The Cisco / Linksys srw 2024 is not really a bad switch. What is really sad that the web interface will only work in IE7 or before. It will fail in any modern browser. There is nothing fancy about a web interface for a network switch. No need to use anything IE specific at all. No need to seemingly do it in a way that IE8 simply stops working. I think Cisco should either stop selling the device, update it, or at the very least put a note in the box that it requires IE7 or below to operate. If they would care that is.
In the pre Internet age dentists with a literary ambition not no corresponding talent could ‘publish’ the book themselves. They dropped a nice amount of cash on a couple of palette of dead trees. Now, in the digital age they just can blog, tweet, update their facebook page. The googlebot might care.
Social media always has been a Ponzi scheme. Much like you run out of fresh suckers in the money ‘making’ enterprises you run out of audience. The difference is that the internet is able to give you the illusion of an audience. It seem that things are working. Everybody in the world COULD find that tweet you just made that is so brilliant.
People and companies alike often fail to look clearly at the actual effort and time that they put into the creation of the content and put it into relation of the size of the actual audience. Luckily failed virals have the built in effect that nobody notices them. But they still exist, and so do millions of tweets that nobody cares about.
The signal to noise ratio of the overall Internet keeps collapsing. People complained about the “Summer of AOL” last century. It is a blessing that we had no idea what was coming our way …
Bill Joy wrote allot of software. Allot of what he wrote in the 70s is still in use. Of course not bit by bit. Not even much of his original source code might be left. But -whether you know it or not- BSD Unix, nfs and vi make your life better. Every day. Before his generation computer code was entered via punch cards. Access was very limited. Even on the terminals that Bill used people had to account for the time they used. But:
So the computers of the time at Michigan, you were charged like $3 an hour. It was
interactive, which was cool. It wasn’t just punch cards, but you were charged like $3 an
hour to be on, and you were charged for CPU time, disk IO’s. Every little thing the
computer did, it would keep counts and charge you. So the Anthropology Department
had an account with several thousand dollars so we could get some reasonable computer
time. And we figured out how to get free time very quickly. There was a bug in the
system where you could tell it when you logged in, you’d say you wanted time, and time
equals seven seconds, or time equals five minutes, some limit. You’d sign up for a block
of time. You’d say T equals K, which was not a number, but that would give you free
time, and then we had as much time as we wanted until they plugged that loophole, which
took several years.
I am sure that they would have found a different way to get the time they needed. Sometimes
gaming the system is a good thing. But certainly not as often as people think. The spirit of Enron is still out there.
In order to operate the ZTE K3565-Z under OS X 10.5 or 10.6 you need to set the
network preference settings yourself. The Software defaults are wrong and will not work.
Vodafone phone support refers to debitel for this product. Debitel charges $1.55 a minute for support.
The bigger problem is that they don’t support OS X. They just say that they don’t know anything about it.
In the end things got working with these settings collected from the Internet and applied with a bit of luck:
When you insert the USB stick you get a volume with
Vodafone MC Installer
I ran this. I think it is needed. Also since its distinct crappyness will give you a taste of things to come. After you installed this the volume will no longer be mounted when the stick is being inserted.
Under 10.6 I got lots of messages about extensions not being working / being compatible. Both after the install and after the reboot this POS installer felt it needed.
Vodafone Mobile Connect.
should launch after the install. It fails the first time under OS X 10.6, complaining that it can not find a the stick. Just start it again.
The Vodafone Mobile Connect junk-app is good for one thing only: it lets you enter the PIN of the stick. The “Activate” / “Aktivieren” button is actually plain evil:
it will overwrite the network preference settings for the K3565-Z with non working defaults. Don’t click it.
Since we are talking crapware here the Network control panels gets populated with three devices for the ZTE stick. You can ignore / remove the ones ending in ATPort and DiagPort.
One should read “Vodafo…565-Z”. The number is *99***1#. That’s ok.
In order to make the ‘Connect’ / ‘Verbinden’ button sing for you have to change settings under ‘Advanced …’ / ‘Weitere Optionen …’.
In the Modem tab choose for the
‘vendor’ / ‘Hersteller’ the setting ‘Generic’ / ‘Allgemein’
then for the
model pick “GPRS (GSM/3) ”
for the
APN: event.vodafone.de
just like your Grandma always told you. Make sure to hit “Apply” / “Aendern” before you try to connect. If you “activate” the card with the mobile connect crapware then your settings will be overwritten.
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because
that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular
s cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic
transmission became popular.
“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said.
“They are still going to be around.” However, he said,
only “one out of x people will need them.”
I agree on the part that iPad like devices will liberate
people from using computers that didn’t want them in
the first place. And there are more than we think.
I think Apple will make a killing by recognizing this with
the iPad.
I like the historical analogy. However I find this one
to be more fitting: Computers are like kitchens, and
iPads are like micro wave ovens. A microwave will
work against your hunger. You are dependent on
pre made things that you have to purchase at a price.
It is easy, but you have not much chance to control
the experience.
A kitchen is more complex to operate than a microwave.
But the food tastes better. It is healthier and cheaper.
And the varieties of experiences is endless.
An Apple TV box stopped reacting to the IR when being back in the Apple interface. The light was still changing colors when a button was pressed, but nothing happened. This forum post describes perfectly shows how to get the IR working again. Since it would be a shame if these clear and wonderful instructions would fall prey to data rot here a (slightly amended) copy of them:
1) if you have not already, patchstick the ATV
2) ssh to the atv
(Steps 3 and 4 will fail if you have set the ATV to not auto update its software, since mesu.apple.com will resolve to 127.0.0.1)
3) download the IR firmware update utility: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/061-3045.20080708.Aq12D/IRReceiverUpdaterTool2
4) download the firmware image: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/694-5586.20081119.2AvT3/irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw
(you probably will need to do chmod +x IRReceiverUpdaterTool2)
5) run the firmware patch: ./IRReceiverUpdaterTool2 irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw
6) if the process worked you should see this message near the end of the output:
At his point the IR indicator blinks yellow. The Apple UI is reacting again. With
an ATV software Version 3.0.2 on a Geforce Go 7300 1GHz ATV the IR became
inoperable after a reboot.
Redoing the update, then unpairing the remote and pairing it again fixed this.
On a side note: I found this blog post 20 minutes after I made it when googling for ‘IRReceiverUpdaterTool2′.
Apple published a “Thoughts on Flash”. The piece is amazingly well crafted and written. The real reason for Apples bold move attempting to keep flash out of the mobile space only shines through. If Flash would become the engine for mobile, then applications could run on Apple and other devices. A mobile software eco system would grow outside of the Apple space.
Apple realizes the potential of preventing this. Out of the box the iPad can NOT do any of the following:
= perform as a calculator
= perform as an alarm clock
= read PDFs
Yes, I am sure, ‘there is an app for that’. Which is the model of the device. And in order to create software for this you have to adhere to Apples programming standards (objective C) and use their distribution channels. They are in control. Letting flash grow in this space would not allow them to control this.
For Apple this makes perfect sense. And it is amazing that they had vision that they would be able to dethrone a system that always could claim greater than ninety percent proliferation.
I remember that early DVDs would start into the movie right away. and then, when done would go to the menu. When you insert a DVD you do it, since you want to see the movie. Not because you want to watch all the other crud, like a menu opening that contains key elements of the movie to come, often oddly animated.
The problem with this is, that probably not enough people care. They don’t care about spam, viruses on their computer, their diet either. In turn the quality of the offerings for ‘the general public’ get worse. To the point that they are plain junk in some cases. I read that ‘30 rock’ would be a good show. When I watched some of the first season the other day I was a bit shocked how little I was able to enjoy it. Probably a unique aversion since I don’t watch TV. So my tolerance for mental junk might be a bit different compared to people who spend hours in front of the TV screen.
Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.
After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:
I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.
But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.
Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:
Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.
Since more than 25 years I write computer programs. Writing some information to a file for later use is a very common thing. It worked (most of the time). But it never felt right. Common up with a format, creating a writer and a parser. All that can be done. Rather mundane. Finally I switched to using sqlite for this kind of thing. And this feel right. It works. And will just cover 99% of all cases were I have used “fopen” in the past. One of the things that I like about coding for a living is that it keeps getting better. Not me, that’s for sure, but the tools. And that almost makes up for the natural decline in raw brain power.
In the right hands you can make some very compelling images with a camera body that retails around 2.700 $US.
I had hopes that miniDV would spawn new content, due to the leap in quality of the recording technology. It didn’t work out that way.
I am hoping again that the 5D Mark II and similar devices do that.
At least wedding videos will look better than they used to.
Back in the day an electron beam was running across the TV screen. NTSC was running with 30 and PAL with 25 frames a second. If the beam would go line by line the screen would flicker. The solution was, to let it run twice over the screen for each frame: Once for all odd lines (1,3,5 etc) and then again for all the even ones (2,4,6). That looked better. It is called ‘interlaced’. Each of these passes is a ‘field’.
Film cameras liked to run at 24 frames per second. Cinema does not flicker since each frames is shown twice, but that is not the point here.
When you have 24 fps footage and your TV runs at 30fps, what do you do? The solution was to insert a so called 3:2 pulldown to make 30 frames out of 24. This was done based on 60 fields to make it look smooth.
Interlacing is dead. There are no electron beams going over glass tubes to make images to speak of.
If you like to compress an NTSC spot that was shot on film, and that has the 3:2 pulldown in it, then you should go back to the 24fps version first. Since I could not find anything that worked I developed this. In 1998. Then, in 2008, I needed it again, and so I looked again. Much to my surprise, nothing really worked the way it should be. Many tools have the button to do an ‘inverse telecine’. But none detect cuts and deal with changing cadence patterns. So, I wrote it again. This time based on quicktime.
I decided to give it away: 32none is a free tool now.
For instance. you send / forward an email to tomorow@replylater.com
and it will send it back to you tomorrow.
Google should buy replylater.com and make this an internal feature of gmail. They don’t need to technically. It would be just a nice acknowledgment.
My project management is much based around email. At any point I have between ten and thirty projects going in the same time. And I need my head for something else, then to keep them all in there.
With a mail based workflow it is actually pretty easy to juggle so many things. replylater.com just adds a wonderful time dimension to it.
The compute power you see here can be replaced by one or two racks today. For maybe a tenth of the price. I used to know my way around SGI hardware, Irix, OpenGL a little bit. I think it was patch number 1508 that brought me over to the US. Or was it 1805?
None of that matters in the slightest bit any longer. The 7 billion Dollars that SGI had in market cap at one point completely evaporated. The glorious campus they built is still in use today: Google picked it up.
In some areas technology moves forward so fast, that the outdated components still far away from the their own end of life.This can be good and bad. Some people have warehouses full of Onyx2s. Not so good. I happen to have lots of disk drives. Pretty good. I would not rely on those drives for anything critical, but having more drives to rotate the personal Backups for instance is never a bad thing.
A batch of those drives was connected via a 3ware card before. It turns out that both Ubuntu’s installer as well as OS X disk utility have troubles with those drives. They will recognize them, but partitioning will stall with OS X. At least ubuntu will display an error message. It displays an I/O error during the creation of the swap partition.
I would think that this is a feature: Getting drives accidentally confused will not lead to you loosing your array, since -as a civillian- your attempts to harm the 3ware drives will fail. The fix was straight forward: I just connected the drives to the 3ware card and ‘deleted’ the array that was supposed be on them.
With INTERDUBS growing in the US solidly it was time to start to add another dimension to its growth. It is an interesting experience to go through the same motions again. Just on a different continent. Luckily we found a great data center partner. It is pretty cool these days that one can get a virtual test server within minutes. Of course we are building real machines again for the real install. After some research we found some great vendors: ISP Proshop served us extremely well for cases, cables and the like. We found that Alternate.de has very decent inventory in terms of high end server parts.
Some observations along the way:
Calling a vendor can mean that they already have your order on their screen. Before they pick up the phone (after the 1st ring). Caller-ID plus decent software makes this possible.
Ordering parts it can happen that they arrive 16 hours after you did so. Standard shipping. 5 Euros.
Payment is done electronically. Online, bank account to bank account. Securely, since you have a little key generating device. And no credit company sits in the middle, getting their 3 percent, just because banks didn’t get their act together.
Prices are horribly high. Almost 20% tax on top of things.
Another drawback: If you are fond of those plastic packing chips (who isn’t) you will come up empty. Crumpled recycled card board works just as well it seems.
So I wrote a script that will save me a minute. I pretty much assumed that I wrote it, just because I like writing code, and this task was just something that fit into the timeslot before dinner. I chalked up the twenty minutes it took as wasted time. Others check Facebook, I write a script that can be done before the next thing on the schedule.
As i said this one will only save a minute. But it will do so every day. Still no big deal, I thought. But -funny as it goes- it finished it a minute early, so I came to realize that I will have saved six hours after a year. Yes, in my head it takes takes 60 seconds to compute 365 / 60. Anyway: after two years I get one more day in Hawaii. That’s actually not bad at all for something squeezed in before dinner.
It also gets to show how bad we are actually in estimating what the impact our actions is. I didn’t start out to save a work day in two years. I simply had twenty minutes to fill and a repeating task that could be sped up. Guess I got lucky. Again.
“It usually takes about 12 to 18 months to build a new center,” she said. “We’re cutting that down to less than a year.”
from a NY Times article about Microsoft and Google and their respective data center operations.
It is interesting that after years in corporate culture people start saying this kind of thing and feel that there is nothing wrong with it.
The article poses the question whether google benefits from looking at each level of the technology stack and inventing where needs are. It does not come to a conclusive answer. I think it is rather obvious: Google was able to reduce its capex spending simply when it felt oppotune to do so. To my knowledge and own experience there hasn’t been any noticeable impact on the Google useability by this reduction in spending. I would guess google simple turned down the pace innovation while the influx of new equipment was slowing.
On a -in comparison- microscopic scale I experience the benefits of looking at the entire technology stack first hand. Part of what runs INTERDUBS is of the shelve, and other parts are enhanced, customized and severely optimized. Some we even actually build ourselves. We constantly look at the running service and identify room for improvement. Be it, in the user experience, or how efficient internals work. Having an understanding of the entire system on all levels lets us identify clearly where enhancements should be made. Each of these steps might only add a couple of percentage points. Having metrics and detailed information about all aspects of the system at all times not only give us visibility into which areas are to be tunesd and enchanced next. It also reveals, that all those little optimizations add up into a configuration ,that is faster by dimensions than the un-altered and generic one would have been.
Having this culture of change and constant optimization is allot of fun. I was plain scared having to do this on live data and a running service. But the goal was that INTERDUBS is available 24/7. And it turns out that technology - used in the right way - is able to do this now. It is literally flying the airplane and rebuilding it in the same time. You start in LA in a 707 and land in New York on a A380.
On Amazon some TV shows I wanted to buy are cheaper in Blu-Ray now than they are on DVD. So I got a Panasonic DMP-DB 60 player. When the disk is already in the player it takes 2 minutes before it starts playing. Then there are another 2 minutes of commercials that can not be skipped.
In other words on a good day I clean up 15 balls from a pool table faster than the time it takes between hitting play and starting to watch a DVD.
Newspapers used to run things. They used to be everywhere. In Paris a couple of weeks ago I realized at some point that we had not seen anybody reading a paper. Even books were rare. It was not only a sudden but also a complete change of habits.
I think we have no actual idea what this means and will mean for the future. Technology develops in a certain pace determined by the problems to be solved and the momentum and financial interests behind it. Peoples use and application thereof is a completely different story.
In hindsight things seem to make sense. But actually only if you choose to ignore facts that don’t fit the pattern. Texting for instance, now a billion dollar revenue stream for cellphone carriers, was never intended to be used by people. It was considered a byproduct of some engineering mode for cell phones.
The invention of the Kinetoscope preceded the existence of movies as we know them by more than a decade.
Technology for pre - internet media was unable to adopt. It took great efforts to shoe-horn color into black and white TV signals. 35mm was the dominantly width in use of film strips used in movies as long as movies existed, and before they became digital.
The internet connects mostly computers with each other. This simple fact puts it into its own league as far as media technology is concerned. MySpace goes and Twitter comes at break neck speed. Limited only by peoples imagination and their willingness to adopt.
Trying to apply mechanisms and rules from ‘old media’ in the Internet space will be as successful as the applications of lessons learned from WW1 was helpful to France when they felt save behind the Maginot line.
Finally I canceled my TWC cable modem connection. About the only thing that is good about Time Warner Cable is that you can cancel it at any time. When the connection worked it was pretty decent. Problem was, that I had regularly a ping loss of 10-20% during the evening and on the weekend. Which makes the connecion useless. In the last weeks I went along with everything that TWC suggested. They swapped the cable modem. Which was pointless since the packages were were dropped inside of their network. Basically they were unable to address the issue within 6 weeks. Their support knows a couple of routines and motions they can go through. Anything that falls outside of that will not be addressed it seems. No escallation. Overall their “Level 3″ support gave me the impression, and the evidence of the problem not getting addresses within 6 weeks supports that, that they do not understand the network that they are responsible for. Getting rid of the connection was the only option. Too bad, since during the 20 hours a day that it usually worked it was actually fine.
Original quote from Timewarner Cable support yesterday after trying to troubleshoot a connection issue for 40 minutes.
Bonus points when dealing with an institution as stupid as that: Figuring out the pattern of the special “access PIN” numbers for the Level 3 phone support after having received a couple of those. Let me know if you need one. And make sure to know if you run that OS that is obsolete since 1999.
In 2007 GM lost $4,589 on each car they sold, in 2008 $4,670. Imagine any GM car, then remove things from it that cost four and a half grand*. This is the car you would get when would try not to loose money on making them. What do you care? Well you should, since next week you will probably own GM. And their losses will (continue to) come out of our (tax) pocket.
* OK, I got those numbers from the Internet and did the division myself, so all sorts of things could be wrong here. And you can also put back about one thousand dollar worth of parts into your imaginary Escalade: That’s what gets spend on marketing to convince you to buy the thing. How about a spare tire, seatbelts, a radio and a fan on the passenger side?
An interesting collection of more or less vague ‘cloud sizes’. My guess is that most of these machines are no longer specialized hardware or workstations. Explains why Sun -for instance- is having such a hard time. Once you scale well in software and do handle hardware failures in that layer too there is really no need for expensive irons. I wonder how many of those large footprint installs run Windows like operating systems.
Having seen meme’s come and go together with their tools I am extremely neutral on any new technology that comes up. Does not stop me from seeing if it could be useful.
As usual I try and then see what happens. Easier to ‘do’ and then see instead of having endless evaluations and discussions about something.
Four days of intense work for less than a percent of improvement sounds not like a great use of my time. But I am actually very happy about the outcome: I was able to increase the success rate of clip meta data detection in INTERDUBS by 0.8%. This is great since it went up from 98.8% to 99.6%. Or looking at it from the other end: two third of all flawed detections were and will be corrected with the improved code. One of the benefits of having 100,000s of clips online is to be able run simulations and stats while improving the code. There is a wide variety in what people like to use as their encoding and file format. I’d rather do some more -invsible- work on the backend than to lecture my clients on how exactly they should encode their files. There are recommendations. Sure. But why fail if you don’t have to?
Even though this application of Grubers Broken Windows is seemingly invisible, in the end it certainly is not: A well running system just needs less support per client. Actually so far I was able to decrease the total time spent on support. Despite the fact that the client based tripled last year.
