Category Archives: Blather

Ramblings of a man who sees the world just a little bit differently.

Blather

Disproving the Existence of Vampires Using YouTube

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Imagine for a second that I’m standing in front of a Web cam and I stick two fingers into my nose. My fingers, of course, would deform my nostril because they’re much too large to fit. Not much audience potential there, hardly worth the bits to store the stream but follow along, okay?

Let’s say I’ve got a human friend weird enough to stick a couple of fingers in my nose in front of the Web cam. Again, there’s the deformed nostril thing. And while that provides a little bit more audience potential it’s still not enough to collect any significant page views.

Now let’s recruit a vampire instead. The vampire’s fingers would certainly deform a nostril just as well. But the Web cam wouldn’t show the vampire, only the nostril deforming. Cameras can’t capture the image of the vampire.

Imagine the invisible (to the Web cam) vampire deforming the human body in various ways. Go on, you can do it, let your imagination run wild. Oh! Even I didn’t think of that one!

You’ve got to admit, there should be plenty of those kinds of video clips on YouTube. But there aren’t.

Practically speaking, there can only be a few reasons for the absence. People are incredibly restrained in what they put up on YouTube. No vampires worth their fangs would stoop to making such silly videos. Google is run by vampires and they disallow such videos. There are no vampires.

I’m leaning toward the last one.

Blather

Tastee Subs

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Wouldn’t you know it? Just yesterday I wrote about Obama’s visit to Tastee Subs in the neighboring town of Edison. Today I visited their sister store for some subs.

I was to meet Pam for lunch in the park today and I planned on bringing some non-sub sandwiches from Rufino’s Deli. (They’re not online AFAICT – I should work on that.) But Rufino’s was closed.

Running a little late now, I piloted the motorcycle down 27 south to the Tastee Subs in Franklin Park. They were open

Today, of course, is the day Obama’s scheduled to visit the Edison store. The line of customers at the Franklin Park store stretched out the door and across the front of the building. It’s a bigger store than Edison, has bigger parking lot, too. Seldom are lines there so intense.

I passed the time with the other folks waiting on the line. It felt good when the staff greeted me – I’m a regular – and I enjoyed congratulating them on their day in the sun. I picked up my subs and soda, paid the bill and grabbed a few napkins on my way out the door. The line had grown even longer. I fired up the bike and hit the road.

The subs were superb, as usual. (They seemed like just might have been stuffed with a little extra meat.) Like I said yesterday, I’m glad Tastee Subs was chosen for the presidential visit. I hope the surge in customer traffic I saw today continues.

Blather

Of Presidents and Guitar Strings

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Tastee Subs
Edison's Finest snacks at local business, site of planned Obama visit.

Obama’s coming to visit a neighboring town, Edison, NJ. The reason that he’s in town isn’t important to me; what I found interesting is that he’s supposed to have lunch at the best sub shop in the whole wide world: Tastee Subs. [ed: link added – they’re online now] (I’d link to ’em but they’re not online. Yeah, I’ve talked to them about that but the owner’s just not interested.) My Dad introduced me to the place back when I was just a little kid; it’s been around that long.

You can read this morning’s local newspaper article to learn more about the particulars of the planned visit. [Bummer, the article link expired.)

Tastee Subs is just a stone’s throw from one of the busiest intersections in that area, Route 27 and Plainfield Avenue. During rush hour – actually, several hours in the morning and several more in the afternoon – it’s not uncommon to have traffic snarled in every direction. Traffic so intense that the signal cycles green once in turn for all four entrances to the intersection. I’m certain that the intersection and surrounding streets will be choked all day long. Harry, my father-in-law who lives not a half-mile from there, will find that incredibly aggravating.

Sam Ash, where I buy stuff like guitar strings, is just on the other side of that intersection. Needless to say, I won’t be going anywhere near these places on the day of Obama’s visit.

In the linked newspaper story there’s mention of Tastee’s roast beef sub. While the roast beef’s good, my recommendation is for the smoked turkey, pepperoni and swiss. It’s not on the menu but they’ll make it for you, no problem. Take all the usual fixings and add some hot peppers for a little extra kick. Mmmmm, good.

I hope Obama enjoys his sub.

Y’know, I’m bitchin’ about the traffic (and I will surely avoid it myself) but I’m actually thrilled that the choice of which small business to visit is an all-American business. Tastee Subs is very well known and highly respected in these parts. With each passing day these kinds of businesses are getting harder and harder to find, especially in the Edison area. Tastee Subs is a business that deserves your support. Might want to wait until after Wednesday, though. Tell ’em Rick sent you.

Blather

Parting the Sea(gate Data)

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I wrote a while back about the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive, which purports to combine the advantages of a solid state drive with the low cost of a conventional drive. It works very well!

I decided to take the next step to see if I could wring a little bit more performance out of the thing. Since last fall’s build as a single-drive system, the desktop had become storage-rich. Besides the recently added Momentus XT there’s the original 750 GB Western Digital and a Seagate 1 TB, the latter used, well, for not much of anything. Relocating the data from the Momentus XT should allow Seagate’s algorithm to place OS and application files on the XT’s flash for lightning-fast reads.

There was only several hundred GB of data to move but it took a few days of here-and-there time to get the job done safely and completely. The system is used for real work. There were backup routines to change (and test!), path dependencies to chase down, stuff like that. But eventually it was done – with the bonus of some much-needed cleanup and organization.

So, what was the result? Windows 7 Professional boot times – BIOS to desktop – are on the order of 25 seconds. Ambitious application loads, full Photoshop for example, are down to just a few seconds. The system is powered down within 15 seconds of clicking Shutdown. I’m thinking these may even improve over time.

Blather

A Year Ago Today

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It’s all over the news. Today’s the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson.

I remember the day like it was yesterday. I was in Wildwood, NJ, enjoying some downtime with the family. Wildwood has a seriously long boardwalk, a couple of miles, and we like to walk it when we’re in town.

We were walking the boardwalk when the news hit. Before we reached the end you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone hawking t-shirts featuring the news.

Marketing. It’s an amazing beast.

And all you heard about for an unbelievably long time was Michael Jackson. Could have been a nuclear war and you wouldn’t have heard about that, the way everyone went on and on about the dead pop star. Shit, I think they’re still arguing about whatever’s left of his assets.

I take you back to January 1985. Volume 1, Number 1, Issue 1 of NutWorks, “The Inter-Net Virtual Magazine for Those Who Teeter on the Precipice of Insanity”.

Boot It

You’re processing some words when your keyboard goes dead,
Ten pages in the buffer, should have gone to bed,
The system just crashed, but don’t lose your head,
Just BOOT IT, just BOOT IT.

Better think fast, better do what you can,
Read the manual or call your system man,
Don’t want to fall behind in the race with Japan,
So BOOT IT,

Get the system manager to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Even though you’d rather shoot it.
Don’t be upset, it’s only some glitch.
All that you do is flip a little switch.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Get right down and restitute it.
Don’t get excited, all is not lost.
CP/M, UNIX or MS/DOS
Just BOOT IT, boot it, boot it, boot it…

You gotta have your printout for the meeting at two,
The system says your jobs at the head of the queue,
Right then the thing dies but you know what to do,
BOOT IT.

You always get so worried when the system runs slow,
And when it finally crashes, man you feel so low,
But computers make mistakes (they’re only human you know)
So BOOT IT,

Call the local guru to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Go ahead re-institute it.
If you’re not lucky, get the book off the shelf,
But if you are, it’ll do it itself.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Then go find the guy who screwed it!
Operating systems are built to bounce back,
Whether it’s a Cray or a Radio Shack.

BOOT IT! BOOT IT!

So, okay, maybe it ain’t the best song parody you’ve ever seen. But NutWorks – and other virtual publications of the day – are certainly the early Internet ancestors that gave rise to the countless time-sucks you find on the Web today.

Like this blog. Now get back to work.

Blather

Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive

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A few weeks back I read of Seagate‘s Momentus XT hybrid hard drive. What’s a hybrid? It combines a conventional hard drive with a small SSD in one standard-size, standard interface package. The idea is that the conventional hard drive provides useful capacity while the SSD provides a significant performance boost. To the Operating System, the drive simply appears as any other drive. There’s no special OS support or drivers needed either; for instance, no need for TRIM support. Seagate has developed a special algorithm – they call it “Adaptive Memory Technology” – which purports to analyze use patterns and optimize the use of the SSD portion of the drive. What you use most often is stored in flash for best performance. The end result is supposed to be a drive that delivers much of the performance of an SSD at a cost that won’t break the bank.

The Seagate Web site might not be the best place to find objective comparisons, but check out the video (scroll down to the headline Compare solid state hybrid drives to SSD and HDD.) to see some impressive performance.

When I built my last desktop I (briefly) considered a pure SSD for the boot drive but decided against it. The cost was crazy high and the capacity was crazy low. When I read of the Momentus XT it didn’t take much to convince me to give one a try.

I decided on the ST95005620AS as a replacement boot drive. This is the 500 GB unit and, other than the built-in 4 GB SLC NAND SSD, it has some fairly conventional specifications – not at all unlike the Western Digital WD7501AALS it replaced. These drives are new, so it was a couple of weeks to wait for stock. I’m fortunate in that Newegg has a local distribution facility; once a drive was available it arrived the next day.

My desktop case (a Cooler Master HAF 932 #RC-932-KKN1-GP) doesn’t provide mounts for 2.5-inch drives so I picked up some adapter rails, too. These rails will hold two 2.5-inch drives but there are a couple of quirks. They use some odd-sized screws (supplied) and the holes were too small for my no-tool drive mounts. I mounted the hybrid in one of the front-accessible bays with the supplied screws. I may eventually drill and tap the rails for standard screws and relocate it to the drive cage for a cleaner cable layout.

I have a few applications for cloning boot drives. I don’t like any of them so I decided to try Seagate’s DiscWizard tool (made by Acronis), free for the download. Installation was quick and painless. But the clone process failed every time! Shame on me for believing you could do a low-level task like that from inside Windows. Fortunately DiscWizard provides a tool to build bootable utility media. I used it to configure a USB drive, booted from it and in short order I had my clone. In my case the target drive was smaller than the multiply partitioned source drive, but the DiscWizard handled it perfectly.

Now, cloning a boot drive is faster and worlds more convenient than doing an IPL from scratch, but it’s not without problems. Sometimes, if you run application software that requires activation, it may notice that the hardware’s changed and void your activation. I had several of those but all were resolved in short order. It’s just something to be aware of. Check your application load and have your necessary licensing information at the ready if you need to contact your vendors.

Okay, so how’s the Momentus XT work? Very well! What’s more, it seems to be getting even better over time. It’s weird.

Boot time is about half what it was with the old drive. It’s dead quiet, too, where the Western Digital is one noisy unit when it seeks, at least in my cavernous case. For the applications I use all the time, first-use loads are near instantaneous. Under Windows 7, the drive part of the Experience Index remained unchanged from my earlier drive but that didn’t surprise me because the specifications are virtually identical. The real difference is first-use of applications and data. There the performance boost is definitely not something you need to try to notice; it’s that obvious.

The jury’s still out on long-term reliability. I only buy Seagate and Western Digital drives, and I’ve had more Seagate failures over the years. To be fair, warranty service from both vendors is always as quick and easy as you can expect.

This isn’t a pure SSD, but Seagate appears to deliver on its promise with the Momentus XT: much of the bang of an SSD with significantly less cost, reasonable capacity and transparent Operating System support. Performance increases are right where you notice it most, on the stuff you use most often. The Momentus XT is positioned as a laptop drive but with these specs it works equally well for desktop applications.

Go and get yourself one of these, you won’t be disappointed.

Blather

Installing Windows 3.1

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Huh? Did I just write that? Windows 3.1?

I found a few sets of install floppys last winter and between the lot of ’em I had a set of readable floppys so there was only one thing to do – install!

I won’t bore you with the details, but in broad strokes… The target was to be a VM and the server had no floppy drive so I needed to turn the floppies into image files. I also needed to install MS-DOS, making image files from those floppys. The VM provisioning and MS-DOS install went easy enough. But when the VM started the server immediately went to 100% CPU use. Of course it did! In those ancient days there was no reason to cooperate! I installed a small driver that caused it to sleep when it wasn’t busy. Then, on to Windows 3.1!

Windows 3.1 Setup

Things were pretty simple back then. Sure, give me all the regular components, and let’s try some printers, but there are no other applications so don’t bother with that, please. Then…

Cannot Update

The first gotcha. Did this mean an option was to install to another floppy? Choosing Cancel to continue is not intuitive, but we have that Start menu today, so…

How To Start

The remainder of the install was fast! Note the reminder of how to start Windows. Back in those days the machine booted to a C: prompt. You could put the WIN command in the startup file, but no one who knew better would do that. Windows needed a memory manager installed before it would run so a reboot was required.

Cover Your Bases

Gotta love that If Windows does not start line. If at first you don’t succeed, try doing the same thing again. And that’s why no one who knew better put WIN in their startup – quite often something would prevent Windows from starting.

Record Your Serial Number

Don’t forget to record your serial number!

Tutorial

I skipped the tutorial.

Windows 3.1 Banner

Apparently I did okay.

The most fun came later when I showed my son what it was like back in those ancient times, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. We played with the various built-in stuff and talked about how things like the clock and calculator had evolved to what they are today, but never did get a printer working.

Blather

Photos Separated by Time

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Being a bit of a history fan I’ve always thought that things like this were fun to see. There’s the inherent difficulty in doing them, though, that whole separation of time thing.

Opportunity recently presented itself!

My son is on the high school robotics team. 2010 was a pretty good year for FRC Team 25 (Raider Robotix) and the team was honored by the Board of Education at their public meeting last week. The BofE administration building is a repurposed school building – the very building where I attended kindergarten through 3rd grade.

Rick in 1963The first shot was taken in the spring of 1963, making me a 2nd grader. It had to be morning, before the start of the school day – the long shadows (I’m squinting into the sun) and everyone’s headed toward the entrance not visible around the corner. What do you think of the collared shirt? The corduroy pants? And how ’bout that sweater? Those really aren’t saggy mini-man-boobs; I was a skinny little twerp and nothing ever fit me right. Yeah, Mom really did make me dress that way. The white thing by my left hand could be a bandage on my thumb but I can’t recall.

Rick in 2010The second shot was taken May 19, 2010, some 47 years later. The stone/gravel covered playground (a serious no-no these days, so unsafe for the kiddies) is a parking lot, now some 4 inches higher to the building and contributing to run-off and local flooding. You can’t see the area in the earlier shot, but the steel stairs (as well as the door they lead to) are add-ons, as is the electrical conduits and lighting fixtures atop the building. See the lower roof visible on the right of the shot? The ability to kick one of those ubiquitous red inflatable balls onto the rooftop was a right of passage that would get you props from your peers back in 1963 – and a reprimand from an adult. I’ve been shaving the noggin for about 13 years now, and I’m wearing my customary Levi 501s, heavy silver rings and a wallet chained to my belt. That’s not my cracker box car behind me; the tail light of my Ford truck’s partly visible on the right.

faces 47 years apart

The third shot – self explanatory. I wanted to see the faces side by side. And now I understand the look on my face there as a youngster: I wasn’t squinting – I had a flash of future insight and read this post! The tiny voice calls across the ages, “Don’t do it!!!” Too late.

Blather

Artifacts

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Remember when these were common?

Inventory Control Cards
Cards from the mid-60s

I found these finely preserved specimens as I went through some old documentation in my Dad’s house. They were with the warranty papers from a gas range installed as part of a kitchen remodel in the mid-60s.

The range had a pair of small vents over the pilot jets. The tiny chrome covers stood out from the enameled surface like perfect jewels, just begging to be touched, irresistible. As a kid I’d sometimes briefly touch one, just because, even though I knew better.

When I was clearing out Dad’s house I smiled as I briefly touched the no-longer-perfect metal. I still knew better and it was still hotter than hell and the result was quite predictable.

Not long after, I had the gas service to the property shut off.

Blather

Jury Duty – NJ Fails Again

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I returned from some travel the other day to find this in the mailbox. It’s an unwelcome notice, if what I hear from many people is any indication. But this one brought some different feelings.

Richard is my Dad. He passed almost two years ago.

One would think that the various state and public records of Richard’s passing would have prevented the generation of this notice, but no – it’s a fail. To underscore the failure, I recall that Richard was summoned to Jury Duty some years back. I handled the notice because he was unable to read it for himself – stroke damage had robbed him of that ability.

On his behalf I had requested – and and was subsequently granted – an excuse. I cited reasons including health and ability as well as age, which alone would have sufficed (see the NJ Judiciary FAQ). Age only goes backward in the movies, and so I figured Richard would no longer be troubled by Jury Duty.

I was wrong.

I’m thinking that I’m going to fill out the form and return it, requesting an excuse on account of, well, death. Perhaps they’ll get the message.

Blather

Fix for Runaway Toyotas Revealed!

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Toyota Solution
Fix for Runaway Toyotas

Actually, the solution’s been built into my Harley-Davidsons (and all other street motorcycles) for a little bit less than forever. Well, since they legislated standardized controls, in any case.

What is it? It’s a real, honest-to-goodness stop switch.

Unlike Toyota‘s Prius, this switch is located right where it belongs, just a short reach for your right thumb, the switch produces immediate, predictable, certain results.

The engine stops.

You don’t need to hunt for the button. You don’t need to hold it for 30 seconds. Because when you need to stop the engine you need to stop the engine, and every millisecond counts.

There you have it!

Where’s my prize? Edmunds? Obama? Who’s got it?

Blather

Hung Scanner

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Hung Scanner Locked in Rack
Locked in the Rack

Hung Scanner Screen Detail
Screen Detail

I found these pictures in my phone when I was getting ready for a firmware update. I meant to write about ’em earlier but I guess I never got around to it.

This hung scanner was stuck in the rack (kind of looks like it’s stuck in a little toilet) and none of the buttons produced any response. I remember getting some funny looks as I knelt to grab the images.

I still like the system because it saves me time, even if I’m only in the store for a few items. I’ve been audited a few times. The audits, at least in my limited experiences, are more of a wave-of-the-hand than anything.

Other stuff about my encounters with Scan-It are here and here.

Blather

Oh-Ten

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How many have, like me, been catching themselves saying oh-ten when referring to the current year? I think that I’ve managed to not actually say it out loud, but I’m not absolutely certain.

The shortening made perfect sense in 2009 and even in the 1900s. Speaking the year shortened from twenty-oh-nine to just plain oh-nine was perfectly understandable. And if you mention the sixties then everyone (regardless of whether or not they actually remember the 1960s) knows what exactly you’re talking about.

Would anyone in their right mind say two-oh-ten? Because to say twenty-oh-ten is just wrong. Eighteen thousand years into the future wrong.

Do you think IPv6 will be around in 18,000 years?

Blather

Surprise!

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My son‘s recent assignment for driver education class was to research insurance quotes. (I’m not sure how relevant that is to the actual practice of vehicle operation, but there you go.) I didn’t think that you’d be able to obtain actual quotes online; I was wrong.

But what really blew me away was how available certain information has become. With nothing more than my son’s name and street address Geico was happy to hand back a list of our vehicles. My vehicles – NOT the kid’s vehicles – mine. No authentication, no nothing.

I’m thinking of sitting down with the yearbook. It’s easy enough to associate local addresses with names – Google and the Post Office are glad to help with that – unless maybe your name’s Patel. Then do the lookups and compile the vehicle lists – again, easy, as we’ve discovered. In fact, since I’m tech, I’d automate that part. With that humming along it’s time to put on the marketing hat… Who’d be interested in who drives what? How ’bout you?

One thing’s interesting, though. They didn’t list my motorcycles.

Blather

Robot Season Kicks Off

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Today kicks off the beginning of another FIRST Robotics Competition season.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is the 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit public charity founded by Dean Kamen in 1989 to inspire young  people to become tomorrow’s science and technology leaders.

I spent the morning at Montgomery High School watching the broadcast presentation of this year’s game. It looks like a serious challenge! For the next six weeks, students will be burning the midnight oil designing and building their competition robots – while not letting their studies lapse. If the enthusiasm I witnessed this morning is any indication, this is going to be one hell of a season. I can’t wait!

Science, technology, engineering… these are key to America’s future, the disciplines that will enable America to retake it’s place in the world, as innovators and creators – as we have always done again and again throughout our history. The kids that participate in programs like FIRST are our future!

If you haven’t seen a robot competition, you owe it to yourself to go check it out for yourself. All of the competitions are open to the public. Check the FIRST site for an event near you. Make the time to attend. See what these kids are capable of doing.

Disclosure: My son is a member of the award-winning Team 25 – Raider Robotix. My company is proud to help support the team.