20081126
GEEK - EEK!
Guess I'm finally used to Vista. I was looking for "Programs and Features" in the XP Control Panel...@_@
20081125
LIFE - Updates
I have fallen off the wagon when it comes to coffee...:-( I'm basically back to having a cup a day. 50% of the time it is because I simply enjoy a nice cup of coffee and the other 50% is because I need it for a perk up. So at least I'm not having three a day.
Additionally, I have now done some pretty ruthless culling against my RSS feeds. I have chopped out a bunch of them that were funny when I found them, i.e. lolcats, etc, but have become too much work to keep up with the flood with little reward, i.e. the signal to noise ratio in these has tended towards the noise side as of late. I've kept the Failblog because it never fails to entertain. What remains is some of the heavy hitters though, e.g. MSNBC's Countdown and Democracy Now! which are basically an hour each, each day. Who's got time to watch two hours of news each weekday (Let alone regular NZ news on telly)? And when to I watch The Daily Show? Never any more really. Now When BSG starts up I will make the time! Hopefully when we move, Margaret and I will have a little more time to watch some of the programs we used to watch. We got so used to the telly being in the bedroom, that since it was moved back to the dining room, we don't really watch anything in the evening.
Additionally, I have now done some pretty ruthless culling against my RSS feeds. I have chopped out a bunch of them that were funny when I found them, i.e. lolcats, etc, but have become too much work to keep up with the flood with little reward, i.e. the signal to noise ratio in these has tended towards the noise side as of late. I've kept the Failblog because it never fails to entertain. What remains is some of the heavy hitters though, e.g. MSNBC's Countdown and Democracy Now! which are basically an hour each, each day. Who's got time to watch two hours of news each weekday (Let alone regular NZ news on telly)? And when to I watch The Daily Show? Never any more really. Now When BSG starts up I will make the time! Hopefully when we move, Margaret and I will have a little more time to watch some of the programs we used to watch. We got so used to the telly being in the bedroom, that since it was moved back to the dining room, we don't really watch anything in the evening.
20081116
20081110
GEEK - 99% painless
So I've been meaning to do s dist-upgrade under Ubuntu for a week or so to install Intrepid Ibex (8.10). My last in-place upgrade to Hardy Heron didn't go well and I ended up doing a reinstall from scratch. This time however, it was simple as. Only a few probs (Some IO-APIC error on boot but it carries on normally after that, the usual problems with graphics drivers though these were overcome very easily with the default prompts at the first boot, and VMWare not working as usual though this is down to kernel dependencies and I've resolved that often enough that I should be able to sort it again). The cool thing is, the whole upgrade was basically click a few prompts. I've actually put more effort in to writing this blog entry than upgrading the OS. So rock out...:-)
20081106
POLITICS - Hope...Not!
Alright. So the election is over. Barack Obama is the President-elect. The question is 'now what?'.
Obama's campaign can be summed up in a few things. Primarily in these words - People's HOPE for CHANGE. I hate to point it out. EVERY non-incumbent political candidate runs on change. Everything is the other guys fault. And if you vote for me, we can fix everything. Yes we can!
Pragmatism is what will kill this ticket of hope. Compromise of the ideals that the campaign started with is what will kill hope.
My predictions. I'll take bets on these of any value you care to take. And I'm not the only one saying these things. Add Ralph Nader in this speech, Cynthia McKinney (US Green Party candidate for the 2008 US Presidential election) on Democracy Now!, as well as Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Glenn Loury on Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS:
1) Number of US troops in Iraq will not change in the next two years in any meaningful way.
2) When/if they do change, those troops will be redirected to Afghanistan.
3) The war in Afghanistan will continue to spread in to Pakistan, and Pakistan will continue to disintegrate.
4) I do not know what will happen with Iran. I will tell you that, if the current administration had the manpower, it would have initiated hostilities with Iran. But it is stretched thin between Afghanistan and Iraq. What is hard to say is if the saber rattling that had been done to date will force anyone's hand in future.
5) Those responsible for the mess in Iraq will not be held accountable for their actions. And if you do not set a precedent and punish politicians for behaviour like this (Clinton gets impeached for a fucking blow job, and NOTHING happens to Bush or Cheney over ANY of the SHIT they have done!), then they will keep on doing it.
6) Nothing will change in Israel because the United States' unconditional military and financial support for Israel will continue.
7) The deployment of US military power around the world will not change.
8) The bailout of Wall Street will continue. It will require a little more money here and a little more money there. None of which will achieve the desired result. None of the people who created this Ponzi scheme will be held accountable. Alan Greenspan says "Oops. I was wrong. The invisible hand of the market won't necessarily look after itself". Duh! I've been screaming that to you for years you hack!
9) Unemployment in the US (And around the world) will continue to climb.
10) House foreclosures will continue unabated.
11) The system of funneling wealth upwards will continue and the gap in wealth distribution will continue to widen, and the middle class will continue to be squeezed towards the status of working poor.
12) The US budget and trade deficits will continue to grow. It was funny, I had someone say "The market conditions will help make US exports more competitive". How much does the market have to change to compete with someone earning dollars a day? Who is going to invest in the manufacturing infrastructure in the US? The US doesn't make anything any more.
13) Oil will head back up as OPEC lowers production because they don't like where the price has gone over the past few months, so we'll be back on track for $200 per barrel oil.
14) NOTHING meaningful will be done about climate change, because 1) We will continue to wait for technology that is 20-30 years away from deployment, if it can be developed at all, 2) Over the next 20-30 years, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to RISE. They aren't going to plateau. They aren't going to go down. They will continue to rise, against a backdrop of already emitting too much. Doing what needs to be done to combat climate change is completely incompatible free market capitalism that requires year on year of sustained economic growth, and you're seeing what happens now when it doesn't grow. It collapses. It doesn't run steadily. If you're not making at least 5% compound growth on the year before, you're going backwards.
We needed a revolution. Obama's 53% of the popular vote is not a revolution. It is not a mandate. Obviously it is barely over 50% of the vote. It is historic. It is amazing. I’m much happier with this result than I would have been had McSame been elected. But all that has happened is the coin has clipped. And in two years, when nothing changes, the Republicans will be back for the mid-term elections saying “See! He hasn’t changed anything! Vote for us!”, and the wheel will make another turn.
I've had some people say to me that they are more optimistic, that the people of America are capable of sacrifice. That they are capable of making the fundamental changes necessary to to stop the Titanic from hitting the iceberg. As I've said before, and I'll say again. You've just voted for rearranging the deck chairs. I've said before, something needs to be done, and you've said "We will. We'll vote!". And you've voted. I hope when things don't change, and you don't get the result you wanted, that you will really do something about it next time.
Obama's campaign can be summed up in a few things. Primarily in these words - People's HOPE for CHANGE. I hate to point it out. EVERY non-incumbent political candidate runs on change. Everything is the other guys fault. And if you vote for me, we can fix everything. Yes we can!
Pragmatism is what will kill this ticket of hope. Compromise of the ideals that the campaign started with is what will kill hope.
My predictions. I'll take bets on these of any value you care to take. And I'm not the only one saying these things. Add Ralph Nader in this speech, Cynthia McKinney (US Green Party candidate for the 2008 US Presidential election) on Democracy Now!, as well as Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Glenn Loury on Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS:
1) Number of US troops in Iraq will not change in the next two years in any meaningful way.
2) When/if they do change, those troops will be redirected to Afghanistan.
3) The war in Afghanistan will continue to spread in to Pakistan, and Pakistan will continue to disintegrate.
4) I do not know what will happen with Iran. I will tell you that, if the current administration had the manpower, it would have initiated hostilities with Iran. But it is stretched thin between Afghanistan and Iraq. What is hard to say is if the saber rattling that had been done to date will force anyone's hand in future.
5) Those responsible for the mess in Iraq will not be held accountable for their actions. And if you do not set a precedent and punish politicians for behaviour like this (Clinton gets impeached for a fucking blow job, and NOTHING happens to Bush or Cheney over ANY of the SHIT they have done!), then they will keep on doing it.
6) Nothing will change in Israel because the United States' unconditional military and financial support for Israel will continue.
7) The deployment of US military power around the world will not change.
8) The bailout of Wall Street will continue. It will require a little more money here and a little more money there. None of which will achieve the desired result. None of the people who created this Ponzi scheme will be held accountable. Alan Greenspan says "Oops. I was wrong. The invisible hand of the market won't necessarily look after itself". Duh! I've been screaming that to you for years you hack!
9) Unemployment in the US (And around the world) will continue to climb.
10) House foreclosures will continue unabated.
11) The system of funneling wealth upwards will continue and the gap in wealth distribution will continue to widen, and the middle class will continue to be squeezed towards the status of working poor.
12) The US budget and trade deficits will continue to grow. It was funny, I had someone say "The market conditions will help make US exports more competitive". How much does the market have to change to compete with someone earning dollars a day? Who is going to invest in the manufacturing infrastructure in the US? The US doesn't make anything any more.
13) Oil will head back up as OPEC lowers production because they don't like where the price has gone over the past few months, so we'll be back on track for $200 per barrel oil.
14) NOTHING meaningful will be done about climate change, because 1) We will continue to wait for technology that is 20-30 years away from deployment, if it can be developed at all, 2) Over the next 20-30 years, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to RISE. They aren't going to plateau. They aren't going to go down. They will continue to rise, against a backdrop of already emitting too much. Doing what needs to be done to combat climate change is completely incompatible free market capitalism that requires year on year of sustained economic growth, and you're seeing what happens now when it doesn't grow. It collapses. It doesn't run steadily. If you're not making at least 5% compound growth on the year before, you're going backwards.
We needed a revolution. Obama's 53% of the popular vote is not a revolution. It is not a mandate. Obviously it is barely over 50% of the vote. It is historic. It is amazing. I’m much happier with this result than I would have been had McSame been elected. But all that has happened is the coin has clipped. And in two years, when nothing changes, the Republicans will be back for the mid-term elections saying “See! He hasn’t changed anything! Vote for us!”, and the wheel will make another turn.
I've had some people say to me that they are more optimistic, that the people of America are capable of sacrifice. That they are capable of making the fundamental changes necessary to to stop the Titanic from hitting the iceberg. As I've said before, and I'll say again. You've just voted for rearranging the deck chairs. I've said before, something needs to be done, and you've said "We will. We'll vote!". And you've voted. I hope when things don't change, and you don't get the result you wanted, that you will really do something about it next time.
20081105
LIFE / POLITICS - History
One would imagine that today, Martin Luther King Jr is looking down from above (If that's the way it works) in joy as the President-elect of the United States is an African American. This is an historic occasion. Now President-elect Obama really has his work cut out for him.
20081104
GEEK - Dream machine - Mobile computing
Don't worry Margaret. I haven't found some new toy I want. In fact, this dream machine doesn't exist (To my knowledge).
Back in the day when every victim and his dog had an iPod I had a 2.5" IDE (Laptop drive) hard drive enclosure based MP3 player. I liked it because I didn't have to use iTunes, I could just drag and drop files through Windows Explorer (Or whatever shell in whatever OS I'm using at the time). This thing died when the 2.5 mm Philips headphone jack came away from the PCB inside the device. I was bummed...:-( It still works as a portable drive, so I must find someone who needs a portable drive, and they can have it.
So I looked high and low for a new portable drive/MP3 player. A new enclosure like the one I had was going to be $200 (For the enclosure alone), and this device had its own limitations, such as it ran off the internal battery, even when doing read/write operations while connected via USB. A large read/write would kill the battery (In the middle of the task...Grrr) and I'd have to wait for it to charge again, so this thing wasn't at the top of my list to purchase again. Additionally, it was a few years old and didn't play back DivX files that hadn't been specifically trans-coded for it, or MP4 (H.264), etc, not that I was watching a lot of video back when I bought it.
Now I'll divert to the side, to talk video. A while back, about the time I was seconded to IBM, I started watching video on my bus-then-train trip from Island Bay to Petone. Initially I started watching these on my PSP, which I had previously purchased for this purpose (That, and with a keyboard which I'd heard was coming for the PSP, plus the PSP's Wi-Fi and browser, I was intending to use it at a mobile computing device). As the video content I watched diversified in terms of content and source, the need to trans-code the content to a format for the PSP became a bit annoying. The key thing was I'd download something overnight, not have time to trans-code it before work, and have to wait another day before I could watch it. This was particularly annoying with news programmes. Then I got my Sony VAIO UX-180 PC (Or UMPC). This solved all the limitations of the PSP and created new opportunities for use (Though at a cost in dollars). Interestingly, one of the advantages of the VAIO was its size meant I always had it on me. This is something that has changed since purchasing my Sager notebook, and changed even more with the use of my 80 GB iPod Classic, but more to come on that later. So with the VAIO I no longer needing to trans-code the content and life was good.
What wasn't happening, when my drive enclosure died, was portable music. When I was somewhere walking around, I'd always have my music going, as many people with iPods do. Over time, this missing service became very annoying. I tried to use the VAIO for this but A) It couldn't hold my whole MP3 library and B) it was like carrying around a brick for an MP3 player. Fine if I had my man-bag (Though it would heat up while on in the bag), not fine if I didn't. Now I shopped around, and it is a fact that you cannot get a high capacity (Over say 8 GB) MP3 player in NZ at a reasonable price, that is not an iPod. I suspect this would be a different story if Microsoft's Zune was available in NZ. The cool thing about the iPod's price is, Apple subsidies the price of the hardware with the expectation that they will make up for in purchases through the iTunes store. I don't like the iTunes store (Much like I don't like iPods and the iTunes client) because they are proprietary to Apple. I'm not some huge Open Sores advocate, but I can buy a laptop for Toshiba or Dell, and sure they both have Micro$oft Windows, but at least I have some choice and I can go put Ubuntu on it if I want. If you want an iPod, it only comes from Apple, and everything to do with it comes largely from Apple (Excluding third party accessories). So in the end I caved and bought an 80 GB iPod Classic as mentioned above, and it was great. I had all my music back, and I was able to use it as a portable removable drive, something I thought I couldn't do, as I thought you could only put stuff on it via iTunes.
So a little while later I noticed that most of the videos I was downloading from places like C-Net, TED, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Democracy Now!, etc were already formatted as MP4/M4V (H.264) and could 'easily' be placed on my iPod, a device I now had on me even more frequently than my VAIO. This, in combination with the fact that I now had my Sager notebook on me (The primary source for downloading my daily video content, as opposed to the TV torrents coming down on our server at home), meant I'd reached the goal of being able to watch whatever I wanted, basically wherever I wanted. What this has in turn evolved in to is a situation where I don't have enough time to watch all the video I'm subscribed to, much the same for all the RSS feeds I follow via Google Reader (And part of the reason you’ll find 40+ tabs open in Firefox when you see my machine. This MUST be a common scenario over the world as people's exposure to digital content *EXPLODES*. I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with it. Prioritisation is the probable answer, but not one I like...:-(
So this diatribe above gives the context for my dream portable device. And this device has the following specs (These are all MANDATORY, excluding the camera. Don't bother pointing me towards a device that is missing ANY of these specifications):
* The full-screen touch screen of the iPod Touch/iPhone/HTC Touch HD, etc.
* The capacity of an iPod Classic (i.e. 80+ GB).
* The slide-out QWERTY (Not AZERTY!!! Shut up Marty. Long story) keyboard of anything like the HTC Touch Pro, etc. People have asked why the hardware keyboard and not to just use the soft keyboard on the iPhone, etc. I hate having my screen real estate of whatever I'm trying to look at (Web, etc) or write (E-mail, document, etc) taken up by a bloody keyboard!
* Exchange integration (My killer app for e-mail, calendar and contacts).
* Media playback including MP3, MPEG-4/H.264 (Plus DivX would be a bonus)
* Wireless including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and available with CDMA or GPRS (I don't care which, as long as both are available for the choice) I'm not doing much mobile data yet for many reasons, including need, cost and the fact that my employer pays for my cellular data.
* Don't really care about the OS.
* A nice to have (Not compulsory though) would be a 3-4 MP camera with at least a x3 zoom.
...This device will achieve the last hurdle of merging my phone with my iPod. I'm sure this is coming. I'm a little surprised it's not here yet. I suspect there are three reasons 1) Cost (Though this is not a reason for some, and therefore not a reason unto itself), 2) patents (I'm sure there are some out there preventing this device from being a reality at this stage) and 3) Whatever other rats and mice of reasons that there are...
So yeah, there you go. I want one. Someday I'll have one. Just wondering why one isn't available now. I’d bet this device will run Google’s Android operating system. It won’t be from Apple, as I just can’t see them putting a hardware keyboard on an iPhone. Maybe someone will make a hardware add-on though I doubt it, and this would make the device rather large.
Back in the day when every victim and his dog had an iPod I had a 2.5" IDE (Laptop drive) hard drive enclosure based MP3 player. I liked it because I didn't have to use iTunes, I could just drag and drop files through Windows Explorer (Or whatever shell in whatever OS I'm using at the time). This thing died when the 2.5 mm Philips headphone jack came away from the PCB inside the device. I was bummed...:-( It still works as a portable drive, so I must find someone who needs a portable drive, and they can have it.
So I looked high and low for a new portable drive/MP3 player. A new enclosure like the one I had was going to be $200 (For the enclosure alone), and this device had its own limitations, such as it ran off the internal battery, even when doing read/write operations while connected via USB. A large read/write would kill the battery (In the middle of the task...Grrr) and I'd have to wait for it to charge again, so this thing wasn't at the top of my list to purchase again. Additionally, it was a few years old and didn't play back DivX files that hadn't been specifically trans-coded for it, or MP4 (H.264), etc, not that I was watching a lot of video back when I bought it.
Now I'll divert to the side, to talk video. A while back, about the time I was seconded to IBM, I started watching video on my bus-then-train trip from Island Bay to Petone. Initially I started watching these on my PSP, which I had previously purchased for this purpose (That, and with a keyboard which I'd heard was coming for the PSP, plus the PSP's Wi-Fi and browser, I was intending to use it at a mobile computing device). As the video content I watched diversified in terms of content and source, the need to trans-code the content to a format for the PSP became a bit annoying. The key thing was I'd download something overnight, not have time to trans-code it before work, and have to wait another day before I could watch it. This was particularly annoying with news programmes. Then I got my Sony VAIO UX-180 PC (Or UMPC). This solved all the limitations of the PSP and created new opportunities for use (Though at a cost in dollars). Interestingly, one of the advantages of the VAIO was its size meant I always had it on me. This is something that has changed since purchasing my Sager notebook, and changed even more with the use of my 80 GB iPod Classic, but more to come on that later. So with the VAIO I no longer needing to trans-code the content and life was good.
What wasn't happening, when my drive enclosure died, was portable music. When I was somewhere walking around, I'd always have my music going, as many people with iPods do. Over time, this missing service became very annoying. I tried to use the VAIO for this but A) It couldn't hold my whole MP3 library and B) it was like carrying around a brick for an MP3 player. Fine if I had my man-bag (Though it would heat up while on in the bag), not fine if I didn't. Now I shopped around, and it is a fact that you cannot get a high capacity (Over say 8 GB) MP3 player in NZ at a reasonable price, that is not an iPod. I suspect this would be a different story if Microsoft's Zune was available in NZ. The cool thing about the iPod's price is, Apple subsidies the price of the hardware with the expectation that they will make up for in purchases through the iTunes store. I don't like the iTunes store (Much like I don't like iPods and the iTunes client) because they are proprietary to Apple. I'm not some huge Open Sores advocate, but I can buy a laptop for Toshiba or Dell, and sure they both have Micro$oft Windows, but at least I have some choice and I can go put Ubuntu on it if I want. If you want an iPod, it only comes from Apple, and everything to do with it comes largely from Apple (Excluding third party accessories). So in the end I caved and bought an 80 GB iPod Classic as mentioned above, and it was great. I had all my music back, and I was able to use it as a portable removable drive, something I thought I couldn't do, as I thought you could only put stuff on it via iTunes.
So a little while later I noticed that most of the videos I was downloading from places like C-Net, TED, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Democracy Now!, etc were already formatted as MP4/M4V (H.264) and could 'easily' be placed on my iPod, a device I now had on me even more frequently than my VAIO. This, in combination with the fact that I now had my Sager notebook on me (The primary source for downloading my daily video content, as opposed to the TV torrents coming down on our server at home), meant I'd reached the goal of being able to watch whatever I wanted, basically wherever I wanted. What this has in turn evolved in to is a situation where I don't have enough time to watch all the video I'm subscribed to, much the same for all the RSS feeds I follow via Google Reader (And part of the reason you’ll find 40+ tabs open in Firefox when you see my machine. This MUST be a common scenario over the world as people's exposure to digital content *EXPLODES*. I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with it. Prioritisation is the probable answer, but not one I like...:-(
So this diatribe above gives the context for my dream portable device. And this device has the following specs (These are all MANDATORY, excluding the camera. Don't bother pointing me towards a device that is missing ANY of these specifications):
* The full-screen touch screen of the iPod Touch/iPhone/HTC Touch HD, etc.
* The capacity of an iPod Classic (i.e. 80+ GB).
* The slide-out QWERTY (Not AZERTY!!! Shut up Marty. Long story) keyboard of anything like the HTC Touch Pro, etc. People have asked why the hardware keyboard and not to just use the soft keyboard on the iPhone, etc. I hate having my screen real estate of whatever I'm trying to look at (Web, etc) or write (E-mail, document, etc) taken up by a bloody keyboard!
* Exchange integration (My killer app for e-mail, calendar and contacts).
* Media playback including MP3, MPEG-4/H.264 (Plus DivX would be a bonus)
* Wireless including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and available with CDMA or GPRS (I don't care which, as long as both are available for the choice) I'm not doing much mobile data yet for many reasons, including need, cost and the fact that my employer pays for my cellular data.
* Don't really care about the OS.
* A nice to have (Not compulsory though) would be a 3-4 MP camera with at least a x3 zoom.
...This device will achieve the last hurdle of merging my phone with my iPod. I'm sure this is coming. I'm a little surprised it's not here yet. I suspect there are three reasons 1) Cost (Though this is not a reason for some, and therefore not a reason unto itself), 2) patents (I'm sure there are some out there preventing this device from being a reality at this stage) and 3) Whatever other rats and mice of reasons that there are...
So yeah, there you go. I want one. Someday I'll have one. Just wondering why one isn't available now. I’d bet this device will run Google’s Android operating system. It won’t be from Apple, as I just can’t see them putting a hardware keyboard on an iPhone. Maybe someone will make a hardware add-on though I doubt it, and this would make the device rather large.
LIFE - TED...
For a wee while now, I've been watching some video podcasts from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design - Wikipedia link) on science, technology and other stuff (As implied by the name of the conference). Some mind blowingly amazing stuff (And yet another thing trying to cram itself in to my non-exist 'free' time, but that is relative and a long story).
This video (Embedded below) in particular was AWESOME. It's short, and easy to watch. Just amazing!
This video (Embedded below) in particular was AWESOME. It's short, and easy to watch. Just amazing!
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