LunaBlog

Quickset has encountered a problem

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:39:20 -0500

Recently I started getting error messages when running Dell Quickset to the effect of

Quickset has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

So very frustrating. The error details weren't much help either

Faulting application quickset.exe, version 8.3.17.0, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.1.2600.5781, fault address 0x00012afb.

I used Microsoft's Process Monitor [microsoft.com] to see just what was happening and found that right before faultrep.dll was loaded quickset.exe was looking for a DLL that didn't exist. A little farther up the chain I noticed it successfully probed a registry entry for a product I didn't have installed anymore (Inte'l WiFi software). Putting 2 and 2 together all I had to do was remove the orphaned registry entry (which pointed at this DLL that didn't exist) and voila!

I'm much happier now that I have my volume and brightness OSDs back in place.

Javac Command Line Argument File

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:01:51 -0500

Recently I ran into a problem where I have too many jars in my classpath to successfully compile a certain application. Does this indicate something is broken in the build system? Definitely. But, until the build system is fixed I still need to compile, right?

There are stupid things to do with the path to get this working, but it looks like the engineers at Sun (when it was Sun) had (sort of) thought this might be a problem in the future, so they build something into the Java compiler called Command Line Argument Files. Basically you can specify all of your javac arguments within a single (or multiple) file(s) and not be limited by the underlying OS or shell program. This is awesome, except it's sort of broken when using classpath entries with spaces.

Luckily, there are workarounds.

Nuclear a-go-go

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:55:35 -0500

Mini Nuclear Plant is safe [engadget.com]: This is awesome! So let's do the math.
10,000 homes
10 years
12 months/year
75 USD/month (average although in my case it's usually 100)

Total: 90 million USD
Cost: 25 million USD
Profit: 65 million USD

Of course this doesn't take into account infrastructure maintenance, delivery fees, etc. But even if all of that totaled 30 million USD there would still be a profit of 35 million USD after 10 years. Maybe not the best, but it's relatively clean power, right? If co-ops could be setup this sort of thing has the potential to put a hurt on many large power providers. Interesting.

Upgrade!

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:37:04 -0500

My hosting provider recently sent out a notice stating that MySQL 4 wasn't going to be supported starting 1/1/2009 and they could turn it off at anytime without prior notice. Therefore I've switched the backend DB over to MySQL 5. This post is really just a test to see if the switch occurred correctly.

Graduate School

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 05:25:52 -0500

I recently started my application for graduate school (again), this time with North Carolina State University [ncsu.edu]. I chose them because they offer an all online Masters degree for Computer Engineering. Sure there were other choices (namely Purdue), but NCSU had the right combination.

Cheaper
Less classes

The first point (cheaper) is because their classes are all 3 credits at 700 USD / credit, so 2100 USD per class. Compared to other schools, Purdue for example, where credits are 875 USD / credit or 2625 USD per class. Right off the bat that's a savings of 525 USD per class; spread that over 30 credits (10 classes) and you're looking at a difference of 5250 USD.
The second point (less classes) is important to me because I really don't want to still be doing this in 5 years. Some schools, Drexel for example, require 15 classes or 45 credits for a Master's degree. True they are only 10 week classes, but they charge 875 USD / credit.
The discrepancies in pricing between universities has me wondering if you're just paying for the name or are you paying for the education? The answer, of course, is that it depends on the school. I learned more about fuzzy math and combinatorics are SUNY IT than I think I would have at Syracuse, but the Real Time Systems class I took at SUNY was par with my undergrad classes. Hopefully NCSU will live up to my expectations.

Update: next.yahoo.com

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:23:14 -0500

It looks like next.yahoo.com [yahoo.com] has been updated and redirects you to next.yahoo.net. It looks like some sort of design group either working with or for Yahoo. Here's what the site says it is:

* * Tasty bits of hacker goodness * * A steady stream of small delights * * Ideas, experiments and the people behind them

WTF Facebook?

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:14:36 -0500

After being bombarded with friend requests on MySpace for obvious spam accounts I pretty much stopped using it. Now I'm all into Facebook, but tonight I got a Friend request from someone I (or any of my friends) didn't know. Okay, so I checked out their profile and wouldn't you know...Check out my 18+ pictures...

What a PITA! I hope Facebook fixes this soon or at least comes up with a better solution than MySpace. Actually almost any solution is better than MySpace's.

Tata Unveils 1 lakh Car

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:12:43 -0500

The $2500 Tata Nano, Unveiled in India [jalopnik.com]: I just back from India today and there was mixed emotion about this. Some people are excited about being able to buy a cheap vehicle that gets great gas mileage. Others, mostly the middle class who already have cars, are kind of pissed because the roads are already crowded with people, rickshaws and cows/goats. This is probably only going to exacerbate the existing situation.

Also, 1 lakh (Rs. 100,000, also known as Indian Rupees, INR) is not necessarily 2500 USD. The exchange rate I was quoted was 1 USD = 38.50 INR, which comes out to more like 2600 USD. Sure it's only 100 USD, but I'm a stickler for details.

Bubble 2.0?

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:42:39 -0500

Bubble 2.0 Coming Soon [pcmag.com]: I call BS on some of those "bubble contributions", search is mundane, come on. Also, IMHO companies aren't making the same sorts of promises, IPO-ing without any product or service and are (on the whole) more business savvy than the nuttiness that accompanied the dot-com bubble. I'm not saying it's not the beginning of a bubble or not, just that it doesn't matter much. Despite the failures of the dot-com bubble there were some world changing successes (Amazon, eBay, etc) too.

Something New From Yahoo?

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:07:22 -0500

Every once and a while I troll the new technology and "lab" sites of the major players (MS, Google, Yahoo, etc) keeping an eye out for what's new. Today I ran into this from Yahoo! [yahoo.com]

Instant Technology

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:53:52 -0500

I was in the car today thinking about consequences of time travel. Assuming that all things can be worked out or created given a sufficient amount of time it can be argued that a consequence of time travel (even one way) could result in (what I'm terming) Instant Technology. For example, I want some basic research done that enabled me to create a solid state battery that can be recharged via solar power with an efficiency of 90%. This would take a long time using conventional research methods, but if I could send someone (or a team) back in time to perform the research for me then it wouldn't matter because I could have the research completed instantaneously after I sent them back (or before). Even if they couldn't complete the research in time for my deadline they could just go back again and continue their work.

This thinking could be applied to lots of different areas and eventually we would all probably end up dieing at some lunatic's hands. Another example, apply the same principal to generating weapons. I need 100 nuclear warheads, send back the required personnel, let them acquire the raw materials, build the warheads and stash them somewhere where I could pick them up. Bam! Instant nuclear arsenal.

There are some other interesting applications of this thinking also. Consider this applied to computing, instant unlimited computational power. Consider this applied to food, instant field of grain. And so on.

It's really all in the eye of the beholder though because these things aren't "instant" for the people doing them. They have effectively sacrificed their lives for someone else's "instant" gratification. Could it be for the greater good, sure, but it could just as easily be for nefarious purposes.

MeddLinks

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:52:38 -0500

A group of my friends and I started this site called MeddLinks [meddlinks.com] that we just launched publicly. In theory it's like a health and medical version of Digg, sort of a democratic version of WebMD. From the site:

Meddlinks is a community resource to gather health and medical articles from across the world via the web and provide the community easy access to them.

Everyone should sign up and vote!

</plug>

That being said there were a lot of technical challenges especially in regards to backwards (IE6--) support. Maybe I'll blog about them one day...

Movable Type

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 05:59:19 -0500

It's weird that I've been so busy lately with so many things "up in the air". I'm just waiting for one of them to land on my head. For instance I didn't even know there was a MT 4.0 [movabletype.org] out! It definitely looks cool, but a few bullet points stuck out at me

Support for publishing standalone pages that automatically use blog templates and designs
Built-in cross-blog aggregation: Publish pages that include data from some, all, or just one of your blogs
Cross-blog management of entries, authors, comments, and community

What does this mean? Well, I think it means that MT is more of a Content Management System (CMS) now than a simple blogging platform. Also exciting is the cross-blog stuff. I tried cross-blog entries a while back, but in the MT 3.2/3.3 days there was just no good solution, glad to see it's in their core now.

Now the real question: Will I use it? No, probably not. Maybe for new sites, but for this one I have it configured just the way I like it. I remember upgrading from MT 3.1 (3.0?) to 3.2 and I had to redo all my templates because they wouldn't work and integrate some new stuff into my templates to make them compliant, don't ask what exactly because it feels like a lifetime ago. Do I want that pain again? No. However, if I was doing a site re-design or setting up a new site then I would definitely consider it.

Edutainment Redeux

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:36:28 -0500

I was just reading a couple of articles in the latest Communications of the ACM [acm.org] about the new types of edutainment, i.e. using games as learning tools. Then I went to update my profile on Microsoft's Connect service and noticed Codename "Grava". I was wondering when someone would either:

Re-invent HyperCard [wikipedia.org]
or make Flash-like "applications" easy to create

Possibly both of these have been attained with Grava, check out the screenshots, slick!