The daily page is back.
Ever since New Mexico Tech decided to screw their alumni, I have deeply missed the daily page, and have not made any donations.
Life is somehow better now.
But I'm still not giving them money.
I miss Socorro.
Mountains
Monday, December 17, 2012
Friday, December 14, 2012
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Winter Wonderland
We visited the Winter Walk of Lights at Meadowlark Park in Fairfax County.
It strikes me that christmas light displays would be even more neat if they completely backed away from anything resembling reality at all.
It strikes me that christmas light displays would be even more neat if they completely backed away from anything resembling reality at all.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Wait, this walk is for you!
First he wants it more than anything. Then it's the worst thing in the world.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
MTBF≈0
Tuesday morning came with cold rain and a grim discovery.
The beloved 13" macbook, barely 9 months old, had become cold and unresponsive.
We poked it. We prodded it. We held down the power button for an eternity. We unplugged it. We plugged it back in. We gently shook it. We opened it. We closed it. We held our breath, closed our eyes, and chanted "Shift-Control-Option-Power!" to appease the SMC grigri. Of course, nothing happened. The LED on the magsafe connector gave a deathly green dim glow. The coffee table queen was no longer with us.
We could have bought a box full of cheap-o laptops for the expense of that piece of aluminum. I threw up my hands in disgust and swore blue ("Pomme de Terre! Pomme de Terre!!").
There being something like 29 months of warranty left, I took it to the Apple store to let them deal with it.
The friendly guy (lets face it, Apple store employees seem like friendly people...), who got it to diagnose did the same poke-prod-plug-chant thing. No luck for him either. Swaping the magsafe adapter showed it was fine. Focus was on the computer. He took it in back to pop the lid and see if something was wrong. After about 20 minutes, he came back to say that we was able to reset the SMC after unplugging the battery. He ran the apple hardware tests (side note: the hardware test interface still uses the System 9 UI. Slick. I still miss the old mac GUI.) The battery tests showed something like 14 discharge/recharge cycles and 102% of design capacity. The system temperature s were great. Nothing was wrong. Still brand new, really.
It was some condolence that a couple of other macbooks in the service area appeared to have similiar afflictions, though I wasn't if the root cause was the same. I wonder if there's a Firmware patch in the works?
We had a quick, but fruitless discussion about possible causes. He said the SMC will put the computer into a failsafe mode if it thinks something is trying to kill the battery by drawing too much current. Sadly, from our perspective, we turned off the computer and it just wouldn't come back on. There was no apparent cause, and the SMC doesn't have a log function (that I know of). To be super thorough, he nuked the PRAM (side note: we've been doing this to macs for eons now... I didn't know that still worked on Intel macs), and reset the SMC one more time. Brainwashing the grigri.
We shook hands, and I pushed through the crowd (did I mention the place was full?) took the glowing aluminum slab back home.
My feelings about this whole experience are mixed. I've had a few friends have Mac and Macbooks conk out over the years, although my experience with the G4 has been excellent, it having exceeded it's design life by four years and the years I expected to use it by two. I'm beginning to suspect that the G4 is somehow an outlier. I really like it, that partially drove the purchase of the Macbook, but having it turn up stone cold dead one morning is pretty disheartening. I don't think it really required a trip to the apple store, but fiddling with the internal battery seems like a warranty voiding maneuver. At the same time, we live really close to the Apple Store, so it's nearly painless to let someone else do what I could do myself. I also recognize that our various devices are getting harder to work on as their integration escalates. At some scary point, it won't be possible to open. What then?
The beloved 13" macbook, barely 9 months old, had become cold and unresponsive.
We poked it. We prodded it. We held down the power button for an eternity. We unplugged it. We plugged it back in. We gently shook it. We opened it. We closed it. We held our breath, closed our eyes, and chanted "Shift-Control-Option-Power!" to appease the SMC grigri. Of course, nothing happened. The LED on the magsafe connector gave a deathly green dim glow. The coffee table queen was no longer with us.
We could have bought a box full of cheap-o laptops for the expense of that piece of aluminum. I threw up my hands in disgust and swore blue ("Pomme de Terre! Pomme de Terre!!").
There being something like 29 months of warranty left, I took it to the Apple store to let them deal with it.
The friendly guy (lets face it, Apple store employees seem like friendly people...), who got it to diagnose did the same poke-prod-plug-chant thing. No luck for him either. Swaping the magsafe adapter showed it was fine. Focus was on the computer. He took it in back to pop the lid and see if something was wrong. After about 20 minutes, he came back to say that we was able to reset the SMC after unplugging the battery. He ran the apple hardware tests (side note: the hardware test interface still uses the System 9 UI. Slick. I still miss the old mac GUI.) The battery tests showed something like 14 discharge/recharge cycles and 102% of design capacity. The system temperature s were great. Nothing was wrong. Still brand new, really.
It was some condolence that a couple of other macbooks in the service area appeared to have similiar afflictions, though I wasn't if the root cause was the same. I wonder if there's a Firmware patch in the works?
We had a quick, but fruitless discussion about possible causes. He said the SMC will put the computer into a failsafe mode if it thinks something is trying to kill the battery by drawing too much current. Sadly, from our perspective, we turned off the computer and it just wouldn't come back on. There was no apparent cause, and the SMC doesn't have a log function (that I know of). To be super thorough, he nuked the PRAM (side note: we've been doing this to macs for eons now... I didn't know that still worked on Intel macs), and reset the SMC one more time. Brainwashing the grigri.
We shook hands, and I pushed through the crowd (did I mention the place was full?) took the glowing aluminum slab back home.
My feelings about this whole experience are mixed. I've had a few friends have Mac and Macbooks conk out over the years, although my experience with the G4 has been excellent, it having exceeded it's design life by four years and the years I expected to use it by two. I'm beginning to suspect that the G4 is somehow an outlier. I really like it, that partially drove the purchase of the Macbook, but having it turn up stone cold dead one morning is pretty disheartening. I don't think it really required a trip to the apple store, but fiddling with the internal battery seems like a warranty voiding maneuver. At the same time, we live really close to the Apple Store, so it's nearly painless to let someone else do what I could do myself. I also recognize that our various devices are getting harder to work on as their integration escalates. At some scary point, it won't be possible to open. What then?
Saturday, November 24, 2012
No more of that for a while
This photo is the last photo from my Canon S95 for a while:
The day after I took it, the camera turned on in my pocket and stripped out the lens gears. The lens will no longer extend or retract.
I'm sending it back to Canon for diagnosis. It sounds like the standard fixit price is $150. Unlike the last compact I killed, i think i'll take it. The price of refurb s95s is more, and new S105s are are $~500. I must say, I really like that camera and already miss it.
I'm sending it back to Canon for diagnosis. It sounds like the standard fixit price is $150. Unlike the last compact I killed, i think i'll take it. The price of refurb s95s is more, and new S105s are are $~500. I must say, I really like that camera and already miss it.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Brick Trick
The Volvo 740 continues to suffer from a bad case of The Miracles. I had been putting off getting emissions inspection for a while. First, because the distributor seal had blown, causing it to spew oil and smoke, and second because the smell of the gases leaving the vehicle, even without an oil leak, is so horrid that I thought the emissions were off the charts.
Of course, it failed the first pass inspection: why? Exhaust leaks. I had left the exhaust clamps a bit loose when I installed the new mufflers so I could save them when the catalytic converter failed (it's mostly rust). I spent an hour replacing each rusty clamp with a new one. The heat seems to break down the antisieze compound, so the old ones were removed by snapping the rusted nuts off with a socket.
With the shiney new clamps installed, and a new exhaust hanger fabricated out of a random bolt and spring from the junk drawer, I took the car back. "Certainly, now, I will pay 28$ to discover my catalytic converter is foozy and the oxygen sensor isn't!" I thought.
But I was wrong. The mechanic called a few hours later to say the car passed. With better marks than last time.
It's not like I'm trying to make this stuff happen.
Of course, it failed the first pass inspection: why? Exhaust leaks. I had left the exhaust clamps a bit loose when I installed the new mufflers so I could save them when the catalytic converter failed (it's mostly rust). I spent an hour replacing each rusty clamp with a new one. The heat seems to break down the antisieze compound, so the old ones were removed by snapping the rusted nuts off with a socket.
With the shiney new clamps installed, and a new exhaust hanger fabricated out of a random bolt and spring from the junk drawer, I took the car back. "Certainly, now, I will pay 28$ to discover my catalytic converter is foozy and the oxygen sensor isn't!" I thought.
But I was wrong. The mechanic called a few hours later to say the car passed. With better marks than last time.
It's not like I'm trying to make this stuff happen.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Can't this thing go any faster?
Among some much more modern machines, I'm still using a 2002 Powermac Quicksilver Dual 1Ghz G4. The rationale for this is best left as a subject of a different discussion, though the argument pretty quickly boils down to the fact that it works. Most major technological developments in personal computing space have been in the direction of web-based tools, gaming, and portable devices. If you are not doing heavy duty calculations or writing large programs, almost any amount of CPU power will do. It's become a commodity. (Now if internet bandwidth would do the same...)
The proliferation of web-based tools and portable devices has actually helped some things get more usable on older hardware. A lot more code is multi-threaded, and the limited processing power of smartphones has made fast code important again. The universal natural of web-based content also means that websites need to work on a range of devices. I'm finding few pages that don't load well or choke up the browser. Remarkably, browsing the web has actually gotten to be a better experience on the old machine over the past few years.
That said, the G4 is still not snappy fast for a lot of things (though, the indomitable performance of Xee and Shoebox keep it alive).
So, like with photo editing programs, I've gotten a bit picky with browsers, always looking for one that works faster. When the G4 was new, that was IE 5.2, then the mozilla/firefox fork Camino, and then recently, Tenfourfox.
For a long time, using Camino was a tradeoff. Safari came along, and generally ran faster, but had some clunky (to me!) UI issues, and tended to render some pages funny and crash for reasons unknown. I didn't really every consider Opera, because the difference in performance never felt that big. I thought Camino would be the end of the line, as the retirement of Gecko, combined with the sunsetting of OS X 10.4 and 10.5, would eventually relegate the G4 to obsolescence.
Enter TenFourFox. Not just new Firefox fork, but a veritable paradigm shift. Not only do the creators want a modern powerpc, OS X 10.4 compatible browser, they want one that runs like the wind. Extensive code optimization and tuning have done wonders for the browser: javascript heavy sites actually work on my G4. (If you're using one of these old machines, lemme give you some examples that will blow your socks off: I'm writing this blog post directly in Blogger, not copying and pasting. Google doesn't complain my browser is out of date! I can use Facebook! Huffingtonpost can be loaded and scrolled through!) I am not completely certain, but I think this single program has probably kept me from replacing the computer. Waiting a bit for science code to run and files to copy is one thing. Waiting to -read- a webpage while it the browser loads is another. Having webpages be useless is fairly damning to the functionality of a computer in the modern era. The browser program gets used a lot.
How much faster?
I ran some benchmarks this morning while sucking coffee through my Cheerios, using the collection of browsers I have laying round and sunspider.
TFF7450 10.0.10: 2,259.1 ms
Safari 4.1.3: 8,731.5 ms
Camino 2.0.9: 13,350.3 ms
IE5.2 : ∞ (wouldn't run)
Now for some comparisons,
1 ghz Tegra 2 Android 2.3.1 : 2,049 ms usng Firefox 17 beta
1 ghz Tegra 2 Android 2.3.1 : 2,162 ms usng Chrome
Sony VGN-P698E Atom Z530 @ 1.6 ghz 1191 ms using Firefox 16
Thinkpad x120e 1.6 ghz AMD E-350 scores 600 ms using Firefox 16
Thinkpad z60m 2.0 ghz Pentium M scores 399.2 ms using Firefox 16
A 2.8 ghz Core i7 980 scores 220 ms using Chrome 22
iPod Touch 3G (iOS 5/Safari): 4585 ms
iPod Touch 5g (iOS 6.1/Safari):1815 ms
MBP Core i7 2640M 2.8 ghz (OS X 10.7): 199 ms using Firefox 16
MBP Core i7 2640M 2.8 ghz (OS X 10.7): 180 ms using Safari
If you really want Javascript speed, you'll still need a new computer... A high end netbook is 4 times faster...
However, the Tenfourfox puts the G4 in a class that's at least usable. IE 8 on the same Core i7 yields 3757.1 ms. Nice code a slow machine can be much faster than bad code on a fast machine.
The proliferation of web-based tools and portable devices has actually helped some things get more usable on older hardware. A lot more code is multi-threaded, and the limited processing power of smartphones has made fast code important again. The universal natural of web-based content also means that websites need to work on a range of devices. I'm finding few pages that don't load well or choke up the browser. Remarkably, browsing the web has actually gotten to be a better experience on the old machine over the past few years.
That said, the G4 is still not snappy fast for a lot of things (though, the indomitable performance of Xee and Shoebox keep it alive).
So, like with photo editing programs, I've gotten a bit picky with browsers, always looking for one that works faster. When the G4 was new, that was IE 5.2, then the mozilla/firefox fork Camino, and then recently, Tenfourfox.
For a long time, using Camino was a tradeoff. Safari came along, and generally ran faster, but had some clunky (to me!) UI issues, and tended to render some pages funny and crash for reasons unknown. I didn't really every consider Opera, because the difference in performance never felt that big. I thought Camino would be the end of the line, as the retirement of Gecko, combined with the sunsetting of OS X 10.4 and 10.5, would eventually relegate the G4 to obsolescence.
Enter TenFourFox. Not just new Firefox fork, but a veritable paradigm shift. Not only do the creators want a modern powerpc, OS X 10.4 compatible browser, they want one that runs like the wind. Extensive code optimization and tuning have done wonders for the browser: javascript heavy sites actually work on my G4. (If you're using one of these old machines, lemme give you some examples that will blow your socks off: I'm writing this blog post directly in Blogger, not copying and pasting. Google doesn't complain my browser is out of date! I can use Facebook! Huffingtonpost can be loaded and scrolled through!) I am not completely certain, but I think this single program has probably kept me from replacing the computer. Waiting a bit for science code to run and files to copy is one thing. Waiting to -read- a webpage while it the browser loads is another. Having webpages be useless is fairly damning to the functionality of a computer in the modern era. The browser program gets used a lot.
How much faster?
I ran some benchmarks this morning while sucking coffee through my Cheerios, using the collection of browsers I have laying round and sunspider.
TFF7450 10.0.10: 2,259.1 ms
Safari 4.1.3: 8,731.5 ms
Camino 2.0.9: 13,350.3 ms
IE5.2 : ∞ (wouldn't run)
Now for some comparisons,
1 ghz Tegra 2 Android 2.3.1 : 2,049 ms usng Firefox 17 beta
1 ghz Tegra 2 Android 2.3.1 : 2,162 ms usng Chrome
Sony VGN-P698E Atom Z530 @ 1.6 ghz 1191 ms using Firefox 16
Thinkpad x120e 1.6 ghz AMD E-350 scores 600 ms using Firefox 16
Thinkpad z60m 2.0 ghz Pentium M scores 399.2 ms using Firefox 16
A 2.8 ghz Core i7 980 scores 220 ms using Chrome 22
iPod Touch 3G (iOS 5/Safari): 4585 ms
iPod Touch 5g (iOS 6.1/Safari):1815 ms
MBP Core i7 2640M 2.8 ghz (OS X 10.7): 199 ms using Firefox 16
MBP Core i7 2640M 2.8 ghz (OS X 10.7): 180 ms using Safari
If you really want Javascript speed, you'll still need a new computer... A high end netbook is 4 times faster...
However, the Tenfourfox puts the G4 in a class that's at least usable. IE 8 on the same Core i7 yields 3757.1 ms. Nice code a slow machine can be much faster than bad code on a fast machine.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Derby Names I
The Girly has been skating for a while now: The Meaties are starting to figure out hits.
Time to suggest names.
If it worked for my brothers cat, it should work for my wife.
Time to suggest names.
If it worked for my brothers cat, it should work for my wife.
A wee list of suggested derby names
- Iron Angel
- Ginger Crunch
- Redhead Revival
- WhatBanjos?
- Screami Mimi
- Mother Arclite
- Silent But Deadly
- Exsquezeme
- STAY BACK 200
- Bruise Button
- Chain of Command
- Divining Ramrod
- Pipedream
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Wolf Spider
You would think that getting a spider the size of your thumb in focus would be easy. The place is crawling with these things, and I can tell you first hand, they don't want to be in focus.
They tell me they're scarier that way.
In the yard
In the yard, trees come and go,
speaking of Michelangelo.
A problem with living here is that if you have a problem, everyone has a problem. Not in a metaphorical way. If you have a tree down in your yard, a million other people in Fairfax county have a tree down in their yard. Most of them make more and can pay more than you, so take a number and deal. Got it?
If you move to NoVa you must learn to think this way.
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