR ; FILE=$DIR/`date '+\%F'`.log; for i in /dev/sd?; do echo $i; smartctl -a $i; echo; echo; done > $FILE

The harder part was figuring out which files were going to be partially lost due to those sectors. After racking my brain on how I could convert those sectors into filenames and getting nowhere, I realized that was a very simple way of finding out: just read all the files and log the errors.
A day or so later I had read the entire filesystem and narrowed it down to the two files that were damaged. Sometimes the low tech option is the best.

While I was doing that, I was trying some new tools and two new boot CDs I had built, something any self respecting system should carry: UBCD and/or UBCD4Win. UBCD4Win is basically a windows live CD you build from your windows install media, and UBCD has a lot of dos boot floppies (disk check, bios, rescue and more), and a nice version of parted magic, recovery linux live distro that runs from RAM.
The only small downside is where gparted, at least on one occasion, has a small bug that kind of shredded an ext3 partition of mine, but it worked fine the rest of the time, even for resizing ntfs partitions.

The cool part was when I tried to rescue to the ext3 partition for practise (I had backups), and saw Ted Tso online in my gtalk friend list (I'm trying to remember when I added him, maybe when I helped him out with his G1 at a linux conference), and he nicely helped me out trying to fake out resize2fs and then debugfs but in the end, the filesystem was kind of mangled though.

Anyway, gnu ddrescue, ubcd and ubcd4win rule (and mine now contain extra tools, including image for linux and image for windows).

Comcast Bill and Customer Support Today

2009-11-04T16:00:00Z

Comcast still tries to charge me $70/month for a few digital channels I watch and they won't unbundle, as well as a DCH-3200 descrambler box that they force me to use by needlessly scrambling QAM64/QAM256 encrypted channels, but at least the process of getting the bill lowered to something somewhat more reasonable is less painful today.

I went to www.askcomcast.com/CA as per the bill as opposed to calling the poke my eyes out in pain 800-Comcast, and 10mn later clock time, it was done.


Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:43:29 GMT-0800 (PST))
Hello, Marc.

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:43:39 GMT-0800 (PST))
do you have access to my account?

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:43:57 GMT-0800 (PST))
I need to ask for your account number.
I see here that you want to have new prices set for your account, correct?

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:44:17 GMT-0800 (PST))
XXXX XX XXX XXXXXXX

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:44:28 GMT-0800 (PST))
Thank you so much for that.
I see here that you want to have new prices set for your account, correct?

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:45:29 GMT-0800 (PST))
this is a long running problem where I am forced to use your descrambling box against my will since I have QAM64/QAM256 capable TVs and DVRs

I've already talked to your executive staff several times about this and basically they just lower my price since I only watch 7 of your channels, 
3 of which now needlessly force me to use and pay for the DCH 3200 tuner/descrambler

That price adjustement just timed out so I'd like you to re-enable it :)

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:46:02 GMT-0800 (PST))
so basically if you can reset the old price, that would be fine
It's still more than what I should pay for 7 channels, but it'll do

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:46:59 GMT-0800 (PST))
I understand your concern. Please give me few moments to review your account.

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:47:06 GMT-0800 (PST))
sure thing, take your time

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:47:14 GMT-0800 (PST))
Thank you so much for that.

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:49:16 GMT-0800 (PST))
Thank you for waiting.

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:49:41 GMT-0800 (PST))
take your time, I multitask too :)

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:50:23 GMT-0800 (PST))
Marc, the best thing I can do to your account is to apply $20 off for 12 mos. So, for 12 mos, you will only have to pay $41.99 for the cable service.

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:50:31 GMT-0800 (PST))
Will this work for you?

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:50:51 GMT-0800 (PST))
that would be fine, thank you

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:50:56 GMT-0800 (PST))
You are most welcome.
Please give me few moments to process this for you.
There will be processing fee for $1.99, one time.
I have completed your request for today.
Your confirmation number is 1000403345242022.

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:52:54 GMT-0800 (PST))
thank you

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:53:11 GMT-0800 (PST))
After 24 hours, you can check your account online to see for the changes in the statements.
You are most welcome.

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:53:23 GMT-0800 (PST))
thanks for your help, your courtesy and have a great day

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:53:26 GMT-0800 (PST))
Recap and breakdown of what I have processed:
- Digital Starter $41.99.
- Transaction Fee $1.99
Everything is set.

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:53:55 GMT-0800 (PST))
As our valued customer, I would like to make sure I have resolved your concern.
It�s been a pleasure serving you today.
Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Marc_(Wed Nov 04 2009 15:54:31 GMT-0800 (PST))
you already did, thanks

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:54:51 GMT-0800 (PST))
You are most welcome.
I hope you won't forget to click END SESSION and take 3 surveys for me. Thank you.

Rotcelyn(Wed Nov 04 2009 18:55:24 GMT-0800 (PST))
Thank you for choosing Comcast as your service provider. We truly appreciate your business! If you need further assistance, you can chat with one of our 
Customer Support Specialists 24 hour a day, 7 days a week at http://www.comcastsupport.com.  You have a great day ahead!
Should you like to watch full TV shows and movies online, go to fancast.com.

Ok, it's still sad that they crypt channels and give you bogus high prices unless you complain, but all in all that was better than before :)

@jbqueru: Why twitter and facebook suck

2009-10-13T15:00:00Z

What is it with twitter, seriously?

Facebook, I can see at least, they trick you into spending a lot of time on their site with flashy useless games, questionaires, they have reasonable features to share pictures with comments, and they silently hold all your data hostage, which no one really seems to realize or care about (they are happy to import your data, but try getting it out, like even getting an rss feed of your friend's updates. Not gonna happen, they want to force you to use their site for that).
Oh, and of course facebook also has the oh so mostly boring twitter like status messages about whether someone I know had one or two eggs for breakfast, or what they think of the day's traffic, or rain, something I really care about :)
(yes, some people do a better job of posting more interesting things overall, but unfortunately they seem to be the exception more than the rule)

But back to twitter: I've been reading jbq's twitter via RSS out of curiosity since twitter seems to suck so much that they make old tweets unavailable after a certain number of days (not unlike facebook which also silently drops updates from friends if you didn't come to read them often enough), and the only think I can see that's remotely useful about twitter is people saying
#footopic: what I think about it

so that you can quickly search #footopic amongst all people who tweet.
But twitter being used as a poor (and crappy) man's IRC by saying
@tweetname: my reply to your tweet

which is then for everyone to see and mixed up with maybe somewhat worthwhile tweet updates in the middle. WTF? Seriously, WTF???
And more generally, if there is some kind of barrier to entry on posts from people, you get better content overall. In other words, if you can tweet whatever goes through your mind with no effort at any time, the overall output is mostly random useless and/or incoherent thoughts from random people. It makes the random blog look good in comparison :)

Oh, and back to facebook for a minute, let's just say for a second that I wanted to put links to my blog posts on facebook for people who think that facebook is the new internet and don't seem to know what an RSS reader is for, 'Blog RSS Feed Reader' tells me "Allowing Blog RSS Feed Reader access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work."
Err, what??? That's the worst part about facebook, they share all your info and your friends info, even when it's clearly absolutely not needed like an rss reader that is bringing my blog into facebook. And of course, the worst part is that any of the people who are 'friends' with me on facebook have probably shared whatever little information I gave facebook without my consent.
That's just a crock of shit. I'm happy I didn't give any relevant information to facebook and lied about my birthday so that it can't be used for ID theft later.

If you didn't know, search the net for how facebook does their best to keep your data hostage, and to force everyone to spend as much time as possible on facebook as opposed to reading outside text that had the gall of not having been published on facebook.

Starwars In Concert

2009-10-12T15:00:00Z

I had no idea that this was going on, not that I am a huge starwars fan (I like the movies a lot, but I'm just not a die hard fan), however I've always much appreciated John William's excellent music in Star Wars. It's a shame that most people don't even know who he is when he's done excellent music scores for so many movies, many by Lucas and Spielberg, as well as others (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, ET, Supermans, Schindler's List). Just check out his imdb list. Anyway, one of my coworkers was selling her tickets to the event sunday afternoon and that's how I found out about it and got her tickets (thanks)
But back to Star Wars, I think that was some of John William's best work, and while I am not the kind of person to go see musical concerts (I enjoy the music, but not sitting in a dark room just listening to it when I can do it at home), and neither is Jennifer, Star Wars in Concert promised to make it more entertaining by telling the saga story with a narrator and giant screens while the music was being played live.

This was a great idea and it sure did not disappoint. The music was as good as I remembered it and the story, screens and visuals were great (in addition to the projection screen, they had some interesting LED based screens strung on the sides).

it's a big hall without the ice in the middle :)

Anthony Daniels, the actor who played CPO in all 3 movies

I also took a few videos (if you get no video, install the divx player if you get no video).

Ouverture (click for vid)

Anthony Daniels, talking about himself, CPO (click for vid)

Anthony presenting the clip about Anakin turning to the dark side (click for vid)

a few lasers (click for vid)

high res clip on Princess Leia (click for vid)

high res clip on the cantina, great music (click for vid)

high res clip on ship battles (click for vid)

high res clip on Luke and his sister (click for vid)

high res victory clip (click for vid)

finale (click for vid)

finale 2 (click for vid)

See more images for Starwars In Concert

Laptop Warmer

2009-10-10T15:00:00Z

Is it the cat warming up the laptop, or the laptop warming up the cat?

Olympics Not In Chicago

2009-10-07T15:00:00Z

One thing I did not hear from anyone here is that in my opinion the two main reasons Chicago didn't get the olympics were:

Chicago is in the US, flying to the US and US immigration suck ass, especially now that they take fucking fingerprints and pictures from everyone, even from legal immigrants with greencards for whom they already have 10 pictures, an FBI background check, and 3 sets of 10 fingerprints. This is actually one of the same reasons why lost of conferences don't happen in the US anymore.

The US gathered enough world hatred in the last 8 years that no matter how hard Obama tried, there is no way people have forgotten all and forgiven yet.

So, in my book this has nothing to do with Chicago, it has all to do because they didn't want to force people to have to go to the US to see the olympics, and I can't blame them.

Back At Work

2009-09-28T15:00:00Z

I finally got back to work, although I was still in the middle of working on home improvements and wish I had another week or two :)

My coworkers found a way to tell me that they missed me somehow :)

Our Wedding Day

2009-08-08T15:00:00Z

And then came the day:

The pictures below are from 5 different photographers, including JBQ with his professional gear (while Eugenia was filming):

JBQ's gear

Setup:

Almost $500 worth of balloons prefilled with air and balloons (600 balloons total)

My dad and Jennifer's working on setting up balloons

the wind was a problem, we had to secure the arch carefully

the result was nice though

a portion of the wine we had

Fabien Lubais, our excellent French caterer and his crew

Talking about Fabien, we totally lucked out on finding him: he was a great French chef who did a great job with our event, especially since we had a fair amount of French food connaisseurs.

Getting ready:

The sand to be mixed for the ceremony

Chat got to be locked up in the office all day

We were barely ready by the time the guests came over :)

Il est bo le ralf :) (Michel aussi d'ailleurs)

The ceremony was in two parts:

oui :)

the crowd, amused by the intermission

So that's around the time that she asked for the Rings, which well, we didn't quite bring after having decided not go with best man and maid of honor. In the end, we were a bit rushed and neither Jennifer nor I kind of remembered to bring the rings. This was no big deal though it only took a minute for me to get them inside and for the ceremony to resume after everyone had a good laugh at our expense :)

all in good time ;)

the sand ceremony

as it goes, nothing can undo our union any more than the blue and white sand can be put back in their bottles

Food time:

Photo ops. Doh, having 5-6 people taking pictures ensured that no one was looking at the same camera :)

Dinner:

the first course is about ready

Eva telling us how it's a miracle that her sister survived so long :)

Desert:

After desert:

jennifer -- I'm totally sober. Now gimme more wine! :)

All in all, it was a great day. Everything went more or less according to plan, Jennifer didn't fall in the cake :) and everyone had a great time. Thanks to all for coming, Michel for retrieving our cakes, and JBQ/Eugenia for the pictures and video.

Work on HAI Omnistat code for misterhouse

2009-08-04T15:00:00Z

We recently made a subzone for our bedroom which allows to send a crapload of air from our HVAC system to the bedroom at night so that it can get cooled or heated quickly without bothering to bring the rest of the house to temperature.
But to control and monitor all this, there was some half finished code in misterhouse that I cleaned up, fixed up and improved. I now get reports of what's going on, can remotely control my HVAC system to change its setpoints, remotely and easily program its 48 time and setpoint settings via a web browser instead of the cumbersome panel interface, and of course I can log everything, like so:

07/08/2009 18:57:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 86, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 18:57:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 18:58:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 86, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 18:58:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 18:59:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 86, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 18:59:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:00:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: fan/cool, heat to 62, cool to 74, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:00:01 Main Omnistat State set to: cool_sp_change 07/08/2009 19:00:01 Main Omnistat State set to: heat_sp_change 07/08/2009 19:00:01 Main Omnistat State set to: current_output_change 07/08/2009 19:00:14 set cool to 76 07/08/2009 19:00:16 Main Omnistat State set to: cool_sp_change 07/08/2009 19:00:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:01:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: off, heat to 62, cool to 76, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:01:00 Main Omnistat State set to: current_output_change 07/08/2009 19:01:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:02:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: off, heat to 62, cool to 76, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:02:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:02:30 MBR Omnistat State set to: temp_change 07/08/2009 19:03:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: off, heat to 62, cool to 76, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:03:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:04:00 Main Omnistat RC-90: Indoor temp is 74, HVAC Command: off, heat to 62, cool to 76, mode: program_auto 07/08/2009 19:04:30 MBR Omnistat RC-80: Indoor temp is 73, HVAC Command: off, heat to 50, cool to 88, mode: program_auto

You can see more on the Misterhouse HAI Omnistat Setup Page

Fucking Insurance Companies And Regulators

2009-06-17T15:00:00Z

So, I got 2 slightly bent rims on my car due to having had to drive over some bad potholes, one was on a 270 degree turn single lane onramp, where I had nowhere to go.
When I called the insurance company for a comprehensive claim, it first sounded like they'd cover it minus the $1000 deductible, and then just told me that it would actually be a collision claim, because I "collided with the pothole on the road". One hour later of trying to go through that bullshit and talking to a supervisor, I got nowhere further. Having to drive over an unavoidable pothole is considered a "collision" for which you are fully responsible, which means a collision point on your record and increased rates.

This just pissed me off, they actually said it was mandated by california, they had no say or leeway in it, and that the state I'm paying tax to, to make sure roads are in driveable condition then leaves huge potholes in some of them, causing damage to my rims due to low profile tires and lightweight aluminum rims, and then they mandate that such claims must be the driver's fault.
The other thing is that a point is a point, whether you rolled a $200,000 car, hit 3 more, one of them drove off a cliff and another one caught fire, whether you slightly damaged someone's bumper in a parking lot and the damage is $800, or whether you "collided with a pothole on the road".

Grr...

For now I told them to stuff it and I'll pay for the damage myself, but that's just wrong.

Switched To Comcast Business

2009-06-10T15:00:00Z

Ok, those of you who know me, you're going to ask who is writing this, and what I did with the real Marc :)
So yes, I switched from our dual DSL setup (12Mbit/s down / 1.5Mbit/s up) to comcast business internet for their 25Mbit / 5Mbit offer.

Now, because I had close to zero trust in comcast, I looked at their customer agreement, and got it amended where it was unclear and changed a few things I didn't like. In the end, this is what I got in the contract I signed:

comcast business is mostly a different company

I'll never have to call the dreaded 800-comcast number ever

$95/month for 25Mbit/s down 5Mbit/s up (real sustained, and 50Mbit/s |

10Mbit/s with powerboost) and I can drop my second phone line that I otherwise don't need (another $20/month savings)

No bandwidth cap

Got the install fees waived

Waived early termination fee

First month free was offered

Now, my SLA actually says I'm getting 22Mbit / 5Mbit (without powerboost), but I seem to be getting a bit more right now (of real sustained speed after protocol overheads).

The downsides:

latency is now 100ms instead of 10ms, although I can live with that

even if it's comcast business, I have slightly lower trust in them, but we'll see.

Now, you have to be careful with speed tests and general speeds from comcast due to speedboost that temporarily gives you fake speeds.

Here are real speeds that I measured with sustained TCP speeds over an ssh connection:

download: 3.2MB/s | 25Mbit/s

upload: 640KB/s | 5Mbit/s

Makers Faire

2009-05-31T15:00:00Z

I hadn't been to Markers Faire so far, but went on to fixing that this year, especially since Daniel was visiting and it made for a good excuse to get out during the weekend.

It was an interesting mix of Burning Man folks and contraptions, computer and other geeks, and generally creative folks. It was quite an interesting mix :)

Electric Miata

Big hand that could take metal and crush it

Remnants from Burning Man :)

All those objects are fakes that came from a 3D printer

Radio controlled battleship battle

Lifesize Mousetrap I saw at burning man a few years ago

Victorian keyboards

with matching laptop

wirewrap 4Mhz CPU

running a modified Minix

The beloved Diet Coke and Mentos guys did their show

And a repeat of the famous youtube video

See more images for Makers Faire

Evolution 7 parter on Nova and "creationism"

2009-05-28T15:00:00Z

I just finished watching an older Nova series on Evolution, from how Darwin came up with Evolution back in his day. It was a very interesting series, which explained some things I didn't even know like how evolution obviously applies to virii and bacteria, and how they recently found out that after the AIDS virus becomes resistent to new drugs, they're actually better off stopping all drugs, letting the drug resistant virus be taken over by the non drug resistant one because it can spread quicker in a drug free environment, and then try to kill that one again with drugs.

Anyway, the low point of the show was when they had to address how effectively we're no better now with regards to science vs christians who still feel very threatened by evolution since it obviously contradicts Adam and Eve, than we were 200 years ago.

The part I didn't know was how the church leaders knowing that they can't get so called "creationism" (nice word that makes it sound like science) into classrooms if it's not science, to do anything they can to pass it for science even there is obviously not a whole lot to back it up.

The pretty despicable part was the very careful and misleading statements that they had fed to school children so that the children themselves went to the school board and asked stuff like

"we want special creation to be taught the facts, we should be be able to know about both scientific views" -> There is nothing scientific "creationism", it's just a story from a book.

"because creationism is not religion" -> right, throwing away gobs of scientific evidence and reproducable experiments for a story from the bible has nothing whatsoever to do with religion. But they have to pretend that since you can't teach religion in public schools.

"there are facts we don't have" -> right, a story from a 2000 year old book with nothing to back it up is absolutely a fact

"I grew up in a church, where god created everything, that's how it's always been and how it'll ever be" -> Yes. If any other evidence shows up, just dig a deeper hole in the sand, put your head in it and chant la-la-la-la-la.

But the part that was more worrying was the flat out brainwashing they were doing in some churches where they were teaching all their churchgoers how to deny and push back evolution without giving any critical though into it of course. They also had cute evil little songs that were teaching the little drones how to respond. Scary, really.

And all this because some people can't admit that maybe some stories in the bible may just be stories, or they may have been simplified to something that people at the time could understand. Neither case should invalidate faith in general or the existence of a god. Even if you push evolution all the way back to the big bang (and while I'll defend evolution all day long, I'm the first to say that the big bang is really a lot more of a best guess theory and just the best we can come up with without current knowledge), there is still nothing wrong with whoever your favourite god is, to have created the big bang, or the universe.
But no, conservative Christians can't deal with such a happy medium because it contracticts the bible, and the bible must be right everywhere, or many feel their whole life would have been a lie, and they can't have that.
Now, the good news is that they are only a portion of Christians out there, many others don't have a problem taking the bible with a grain of salt with regards to taking its general message, but giving details like how long creation took (like a day being a metaphor for 1000 years or somesuch), some leeway. Whether you agree with that or not, at least they have a belief that makes sense, and don't have to feel threatened by scientific discoveries or theories.

It's too bad that for so many other people however, church and critical thinking are incompatible. I suppose many of the critical thinkers just become "spiritual, but not religious", which I can understand a lot more easily. Of course, I'm going to guess that some of the church leaders don't want that to happen since they can't quite control the "spiritual but not religious", nor get money from them, so it sure looks like they suppress critical thinking as much as possible to stay in control.

But eh, if they insist, I think it's only fair to also teach about the_tons, and how X_enu came with his spaceship and dropped all the bad souls in a volcano on earth, which in turn created us. I mean, that sounds like a perfectly good explanation. That's called scien_tology and there is even "science" in the name, so it must be true. I think it's only fair that this be taught in schools side by side with evolution.

Anyway, carry on, I just had to rant a bit. Thank you for indulging me :)

Sopranos Disappointing

2009-05-19T15:00:00Z

I just finished watching all 6 seasons of the Sopranos.

So, the show was enjoying for the most part, even if they were missing some continuity between some episodes, but I was disappointed by the ending.
It just felt cheap and rushed. That last episode just looked like just another episode, except that none was coming after :-(

Reality And Movies

2009-05-17T15:00:00Z

I was watching the Transporter 3 (yes, yes, I know). So, on one side I'm willing to suspend disbelief when you land on a train with a car, or it comes to being able to breathe underwater from a car tire (although mythbusters tried it out, and not so much), or how you can take an Audi from the bottom of a lake and get it to run again in 2mn (eh, top gear kind of did that with a truck after a few hours).

But, a cell phone call from inside a car that's sinking under water? Seriously? Really?
I wonder if they're ok with it because most viewers don't know any better, or maybe this only bothers me because I'm willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to aliens or stunts, but not basic physics and science unless we're talking the Matrix where physics are negotiable :)

50k Emails

2009-05-06T15:00:00Z

I passed the 50,000 sent Email threshold in my personal inbox recently. What records I was able to keep go back to 1996 (unfortunately, everything before that got lost).
Now, that doesn't count work Emails for instance, in my last 6.5 years at google, my sent box says I sent over 41,000 Emails. Looking at some incomplete records I have, I sent 918 Emails while at netapp (9 months), 613 Emails while at SGI (9 months), 13684 Emails at VA Linux (3 years).
So, for whatever that's worth, I sent a few more work Emails in the last 10 years than I sent personal Emails in the last 13 years, for a total of over a 100,000 Emails sent. Not bad :)

Misc Updates

2009-05-03T15:00:00Z

In the random news department, my Onkyo TX-SR705 receiver started failing by going into firmware upgrade mode for no reason and being unusable after I moved it to a cabinet, and jolted it a bit during the install (at most).
Amazon was fantastic there, I was able to get them to take the receiver back and send me another one (this is the second receiver that failed and that they swapped, past their own 30 day return window). This is even more amazing because the price had gone back up from their $400 special to $800, and they sent me their last one with free shipping and a label to return the old one for free too.
After a few hours of work, the 3rd one is setup and working again. I'll make sure not to breathe on it too hard :) but seriously Amazon went above and beyond the call of duty here.

I got a free scooba 5900 from work. I was never really sold on the scooba, and indeed it looks like a finicky little device that needs a lot more help and care than a roomba, to the point that you may not save that much time compared to mopping yourself. It's also unclear that it's safe to use on our stone and hardwood floors, which might not be fully sealed. It also seems that the battery on the one I got is mostly dead, but eh, it was free :)
Maybe it's worth using it as credit for a newer scooba 350 or so, but I'm not sure.

In the good news department, after trying and ordering 3 pairs of hiking boots at REI, I think I finally found a pair that will work for me (i.e. that is wide enough without being way too long, which is otherwise bad for a hiking boot): Lowa Renegade GTX Wide. So far those seem both lightweight, which is nice, and willing to give more in the toe area. Hopefully they won't destroy themselves in a few days, but it seems like they may just work for my wide feet (I'm a 9 E wide).

Last, but not least, I've been spending a lot of time in the last weeks reading our 4 books on Hawaii and its Islands and working with a travel agent to plan our 3 week honeymoon. Those books are fantastic and have so much info, it's not even funny. In return, it's taking a lot of work to read all the useful info but it's allowing me to plan a very good honeymoon. Hopefully all that work will have been worth it :)

Solar Panel Install Done

2009-04-06T15:00:00Z

Actually the solar system has been up since Feb 26th, but I've been waiting on the install and hookup of the add on monitoring system. The monitoring isn't quite working reliably yet, but oh well the important part, power generation, is working fine and that's what matters :)

stack of 27 $1500 bills sitting outside :)

I chose the 225W panels as they were slightly cheaper but also looked nicer

this shows the rails that the panels are attached to

18 panels facing south east (not ideal) and 9 facing due south

the 6000W DC to 240V AC inverter

the PG&E guy coming in to install the time of use meter

See more images for Solar Panel Install Done

Insteon Setup and my own Blender Defender

2009-03-16T15:00:00Z

I have been spending a fair amount of time learning how to setup and work with Insteon Home Automation recently, as a way to replace X10 I had in my old house. Insteon is meant to be close to 100% reliable when setup correctly.

I could write a lot about Insteon, but I already have spent around 10H doing so in the Misterhouse Insteon docs for linux HA I wrote. In the process, I also researched UPB and Z-Wave to decide which one was the best option and here is my Summary of X10 vs UPB vs Z-Wave vs Insteon.

my own Blender Defender

what an insteon dimmer switch looks like

my main power strip going to a filter, X10 and Insteon modems

X10 CM11a on the left, Insteon Filter on lower right and Insteon Modem (PLM) on upper right

The Insteon Filter allows me to plug my UPS and devices in the back of it without them messing with Insteon signals going to and coming from the powerline.

While most of the time was spent setting up misterhouse to control our home lights and create virtual scenes as well as manage our outside lights depending on motion sensor input, I also build our own Blender Defender to teach chat to stay off the counter where he likes to go explore in search of food :) (Blender Defender is not my idea, I just improved on the concept since mine had to work at night too, see the link for the original author who inspired me).

My blender defender was a bit harder to build because it had to work at night, and I had to include a motion sensor to turn the light on first before the camera could work and detect motion (which makes things a bit harder because the motion detection library has to deal with a change in light, which can look like motion).
So far, it seems to have worked, although it was a bit less satisfying, maybe also because our blender is missing the strobe lights and isn't as scary and chat seems to have learned the first time.

Anyway, here's the result, taken in the middle of the night with the living room light turned via Insteon thanks to the script (yes, the camera doesn't show the blender, but the cat has been coming by jumping from the couch next to the kitchen counter, and this is the only camera angle that stops the cat as soon as he crosses the threshold without triggering when he's at the same height on the couch side, which is allowed).

Just like the original blender defender, I also used the super cheap D-Link DSC-900 and wrote my own scripts to activate my insteon device and light (including the fun part of preventing the outside patio light from turning on on outside motion sensor events as the light through the window could have changed the kitchen picture enough to trigger the blender in the middle of the night).
The hard part in the setup was the motion sensor library tweaks. You'll want motion and I heartily recommend starting with my motion.conf file and look for the CHANGED tags as a guide to setup your own (please understand that eventually you'll need to tweak for your own room and camera, good luck with that :) ). See more images for Insteon Setup and my own Blender Defender

ScottEvest Rules

2009-02-09T16:00:00Z

Scottevest has always ruled, I became their customer a while ago already.

Recently, the just replaced an older pair of pants I bought from them because it cracked (nice of them, not everyone would do what's right), but around the same time I contacted them about feedback I had and the CEO replied to me with this video: link here if you don't see the video below

www.tokbox.com

Jordan definitely gets credit for actually caring about his customers.

Excellent support and service from Amazon on my Onkyo TX-SR705S 7.1 AV receiver

2009-02-06T16:00:00Z

Last year, during thanksgiving shoppping week, I bought an Onkyo TX-SR705S 7.1 to replace my dying yamaha AV receiver. Amazon was nicely selling it for a mere $400 (instead of $800-ish), which for a fully featured AV receiver with 3 1080p HDMI ports and all the typical audio stuff you need (including auto setup with Audyssey as I remarked earlier).

Anyway, one thing I noticed was that the said receiver was using a ridiculous 45W when in standby mode (vs 55W when on).
It became a bit pathetic was that when I called Onkyo to ask them what was the expected standby use, and they were unable to tell me (after 2 calls and two techs). They then sent me to a support center that just would not help me without me sending my receiver in for repair when I wasn't even sure it was broken. They, too, were unable to tell me if 45W for standby was conceivably normal.
After adding Xmas in the mix and another trip where I wasn't home to take care of this, I called amazon late January (two months after purchase), explained the problem and they agreed to just send me another unit for free so that I could see whether 45W was normal or not, and return the old or new unit with a prepaid label. That was about the best support one could have hoped for (it's worth to note that the receiver went back to $800 in the meantime).

Turns out this was not all for naught, the new receiver registered exactly 0W when in standby. Kudos again to Amazon for outstanding service.

Air France Suckage

2009-01-17T16:00:00Z

I almost forgot to mention how Air France got us home about 3H late and with a piece of luggage delayed 8 days (!!!).
Long story short, all their planes left hours late that day because they only had half the staff necessary to check people in, and on top of that this is the 2nd time in a row that they can't get luggage to destination on a direct flight, although taking an extra 8 days to deliver a piece of luggage is unheard off...

Their repeated "performance" was really deplorable.

Solar Panels

2009-01-16T16:00:00Z

Around the time the garage was finished enough, I looked into solar panels for the house, because

the electricity bill was getting a bit steep (between $200 and $300 per month), although we found part of that bill was due to a broken high amperage fan that was running 24/7.
electricity rates just went up, and are scheduled to go up even higher
the federal tax credit for going solar became unlimited on how much it covers, making panels effectively half price between the CA and federal rebates (the federal credit used to be fairly curtailled).
the tech, cool, and green factors of course did not hurt :)

Solar & PG&E 101

So, one would think that getting solar panels is not that hard: you call a company over, they measure your roof space, your design factor (i.e. which way the roof is pointing as well as its inclination vs the ground, something like 18 degrees in our case), and then you decide how many panels you can fit or how many you want to put to offset how much your power bill.
The first problem is a not so simple multi factor equation because you switch to a time of use electric meter where the time of the day changes which billing range you're in, and each range has 5 tiers, the more you use the more expensive your Kwh becomes.
Then, to make things fun, you can try to compute how much you end up paying by Kwh for your solar electricity by factoring in how much you paid for the system over 30 years, and currently that per Kwh price for baseline usage (i.e. the first tier) was around 13¢ for me, or more than what I pay from PG&E. However, all remaining tiers were more than solar. Then, you could say that PG&E prices go up and baseline price will go up beyond 13¢. This is entirely correct but you have to factor this against investing the money you'd have put in panels at 4% and see what's better off.
Oh, and if you decide to generate your baseline use too, you don't want to overproduce because if you do, PG&E will not give you a negative bill: over the course of a year you can only offset your bill, not make it negative.
The last kicker is that you don't have to produce as much as you use to have a $0 bill because when you produce in May-Sept between noon and 6 (or something like that), that electricity is worth several times a kWh you use at night or during the winter. I found that producing 8,000Kwh can offset a 12,000Kwh yearly use.

Fitting solar panels on limited usable roof space

Anyway, now that this is out of the way, our house made going solar a bit more challenging because our roof is very jagged and most of our roof is not getting good sun exposure: a lot of it is east, which is not that desirable, whereas our west facing roof (better because it gets sun in the afternoon when electricity is worth more), gets significant shading from the trees on the creek side of our property.
So, we're left with our garage roofs pointing south-south-east unshaded, and a few pieces of our roof pointing due south, and that made things interesting because we had to fit panels on limited roof space, part of which was triangular shaped, making rectangular panels harder to fit, especially the bigger ones.
After getting my quote from the first vendor, it became clear that we'd have to worry about price per Kwh as much as Kwh per square footage of roof used.

Picking Vendors

This turned out to be much harder than I thought because they had different panels with different efficiency and pricing, which just added more variables to the already multiple variable equation of what to get. Also, all vendors gave you production estimates for the year, and end pricing after rebates. However most did not give Kwh/year / dollar (i.e. how many dollars a Kwh every year cost you), and only one gave the square footage used by their panels, and the more important Khw/year / sqft (i.e a panel array that produce 23kWh/Y per sqft of roof space used). While I know that those are not perfect numbers, they were the most useful in my comparison.
I wondered why the different vendors don't provide that useful data, but then I also realized that the 4 tech sales reps I talked to all said "oh, I never had anyone ask me that, let me find out for you" on multiple occasions. So it looks like most people just look at their spreadsheets and pie charts, find them pretty and sign based on that, or maybe based on price without knowing if they're getting the proper technology, or an install on paper that will even fit in practise. Admittedly my install case was probably a bit harder than some, but I got quotes that just didn't produce enough to be interesting and where the salesperson didn't measure what was really possible, so didn't offer it, or a quote where quite frankly the panels didn't fit (I went on the roof and measured), or a quote with thin film where the numbers showing thin film degradation over time had a 3X difference between a spec sheet and the sales pamphlet (-0.5% per year vs -1.5% per year, which is a huge difference). I ended up picking between the four vendors that had been pre-screened by work, and I'll list them below in the least desirable to most desirable order:

Rec Solar was last for two reasons: the salesman is the only one who never even climbed on my roof to measure exactly what surfaces were usable. He just eyed them and gave me a quote on paper without actually knowing if they would fit, what the design factor was, or if we could put more panels. Yet, I was supposed to sign, and then they'd come and see what they could really do for me. Yeah, right... Anyway, they did offer interesting and efficient smaller sanyo panels, but they were totally overpriced.
Oh, the best part: one of the quotes was badly done and quoted a likely incorrect kWh/Y figure, giving a ridiculously high $4.3 per kWh/Y
Akeena had a good, knowledgeable technical salesman, but their system was very overpriced and while it's nice for having panels that connect like legos, requiring fewer attach points and wires, my roof did not allow for that many panels to be strung together and put in a single place. Out of the two quotes I got, the prices were quite high, and the panel efficiency was fairly poor too for monocrystaline (supposedly better) by being beat by much cheaper polycrystaline panels (evergreen 210) from solarcity.
Solarcity (First Solar reseller) came as a close second. The salesman really did his best to fit his system on our roof, address my concerns and my questions, and they threw in free monitoring of both production and home use (usually another $2k), as well as price matching. They gave me 3 fairly different options (at my request).
Cobalt Power (Sunpower reseller) was the last option I got, based entirely on Sunpower panels. To their credit that was the only option they needed because their panels were quite good.

The major problem I had comparing the vendors is that they all give you predicted production numbers that they call conservative, but have nothing to back them up. In other words, if they promise you a system that could make 9000kWh, but due to a difficult or poor install, or an over optimistic design factor they end up producing much less, that's pretty much too bad. Most of them would not back up their production numbers with any guarantee whatsoever. In the end, I got Cobalt to back up 85% of the production they promised, but if you think about it, a production 15% lower than what was hoped for is pretty big (of course, it's hard to give a 100% number since it also depends on weather).

Cobalt Power ended up winning because they quite frankly had the best panels. Not only did they have the best efficiency (yearly power per sqft of roof space) which was a crucial factor for us, their panels were a bit smaller so they fit better in confined spaces, and they were also quite competitively priced and not much more expensive than Solarcity.
Solarcity could have worked, but I didn't trust thin film too much since no one else used it, its degradation over time was just unclear and I read conflicting information about it. As for their evergreen polycrystaline solution, it was actually decent, but was 30% less efficient per amount of space as sunpower panels, while not being that much cheaper, so it was hard to go with that, even though I really liked the Solarcity rep too.

So there we go, I signed up with Cobalt, knowing that it was the best bang for the buck for the most efficient solution that we could fit on the good portions of the roof.
At the end, I did agonize between 27 225W panels or 30 panels as I was slightly worried that 30 panels just might produce more than what we used (at which point they become a clear monetary loss). In the end, we agreed that as long as 27 panels brought me in baseline, erasing all of baseline just wasn't necessary since it's a best a wash, and more likely a small loss over investing the money you didn't spend.

Install starts in a few weeks, I'll report back then. In the meantime, below was a rather time consuming to gather and compute comparison table that should be useful to other folks. If you're looking at this yourself, I heartily recommend you consider Sunpower first (Cobalt Power distributor in the bay), you can Email Mark Byington markb(at)cobaltpower.com for more details on a home visit and quote.


.	company	panels	qty	panel size	panel ft^2	total panel ft^2	W STC	shading factor	kWh/Y	net cost ($)	price/ kWh/Y	kWh / Y / ft^2	comment
.	cobalt	SPR 230	27	31.4" x 61.4"	13.38	361.26	6210	0.86	8463	27416	3.23951317499705	23.4263411393456	highest power density
.	cobalt	SPR 215	30	31.4" x 61.4"	13.38	401.4	6450	0.84	8539	25882	3.03103407893196	21.2730443447932
.	cobalt	SPR 225	30	31.4" x 61.4"	13.38	401.4	6750	0.84	8909	27665	3.1052867886407	22.1948181365222
.	cobalt	SPR 225	27	31.4" x 61.4"	13.38	361.26	6075	0.85	8114	26216	3.23095883657875	22.4602779161822
.
.	solarcity	sanyo 200	35	31.4" x 61.4"	13.38	468.3	7000	0.88	9006	33160	3.68198978458805	19.2312620115311
.	solarcity	evergreen 210	34	37.5" x 65"	16.92	575.28	7140	0.88	9047	28696	3.17188018127556	15.7262550410235
.	solarcity	FS -275	95	23.6" x 47.2"	7.75	736.25	7125	0.87	9196	27032	2.93953892996955	12.4903225806452	first solar thin film, note 95 panels, and lowest power density
.
.	akeena	andale ST175	24	32.2" x 62.6"	14	336	4200	0.86	5293	21948	4.14660872850935	15.7529761904762
.	akeena	andale ST175	32	32.2" x 62.6"	14	448	5600	0.81	6354	28535	4.49087189172175	14.1830357142857
.
.	REC solar	sanyo 195	28	35.2" x 51.9"	12.69	355.32	5460	?	5854	25246	4.3126067646054	16.4752898795452	quote bad, numbers don't even add up
.	REC solar	sanyo 195	24	35.2" x 51.9"	12.69	304.56	4680	?	5643	21589	3.82580187843346	18.5283687943262

New Geotagging

2008-12-15T16:00:00Z

I've spent the last few days adding geotagging to my pictures after fixing/improving my pictprocess script and updated the geotagging with GPX Visualizer and gpsPhoto page.
I've also updated all my older blog entries in the hiking section to have pictures you can click on and see where they were taken, especially the John Muir Trail from Bishop to Whitney and other outdoors pictures like from San Francisco to Saulsalito or the Fremont Older and wine trail biking loop we often do

Duplicate Posts On Google Reader

2008-12-03T16:00:00Z

For those who of you who are seeing duplicate posts in google reader or other atom/rss reader, sorry: when I rename posts in rig3, the old post disappears and a new one is created, as expected, but some blog readers don't seem to remove posts that are gone.
It's kind of annoying and I haven't found a fix for that yet, my main blog does not have this problem, and proper readers shouldn't.

Onkyo TX-SR705 Receiver

2008-12-03T16:00:00Z

Interesting story: I bought a new receiver to replace my old Yamaha that just died, and used the new Audyssey auto speaker setup, the receiver kept telling me I had an error with my front left speaker. Yet, sound was coming out of it just fine, and an ohmeter confirmed it had an resistance of 4 ohms.

After some debugging, I opened the said speaker, and found that the magnet attached to the tweeter (by nothing else than magnetism), had detached itself from the tweeter and grafted itself onto the magnet of the lower speaker, messing with the sound somewhat.
I just put the magnet back where it belonged, and the sound setup completed.

I'm just impressed that Audyssey was able to detect the subtle sound difference due to that magnet in the wrong place, and that it reported it back to me :)

What Overachievement Means at Fedex

2008-12-01T16:00:00Z

I ordered a new receiver, which isn't technically meant to arrive until tomorrow as per the delivery SLA. However, as a nice surprise, it was actually here 3 days ago already (friday) and was on the truck for delivery, but "No attempt made, delivery scheduled for next business day".
I can already see the driver with his package on the truck saying "umph, this one looks heavy. It's early anyway so I'll probably worry about delivering it next week"

Not the end of the world, although I'd have been happy to play with the receiver last weekend.

Tracking number XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Reference XXXXXXXXX Ship date Nov 24, 2008 Shipment ID XXXXXXXXX Estimated delivery Dec 2, 2008 Destination XXXXXXXXX Service type Home Delivery Weight 35.0 lbs. Status Delivery exception

Date/Time Activity Location Details Nov 29, 6:17 PM Delivery exception SAN JOSE, No attempt made, delivery scheduled for 2008 CA next business day 8:31 AM On FedEx vehicle SAN JOSE, for delivery CA 7:22 AM At local FedEx SAN JOSE, facility CA 3:47 AM Departed FedEx SACRAMENTO, location CA 12:54 Arrived at FedEx SACRAMENTO, AM location CA Nov 24, 10:08 Arrived at FedEx LEWISBERRY, 2008 PM location PA 7:00 PM Package data transmitted to FedEx 6:35 PM Picked up LEWISBERRY, PA

Electoral College Must Die

2008-11-05T16:00:00Z

So, Obama won with 6% of the popular vote (i.e. the real voters) and wins the election with 2/3rd!!! of the electoral college. Seriously, what kind of crap is this?
Now, it's not that I'm unhappy about him being elected, on the contrary, but 6% of the votes turning into 33% of the votes is just a load of crap. Thankfully it didn't tank the election the wrong way, but it did in 2000 and it will again in the future since no one seems to be worried enough about this being a problem worth fixing.
But then again, no offense, this is from the country where a student getting 7 grades of B+ (89%) gets a 3.0 GPA and a student getting 7 A- (90%) gets a 4.0 GPA. In other words a 1% difference becomes in the worst case scenario a 25% difference.
That's only multiplying the mistake by 25X, so getting the number of votes off by 6X is a breeze in comparison. That said, the freak scenario is indeed scoring 1% more votes in all the states and getting 100% of the electoral votes, or a 100% difference. Great! And of course, it's totally possible for some candidate to get 66% of the total votes and still lose the electoral college and the election in a worst case scenario.

Kudos to South Park for having an animated episode less than 24H after the results, BTW

On The Eve of The Election

2008-11-03T16:00:00Z

This whole discussion about Missouri brings me back about a somewhat sadder point, being that too many americans think that it's more important to vote for someone who's the right amount of conservative or liberal, when it should really be about whether he (or maybe one day she) can run the country properly and right now take better care of the economy. I'm always disheartened when I see hard working Americans who barely make a living then run to the polls to vote republican no matter what (up to "this candidate is closer to god") when republicans have a good track record of helping people stay rich or get richer, no matter what the cost, and no so much a good record of helping the struggling class.
While Bush was shown in the end not to have won the first election (but the real recount showing that Gore did win Florida happened too late to matter), I still never really got how all those people who now got royally fucked over by the republicans and their inaction in front of wall street greediness, thought that voting for the "closer to god" candidate was more important than the one who would actually take are of middleclass America.
The worst part is how many who foreclosed and lost their house and/or job, would still blindly vote republican based on their personal convictions and religion instead of economical common sense for them. I tend to understand people who are better off and want as little government intervention and taxes as possible. Hoewever, what if you're liberal but want little government intervention and low taxes? or what if you're very conservative but you need government help, a real health care system and a little bit of government help here and there, as well as a proper retirement? Well, in both cases you can't really vote republican or democrat and yet most voters are adamant about one party or the other instead of realizing that it's a tradeoff in both cases and they'd be better off picking the more intelligent, articulate, and reasonable candidate (Bush being neither of the 3).

At least the good news for 2008 is that while Bush #2 is a congenital idiot and a drunk, I at least respect McCain as being a reasonable and sensible man. I might not agree with his republican stance on the economy, or the war in Irak (which is responsible for a big hole in the said economy, even when you put aside all the money that was stolen by Dick Cheney and Halliburton), I really really wish that McCain had been the republican candidate for the last 8 years if we had to have a republican for the last 8 years. I'm somehow pretty sure that he would have done a much better job. That said, because of his political party and campaign finance money that he had to accept, even if he is a respectable straight up person, I'm worried of how much he would be able to do to fix the economy compared to Barrack without angering people and corporations who financed his campaign, but it sure can't be worse than Bush.
In a not so funny way, it's actually worrying how many Americans don't know or care that their president is seen as who he is, a dangerous blistering idiot by the rest of the world, and for as long as I've known US presidents, including when I didn't live in the US, this had never happened for prior presidents. Some were more liked than others, but none was so universally despised and disliked as Bush #2 (people in other countries actually occasionally give me crap for my living in the US under such a terrible president).
Another thing that too many people don't seem to realize here is that this two party system actually forces political candidates to pick one of two buckets, and that bucket is likely not to fit all their beliefs (like some republicans are actually fairly liberal, but republican financially, just like some democrats can have republicans financial tendencies), so in the end the party they picked is just something they had to affiliate themselves to, but it means that it's more important to look at the candidate him/herself than his/her party affiliation.
To illustrate my point, California, which is supposed to be a democratic state, actually impeached its democratic governor, and replaced him with a republican: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold is not much of a liberal, he's not exactly a fan of gay rights, and even took steps to prevent gay marriages, but on the other side of the fence, he's been doing a better job running the state than the previous democrat guy (and gay marriages were fought and won in the CA supreme court). This is how things are really supposed to work. Hopefully it'll work on the federal scale too...

So, I'll be celebrating either way tomorrow because it'll be the end of Bush either way. I'm just secretly hoping for Obama because if McCain wins and then dies half way through his mandate, we'll be severely screwed with Palin: she looks even more stupid and ignorant than Bush, which I didn't think was possible (that said, you could make the same point about Obama if he gets shot by a racist, as his VP doesn't seem like a great guy either).

BTW, for those who thought by now that I was a democrat loving liberal socialist hippie, I'm more of a right wing liberal, which is something between democrat and republican and that doesn't exist in the US.

Doh! I guess I won't have my picture with the president afterall :)

Democrats would definitely raise my taxes if they win and I will personally lose out. I'm really for the more reasonable guy, whoever that happens to be at the time and would have likely picked McCain over a seemingly useless democrat candidate. Either way, it doesn't matter, both because the electoral system is broken with the electoral college and individual californian votes don't count since it's a democrat state in the end either way, and because I'm not a citizen so I don't get to vote either way :)

Letter To Comcast: You Will Be Irrelevant Soon

2008-11-01T15:00:00Z

My comcast internet randomly going up and down with the rain reminded me that I had to send a few words to comcast about what I think of them in general. I found their executives' Email on the net and sent them this little letter...
So far they replied to thank me for the feedback. I'm not sure if they mean it or not, or whether my letter will help delaying or stopping their planned rollout of 5C encryption on their firewire ports, making mythtv recording mostly impossible, but eh, I had to at least try.
If you are their customer, you should definitely tell them what you think of them too, they deserve the feedback afterall...

From: Marc MERLIN 
To: david_cohen =at= comcast.com, ralph_roberts =at= comcast.com,
        marlene_dooner =at= comcast.com, payne_brown =at= comcast.com,
        kerry_knott =at= comcast.com, esl_corp =at= cable.comcast.com,
        john_schanz =at= cable.comcast.com, john_ridall =at= cable.comcast.com,
        brian_roberts =at= comcast.com, joe_waz =at= comcast.com,
        audit_committee_chairman =at= comcast.com, darcy_rudnay =at= comcast.com,
        corporate_communications =at= comcast.com, steve_burke =at= cable.comcast.com

Dear Madam, Dear Sir,

I realize that at this point you have likely already made the decision of
appealing to the lowest common denominator customer and that angering most
of the techie population in the Silicon Valley may just be an acceptable
loss to you.
That said, if I am mistaken, I'll tell you what you are doing blatantly
wrong and what you can do about it. I am also going to warn you about the
problems with your HDTV service, and how you are very likely to get a class
action lawsuit if you continue the deployment of 5c encryption on your
channels, preventing recording through firewire (more details on that later)

Executive Summary:
- I'm very close to dumping your TV service because $67/month to watch
  basic broadcast channels plus 4 cable channels is both a ripoff and you're
  making it increasingly harder for me to record digital channels. But just
  the fact that I'm paying $12-ish for broadcast channels and $55 for a mere
  2 channels I want on top of that is very bad pricing on your part and is
  causing people like me to jump ship. I don't care if you add channels, I
  care about how much I pay for the ones I want.

  Also, as soon as you remove your channels tunable without a cable box
  (i.e. basic analog cable) and continue to prevent recording digital
  channels tuned through your unnecessary but yet required cable box, you
  will become entirely unattractive and more expensive compared to satellite
  or IPTV solutions.

- Your cable internet service, while reasonably priced while still on the
  package pricing, has been somewhat unreliable and plagued with the most
  infuriating clueless tech support I've ever worked with (not counting
  when you mistakenly shut me off and treated me like a criminal by putting
  me in the copyright infringer pile due to a temporary overusage due to a
  bug.

Phone Service
-------------
Honestly, considering the experience I had with your internet service
sometimes going down for a day or more and being told that I didn't have
business service and that I had no SLA, and that I'd probably get 1 or 2
dollars back a the end of the month to make up for the fact that I had no
internet connectivity for over 2 days (it was a city wide problem), is why I
would never consider phone service from you (and quite frankly no tech savy
person I know in the Silicon Valley has your phone service either).

TV Service
----------
1) you make TV hard to get to without your equipment
----------------------------------------------------
To your credit, that's the one thing that has mostly worked in the 12 years
I've been your customer for analog service.
Why Analog? Because with multiple TVs and 4 VCRs back then and now multiple
DVRs (not yours, mine, self built), cable had the big advantage of allowing
multiple recording streams without extra decoding hardware.

Then came digital cable, which I ignored since it required a cable box per
channel to view and was a major pain the butt to link to my VCRs and DVRs.
But now, with HDTV, I have a bigger problem. I can thankfully tune the HD
broadcast channels that you are required to carry unencrypted by law, but
I am quite antagonized by the fact that you require me to lease a cable box
I neither need nor want to tune HD channels like SCIFI-HD or Discovery-HD.

I had to beg to get an HDTV DCH-3200 cable box, you didn't even have them at
your local branch and they had no phone number for me to call before driving
there to see if they received new ones (which they didn't for several
weeks). Through much work, I was finally able to tune and record just one
channel at a time through the firewire port to my DVR in HD.
However, some of my fellow engineers who managed to do that in other markets
are increasingly getting booted off as you turn on 5c encryption on all your
channels and prevent people from recording channels that they paid for.

You are probably aware that The FCC has passed a regulation that if I am are
in the United States, and you have a HD subscription and a HD cable box,
you have to honor my request replace or upgrade your cable box with working
FireWire.
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-03-225A1.pdf
Page 50, section 4
    (4) Cable operators shall:
        (i) Effective April 1, 2004, upon request of a customer, replace any
        leased high definition set-top box, which does not include a
        functional IEEE 1394 interface, with one that includes a functional
        IEEE 1394 interface or upgrade the customer's set-top box by
        download or other means to ensure that the IEEE 1394 interface is
        functional.

I'm pretty sure you will lose in a class action suit when the people go
after you for effectively disabling the firewire connection by encrypting
all signals on it so that they are useless.
If you were going to tell me I should be using your PVR, don't bother. First
your PVR is slow and bad, second it doesn't share programs around the house
between TVs, and 3rd I shouldn't have to buy or lease your PVR when I have
my own that's both better and that I can program to do what I want.

2) you charge a fortune for basic cable
---------------------------------------
More specifically, you do not sell basic cable or anything a la carte. You
force me to pay $67/month for the most basic HDTV package I can get.
If I get an HD antenna and put it on my roof, I'll only be missing 2
channels: Discovery and Comedy Central.
I can now watch my Comedy Central programs streamed from their web site,
and Discovery is also making their programs downloadable from their web
site.
Pretty much everything else is on http://www.hulu.com/ or is being added
soon. My home built DVR is of course internet enabled and can stream
directly to my TV, replacing your cable box and your service as a whole.

So, please tell me why I'm currently paying you $55/month for 2 channels
that I can pretty much watch on the internet anyway?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Cable Internet
--------------
I'm not going to mention the shameful pretense of unlimited internet when
you had secret caps for so long, as well as traffic shaping (I can't even
blame you for them, but I do blame you for hiding them and lying about
them), or how you treated me like a criminal in error and that I had to use
my fiancee's name at my old address before I could get service back, since
both of those are past (it's another long story that I don't feel like
telling anymore).

However, I will mention that you have the worst tech support I've ever
worked with. I'm a unix sysadmin and network engineer; I know when your
service is down probably faster than you do and I do not take kindly of
having a support monkey telling me to reboot my windows machine (I do not
have windows) when I point out that I do get a DHCP address from you, that I
released it and asked for another lease, but that you only give me a
192.168 IP because at least your local service is down.
I only used your service as a backup for my faster DSL connection (although
it's indeed not cheaper than you), and now that my dual line DSL has been
working stably for long enough without any weird caps or traffic shaping,
I'm happy that I'll be able to put behind me the stress and bad experience
that having your internet service, was.
As general feedback, no one technical that I know in the silicon valley
has comcast internet, unless they are in an area where it's impossible to
get DSL.
And by far, the worst part is when you have to call support and you are
forced to listen to those forced down your throat, infuriating adds for PPV
boxing or whatever that you couldn't care less about because you're calling
about your cable internet being down (that's just after having a clueless
tech who may just hang up on you when you tell them that you aren't using
windows).

In a nutshell
-------------
As you can tell by now, while I've been your customer for as long as I've
lived here, I've been nothing but unhappy with my interactions with you,
your on the fly pricing that goes away, fake charges that are put on your
bill for equipment you don't have or didn't ask for, and the hours wasted
arguing on the phone.
Your internet service has now become irrelevant, and while you had a
technical lead on the TV side by having almost unlimited concurrent streams
of channels on a single cable, you've managed to remove that advantage by
forcing needless cable boxes and encrypting channels to make sure that they
are no more watchable without one STB per recorder or TV, just like
satellite (except that satellite is both cheaper, and does have more HD
channels and in higher quality than you).
Before long, or maybe even as of now, IPTV and internet watchable shows are
going to make people a lot less likely to pay you a ridiculous $50-$60 just
to watch the few channels they care about and lease a cable box they neither
need, nor want (recent TVs and PVRs can tune QAM256 and 8VSB digital
channels without the help of an external STB/cable box. Mine can, and I'm
pissed that you're encrypting your channels for cripple the usability of my
devices).

If you have a reasonable price you can offer me for basic HD cable, you may
keep me as a customer assuming you never turn on 5C encryption in the
silicon valley (the day you do that is likely the day you'll have that class
action suit on your hands), but otherwise this hour I spent to give you this
feedback in the hopes that someone who still cares, is reading this, is the
last hour I will spend with you.

Marc Merlin.

Digitizing Old Videos

2008-10-28T15:00:00Z

I've been sitting on 4 old VHS tapes I filmed in 1992-1993 when I was an exchange student in Missouri. It was about 14-15 hours of footage in PAL, which was a problem since I had nothing to read those tapes here.
I ended up asking coworkers if someone had a tri-standard VCR lying around, and sure enough someone did and nicely offered to lend it to me (those things used to cost $500, considering that they were triple head VCRs with built in digitizers and digital converters, something that is trivial to do today, but cost a lot of CPU and money back then).

As a result, I've been spending the last 10 days or so trying to re-read those old tapes and encode them to mpeg2 and then divx. It's been a painful process because the tapes are obviously not in pristine condition and each time the picture skipped, the encoder on my mpeg2 card in my mythtv got out of sync and the rest of the recording was crap. As a result, I've had to watch the recordings, stop when bad, rewind and digitize in a new file until I got to the end, and do this again until I was done with all the tapes (I ended up with around 35 chunks that I had to hand paste together).

If you are curious, the magic incantations are:

To capture an mpeg2 file

v4l2-ctl --set-input 2	# composite
v4l2-ctl -s 2		# switch card input to 625 line PAL-I (not 525 line NTSC-M)
v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl=video_peak_bitrate=8000000
v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl=video_bitrate=6000000

Look at each piece with mplayer, find out which sub-piece to cut, and cut it like so:

mencoder -ss 0:10:20 -endpos 0:0:13 -oac copy -ovc copy -of mpeg yfu6.mpeg -o YFU6.mpeg

When all the pieces are ready, paste them all together like so

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -of mpeg YFU?.mpeg -o YFU-all.mpeg

And if the output is good, you can then encode it (I use a script that effectively runs this):

# $1 => infile, $2 => outfile
br=800
vf='-vf scale=540:405,crop=512:384'

    pass="$2".pass
    for i in 1 2
    do
        echo "DOING PASS $i"
        echo "-------------"
        # Trellis searched quantization
        nice -19 mencoder -passlogfile "$pass" $demux -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=3:abr:br=128 $time $aspect $vf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:trell=yes:v4mv=yes:vbitrate=$br:vpass=$i -ffourcc DX50 -o "$2" "$1" || die "multipass failed on pass $i"
    done
    /bin/rm $pass &>/dev/null

or if mencoder mpeg merge doesn't work (sometimes, merging mpegs failed for me):
```
avimerge -o big.avi -i my_file1.avi my_file2.avi my_file3.avi
```

Joyeux Noel

2008-10-19T15:00:00Z

I just forgot to give a heads up for a good french movie: Joyeux Noël, it's about how the French, the Germans and the Scottish who were supposed to fight during the first world war eventually said what the fuck, and celebrated christmas together, helped one another out, and eventually refused to fight against one another.
It's a really good movie documenting a known event, well worth watching.

Squirrels

2008-10-03T15:00:00Z

It's not spring, but squirrels still seem to be getting busy :)
(seen in a google parking lot)

I wonder what color the babies will be :)

Comcast's HD is a total Scam

2008-06-14T14:36:00Z

Now that I can record SciFi in HD, I got my first episode of Battlestar Galactica. Boy, was that disappointing. Now I see why they show almost nothing in true HD on that channel, it's because it compressed to death, to the point that outputting 1920x1080, or around 6GB for 1H of video, is a total joke.

First, to get that out of the way, there is nothing wrong with my mythtv setup: it gets raw mpeg2 and saves raw mpeg2, nothing is lost in the process. Also, the jepgs below are compressed at 85% or better to make sure they would not worsen the picture quality (trust me, it's hard considering how bad it is to start with).

Comcast's picture quality for HD on Scifi is so bad that you can see major picture quality faults without even pausing the picture. So Xav, stick to Satellite, cable HD quality is indeed totally pathetic.

Hell, this is not new but here are a few samples to see what I mean:

So, this frame looks bad, but it's a 5th of the size it's actually broadcast in

Now, this is a portion of the full size frame that is actually displayed. Yes, it's that bad

and another portion of a full size frame, lovely...

Yes, it is really that bad. Good job comcast, I'm happy I pay for this shit and that I have no incentive to download much better quality copies of the show off the internet.

Ubuntu, what the fsck is wrong with you?

2008-05-18T14:41:00Z

Since Ubuntu Hardy had just come out, I figured it was a good time to upgrade my laptop and mythtv server to the new version (the rest of my machines still run straight debian, and I just apt-get install stuff on them from testing without ever doing apt-get dist-upgrade).
Since I'm not totally stupid, I upgraded my laptop first and things pretty much went OK (X broke, but that's because of my unsupported ATI firegl 5200 chip, that required the fglrx binary only driver at the time.

So, I decided to upgrade my mythtv next. I figured I might have to fix up a few things after the mythtv 0.20 to 0.21 upgrade, but things couldn't be so bad, could they?
Well, what actually happened is that my server never rebooted after I upgraded the kernel. Ok, no biggie, I wait to get home and see what's up, and what was up was that /dev/sda1 would mount, but none of my other partitions (/usr, /var, and others) would mount: e2fsck said the partition was busy, and /bin/mount refused to mount the partition because it was busy too.
WTF? They were not used in /proc/mounts, or anywhere. I was quite stumped, and debugging without /usr or /var wasn't fun (BTW, thanks debian/ubuntu switching from one crappy editor in /bin: ae, to another crappy editor: nano. What a lot of crap, just compile a small minimalistic vim or other vi clone and put it in /bin already!
Anyway, after much searching, I found out that the problem was due to evms. The upgrade helpfully removed my lvm2 scripts and stuck evms in there. Not only that, but they forced me to switch to evms!
But it gets better, the evms init script makes the partitions busy and prevents mounting them from their normal location (/dev/sdax) and forces the use of /dev/evms/sdax, unless you a using a non standard kernel patch that isn't in my kernel.org kernel.
And I love how the fix that is typically given is "apt-get remove evms" when that, in turn, removes lvm support and screws me over too...
To the geniuses who thought it was ok to pull that kind of crap: you suck. I don't care if it was somewhere in the release notes, you can't just force me to switch to evms, break/remove my lvm scripts, and depend on a non standard kernel for me to be able to see and mount my regular partitions and my lvm partition.
You cost me several days of myth downtime, lost shows, and therefore have blood on your hands!
And I don't care if evms is great, it's not the agreed upon future of linux, so forcing people to switch in a non revertable, non compatible change is just wrong on too many levels!

Ok, now I can focus on fixing what broke/changed in mythtv 0.21...

Ongoing Stupidity of Airline Security

2008-05-14T03:42:00Z

So, Jennifer and I flew to Chicago during the weekend, and for reasons that are a bit long, I didn't have my driver's license with me.
Not to worry though, I knew that for a local flight, licenses or IDs were not actually required to travel within the US.

At the checkin, I showed them a copy of my real license, which they could have looked up by number, but they have no way to do that. I also had a real copy of my old license, which had expired driving privileges, but was still a perfectly good ID.
Why expired driving licenses aren't good IDs if the picture matches, is beyond me...

Anyway, I got the SSSS (special security screening something...), and the sole security guy at SJC proceeded to inspect every single pocket of my scottevest jacket while complaining to me that had too many pockets and too much stuff (he actually missed a couple of pockets).
Then, he started working on my backpack and asked me "is it as bad as your jacket?". I told him yes, he started and then just gave up because by then he had backed up the security line for 10mn.

So, outside of the fact that going through all this when I actually had a fully legit but just expired ID, and a copy of my real ID that they should be able to look up, is pretty sad.
Where they failed is that I was going through security with Jennifer, we had a combined ticket, she didn't have the SSSS, and they didn't search anything on her even though she was with me the entire time.

On the way back, it got worse though: we showed up a bit earlier at the airport (Chicago/ORD). Since I was somewhat annoyed that the previous guy emptied all the carefully sorted pockets in my scottevest, I just gave my jacket to Jennifer, I got the SSSS again, the guy barely looked at my backpack and couldn't look at my jacket since I didn't have it with me (not that he would have bothered apparently), and I went through.
Then, it occurred to me that the only reason I got SSSS was that they had written SSSS on my printed at home boarding pass. Next time, I can just print two boarding passes, they print SSSS on one, and I show the other pristine one at security.

Seriously, this stuff is just a joke!

Windows still sucks, and how it will get worse with Vista

2008-04-21T13:12:00Z

So, windows sucks of course, but if you have to pick one, XP is mostly agreed upon as the most usable and least sucky one (although I have windows 2000 in my vmware image because it's smaller and good enough as an application loader).
I wanted to test the new Seattle Avionics Voyager 3D flight planner and synthetic vision software, so I had to use native windows.
First I found out that my WXP partition on my thinkpad was actually broken and that windows would just BSOD after a few minutes of use without any useful error message.

Ok, I used a WXP SP2 CD to do an install/repair on top, but first had to disable AHCI SATA and set my boot drive as IDE to make windows happy (see the SP2 installer has 0 SATA support!). Ok, fine, whatever, I get windows reinstalled on top, things actually work out pretty well, I go in the bios, put SATA AHCI back to make linux happy and go on with my life.
The next day, try windows again and realizes it won't boot longer than 10 seconds, and later I figure out that it can't boot because it removed the SATA drivers in my existing install and became unable to use my drive in AHCI mode. Good job microsoft!
I then wasted a good 2 hours trying to convince WXP to install the AHCI driver (I even knew what chipset I had, which exact driver I needed and where it was on disk), but WXP kept ignoring my request and installing ide-piix instead, the driver for the IDE emulation mode....
In the end, the only thing I was able to do was to find a USB floppy drive, find a floppy (both are hard to get today), find an intel WXP driver floppy generator which then made a driver floppy I was able to use for a 3rd WXP re-install. The best part is that you have a couple of seconds to press F6 during the install boot to tell it you have a driver disk. It went by so fast, I missed it 4 times before I saw and caught it. WTF can't the installer even tell you "I need a driver, do you happen to have one?" instead of "I can't mount your Hard Drive, press F3 to reboot".
Please fire the morons reponsible for all that crap!

Anyway, hours later, system is back up in AHCI mode.
With linux, it would have taken me about 15mn of my time, it would clearly have told me it couldn't find the boot drive, and it would have allowed me to add/enable the driver without having to do 4 consecutive 1H long installs to reinstall a simple driver that I already knew by name!

The thing that worries me is that how ridiculous, and quite frankly difficult things have gotten. This procedure was overly complicated, and quite frankly borderline impossible for most people, simply because microsoft could not be bothered to add SATA support to their installer. I think it's because they just want people to install their piece of crap Vista instead, and this part worries me because they're going to make it increasingly difficult to use XP and force people into all the crap that is vista and its even worse license.

Choosing the right Closet Organizer System: Zen Space Solutions (and blinds.com for blinds)

2008-04-20T02:14:00Z

Jennifer and I were missing blinds for our house, and some kind of closet solution (right now, we only have empty closets, and nowhere to put our stuff away).
For the blinds, the least expensive was actually to get premium hunter douglas material direct from blinds.com, and tack on a local installer. It was cheaper and better than Home Depot, or 3 day blinds (this is the summary of several days of work and research from Jennifer).

For closets, to have a good idea of what we needed and designed, you can look at what we got after working with Coast Closets, the last design we came up with (note that you can click on the 3D views to see 3D versions of the closet designs). The final proposed price was actually lower after rebates and some tweaks we could have done.

We tried some local companies first, wood, and then melamine, but they basically wanted $7500 to do all our closets. It just felt too much, so we started looking at other options (especially Jennifer).
Eventually, we found Budget Closets for a local option, downgraded our color from floor color to white, and Jennifer later found Coast Closets , which looked like the ideal and cheapest option: we eventually got a quote around $3200, but there were three catches:

the design had to be done via Email and or the phone since it was an order from the East Coast. We also had to take very exact measurements and be ok with having closets that would be slightly too small since they wouldn't be cut to exact fit on site. This would have been ok to save $1000, although designing and correcting on the phone was a bit frustrating and pretty time consuming.
the next issue was that we'd have to arrange for our own local install. In theory it's something we can install ourselves, but we just didn't want the burden or deal with potential problems if the install in the studs wasn't quite right, and later the cabinets fell because of too much weight in some of the anchor points. Problem was that experienced installers wanted to charge a ludicrous $1200-$1500 for a 1.5-2day install, which then made that option not attractive anymore. It would probably work better in places where contractors don't charge an arm and a leg.
but the last problem which ended up being the dealbreaker for us was that in order to offer better prices than just about anyone else, Coast Closets works directly with the mill and is constrained by what the mill can do, or extra charges they might add if we wanted some non standard cut (making the end price less attractive). Mark from Coast Closets really tried hard to help us, but our closets and needs were just a bit unusual and ended up requiring a bit too much custom work, making his solution not as much of a good match for us anymore.

After going back and forth on that solution and seeing how we could work with it, we ended up giving up and going with a small local installer/builder we found while looking for installers: Zen Space Solutions . It ended up costing $4500 at a deeply discounted price since he was trying to compete with the Coast Closets offer. The end result will be about $1000 more, but more custom and better finished. I guess this is what it takes...
At least, we didn't just throw money at the problem, and while it was painful and draining at time, at least we did proper research and diligence in finding the best result/price deal.
Otherwise, Budget Closets would have worked too, although they have more overhead and are more expensive, and for people who don't mind installing themselves, and Coast Closets is still the cheapest option by far if you are comfortable doing your own installs or have access to cheaper install labour than we did.

New MythTV setup: ER in HD

2008-04-11T14:35:00Z

As part of the new tech setup, I've been working on getting my mythtv PC to work with HDTV. That shouldn't be hard in theory, but "theory, theory and practise are the same, in practise, they're not :)".
The first thing I found out is that the AMD Sempron 3100+ CPU in there isn't fast enough to play even 720p in realtime, but I found that by using nvidia's XvMC in the card, that was good enough to barely play HDTV in realtime (although that took some configuring).
Then came the problem of actually recording HD content: I had gotten an HDHomeRun from a coworker, which is indeed a neat little device that records unencrypted HD from cable, and forwards the mpeg2 stream to a computer, in my case my mythtv computer.
Up to then, my cable quality was an issue in the house because the incoming cable feed was split 2 ways outside by comcast, then 6 ways to each rooms, and then another 8 ways next to my my AV center in the family room. Obviously the signal was crap by then and I had to find places where to put amps and where to split the signal just the right amount of times.
I found a good store close to my house where they had all kinds of home wiring stuff, including various amps and high quality splitters, and after that the fun was to find where to put the amps, splitters, and signal attenuators (yes, ampping too much makes things not work) to get everything to work. Oh, the best part is that if you put a cable modem behind a regular amp, it won't work, you need a 2 way amp for the return signal of the cable modem to work.
Anyway, when half a day later I had decent analog cable signal where I needed to, I was able to get unencrypted HDTV channels to both my TVs and especially the HDHomeRun device.
You'd think I'd be done by then, but that didn't do much good until mythtv both had TV guide data for the HD channels, and knew to prefer HD recordings to regular recordings. That part wasn't much documented but I got help on the mythtv-users list , which basically was a matter of finding the right xmlids for the HD channels and giving them a higher priority over the same channels.
Anyway, after all this, I finally got one program in my lineup that recorded in HD: the weekly episode of ER, which was a nice surprise.
Yet, for SciFi-HD, I still get to download shows from BT if I want HD because comcast suck (and if they didn't suck, it'd be encrypted so that I can't get it anyway...).
Some people would ask why I go through this pain, which is a valid question. I still like the flexibility of running my DVR, as well as the occasional tinkering.

Our Experience with Chen-Chen from Help-U-Sell/Happy Choice Realty

2008-03-02T14:50:00Z

A few months ago, I wrote about our search of an agent we not only felt comfortable working with, but also one that would be realistic in what they charge for their work, and not the outdated, unrealistic 2.5-3% (especially in the case of higher priced homes)

So, several months later and finding the right house, I can share our experience.

Executive summary

The best deal is to go with helpusell.com (half fee on the buying side, i.e. 1.25% or 1.5%, and a set $7k-ish on the selling side).
The agent we ended up with, Chen-Chen Wu (homes@chenchenwu.com / 650.269.5996) was fantastic. In my opinion she provided better service than the average full fee agent.
For that matter, she helped us present an offer that let us win the house even though we didn't actually have the highest bid. Right there, she already earned her entire fee back (and she provided more service than that).

How we picked an agent

I ended up avoiding redfin because of warnings that their agents weren't necessarily good at making "close" deals (i.e. multiple offers and/or a picky selling agent), and that some selling agents would also boycott redfin since they see them as a threat.
I do like the redfin idea, but I was just a bit too nervous about using them, especially on somewhat higher end homes and in multiple bid situations. At 1% fee on the buying side, they were the cheapest though.

Our perks team at work had a deal with clickhomes, which charges a set 2% on the buying and selling side. It's a bit better than 3%, but still too high, especially on the selling side where it's easier to get close to 1%.

We also interviewed several agents to see what you could talk them down to, and what they were offering in return, but we found that many did not want to lower their fee significantly, even if they didn't have to drive us around every weekend (we can look for homes and do open houses ourselves). One eventually did agree to slash his fee in almost half, but considering that this is not what he was hoping to charge, or charges his other clients, it just didn't feel very right to go with him since it could have stressed the relationship by making us lesser worth clients.

In a nutshell, we found that most "legacy" (i.e. full fee) agents were kind of bullies hanging on to their overpriced, outdated and fairly monopolistic pricing scheme. They are obviously good salesmen and all used some amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics to justify their higher fees, but this just further turned us off from working with them.

Help-U-Sell

In the end, we found helpusell.com.
The franchise actually means that each agency may not offer the full range from basic to full service, although the one we picked, Happy Choice Realty, did. Basic service is what you'd want if you're an reasonably independent person, need limited hand holding and you are able to go visit open houses on your own.
For that, they charge a reasonable half fee, and refund you the difference (i.e just .25% or .5% more than redfin). Some Help-U-Sell franchises can also provide more time and help for first time buyers, but of course, they have to charge a bit more for that. The main point is that you pay for what you need and use, and not a flat 2.5-3% whether you're an undecided first home buyer, or a reasonably experienced independent buyer. Note however that not all Help-U-Sell locations offer full service, but the one Chen-Chen works at, does, should you need it.
Anyway, the way it worked with Happy Choice Realty/Help-U-Sell is that they have one of the better online MLS aggregators (they all suck somewhat :) ), you get the Emails as soon as a property in your search area and within your criteria (sq ft, price, # of rooms, etc) shows up.

When you start, you go through all the houses on the market, review the ones you'd like to see, and the agent takes you see them, like a regular full fee agent. Two reasons for this:

most of those houses already had their open house, so you need an agent to get in.
this gives a chance to the agent to see what you like and what you don't and help make better recommendations later.

After that, you get the mails with new properties throughout the week and depending on the property, the agent may or may not be able to see it before you at an agent tour, and you can ask your agent before going. Basically, you go see the properties added that week and that peak your interest, by yourself at the open houses.
If for some reason, you can't go to an open house, the agent would then make time to go with you, although you obviously can't do this every week, unless you want to pay a bit extra for the agent's time.

Chen-Chen

Long story short, after many months of searching, we ended up finding the right place, which Chen-Chen actually found and suggested for us, as it was just outside our search radius (it ended up being in Cupertino, across the street from one of the areas we were looking in). Without her, we would likely have missed that house.
She also did a great job negotiating for us, guessing the right educated guess of what amount to submit in our offer, and working the other agent and sellers to make us win :) Another lesser agent could have blown the deal there, or made us overpay.

And of course, it was very valuable throughout the process to have an agent who could tell us what prices should reasonably be, let us know if what we were looking for even existed, and where. Chen-Chen even twice made the difficult recommendation that we pass on a property we did consider seriously, because she thought we could get closer to what we wanted (and while that decision cost her more time and effort, she was also right).
Last, but not least, she had more than one opportunity to get us to get a bigger commission by getting us to pay for a more expensive house or offering more than what was necessary on the one house we got, but never did anything close to that. Unfortunately some other agents will in those situations.
In our case, Chen-Chen, without our having to ask even negotiated the agreed upon price down to lower it by the portion of the fee she wasn't going to charge (this is dependent on the seller agreeing, but most will since they gain on the taxes side too).

While I'm a hard critic, and hard to please when big money is involved, I really have to say that in general Help-U-Sell is the way to go: you pay a lot less on the buying side, a flat fee on the selling side. You're not paying for some big firm with three levels of overhead and fee splitting you don't need, or fancy buildings or the countless dead trees and expensive marketing material the big firms spam everyone with.

And within Help-U-Sell, we've obviously been nothing but delighted with Chen-Chen's work: superior work and ethics without paying more than necessary.
The least I can do is recommend her: homes@chenchenwu.com/650.269.5996.
I would not have spent the time to write this much for someone's work, had it been just adequate or average.

magic took a dive (updated)

2007-11-29T15:58:00Z

My main server, magic.merlins.org, which you are reading this page on, had its biggest downtime in a while: 5 to 8 hours depending on the services (www came back up first).
I could actually have brought the services back up quicker by failing over to my secondary live server, but because of state involved, and work involved in making my secondary server, primary for mail, and then switching back (this includes making my mailman backup primary too, and then dealing with queues, archives, and all that fun stuff).
After asserting that I'd be able to bring magic back up, I just opted to ride the downtime and not worry about switching the services to moremagic, and then back to magic a few hours later: too much work was involved, and I had enough work on my hands recovering magic as is.
That said, if magic were to really die one day, like the hardware dying (and it could happen, I found out that one of my two CPUs in there actually has died and that the server is continuing to work with one CPU left), then I would do a bona fide switchover to moremagic.

So what happened?
I went to the colo to upgrade the drives in my external array (from 36G to 180G, upping the external storage to 1TB).
Unfortunately, while I was swapping the drives on the live server, for some reason, I decided to run rescan-scsi-bus to see my new drives were being seen, and something went very wrong there: that command caused something very bad to happen on my primary system SCSI bus and caused the system array to fail.
When I rebooted (oh and that was with a new kernel, since I used the reboot to upgrade kernels too), my raid5 array was not being seen, and I only had my root filesystem: no /usr, /var, or anything else.
From there, I started debugging, and trying the typical commands to bring back a raid array that was killed, but it would only bring one drive back out of 5, which was insufficient.
At that point, the next step is to rebuild the raid5 array on top of itself, which is supposed to bring every back up. I had done this in the very distant past, and it had worked.
Unfortunately, it worked enough for my raid5 array to function as a physical volume for my lvm volume group, and it even showed my logical volumes within that VG. I thought I was home free, until I got the dreaded error that none of my filesystems were mountable or even looked like ext3.
After several reboots which were not fun because I had to boot with init=/bin/bash due to a problem with the new kernel (I didn't know that yet), and then manually bring up udev, udevd, lvm, and raid5 (it's become non trivial to do this nowadays), I realized that the new mdadm tools created a different default raid5 array when the tools from 2002, so I had overlayed new md blocks that weren't compatible with the data I had on disk (yet, it was close since I could see my VG and LVs). After more time and more reboots, I realized that the chunck size for raid had changed from 32K to 64K and that the new default raid layout was left-symmetric instead of left-asymmetric (WTF did they have to change that).
Well, 2H later, I had my raid array back up, with my VG and LVs. I was then able to mount all my filesystems, except /var which had been damaged beyond e2fsck recovery (i.e the entire filesystem was in pieces in lost+found). In hindsight, I should have backed up that data before wiping it, but at the time, I felt the data was toast, and I didn't have the time to wait for a 10GB copy to another partition.
My recovery plan was to copy /var from moremagic, which would be close, but not quite the same (it was as different machine, but I had some shared data pieces that were rsynced daily), and then rsync/overlay the real data that I had on an almost full machine backup on my main disk server at home.
Then, I had to add the missing pieces (like recent pictures), from my laptop.
In the end, it took 4 to 6 hours of copies to get most of the system back to where it was, with very little data loss. I did lose files that had recently been uploaded to my ftp server (I don't back that up, it's too big), and I did lose 8 hours of work and frustration to piece everything back together.

I was then able to bring apache back up first, but I had to wait longer for Email for a 2GB mailman sync to finish. As I write this, I'm still rsyncing logs back and it'll probably take another 12H or so, but the server has been back up and working since about 17:30.
On one side, I'm glad I had reasonable backups and lost virtually nothing, as well as the fact that I was able to rebuild the server in place instead of bringing it back home and having to make a new one from scratch, but on the other side, the 8 or so hours I spent doing this, sucked.
I'm also concerned that I was able to lose an entire partition just for running rescan-scsi-bus, which I had run many times in the past without such problems.

Update1
Actually, I found out that I lost most of my archived web logs from 1999 to 2005. I'm kind of sad about that, but such is life I guess. It could have been much worse...

Update2
Never mind, I actually didn't lose anything, except a lot of time. After rebooting this morning (after my last backup restores had finished over night, a full 24H after the machine went down), I just realized that /var/ftp, which I thought I lost was indeed a separate partition (duh!) and therefore wasn't lost when /var was lost. This means that in the end I didn't lose any data at all, except a lot of time.
I can't quite say that I haven't lost anything on a raid5 array anymore, but at least I didn't lose the actual data since I had backups of it all. Pffeew...

A beware tale about Paypal & Paypal response

2007-10-21T14:39:00Z

If you don't routinely sell stuff on ebay, or aren't verify familiar with, but use paypal, read on.

As you probably know, paypal tries very hard to upgrade everyone to a premier account so that they can scam you 2-3% for each and every transfer you do (even paypal account to paypal account, or from a bank transfer which costs them virtually nothing). In other words, if you send $100 to your coworker for a recent dinner, they keep 3%, and so on.

Obviously, the idea is to never upgrade to a premier/business account.

That said, they (somewhat recently?) changed ebay so that if you sell anything on Ebay, and the seller happens to use a credit card, you are totally screwed.
You are not allowed to refuse the payment and ask the seller to use a paypal funds or bank account funds. They flat out removed the deny payment button.
At that point, you are forced to upgrade to a premier account, unless you wait 60 days for the payment to time out, your auction to go down the drain, and the buyer to get pissed at you.
After that, your paypal account is tainted and you can't use it to get money from your buddies anymore. The only workaround is to open a new and separate paypal account that you never use for auctions.

So, if you sell on ebay, you get dinged twice: first on the auction fee (ok, that one is for the service), and then the needless paypal fees behind it.

The fine print, which is of course well hidden, is in this page

I also suspect (although haven't verified), that paypal will auto-switch your default payment type to suit you: if you're paying a premier member, they'll use your bank account so that they can pocket 2-3% (they do this for me every time, then denying me my credit card payment protection and especially the 3 month loss protection and 1 year warranty extension I'd get with my credit card).
If you're paying an regular member like me, I'm guessing that they default the payment to credit card to then force that member to upgrade.

I hated them before, I hate them even more now..

(update later) I found out that you can actualy downgrade from a premium account down to a regular account if you call their support, as a one time thing. They still scammed me the money for the two ebay transactions, but I was also able to call them about a bad seller who sold me fake nokia batteries, and they refunded me the amount of my payment, which made up for the fees they took me.
I was able to downgrade to regular account this one time.
For next time, I'll know not to put a paypal address directly in an auction, but to ask the seller to contact me first and only pay from bank account funds (and not a credit card)

(second update: reply from paypal, and my reply)

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 10:22:43AM -0500, webform@paypal.com wrote:
> Hello my name is Jim, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding downgrading your account, and I understand your frustration and concern over this issue. I am happy to assist you with your questions.

I called in friday and got my account downgraded.
Should this happen again, I'll just close my account next time.

> Personal accounts, as the name suggests, have always been intended for personal use only, and are not designed to be used for business purposes. PayPal considers the receiving of funds from eBay, Auction, or Website sales in excess of the Personal account limits to be beyond the normal level of personal use. By requiring Premier or Business accounts for all accounts that receive a large volume of payments from eBay, Auction or website sales, PayPal ensures that all high activity selling accounts are treated similarly.

That would be fine if it were the complete truth.
The part where paypal is being totally unfair and greedy is:
I had only ebayed one item, and the buyer used his credit card by mistake instead of his bank account. Paypal forced me to upgrade to premier just for that one payment, and purposely removed the option to receive a credit card payment, or to have the buyer resend me a payment from his bank account through paypal.
Note of course that you conveniently make it illegal by your own rules to accept paypal for an auction, and request not to accept credit card payments.
What paypal is doing here to force me to upgrade against my will is despicable. What you are doing is that I will look elsewhere than ebay next time, and you will lose money instead of making more through so much greed.
of course, charging 2-3% for person to person payments from paypal funds or a bank account, is close to theft. I will never use a premier account as long as you steal money that way.

I realize that you didn't make those rules, but feel free to forward my comments to your management.

Compact Digital Cameras with 7-10x zoom and Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 vs Ricoh Caplio R6 review (and other 7-10x zoom compact cameras) (updated)

2007-05-14T07:40:00Z

I had been waiting patiently for the new crop of compact digital cameras to come out to get a high zoom one as a replacement for my Canon SD550. The Canon was a reasonable camera for its size, but its main problem was that its pretty powerful flash often took up to 10 seconds to recharge, and wouldn't be ready for that first picture after the camera was turned on, giving that very uncomfortable "press the shutter, but no picture, no picture, still no picture" feeling. At the same time, I often found myself wishing that I had a better optical zoom.

I ended up waiting until April 2007 to have cameras I could decently choose from (I had spent many hours researching then current cameras in November 2006, and back then, wasn't able to find any option I could live with)

Here was my list of requirements for the new camera:

has to fit on my belt or in my pocket (i.e. like my canon SD 550)
optical zoom 7x or better
Being able to take pictures of buildings I'm just in front of (wide focal, ideally less than 30mm)
5Mpix or better
real image stabilization
long night exposure mode with multiple second shutter openings.
camera orientation saved in JFIF header to auto-rotate pictures after download
Uses SD (no xD or memory stick or other useless different formats)

Near requirements:

battery level indicator (canon has been too cheap to ever add that)
good night/low light pictures in manual modes (well, as good as you can on a small camera)
ideally has a mini USB plug on it (no custom cables)
has a diving housing box

After some research, contenders were:

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ2 and DMC-TZ3 : 105 x 59.2 x 36.7mm | 10x zoom (28-280mm)
Ricoh Caplio R6 : 99.6 x 55 x 23.3mm | 7x zoom (28-200mm)
Canon powershot TX1 : 89 x 60 x 29mm | 10x zoom (39mm-390mm). I rejected this one becuase 39mm is too narrow, and it's been reviewed as a hybrid with compromises
Casio Exilim Hi-Zoom EX-V7 : 95.5 x 59.8 x 25.1 mm | 7x zoom (38-266mm). Looked like a decent option, but 38mm is too narrow.
Samsung NV7 OPS : 106 X 62.3 X 20.9mm | 7x zoom (38-270mm). Also rejected for 38mm being too narrow.
Nikon Coolpix S10 ( review2 ): 111.7 x 58.4 x 40.5mm | 10x zoom (38 - 380 mm). 38mm is too narrow, the camera is starting to be too large, and I don't like the swivel design.

Before I start, I'd first like to state my annoyance at apparently what's sometimes a patent problem (I'm going to assume a patent issue more than none of the manufacturers having a clue as to what useful features are), and sometimes apparently the inability of manufacturers to borrow useful features from older cameras from their competitors. As a result, while we should have to chose between camera sizes and picture quality, for cameras that have otherwise similar features, it's instead a struggle between which features you'd really like but you'll have to drop in order to have just a single camera that gets even close to what you'd like.

Examples:

I've owned 4 canon compact cameras. Canon never bothered to add a battery meter in any of those cameras (I hear there's a patent to pay, and they're too cheap to pay for it)
Ricoh somehow thought it was acceptable to put out a camera today that didn't have a picture orientation sensor. How is that even possible? I haven't rotated a picture myself in at least 5 years.
Put a viewfinder please! Yes, I know it's likely not physically possible to put an optical viewfinder on a 10x zoom for a compact camera, but you can put a small LCD that emulates a viewfinder.
Why? (a) to save battery power by turning off the main LCD and (b) to allow following a moving target at full zoom through the viewfinder by acquiring the target and following it with one eye through the viewfinder and one eye looking at it directly. If you think this is silly, trying following a fast moving target in the sky at max zoom through the LCD.
Ricoh has had the nice feature of downsizing picture resolution seamlessly to increase the zoom factor since at least 1999. Panasonic has a half hearted attempt at it, canon and most others I know, never did.
Why don't most cameras let you zoom while taking movies? The TZ3 has a very quiet zoom, it wouldn't make any noise on film. Similarly, it could just do a digital zoom by resolution downsizing like the Ricoh does, but it just doesn't. Most other cameras I looked at didn't support any zooming during videos.

For Christ's sakes, if the only reason a manufacturer didn't provide zoom during movies is merely zoom noise (and not an issue with complicated compact zooms and keeping constant focus during zoom), don't do that. I'd rather have a little noise in my movie than no zoom at all!
The canons let you crop a video you just filmed, removing useless portions of the film without needing a computer. None of those two new cameras implemented that useful feature.
I have a hard time believing that cameras can also come out today without any stitch assist. Take away useless new "features" like face recognition and please leave old established features like stitch assist (neither the TZ3 or R6 have it). If you don't know stitch assist, it's also known as panorama mode: the camera lets you see a piece of the previous picture you shot and lets you overlap the new picture with the old one to allow for later stitching on your computer and a wide panorama.
The R6 has a cool fast shot feature where you hold the shutter, and it'll take pictures forever and keep the last 16 after you release the button. It's a great feature if you're waiting for a snowboard jump, or the start of a race, or something. That would be a cool feature to put in other cameras too.
(the TZ3 has something close, you just take a movie and it can make a stop motion picture from 9 frames of your movie. Resolution is poor though)
The R6 also has the simple feature of letting you save a set of preset settings into a user memory. Good idea for other manufacturers.

This is weird because on the other side, all manufacturers fight to copy one another on fairly useless features (in my opinion) like face recognition. If any of you are reading this, look at the above features first, and look at other features from your competitors that you are free to copy.

In the end, I was really left with those two cameras and neither did everything I wanted, but I was hoping one would at least close enough that I could live with it, and it would make a suitable replacement for my Canon SD550.

Let's start with a few pictures comparing them:

Now, I need to state that while this is not going to be a professional review and comparison, I did thorough testing for my own use, and I'm sharing the summary of my findings here. While some of you might disagree with a point somewhat, this should still be a useful review and comparison if you're having a hard time deciding between the two cameras, which in my opinion are the only to real contenders for small high zoom cameras with wide angle.

Ricoh Caplio R6

I'll start with the Ricoh Caplio R6. While it doesn't look much smaller, it actually is noticeably smaller when you're carrying it (it fits in my canon SD550 belt pouch, where the TZ3 doesn't come close).
I also liked the good old Ricoh resolution downsize digital zoom. Along with a 7x optical zoom, if you accept to scale your picture down to 640x480, about 7 times smaller resolution-wise, you end up with up to 45x zoom for a VGA sized picture. Now, in real life, I found that the details on those 45x pictures, usually aren't that sharp, and that the camera sometimes has a hard time focussing in those conditions, but it's still a nice feature.
The R6 uses a similar resolution downsize trick to give you some kind of zoom during videos, still yielding a stable 640x480 picture. The zoom is however jerky and only gives you 3x. It's not great, but understandable considering the optical zoom is pretty noisy. I also need to note that it does a good job of changing the light exposure if you move the camera from a dark spot to a bright one while filming (my canons wouldn't do that)
What's a bit awkward is that the R6 tries to do without a rolling selector button, but has to hide some functions in menus and submenus instead. You can't easily switch from 100 Iso to high iso mode by just rolling a switch (although the preset setting option might help a bit here). What's more awkward is that to record a movie, you have to go in scene mode and select the movie scene. The R6, while doing without a rolling selector button, however does have a button that you can program settings on: it's a nice idea.

As far as scene modes, it doesn't have many, but then again, I personally couldn't care less about scene modes. As far as I am concerned, scene modes are only presets for people who don't know how to set their preferred manual settings for each kind of shot.
One nice preset however is the option to take a slide or a poster from an angle, have the camera detect the trapezoid, and fix it back to a rectangle.

More generally, the camera can take any previously taken picture and fix it after the fact. It's slow for a 7Mpix picture (about 30 seconds), but it works remarkably well.
From the few tests I've done, in low light situations, the R6 seems be a bit less noisy than the TZ3, and its flash seemed decent. It takes around 5 seconds to recharge. You can find the low light pictures here
For night pictures, it can take pictures with a 1 to 8 second shutter time, which is ok for most shots, although not quite enough for very low light situations (night sky). You can see night pictures here
The R6 is like other Ricohs, nice for its manual focus option, and very good macro capability.
Last, but not least, the R6 has a novel fast shot mode where it can capture 16 800x600 shots at high speed and make one picture out of it, or (better), take high speed pictures for as long as you press the shutter, and it'll keep the last 16 shots and make one pictures out of it (perfect for when you're waiting for sommeone to jump or some event to start). See this picture for an example of what it looks like

The first negative point for me is that Ricoh did not seem fit to put an image orientation sensor in the camera. I'm sorry, but I stopped rotating pictures by hand on my computer years ago. Get with the program Ricoh...
However, another problem that made me uncomfortable with the camera was the fact that I got some blurry pictures in full daylight. It only happened a few times, I can't tell you why, but here's an example: 102_Bad_R6_Picts_100iso_0.0023s_noflash (sorry, it was inconvenient to go back in a plane and try some other settings after the fact ). I also have a couple of pictures taken in auto high ISO with flash in wide angle ( 400 ISO/0.031s and 800 ISO/0.028s ), and that turned out quite blurry. I'm sorry, but that should absolutely not happen! (in years of using Canon cameras, I've never had that, especially not for two short range, short exposure time flash pictures taken in a row).
That said, most pictures were good thankfully, see more day pictures .

If you would like a longer review, you can read this other Ricoh Caplio R6 and a list of specs

Summary

Pros:

much more compact than the TZ3, and yet a good 7x optical zoom
zoom past 7x with resolution downsize zoom
some amount of zoom during videos, but resolution, not optical zoom based (i.e. not that good, but better than nothing)
during movies, camera adjusts for lighting
Very nice image straightening feature (take a picture/whiteboard from the side, the camera can change the trapeze back into a rectangle)
can take 3 pictures in a row with white balance or exposure settings offsets
Very good macro capability
Manual focus as well as infinite focus options
Cool option of letting you save a bunch of settings in a preset memory for later recall
Less noisy than R6 at 200, 400, and 800 ISO
Battery life feels a bit better than TZ3
Standard mini USB connector on the camera

Cons:

No viewfinder
no orientation sensor!
no underwater housing that I could find
videos don't seem to work with mplayer
doesn't seem to show ISO that was used after picture was taken (you need to go to play and review the picture later to find out)
Some daytime pictures had some white wash out requiring EV correction
Occasional blurry pictures
ISO high triggers too quickly (250 ISO for pictures in full daylight)
Cannot take night pictures for longer than 8 seconds (not enough for night skies or some burning man shots )
No stich assist

Panasonic DMZ TZ3

First, I've stated earlier, the TZ3 is unfortunately noticeably bigger than the R6. After having a canon SD550 on my belt for a while, switching to the R6 wasn't bad, but switching to the TZ3 definitely makes my belt pouch bigger. Unfortunately, the batteries' form factor doesn't help, they are much thicker than wide, making your belt pouch even thicker as a result (usually the batteries sit in front of the camera in most belt pouches)
The absence of viewfinder is a problem when the camera freezes its picture while trying to auto focus on a moving object. I tried to take pictures of moving birds at full zoom, the picture froze for several seconds while the camera was trying to focus, and I entirely lost my moving subject and the pictures as a result. I would have been happy with a simple viewfinder with an aiming cross, even if it didn't go through the lens.
Update : there is continuous autofocus option doesn't prevent freezes altogether, but may help. The other gotcha is some autofocus modes are actually documented to freeze the picture (notably the H 3 area focus mode, while the 9 point mode doesn't seem to hang much or at all). I still miss the viewfinder, but it makes its absence more bearable.
It's also sad that the LCD is of questionable quality. It needs a special mode to be visible from high angles (i.e. holding the camera above your head) where the R6 and canon LCDs just work all the time from all angles. Overall, the TZ3 LCD just didn't seem as good compared to the other ones I've used. It's usable enough though.
I'm disappointed that the camera doesn't let you zoom at all during movies. They should really have allowed use of the very quiet optical zoom, or at least some digital resolution based zoom.
For night pictures, while the camera did somewhat decent shots, but forces you to select specific night scene modes depending on the shutter speed you want (that's unfortunate and non intuitive). Once you figured out how to use the scene modes, you can get decent night pictures and long shutter modes of 15 to 60 seconds allow for quite nice night pictures .
During low light situations, the 200 to 800 ISO modes are usable, but somewhat noisy and clearly more noisy than the R6 as you can see in this picture gallery .
All this said, the 10x optical zoom is good, and you can get up to 15x if you are willing to downgrade your resolution to 3Mpix, but it's awkward: you can't just keep zooming in like you can on the R6. Picture quality at 10x zoom is pretty good for a camera this size though, you can check them out . For that matter, I didn't take any pictures outside where the lighting was all wrong, or the picture blurry.
Flash pictures looked ok, and the flash also recharges in about 5 seconds. The camera makes that fact clear by turning the screen off, likely to divert more power to the flash. It's both a nice idea, but also a bit annoying when you're trying to keep a subject in your screen on a camera that doesn't have a viewfinder.

A few other random noteworthy things about the camera: it has a nice dual picture review mode (where you can view side by side any two pictures you took, and compare them), it has an exposure bracketing mode where it'll take 3 pictures at different EV values and leave you with hopefully one good one, it has a clipboard which is basically an internal memory for a few low res pictures like maybe road signs, or a map you saw on a wall, and it can extract a single picture from a movie (although at a silly 1920x1080 resolution that is about 6x bigger than the actual frame resolution and is therefore digitally blown up), but it has a nicer option to create a picture with 9 frames of a movie to show a stop motion scene.
The last important thing you need to be aware of: my original review listed several things that I thought the camera couldn't do because those options were absent in the list of manual options. It turns out that Panasonic has unfortunately decided that some of the options would only be available in the scene modes.
You need to use a scene mode to:

take a picture with more than 1/2sec shutter speed (night mode lets you go up to 8 seconds, but it will decide for you how long is enough, you can't set it yourself). Then, beyond 8 seconds, you have the starry sky mode which lets you pick 15, 30, or 60 seconds
The camera has a potentially nice (even if super grainy) 3200 ISO mode. I'd rather have a super grainy picture that's not blurry and I'm happy that it's there. I'm unhappy that they had to hide it in a scene mode, outside of which you cannot use it.
The infinite distance focus that I think is missing, might be in a couple of scene modes without being documented. Again, why? Just make it a simple manual option to chose from.

If you would like a longer review, you can read this Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ2 and DMC-TZ3 dpreview / Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 dcrp review and list of specs , list of specs2

Summary

Pros:

10x zoom with a poor orientation downsize zoom
orientation sensor
during movies, camera adjusts for lighting
Zoom is very quiet and with a reasonable speed.
cool even if mostly useless jitter measurement screen (shows how much you are moving the camera and how much your subject is moving)
$200 underwater housing
view by date calendar
Decent macro capability
option to resize and trim pictures after they were taken.
dual picture view/review mode
3200 ISO mode (very grainy as expected though)
Exposure bracketing mode (takes 3 pictures with different EVs) like the R6
clipboard could potentially be useful to some
While battery life isn't great, a power save mode lets you shut off the LCD while the flash is recharging

Cons:

No viewfinder and screen hangs while autofocus happens, so you cannot follow a moving target at full zoom until the camera is ready to take the shot (typically it means you'll miss it)
a little big for compact camera, especially compared to the R6
on top of the someone large form factor, the batteries are too thick, which makes even more of a bulge on your belt carrying pouch. The R6 batteries are much more convenient size-wise.
No Zoom during videos, which is sad considering that optical zoom is quiet
Zoom with resolution downsize is clumsy compared to the R6 (you need to manually downsize the resolution before you can zoom more)
LCD viewing angle and quality is poor, it requires 3 LCD settings as a result and there's all poorer than the R6's unique LCD setting.
No manual focus.
I couldn't find a way to set the focus infinite mode, which be useful when taking pictures of planes in the sky (you don't need the autofocus to waste time and maybe mess up). Maybe the scenery mode helps, the manual doesn't make it clear.
Noticeably more noisy than R6 at 200, 400, and 800 ISO
No stich assist
No standard mini USB connector, but some custom connector. Come on, the camera isn't small, you could have fit a small usb connector on it (this is as silly as a big brick phone putting a super small microSD card when it could have fit an entire compact flash card, and a normal SD card without sweating)
no USB2? What is wrong with you Panasonic? But then again, since you put a stupid custom plug that I won't be carrying an otherwise yet other custom cable for, I suppose it doesn't matter anymore. I'll just copy the pictures from the SD card directly. Still, that's sad!

First, feel free to review all the comparative pictures I've taken on them, you can decide for yourself.
The batteries on the DMC are a bit bigger, but don't last any longer. Considering that the Ricoh R6 actually ships with a battery smaller than the slot it can fit in and comes with larger upgrades, it should have better battery life than the DMC TZ3 with an extended battery.
The Ricoh's high ISO pictures looked a bit better overall.
Macro pictures were slightly better on the R6, but the TZ3 was a close enough second so that both will work fine for your typical macro pictures.
I liked the rolling selector on the TZ3, it was quicker to select options on the TZ3 than the R6 with fewer buttons.
While both cameras had a quick picture review option, the R6 would not show the shutter speed or the ISO after a picture was taken. I found this to be a problem when taking pictures in auto-hi ISO mode, and not knowing how high the ISO had been pushed.
As already mentioned the zoom is a bit better on the TZ3, but the camera is also larger. Now, coming to image quality, I wish I had more details to give you, I'm not saying that pictures taken from the Ricoh R6 are routinely bad, I'm just saying that I saw a few pictures that worried me: A picture taken indoors close to the subject in a well lit environment with flash, cannot be blurry. If I take two such pictures in a row, and they are both blurry, that is a problem. A few outside pictures that were blurry for no good reason that I could find also worried me. I'm not a professional photographer, but I've taken about 40,000 digital pictures in the last 8 years, and rarely in the automatic mode. I can't promise that I didn't do anything wrong with the R6, but at least I gave it my best shot and I felt it let me down a few times where it shouldn't have.

I really wanted to have liked the Caplio R6, for its size and its cool features, but first the lack of orientation sensor, and then those few pictures of questionable quality, were enough to turn me off (I also couldn't find a diving/underwater housing for it, although one may show up sooner or later, there was none that I could find).
While it's true that the camera is bigger, I feel that the pictures were a little bit better, especially in high zoom situations, and call me silly but I didn't want to rotate my pictures by hand. Sorry Ricoh, but that's your fault.

I still think that both cameras are the best choices today. If you can live without an orientation sensor, and aren't as picky as me on picture quality in all cases (I've had canons for many years, and they were slow to take pictures, they got me used to good pictures, even from a small camera), the Ricoh Caplio R6 is a nice camera with a very good zoom for its size.
Now, if you want a diving housing, auto-rotated pictures, a 10X zoom instead of 7x, and pretty good picture quality for its size, then the Panasonic DMC TZ3 is likely what you want.
I hope this helps you, good luck finding the right camera for you, and feel free to tell your salespeople from Ricoh/Panasonic/Canon other what features you'd like and what they're missing.
While I can't help you with your individual camera, if you have found factual errors or clear omissions in this page, feel free to contact me (you can also send me a quick thanks if the 10 or so hours I spent on it were useful to you and link to this page if you think it'll be useful to others)

Logic and Comcast do not mix: disconnected

2007-05-04T23:34:00Z

In March, Comcast disconnected my cable internet service, ultimately due to a problem about overusage (too much "unlimited" data used). While they were hard to get a hold of (or at least someone who had any clue what was happening), you eventually have to call a number where they make you feel you are a criminal, and they won't talk to you: you have to leave a number on your answering machine and hope they call you back while you are able to pick up (and leave you shutoff for as long as it takes). Luckily, I had my cell phone with me when they called me back in the evening and explained "you used too much data in February, and got disconnected as a result".
Ok, great, never mind that unlimited is not unlimited, they were likely correct about the data usage (400GB in a month) so I fixed the problem (mostly an rsync backup script that was doing something wrong and using at 20-40x the amount of bandwidth it should have). Their representative said "you have one month to fix it and we'll resume monitoring and shut you down if it happens again". This was March 14th.
About 6 weeks later, in early April, they shut me down again with no warning or call. I call back after going through the useless 1st level support who wanted me to reconfigure my windows DHCP settings and then said I shouldn't be trying to use the service if I had linux, and I eventually talked to their security staff who said "you had an overusage for March again, so we shut you down for good this time"
Me: "Mmmh, you warned me on March 14th, I couldn't fix anything that happened before you warned me, but fixed it after that date"
Him: "You had an overusage for the second month in a row, we had to shut you down, it's our policy"
Me: "Why don't you look at my usage numbers after you warned me and I fixed it"
Him: "We don't have those numbers, we only have all of March"
Me: "But you know March was almost half over before you warned me, and I had no way to go back in time and make that go away"
Him: "Sorry, it's our policy"
Me: "So, what's the point of warning people if you don't give them a chance to fix the problem. What about the one month grace period your collegue told me about"
Him: "There isn't any grace period, sorry"
Me: "So there was nothing I could do then"
Him: "In your case, I guess not, sorry"

Putting aside the unlimited which obviously not unlimited, it's pretty pathetic that while Comcast tries to do the right thing by warning you and giving you a chance to fix an overusage problem, their braindead-ness and refusal to follow basic logic, causes them to shut you down before you can actually fix the problem.
Good job, comcast!
Verdict: "Sorry, you can't be our customer for 1 year". Considering how they work, I'm not sure I want to be their customer at all ever again.

Until they fix their warning system to match logging cycles, or honor the one month grace period they promised me, and then pretended they never had, I can see how they're going to get many other people shut down that way.
If comcast is actually meaning to give their customers a chance to fix a usage over an arbitrary limit they won't disclose, they have some serious fixing to do, starting by not putting their customers in the criminal/DMCA pile that their regular support folks are not even allowed to help.

Internet, is it like the TV?

2007-03-31T03:15:00Z

I was going to my host sister (Alanna)'s wedding in Dallas, and called a few hotels nearby. When I called the 3rd hotel, and asked if they had internet connectivity, the reply was "internet, is that like the TV?"
Oh boy...

Telling Jetstar that they suck

2007-03-04T15:13:00Z

I sent the following Email to Jetstar (even though they try to hide their Email address), as well as the Australian board of tourism with a shred of hope that they might do something about their ridiculous 7kg per carry on limit within the country.
(ok, I might have just slightly exagerated some of the points below, but that was to drive the point across :) )

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am Emailing you because of my severe dissatisfaction with how I was treated during a flight with your airline, and let you know how disconnected you are with reality of you are hoping to attract tourism.

In a nutshell, you charged me more than $150 for what you called extra luggage, and you were really trying to charge me over $300, you humiliated me by having empty all my luggage and carry ons to meet the ridiculous 7kg/carry on luggage limit, and you denied me entrance with a carry on (small laptop backpack size) and my small laptop bag when in 20 years of flying I have never had a single airline deny me a carry on, and my laptop bag as a personal item, which your staff did.
Unless you tell me that you are going to make clear changes to improve the situation, I will forever avoid your airline, and warn all others against using it, starting with my 10,000 coworkers at google, and all my peers in the computer conference community.

I flew from the US to Sydney for 2 weeks to go to a conference and to go diving after that. I didn't pack my entire house, I just took enough clothes for the trip, some light diving gear (not even a BCD, or full suits), and my laptop and related computer equipment in my laptop bag.
My girlfriend and I had 2 checked in pieces of luggage each, between 15 to 25kg each, well under the 32kg/piece limit. We also each had a small backpack as a carry on, and a laptop bag.
This was no problem for our flights to and from Australia, and I guess we got lucky because it wasn't a problem for our flight with Jetstar from Sydney to Cairns. However, on the way back, some overzealous employee of yours maybe decided to apply your ludicrous rules on carry-ons.
First of all, I don't care that some loser was able to sue after getting a carry-on on his/her head. I didn't fly to Australia to have silly restrictions because of one person who had one problem and was allowed to sue successfully somehow. Australia isn't worse than the US, is it?

While my carry-ons were small, they are dense: my computer equipment, batteries, cables, and accessories do weigh a fair amount. My laptop bag is closer to 15kg and has never been below that, nor can it be: I need that equipment, and I cannot check it in as if I ever lose it, I am risking my job.
Your staff not only refused to let me take my laptop bag, but also told me that I could not take my carry on and my laptop bag, so I could not even rebalance the weight between the two (and again, I cannot check this in: I value my job and my ability to do work and give my talks at conferences too much to allow any airline to handle that sensitive equipment again)
Then, I'll save you the overweight bill we got from our check in luggage plus carry on weight that now had to be checked in too. We had to grossly cheat to avoid paying over $300, had to move lots of already carefully packed luggage around to meet your rules, and had things broken when we got there because of that rebalancing, and empty space in a piece of luggage that was otherwise well packed and padded to prevent damage to the internal items.
In the end, we lost 30-40mn, I felt fairly humiliated, and you charged us an extra $150 or so, and that's again only because your representative gave me no choice but to grossly cheat so that I could still keep my laptop with me and not pay several hundred dollars more.

So, my problem with you are:

your sales staff on the phone flat lied to me when they told me that I would be able to take my carry on and my laptop bag with me on the plane, even though the laptop bag would never be 7kg. I quote what your staff said: "if it's a laptop bag, we allow it regardless of the weight, we know that 7kg can be difficult to meet". It is outrageous than your checkin staff later says that it's not true, and effectively not only fines me heavily for the weight, but made us spend more than 30-40mn, almost making us miss our plane, to move lots of things around.
The 7kg/carry on limit is a joke. If Australia or internal carriers don't stop this silly rule, I will simply take my tourist dollars elsewhere (I spent about $10,000 this time, and I'l be happy to spend them elsewhere next time)
Denying us a small carry on backpack and a laptop bag as a personal item, is unheard of.
Your staff was totally inflexible and couldn't care less whether I made my flight, got home, or not.
Because my international flight was not with Quantas (I couldn't use them because their times didn't work for me), my international check in luggage allowance didn't transfer to you. I can understand that you would not let me check in 32x2 kg of luggage without any financial compensation, but you should sell $100 international luggage allowance vouchers for travellers instead of charging an insane $7/kg, or $300 on top of the flight for a person who does happen to have the 32kgx2

Please let me know if the way I was treated is representative of how you do business, and if not, whether you are willing to make things right. This will also let me know whether I should warn all my coworkers and colleges against using your services, or not.

Thanks
Marc

Watched full series: Heroes & Firefly/Serenity

2006-12-16T05:01:00Z

Current Music: Asot 271
Current Mood: Good

After watching all the current episodes of Heroes in 3 days (11 episodes), I watched the 14 episodes of Firefly , and the resulting movie again: Serenity .

Heroes was an interesting series to watch, even if the premise behind it is actually not that different from the 4400 : humans who were changed to have supernatual abilities.
It'll be interesting to see the rest when it comes out next year.

Firefly unfortunately was killed by Fox, who were just assholes on this front. They refused to show the pilot because it was in widescreen, and didn't fit what they wanted to show. They soon after cancelled the show without ever giving it much of a chance, even though it had started to attract a lot of viewers.
The later movie Serenity did great too, but Fox retains all the TV rights, so the series is likely going to remain killed.
Kind of sad when things like that happen, but then again Fox is also Fox "News", so they're already on my shitlist. Too bad the Firefly producer didn't sign up with some other channel originally.
But then again, if I were to get one show back, I'd take Babylon V first. Firefly was nice even if the wild west, 6 shooter atmosphere looks a tad weird to me, but B5 was better :)

HP Photosmart C6180 vs Brother MFC-665CW for linux and others

2006-12-01T14:28:00Z

I had been looking for a multi function fax/flat bed scanner/copier/printer, with ethernet and wireless support.
First, when I happened to stop by Office Depot, I saw the HP Photosmart C6180 , which seemed to be a decent device. It was a bit expensive ($300), but I figured that if it came from HP, it would have to have great linux support, so I bit the bullet and bought it.
Well, after several hours of configuring it, and setting up linux to talk to it, I came to the conclusion that I was somewhat disappointed. In the process, I also had to upgrade my windows/vmware image to W2K SP4 (I had no service packs before in order to keep the image as small as possible) so that I could try some of the windows software for the scanner.
Printing did work pretty easily, but I never got faxing to work except from the command line and on the printserver, not remotely. Sending jobs through the printing system just would hang forever and I couldn't find an easy way to just use the fax as a printer from windows. As for scanning, it just wasn't supported on linux and required windows to work, which is quite disappointing. HP did put out the hplip software suite, but outside of a spiffy control panel that doesn't do that much for me, it didn't get faxing working, and it didn't support scanning...
A few days later, I ran into the Brother MFC-665CW at Fry's while going to buy something else, and it turns out that office depot had it too, but helpfully was hiding it in the back and just did not feel the need to display it. That's disappointing because the unit only cost $150, supported everything the HP did, also had a build in answering machine and phone handset, and also had full linux support , including for scanning over IP. Go figure... Anyway, I ended up returning my HP Photosmart to them, and got the Brother MFC instead.
I still need to spend some time to configure it, but it looks like a much better choice for half the price.
Sorry HP, but your product was too expensive, inferior, and you even tried to sell out linux for your own benefit this past month.

Long distance

2006-10-19T07:52:00Z

After AT &T; tried to tell me with a straight face that it was ok to pay $60 to call france 14mn, and graciously back-ordering a $5/month international dialing upgrade to lower the price when I complained loudly, I switched to Pioneer Telephone .
3.25¢/mn to the US, and 6¢/mn for France is more like it, and how it should be.
There is also a nice site that compares all the long distance plans in California

How to convert raw cr2 pictures with linux, and merge pictures by date and Exif data with jhead

2006-09-20T05:07:00Z

I recently went to an event with a coworker who took pictures with an SLR Canon Camera that took cr2 raw pictures. My goal was to convert them to jpeg, and integrate them with my own pictures (merging/interleaving them by date using the picture data inside cr2 and Exif for my jpegs)

Here were the steps:

Convert all the cr2 pictures to jpeg
You need to install dcraw , and then after reading the man page, I figured this would be a decent command that would work for most pictures:
for i in *.cr2; do dcraw -c -q 0 -B 2 4 -w -H 5 -b 8 $i | cjpeg -quality 80 > $i.jpg; done
(cjpeg comes from libjpeg-progs )
Set the cr2 file time to the cr2 picture date inside the file:
for i in *.cr2; do dcraw -z $i; done
Set the file date on the jpegs to match the cr2 dates: for i in *.cr2; do touch -r $i $i.jpg; done
Find a matching picture between both picture sets, and compute the offset between both cameras (it should be 0 in an ideal life, but real life is usually lees than ideal :). ls -l image.cr2 vs jhead image.jpg will give you the times for each picture
Temporarily offset the time in the jpeg pictures that didn't come from cr2, like so: jhead -ta-4:55 *.jpg
If you only had jpeg pictures, all with Exif data, you could use jhead -n *.jpg to rename them all so that they sort by date, but here we'll have to use the file times to sort them, so we'll ask jhead to set the Exif time as a modification date for the pictures that were jpegs to start with: jhead -ft *.jpg
By then you can now merge both sets of pictures in the same directory, and you can then use the program of your choice to rename them by filenames that are sorted in the same order than the filenames ls -ltr *.jpg should list
the pictures in the order they were taken
I personally use midnight commander (mc), go to the picture directory, select 'sort order' by time, select all the files with + and enter, and put them all on the command line for rename with rename -y mergedpicts 100 CTRL-X T, rename being a special script of mine (follow the link to download)

And that's it, after all those *cough*simple*cough*easy*cough* steps, you end up with a bunch of jpegs ordered chronogically.

The end result of all this work was my picture library of pictures from the Reno Air Races

Geek Apparel: ScotteVest and Thinkgeek

2006-08-19T01:06:00Z

I recently did a little online shopping, at ScotteVest , where I got a few multi pocket pants, the nicest ones being the hidden cargo pants with 11 pockets and compartments, as well as the 237D 3 season 33 pocket jacket :)
Needless to say that I like them very much :) I was also going to write that I stopped short of buying the solar panels so that I didn't look like a total geek, but after looking at the page again while linking to it, I thought they were too cool not to buy (and would come especially handy at burning man if I can't secure reliable electricity)
As for their pricing, while they don't give any of their clothes away, they are priced quite favorably compared to half decent stuff you'd find in stores.

Code   Name                             Price
LNG-BK  SeV Lounge Pants Black          $79.99
        . Size: S:S
HCP-B   Hidden Cargo Pants Black        $79.99
        . Size: 3234:3234
HCP-S   Hidden Cargo Pants Stone        $79.99
        . Size: 3030:3030
HCS-S   Hidden Cargo Shorts Stone       $49.99
        . Size: 32:32
UCP     Ultimate Cargo Pants            $99.99
        . Size: 3030:3030
237D    237D                            $159.99
        . Color: O:O
        . Size: L:L
CMLBK   Camelbak 35 oz Omega Reservoir  $21.99
Tie     Gadget Tie (Special Offer)      $9.99
MFL-CA  Microfleece Pullover Camo       $39.99
        . Size: L:L

For Thinkgeek , I did my bi-yearly visit for new toys, and sure found nice ones

 Item                                               Qty         Price
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Caffeine Candy Sampler v6.0                        1          $13.82
 Laserpod                                           1          $53.90
 Si-Link FM Transmitter                             1          $15.40
 The Bionic Wrench - 6-inch                         1          $19.11
 The Bionic Wrench - 8-inch                         1          $21.75
 Levitating Desktop Globes - 8 Inch Globe           1          $55.00
 ROMP (Random Oscillating Magnetic Pendulum)        1           $7.42
 Floating LCD Clock and Shuttle - Base w/Clock      1          $55.00
 Flexible Shaft Ratcheting Screwdriver              2          $13.19
 Soldius 1 Solar Charger                            1          $64.06
----------------------------------------------------------------------

/me <- happy :)

Roomba Patch

2006-08-06T08:06:00Z

My roomba was having problems vaccuming, with no good reason, so I called Roomba tech support and they sent me a firmware upgrader by mail. It's kind of strange that they just didn't use a normal serial port and computer software, but in the end, what mattered was that their little gizmo upgraded the firmware, and my Roomba is happy now. Both cool and weird :) (a few other pix here )

Stanford Solar Challenge Vehicle

2006-06-17T13:17:00Z

Since Google sponsored the Stanford solar powered electric vehicle, the students were nice enough to bring their vehicle to our parking lot for us to look at.
The Stanford team won the race by a hair this year, and their vehicle can reach about 65mph with internal Li-Ion batteries plus full solar power. It was nice to see it face to face.

Useful VTA bike map

2006-05-12T05:57:00Z

I just got this from a coworker:
http://www.vta.org/schedules/VTA_Bike_Map.pdf

It's a nice map of all the bike routes around the bay, quite nice.

New SA-Exim record

2006-02-11T04:54:00Z

I'm still amazed (and happy) at how well the simple premises I used when I wrote sa-exim . I looked in my spam folder, and just found a new high
spam score record, where it just broke the 100 mark (106 to be precise).

In the meantime, I still get less than 1 spam a day in my main inbox (from several hundred thousands received), and my mail doesn't get eated by some provider that puts legitimate mail in my spam folder...

X-Spam-Level: **************************************************
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=106.0 required=7.0 tests=BAYES_99,ENVCALLBACK,
        FROM_LOCAL_NOVOWEL,HDRCALLBACK,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02,
        HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_1,MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS,
        MIME_HTML_ONLY,MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI,PERCENT_RANDOM,
        RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100,RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E4_51_100,
        RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E8_51_100,RAZOR2_CHECK,RCVD_HELO_IP_MISMATCH,
        RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_DSBL,RCVD_IN_XBL,RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO,
        TO_EFREI,UNRESOLVED_TEMPLATE,URIBL_AB_SURBL,URIBL_JP_SURBL,
        URIBL_OB_SURBL,URIBL_SC_SURBL,URIBL_WS_SURBL,X_MESSAGE_INFO
        autolearn=spam version=3.1.0-mmrules_20041125
X-Spam-Report:
        *  2.9 FROM_LOCAL_NOVOWEL From: localpart has series of non-vowel letters
        *  4.5 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary
        *  9.0 HDRCALLBACK Envelope sender callback failed
        *  8.0 ENVCALLBACK Envelope sender callback failed
        *  6.0 TO_EFREI To old efrei address
        *  4.4 X_MESSAGE_INFO Bulk email fingerprint (X-Message-Info) found
        *  1.3 UNRESOLVED_TEMPLATE Headers contain an unresolved template
        *  4.0 RCVD_HELO_IP_MISMATCH Received: HELO and IP do not match, but
        *      should
        *  1.5 RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO Received: contains an IP address used for HELO
        *  0.5 HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02 BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image
        *      area
        *  1.8 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
        *  5.0 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
        *      [score: 1.0000]
        *  3.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
        *  3.6 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04 BODY: HTML: images with 0-400 bytes of words
        *  1.5 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E8_51_100 Razor2 gives engine 8 confidence level
        *      above 50%
        *      [cf: 100]
        *  1.5 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E4_51_100 Razor2 gives engine 4 confidence level
        *      above 50%
        *      [cf: 100]
        *  7.5 RAZOR2_CHECK Listed in Razor2 (http://razor.sf.net/)
        *  4.0 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100 Razor2 gives confidence level above 50%
        *      [cf: 100]
        *  3.0 RCVD_IN_DSBL RBL: Received via a relay in list.dsbl.org
        *      [<http://dsbl.org/listing?220.77.108.253>]
        *  6.5 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
        *      [Blocked - see <http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?220.77.108.253>]
        *  3.9 RCVD_IN_XBL RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus XBL
        *      [220.77.108.253 listed in sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org]
        *  3.8 URIBL_AB_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the AB SURBL blocklist
        *      [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
        *  4.1 URIBL_JP_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the JP SURBL blocklist
        *      [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
        *  4.0 URIBL_WS_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the WS SURBL blocklist
        *      [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
        *  3.0 URIBL_OB_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the OB SURBL blocklist
        *      [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
        *  4.5 URIBL_SC_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the SC SURBL blocklist
        *      [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
        *  0.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI Multipart message only has text/html MIME
        *      parts
        *  2.3 PERCENT_RANDOM Message has a random macro in it
        *  0.9 HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_1 HTML is very short with a linked image
Subject: SPAM: 106.0: massive toys deeper and harder into their tight pussies & asses.
X-Spam-Prev-Subject: massive toys deeper and harder into their tight pussies & asses.
X-SA-Exim-Version: 4.2 (built Thu, 03 Mar 2005 10:44:12 +0100)
X-SA-Exim-Scanned: Yes (on mail1.merlins.org)

Hundreds of officers parading on Hwy 101 S this morning

2006-01-13T15:16:00Z

When driving to work this morning, I noticed a bunch of police cars blocking off 101S on Fair Oaks, and considered turning around to take central instead, but since it looked like something potentially interesting was happening, and 101N seemed to be moving, although somewhat slowly, I took it.

Turns out, I caught the beginning of a parade of hundreds of police officers from all over the area.
It was a bit surreal, hundreds of officers in a single lane (carpool lane) in an otherwise blocked off Hwy 101, with all kinds of police vehicles, vans, limos, etc, going on for 20mn+ while I was driving the other way, taking pictures, and trying not to rear end the car in front of me :)
Turns out it was to honor officer May, who was brutally shot and killed a few days ago in East Palo Alto.
Read more from sfgate

After I posted the pictures at work, soon after people started asking WTF happened on 101S (since it did mess with commute traffic in a pretty major way), it started a long thread as to whether inconveniencing thousands of commuters, and causing accidents on 101N.

It's hard to say. At least, they did reach their goal of drawing attention to the problem.
I personally give to the CHP 11-99 foundation , a worthy way to help.

The other pictures, and a few videos are here

No, you may not make comments about how taking pictures and movies while driving was probably not a good idea. Some people did crash on 101 due to watching the officers, but I didn't, I'm better than that :)

Raid 45

2005-12-23T03:42:00Z

So, about 2 years ago, I "borrowed" a web page page on raid, and added a fake definition on raid 45, "double inverse parity", and published it here (the point being that I'm the top hit on google for raid45 )

Why would I do such a thing you ask? Well, the original intent was to catch people I phone screen when they type all my questions into google and try to read off a web page.
Now, in real life I don't actually need that, I can very well tell if people are looking stuff up, but I found the idea amuzing.

In the meantime, some of my coworkers did successfully use my page to catch cheaters, but I think the best part is that someone took the fake definition I made for the fake raid level 45, and put it in his page .
I'm still laughing because he just copied the nonsensical "uses a double inverse parity that is both on the last drive, and also spread across all the drives" verbatim.

Before long, my definition will be in a book or something :)

The Apprentice

2005-12-19T05:14:00Z

Yes, I admit it, it's been one of the shows I've been watching when I work on my laptop, or as background when I'm around the kitchen/living room.
By watching it, I think I actually learned a few useful things about interactions with coworkers, bosses, and the workplace in general.
If you have no idea what it is, it's a 15 week long interview to get a job working for Donald Trump. The candidates get a task each time, and compete against one another to achieve the task. In the end, the winner gets a high paying and ranking job for Donald Trump. Smart of him to have come up with that idea.

I just finished watching the finale, and I was quite disappointed that after both top candidates had been so good, and Randall won, he said that he did not believe the other candidate should get a job working for Trump too, making a bogus reason that there should only be one winner. He really seemed like the kind of person who would be happy to share his victory, and for whom victory didn't have to be at the expense of someone else.
This shows how much I still have to learn about human nature...

VCF 8.0

2005-11-07T14:25:00Z

This was my 3rd visit to the Vintage Computer Festival. I managed to go to the 4th, 6th, and 8th. While it was a bit small this year, it was still entertaining to visit.
For one, I got to use a PDP-1, and play spacewar, the very first computer video game, which a technician loaded from punch card tape.
A few pictures are below, and the other ones (including a few videos, including the difference engine), go there

this is back when you could see a status light for each bit of each register in the CPU

Someone actually made a Babbage difference engine out of mecano. Babage only ever described the machine in drawings in 1849, but never got it built due to how complex it was for the time

can you say big floppy? (it was actually an optical drive)

The first palm PDA prototype

The sad state of the US GSM cell phone network

2005-10-31T00:49:00Z

Current Music: Les enfoirés - 2000 - La Bombe Humaine
Current Mood: Fair

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday with Cingular/AT &T; yesterday, for the 5th or 6th time.
This all started with me being an AT &T; customer, which was fine, until the day they got bought by Cingular. In theory, that means a bigger and better network to roam on, so that was good news.
In real life, this meant two networks that my phone could see, but this also meant that AT &T; turned off their closest tower to my house, leaving me with a far away tower with bad signal.
This turned out to be because Cingular Wireless had their own tower down my street with great signal. This was all great except that my old phone would not use the Cingular tower since it wasn't its 'home network' unless the AT &T; tower totally disappeared, which it seldom did (i.e. I had enough signal to get one unusable bar). Solution to that was to reconfigure my phone to manually lock to the (otherwise inferior) Cingular network. That worked for home, until I went out of Cingular coverage, and my phone wouldn't pick a working AT &T; tower until I put it back to automatic mode. Lame...

Solution from AT &T; : "you have to get a new phone with a new 64K Sim, along with cingular service". For quite a while, I just didn't bother since I was still using the old and reliable TDMA service on my Siemens S46 dual mode tri band phone, and one day they sent me a letter that they were going to turn that service off.
All, right, great: at this point I didn't have a choice anymore and bought a new Nokia Communicator 9500 (unfortunately it only did 1900Mhz in the US, no 850). Cingular asked me why I didn't buy one of their 850/1900 pre-programmed phones instead, and that's mostly because they were crap, like the Palm based Treo 650 (the Palmsource engineers, some of them I know personally , have since then fled the said company, confirming that that phone and its OS has no real future).
Anyway, the Nokia Communicator 9500 is a great phone, I went to Cingular to migrate my service from AT &T; to Cingular, went through more work to get everything working again, and ended up with a more expensive plan I didn't really need.
I then go home, and end up with the same exact problem: phone locks in on AT &T.; Grr!!!

More time with support on the phone, eventually I get a knowledgeable person from tech support who sends a reprogramming to my phone's Sim card to tell it to prefer Cingular over AT &T.; That was yesterday, the phone accepts the programming, I turn it back on, and still the same thing!
More time with support, more explaining why I didn't want to use their crappy phones, and eventually the support person tells me that my phone must be overriding the Sim's preferred network (i.e. Cingular) and that I should talk to Nokia to see if I can disable that.
I do so, and Nokia tells me that there is no such setting, and it must be a problem with the provider.
Joy...

Y'all suck!

Anyway, I'm back to locking my phone on one network, and having to change that every so often when I get out of Cingular coverage. It sounds that my only hope at this point is to wait for Cingular to actually merge both networks so that they only show up as one. With a little luck, that'll happen in a few months...

Of course, I could switch to T-Mobile, the other GSM provider, but they just have an inferior network and don't offer EDGE, just GPRS...

I'm so glad I live in a technologically advanced country.

and a few parting words from cartman...

2005-10-16T15:01:00Z

As we fight our way northwest into the great unknown, only one thing remains certain: is that I hate you guys with every tired muscle in my confederate bottom. We have taken topeka, and now I must rally the men en route to Missoura, because I will not stop until we have won it all, and you guys are my slaves, because I hate you guys, I hate you guys so very very much :)
This is why I love South Park :)

Another favourite is "I hate you guys, words just cannot express how much I hate you guys" :)

New spam record, and 70,000 spam blocked

2005-10-16T13:49:00Z

I was shuffling my SA-Exim logs, after realizing that I had more than 1G of spam mail saved, I also found the highest scored spam ever: 86.2!
In the meantime, I also found that my anti-spam software has blocked more than 70,000 spams on my server. Go me! :)

Subject: SPAM: 86.2: ºô¸ô¶}©±Àu´f¤è®×¡I ¦nÂ§·m¥ý³ø¡I
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=86.2 required=7.0 tests=BAYES_99,BIZ_TLD,
DOMAIN_RATIO,FORGED_IMS_HTML,FORGED_MUA_IMS,FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD,
HEAD_ILLEGAL_CHARS,HELO_DYNAMIC_DHCP,HELO_DYNAMIC_IPADDR,HTML_90_100,
HTML_CHARSET_FARAWAY,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02,HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_WEB_BUGS,
HTTP_ESCAPED_HOST,HTTP_EXCESSIVE_ESCAPES,MIME_BASE64_TEXT,
MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS,MIME_HTML_ONLY,MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI,
MISSING_MIMEOLE,MPART_ALT_DIFF,MSGID_SPAM_CAPS,MSGID_YAHOO_CAPS,
RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100,RAZOR2_CHECK,RCVD_BY_IP,RCVD_DOUBLE_IP_SPAM,
RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_DSBL,RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL,
RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL,RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB,RCVD_IN_XBL,SPF_HELO_SOFTFAIL,
SUBJ_ILLEGAL_CHARS,TO_MARCNEWS autolearn=spam
version=3.0.3-mmrules_20041125
X-Spam-Report:
* 3.8 MSGID_YAHOO_CAPS Message-ID has ALLCAPS@yahoo.com
* 1.2 HELO_DYNAMIC_DHCP Relay HELO'd using suspicious hostname (DHCP)
* 4.1 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary
* 4.4 HELO_DYNAMIC_IPADDR Relay HELO'd using suspicious hostname (IP addr 1)
* 4.0 TO_MARCNEWS To marc_news
* 3.8 MSGID_SPAM_CAPS Spam tool Message-Id: (caps variant)
* 0.1 RCVD_BY_IP Received by mail server with no name
* 2.9 SUBJ_ILLEGAL_CHARS Subject contains too many raw illegal characters
* 3.1 SPF_HELO_SOFTFAIL SPF: HELO does not match SPF record (softfail)
* [SPF failed: Please see
http://spf.pobox.com/why.html?sender=rr.com &ip; =24.95.54.50 &receiver; =magic.merlins.org]
* 2.1 HEAD_ILLEGAL_CHARS Header contains too many raw illegal characters
* 2.7 FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD 'From' yahoo.com does not match 'Received' headers
* 0.5 HTTP_ESCAPED_HOST URI: Uses %-escapes inside a URL's hostname
* 2.3 BIZ_TLD URI: Contains an URL in the BIZ top-level domain
* 0.2 HTTP_EXCESSIVE_ESCAPES URI: Completely unnecessary %-escapes inside a URL
* 3.2 DOMAIN_RATIO BODY: Message body mentions many internet domains
* 0.0 HTML_WEB_BUGS BODY: Image tag intended to identify you
* 1.8 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
* 0.1 MPART_ALT_DIFF BODY: HTML and text parts are different
* 4.0 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100 BODY: Razor2 gives confidence level above 50%
* [cf: 100]
* 5.0 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
* [score: 1.0000]
* 3.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
* 0.0 HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02 BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image area
* 0.0 HTML_90_100 BODY: Message is 90% to 100% HTML
* 0.3 MIME_BASE64_TEXT RAW: Message text disguised using base64 encoding
* 7.5 RAZOR2_CHECK Listed in Razor2 (http://razor.sf.net/)
* 3.1 RCVD_IN_XBL RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus XBL
* [24.95.54.50 listed in sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org]
* 0.0 RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB RBL: SORBS: sender is a abuseable web server
* [24.95.54.50 listed in dnsbl.sorbs.net]
* 2.0 RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL RBL: SORBS: sent directly from dynamic IP address
* [24.95.54.50 listed in dnsbl.sorbs.net]
* 3.0 RCVD_IN_DSBL RBL: Received via a relay in list.dsbl.org
* [http://dsbl.org/listing?24.95.54.50]
* 6.5 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
* [Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?24.95.54.50]
* 0.1 RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL RBL: NJABL: dialup sender did non-local SMTP
* [24.95.54.50 listed in combined.njabl.org]
* 4.1 RCVD_DOUBLE_IP_SPAM Bulk email fingerprint (double IP) found
* 2.4 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts
* 0.0 MISSING_MIMEOLE Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE
* 2.4 FORGED_MUA_IMS Forged mail pretending to be from IMS
* 2.0 FORGED_IMS_HTML IMS can't send HTML message only
* 0.5 HTML_CHARSET_FARAWAY A foreign language charset used in HTML markup