n3wjack's shared items in Google Reader

Microsoft bans open source license trio from WinPhone

(author unknown) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:30:53 PST

Reserves the right to block redistribution

Some open-source apps for Windows Phone and Xbox have been banned from Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace. And there's uncertainty hanging over the rest.…

Anonymous security firm hack used every trick in book

(author unknown) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:52:10 PST

SQL injection, weak password security, social engineering - oh my!

An attack by Anonymous on security firm HBGary used a combination of software vulnerabilities and social engineering to pull off a highly sophisticated hack, it has emerged.…

iPad Owners Are 'Selfish Elites.' Critics Are 'Independent Geeks.' Discuss.

Eliot Van Buskirk — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:53:00 PDT

According to a survey of more than 20,000 internet users, iPad owners are uncaring elites, while those who denigrate the device lack sex appeal. That's about what our personal anecdotal experience has been ...

“catfish blues”

aeric — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:51:14 PDT

Prank Emails Read on Christian TV Show

Charlie Todd — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:21:28 PST

YouTube user raepmykipz has been wreaking havoc on a UK Christian TV show by pranking a regular segment where they read viewer emails aloud. While a little off topic for this site, these videos are really funny.

Cabinet Maker Prank
Dead Body Prank
High School Reunion Stripper Prank

Facebook spams social networkers with phishy email

(author unknown) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:41:10 PST

Click on this link...bitch

Facebook has taken the unusual step of sending its users email asking them to click on a link so they can restore site configuration settings that were recently lost. Facebook isn't kidding, and neither are we.…

'Water bears' survive in outer space

(author unknown) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:02:19 PDT

Look ma, no space suit

A European Space Agency experiment shows that tiny eight-legged invertebrates known as "water bears" are the first known animal to survive the vacuum and radiation of space.…

Hadron boffins: Our meddling will not destroy universe

(author unknown) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:47:31 PDT

No 'strangelet soup' for you

Boffins preparing to fire up the most powerful particle-smasher ever built have released another reassuring report which says that their machine will definitely not destroy the universe - nor even the planet Earth.…

Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered

(author unknown) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:02:04 PDT

There's something rotten north of Denmark

Just a few weeks ago, predictions of Arctic ice collapse were buzzing all over the internet. Some scientists were predicting that the "North Pole may be ice-free for first time this summer". Others predicted that the entire "polar ice cap would disappear this summer".…

Columbus Ohio Internet Usage Unknowningly Monitored for Profit

Angelo — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:09:39 PDT

I just found out my Internet Service Provider (ISP) called WOW Internet and Cable has been monitoring our web traffic since March of 2008 for profit. The monitoring takes place by installing hardware made by NebuAds within the ISP’s network, WOW Internet in my case. Web traffic from WOW Internet customers (like me) is routed through these hardware devices for tracking. The data (html, javascript, images, etc…) that customers like myself request from web sites such as Google could be modified in order to display targeted advertising. According to DSLReports, WOW cable (and other NebuAds clients) can make at least $2.50 a month per customer.

I was made aware of this by a local TV station here in Columbus, Ohio.

When I spoke with WOW today, they informed me that I was recently made aware of this change when they sent me a notice in the mail of recent change in the terms of service. Like any trusting customer, I did not read the fine print. The notice did not come with a cover letter explaining what part of the notice changed and/or why. See Third Party Advertisers section of WOW Internet Terms.

Notice that in the WOW Internet Terms they created an acronym for “Personally Identifiable Information” as “PII”. The way the acronym is written in the sentence it implies that it encompasses other items. Make no mistake, they clearly state that PII is your name, address and phone number and nothing else. They do not state that IP addresses are PII. In my opinion, your IP address on the Internet is just as personally identifiable as your telephone number or street address. An IP address identifies you on the Internet so data knows where to be directed over the entire World Wide Web. The same can be said about telephone calls and snail mail. Apparently WOW does not believe that your IP address on the Internet is considered “personally identifiable information” even though IP addresses have been continually used to identify individuals and is commonly added to header information of many Internet protocols such as email and web browsing.

Users may opt out of the service on a per browser bases using cookies. This means that anytime I decide to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, Opera, Safari or another computer for that matter, I have to remember to follow a procedure (that I currently do not know) to add a cookie to each browser I use to turn this tracking off. Further more, I now have to do this for every computer in my home and for anyone who visits who uses my Internet. This means that browsers used in my home must support cookie handling, removing my choice (or anyone else in my home’s choice) of turning off cookies in web browsers. For 3rd party applications (Non web browsers) that use the Internet (such as to download or check for product updates) will continue to be tracked by WOW.

WOW Internet is the 12th largest Cable provider in the United States. WOW has been using NebuAds to profit from its customers since March/April of 2008. For the past three months, WOW has made more than $7 from myself alone. I have yet to see any savings passed onto my bill. It appears this $2.50 is an additional revenue stream for WOW and is not something they are using to pass savings to their customers in exchange for invading their privacy.

The 3rd largest cable provider, Charter Communications, recently decided not to use the NebuAds service to make money from its customers. Charter decided to abandon the practice following the release of a report that caught the interest of the United States Congress into the legalities of the adveritsing targeting mechanisms.

The most upsetting aspect of this whole thing for me personally, is that I’ve discovered that this tracking is known to cause problems with Google Gmail. I use Gmail and Gmail for my domains and have come to rely heavily on Google’s Gmail service. Since March I have experienced issues with Gmail and for the longest time have presumed Gmail was the problem. Now that I know that my ISP, that I’ve been paying over $100 a month to provide me reliable access to the Internet, may have been the cause of the problems I’ve been experiencing with Gmail frustrates me greatly. I’ve lost a lot of time and productivity with the problems I have had with Gmail. Email is a vital service, especially for someone who requires not only for tracking and paying bills but for employment and work as well.

I’ve called and notified WOW that they will have to contact me in 7 days to let me know that they will no longer be tracking my Internet and have stopped modifying my Internet traffic. Otherwise I will switch to another ISP. They have until July 7th to resolve this issue, or they will loose me as a customer. If after July 7th, they do not rectify this problem with their service, I will contact federal, state and local government representatives in my area of WOW’s shady practices, notify my neighbors what WOW is doing with their Internet usage, and make it a point to NOT recommend WOW for Internet services.

WOW, you have 168 hours. What is your answer?

UPDATE (GREAT NEWS)

WOW cable called me today (Thursday) at about 4pm to let me know that they are removing the NebuAds for all of their customers! I no longer need to switch ISPs! What an emotional roller coaster but unlike some businesses apparently WOW does listen to its customers. I’m going to stick with WOW now that they will no longer deploy this questionable intrusion of advertising in my web surfing.

As soon as I have a press release to link to I’ll create a new blog post about it.

Members of the Europarlement make money out of vacation

(author unknown) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:02:16 PDT

According to this reportage, there are several members of the Europarlement making money by signing in while leaving few minutes later.
I am not sure how accurate this is, but I stick to the saying 'where there is smoke...'
I hope spreading the movie might make sure measurements are taken to avoid this total waste of money..

Hey eskimokaka, are you aware of such stuff happening in Brussels?

The internet as a set of electric telescopes

Clo Willaerts — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:03:00 PDT

The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web - NYTimes.com: "In 1934, [Belgian lawyer Paul] Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”"

Spore monsters are spreading

Clo Willaerts — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:49:19 PDT

Monsters are not signs of God’s punishment � Jahsonic: "For the Italian physician Fortunio Liceti, true monstrosity inspired wonder and not horror."
You won't believe it but this YouTube movie of a monster called segoat is more disturbing than the original Goatse. There's a free version of the Creature Creator that is part of the upcoming multi-genre "massively single-player online game" Spore and this is probably what the movie was made with. The Segoat is not in the official Sporepedia, although I spotted 4 other monsters that could be interpreted as tributes to Goatse. More gameplay and behind the scenes footage in Spore's YouTube channel.

How to Shoot Awesome Black-and-White Photos

How-To Wiki — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:00:00 PDT

Turn up the drama in your snapshots by ditching the bright colors and going with moody black and white. You can get some great black-and-white results using just about any digital camera by following these simple tips. In Wired's How-To Wiki.

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

(author unknown) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:06:34 PDT

Intelligence begot atheism

A psychology researcher has controversially claimed that stupidity is causally linked to how likely people are to believe in God.…

Lesbians like straight men, researchers find

(author unknown) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:26:12 PDT

Why? Asymmetric brain structure

A study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has provided strong evidence that sexuality is a biologically fixed trait demonstrated in physical brain differences, New Scientist reports.…

Towards Moore's Law Software: Part 1 of 3

Jeff Moser — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:29:51 PDT

(Disclaimer: I've been on a mental journey these past four weeks thinking about how mainstream programming practices are not very expressive. This problem leads to a lot of bloated code that buries its core ideas. In this three part series, I try to highlight a few lesser-known ideas that some smart guys are working on and show how we might realistically get to a much better place. I give the background in parts 1 and 2 and then make some conclusions in part 3. If you're pressed for time or don't want to read much, stop here and go to the third part. However, if you have the time, the third part will make more sense if you read these first two parts.)

Six times more code. I turned in my exam and walked out of the room in shock.

The last question on my programming languages class midterm in the spring of 2004 blew me away. Part one asked us to write a function to swap items in a list based off a function using Scheme and part two had us write the equivalent code in Java. My Scheme version took up about a fourth of the page where the Java version took a page and a half. Even today, with the latest version of C# that has many new toys that were missing from Java at the time, such as lambda functions, I probably couldn't cut the ratio below three to one.

I've often reflected back on the midterm and that class. It was the first real time I was exposed to programming languages that weren't more or less the same style that I had been used to. I didn't really understand how different the other languages were. My ego also took a hit when I found myself struggling for a few weeks to get up to speed on functional languages like Scheme and ML. It was like being placed in a foreign land without knowing the local language. As I started to adjust, something interesting happened. I began to see honest differences in how I thought about programming problems.

The whole experience led me to finally to conclude that there is no single perfect universal programming language. Until I came to that point, I wasted a lot of time thinking that ~~GW-BASIC~~ ~~QBASIC~~ ~~QB 4.5~~ ~~VB4~~ ~~Delphi~~ ~~Java~~ ~~C++~~ C# 1.0 was the only language I would ever need. If I were smart, I'd realize that 10 years from now, there's a good chance that my day to day language won't be C# since 10 years ago I was happily writing Delphi 2.0 code.

I think the most important lesson that midterm question taught me is that the language you pick for a specific problem makes a notable difference. Plato expands on this when referring to good design:

"First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about... Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might." Plato, Phaedrus, 265D.

Indeed, it's important to pick a language that divides the problem "at the joints, as nature directs" instead of forcing you to be "a bad carver."

Admitting There is a Problem

More recently, I had a discussion with Alan Kay, one of the founders of object oriented thinking. Like a teenage fanboy backstage at a popular rock band wanting an autograph, was I wanting object oriented design help from him. I told him that I was having problems making a piece of code I was working on elegant because the language and other design patterns being used were adding too much "goo." I was thinking he'd have some witty pattern advice or something else.

His response was classic: "You 'avoid the goo' by avoiding the goo."

This was such a profound statement to me that it's taken me four weeks to begin to understand what he meant. There are times when I get so entrenched in "coping" with the language and its shortcomings that I fail to see that there is a much better attack vector that finds the problem's natural joints. I often think I am far too pleased with my current tools. It doesn't help that many of the blogs that I read have similar feelings. The problem is that they don't force me out of my comfort zone to dare to think different.

A discomforting side effect is that it I might not even realize that I'm not dreaming big enough. J.C.R. Licklider, a key person that led to the creation of the Internet, specifically referred to his network idea as the "Intergalactic Network" because he wanted to get people to think really big thoughts instead of cornering themselves into "safe" solutions. This is the kind of kick in the pants that I need from the founders of modern computer science.

We've done some good software engineering over the past few decades , but the result is usually a system with lots of code. For example, take Windows:

As you can see, Vista is huge at over 50 million lines of code. This is just the operating system, and doesn't account for many other applications we use on a daily basis. I'm really not picking on Microsoft; I happily use Vista on my home and work machine. Linux, like many other open source projects, has a hefty amount of code as well.

Is software really that complicated?

Does it really have that many interesting ideas that are inherently complicated to warrant millions of lines of code? Even if "lines of code" is a poor way of measuring code complexity, a single person can't even hope to read that many lines, let alone understand them.

Is it big because it has to be big or is it big because we, as an industry, have been bad "carvers?"

Back to Simplicity

Brevity is hard to achieve, but it often pays off. The less code I write means there is less room for bugs to get in. Thus, it seems that in programming, as in mathematics, beauty is measured per word.

Most programs are just one or two core, sometimes beautiful, ideas. The problem is that there is so much scaffolding "goo" around them that they get obscured.

I remember when I learned of how Ethernet allows multiple computers to share a single wire. When two or more computers try to "talk" on the wire, they each notice this "collision" and then they back off from transmitting and then... they wait a random amount of time before they transmit again. When I was in school and first understood this core idea, I was impressed with how elegant it was. It sort of works in the same way that people find their turn to talk at a dinner table.

Another program that has a beautifully simple core idea is the "traceroute" program. It tells you what path your data travels along in order to get from your computer to a destination computer. Each packet that your computer sends has a time to live (TTL) number on it. As the intermediary routers pass that packet to another router that's (hopefully) closer to the destination, that number gets decremented by 1. If that number ever hits zero, the packet gets dropped and note is sent back to its sender with a message saying something like "Hi, this is router XYZ, and I'm sorry to report that your packet died in transit because there were too many hops between you and where it wants to go." The beautiful idea is that traceroute takes advantage of this "error" message. It puts a TTL of 1 on the first packet it sends out and records the router that gives its condolences. Then a TTL of 2, then 3, and so forth until it finally gets a confirmation that the packet arrived at its destination. It's beautifully simple, but this idea is obscured by the hundreds of lines needed in a traditional implementation of it.

Maybe we write so much code to make others think the ideas are really hard or something. It's unfortunate that we do this because it scares off some really bright kids away from our profession. Many of the algorithms that we use on a daily basis can easily be performed by young kids.

Take sorting.

Sorting algorithms as we typically learned them in school usually take awhile to understand. However, there is a much better way to teach them. I had the privilege to meet Tim Bell, a CS professor at the University of Canterbury, who has helped develop a set of activities that teach children how to learn many core ideas of computer science without even needing a computer.

Since kids can often understand the ideas behind our code, maybe we write so much code because it seems to offer job security. I don't really care to make things more complicated than they absolutely have to be. If an average 8 year old can understand my code, I'll consider that a high compliment. Really!

I'd like to express a pure thought without needing so much syntax scaffolding goo. I want to write code that is so simple that just looking at it makes it very obvious what it does and leaves so little room for error that it's practically bug free just as a result of being so.. simple.

And by simple, I don't mean using tricks. I'm tired of seeing people in demos click "next, next, next, finish" and having a wizard generate hundreds of lines of code that you might need to tweak. And by short, I don't mean doing bad things like removing the white space and putting everything on one line or any using other types of tricks. When I say simple, I mean it's a simple thought.

It's imperative to keep things simple when you write them because the code is often read many times. Ruby's creator, Matz, writes:

"Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lives. Bugs must be debugged... During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code; it is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer."

Humans are the audience. Stop trying to make things nice for the compiler. It'll understand regardless. Write for the human. It's usually only the ideas that the code represents that are beautiful, so the language shouldn't obscure them too much. At the very least, make your code habitable.

Going Meta

Ok, ok; enough ranting that code can be ugly. How do we get better?

Unfortunately, this is difficult to answer for a guy like me to answer because I've been so entrenched in the typical way. It's sort of like Henry Ford coming to me before he invented the Model T and asking what America needs for transportation. I would have probably replied: "a faster horse is all we need!" So having acknowledged my weaknesses, I'll look to others that are far smarter than me who are looking into concepts like metaprogramming.

One such guy is Charles Simonyi, who was lead architect on what became Word and Excel. Before immersing himself in the land of office documents and spreadsheets, he was a PhD student at Stanford. He wrote his PhD thesis on "Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method" and the idea has been in his mind ever since. In the 90's, he moved on to Microsoft Research and while there wrote "The Death of Computer Languages: The Birth of Intentional Programming." The idea behind Intentional Programming (IP) is that your source code, be it graphical or text, "talk[s] to machines as little as possible. Instead, [you] would concentrate on capturing the intentions of computer users."

Charles really was enamored by the idea of IP and desperately tried to convince Microsoft that it was the direction the company should take for future programming language development. Think about what must have gone through Microsoft's top level management's mind. It was probably something like "that's really cool Charles, but we can't really make such a disruptive change right now, you see, we've been funding this '.net' project for awhile that's a bit more conservative than what you're suggesting, and it's much closer to being shipped... how about you work on making that nice instead?"

He quit.

UPDATE: Part two is now available.

Donating $5,000 to .NET Open Source

(author unknown) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:59:59 PDT

Way back in June of last year, I promised to donate a portion of my advertising revenue back to the community:

I will be donating a significant percentage of my ad revenue back to the programming community. The programming community is the reason I started this blog in the first place. The programming community is what makes this blog possible. It's an open secret amongst bloggers that the blog comments are often better than the original blog post, and it's because the community collectively knows far more than you or I will ever know.
So, what's significant? Let's start with $5,000.
I've personally benefited most from the .NET open source community, which I feel is radically under-served by Microsoft, so I'll be contributing this money to one or more .NET open source projects to maximize its impact. And what's even more exciting is that I have a verbal commitment from Anand Iyer, a MS Developer Evangelist, for Microsoft to match my contribution. That makes a cool $10,000 we will be contributing to support open-source .NET projects!
As much as I abhor advertising, I'm tremendously excited to have the opportunity to share my advertising revenue with the larger .NET programming community. For me, that's the tipping point. Giving back to the community is what makes the pain of advertising worthwhile.

You may be wondering why I'm singling out .NET here:

Why am I focusing on .NET open source projects? In short, because open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem. Many highly popular open source projects have contributed so much to the .NET community, and they've gotten virtually no support at all from Microsoft in return. I'd like to see that change. In fact, I'll go even further-- I think it must change if Microsoft wants to survive as a vendor of development tools.

I originally had grand plans of dividing the money up a few different ways, and setting up a voting system to determine which projects were awarded the various grants. I even considered a March Madness college basketball themed set of brackets and finals and everything. After agonizing over this process for months, I've decided that's too complicated. There are almost a hundred contenders, all of which have to be mapped to the criteria I defined for the grant:

The project must use an open source license.
The project must use a commonly available method of public source control.
The project must provide public evidence that it accepts and encourages code contributions from the outside world.

I'm exercising my executive privilege and keeping it simple. I'm picking a winner and they get the whole $5,000.

The winner is still based on voting, of a sort; I did a word count on the comments to my original post. One project was mentioned over and over again in the comments, and it met all three criteria.

I'm proud to announce that this year's $5,000 .NET open source grant goes to ScrewTurn Wiki.

This is like one of those exaggeratedly giant checks you see people winning on TV; it's for promotional purposes only. There's no actual check. The real money is being sent via wire transfer to Dario Solera, the ScrewTurn Wiki project coordinator. What's Dario going to do with this money? You'll have to ask him. That's not for me to decide. There are no strings attached to this money of any kind. I trust the judgment of a fellow programmer to run their project as they see fit.

(Microsoft's $5,000 grant will be handled independently; details will be forthcoming soon on that.)

I won't lie to you. It was easy to promise this grant money when I was essentially getting paid twice -- once by my previous employer Vertigo Software, and again by my blog via advertising revenue. That increasing sense of guilt over "double dipping" was one of the reasons I felt compelled to quit. But now that I have to cover the mortgage -- a crazy California mortgage no less -- with revenue from my blog, and the unknown future revenue from our upcoming stackoverflow.com, it's a bit scarier.

But I figure if it isn't a little scary, it's not worth doing.

And I have found that you get back what you give, many times over.

It's a small gesture, I know. But I believe in this stuff. I wouldn't have kept banging out entries on this blog for the last four years if I didn't truly believe in the power of programmers collectively building useful stuff together. Here's to Dario Solera, and all the ScrewTurn Wiki programmers -- and to the spirit of every programmer who has ever helped build something for the programming community.

And who knows -- maybe next year we'll even do this thing again.

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Let That Be a Lesson To You, Son: Never Upgrade.

(author unknown) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:59:59 PDT

I occasionally follow Jamie Zawinski's blog. Jamie's an interesting guy. In the process of researching an earlier post, I discovered that he played a significant role in unearthing the classic Worse is Better paper:

About a year later [1991] we hired a young kid from Pittsburgh named Jamie Zawinski. He was not much more than 20 years old and came highly recommended by Scott Fahlman. We called him "The Kid." He was a lot of fun to have around: not a bad hacker and definitely in a demographic we didn't have much of at Lucid. He wanted to find out about the people at the company, particularly me since I had been the one to take a risk on him, including moving him to the West Coast. His way of finding out was to look through my computer directories - none of them were protected. He found the EuroPAL paper, and found the part about worse is better. He connected these ideas to those of Richard Stallman, whom I knew fairly well since I had been a spokesman for the League for Programming Freedom for a number of years. JWZ excerpted the worse-is-better sections and sent them to his friends at CMU, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, who sent them to their friends everywhere.

Or, perhaps you've read the classic Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years? That was written by Peter Norvig, who is now the director of research at Google. It refers to Mr. Zawinski thusly:

One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.

I think you'll agree that it's fair to call Jamie Zawinski a world class software engineer. Jamie's blog documents, in great detail, how he runs his DNA Lounge club in San Francisco. It's a great read, full of fascinating, often geeky backstage details. The DNA Lounge is powered by open source software, including various flavors of Linux. Sometimes this can be painful. In 2006, Jamie ran into serious problems with the Linux sound architecture:

You may have noticed that the audio archives have only had one channel for the last few weeks. You would probably assume that's a simple matter of replacing a cable; turns out, not. As far as we can tell, the audio going into the computer is stereo, and somewhere in there, it drops (most of) the right channel. So, bad connector, right? No, we've tried four different sound cards, and checked the mixer settings. At this point it seems like the last time we (accidentally) upgraded ALSA, it introduced some software bug that is making one channel go away. I can't even fathom how such a bug could exist, but that's Linux for you.
We seem to have solved the "missing right channel" problem. It was, in fact, a software problem. We were running Fedora 4, and when we installed the latest patches on March 31, that's when the right channel vanished. We tried downgrading to the version of the kernel and ALSA as of three months ago, and that didn't fix it. But, Jonathan took all the sound cards home and tried them in his machine, and they all worked fine there. He was running Fedora 5. So we upgraded to that, and the problem went away.
That's right: upgrading to the latest FC4: breaks the world. Giving up on FC4 and going to FC5: un-breaks it. Nicely done, guys.
For years I've had it drummed into my head that you always have to keep your systems patched, if you aren't running the latest security fixes, the script kiddies will eat you alive, running a six month old OS is like leaving your front door wide open, blah blah blah. Well you know what? F**k that noise. I'm done upgrading anything ever. The next time I get this s**t into a state that seems even remotely stable, I'm never touching it again. If we get hacked, oh well. I have backups. It has got to be less work to recover from than constantly dealing with this kind of nonsense.

The DNA lounge provides streaming audio and video webcasts of whatever is going on any time the club is open. So problems like this are especially troubling -- Jamie's business depends on this stuff working.

I was particularly disturbed to find this recent entry:

I spent a solid four days trying to upgrade the kiosks from Red Hat 9 + LTSP 4.3 (vintage 2003) to... something newer. In this case, Ubuntu 10.7 + LTSP 5, since it seems like that's what the cool kids are running these days. Why would I do such a thing? Well, one reason is that the Firefox 3 beta would neither install nor compile on RH9 (missing libraries), and another was that the kiosks are a little crashy (they reboot themselves pretty regularly for no adequately explored reason), and also, it's "just kinda old", which some people will tell you might mean, maybe, kinda, less secure. So I figured I'd give it a shot.
Well, since this is not my first rodeo, when I say "upgrade" what I really mean is "do a fresh install on a spare drive."
So, after four days of this nonsense, I gave up, and just put the old drive back in. "Nonsense" in this case is defined as: the upgrade made the machines be even crashier than before (they can barely stay up for an hour) and it's a far worse kind of crashy: it's the kind of crashy where you have to press the shiny red button to make them come back to life, instead of them being able to do that themselves.
So, f**k it. They'll be running a 2003 version of Linux forever, because I frankly have better things to do with my time.

I can't fault Jamie's approach. A clean install of an operating system on a new hard drive -- for kiosks running controlled hardware, no less -- that's as good as it gets.

Apparently, Linux is so complex that even a world class software engineer can't always get it to work.

I find it highly disturbing that a software engineer of Jamie's caliber would give up on upgrading software. Jamie lives and breathes Linux. It is his platform of choice. If he throws in the towel on Linux upgrades, then what possible hope do us mere mortals have?

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Adventures in Rechargeable Batteries

(author unknown) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:59:59 PDT

Every self-respecting geek loves gadgets. I'm no exception. And so many of my favorite gadgets have a voracious appetite for batteries. I don't know why all the other battery types fell so far out of favor, but between AA and AAA, I could probably power 95% of my household gadget needs.

I've been a rechargeable battery user for years. It seems the frugal thing to do in the long run, and it's also healthier for the planet when we aren't discarding mountains of single-use batteries into landfills. I remember switching over to the then-new NiMH battery type based on a late 90's John Dvorak column touting their availability and power. Miraculously, that very article is still available on the internet:

The calculation of cost for nickel hydride batteries in the table is for 100 recharges. Hawk says the industry knows that nickel hydride batteries can easily last through 500 recharges. I've seen data indicating that 1,000 charges are possible. This drops the cost per 10,000 pictures to 70 cents! I'm convinced that the industry doesn't want people to know about these batteries. I seriously doubt you'll be seeing them on a rack in the grocery store anytime soon. Do the math: It's like buying 1,000 alkaline batteries for less than 10 bucks. Imagine what this does to the lucrative disposable-battery business.
So now I wonder where the D, C, and AAA nickel hydride batteries are? Mostly in Japan. As far back as January 1996, Toshiba rolled out the first complete line of standard cells and other Japanese battery makers have followed. This event was essentially hushed up in the U.S. market. The big-name American battery companies have avoided this market-killing technology for obvious reasons.

I immediately rushed out bought a bunch of the batteries and the charger from the importer that Mr. Dvorak recommended. In fact I still have some of those original models. Let's compare these ten year old 1998 NiMH batteries to their 2008 cousins:

The picture can be a little hard to read, so I've reprinted the technical details from each AA battery below:

1998	NiMH GP Rechargeable	1.2v, 1300 mAh
2008	NiMH Energizer Rechargeable	1.2v, 2500 mAh

Is it really true that AA battery capacity has almost doubled in the last ten years? That's pretty amazing. But as I found out, it's not the entire story.

For one thing, there's the issue of discharge rate. It turns out that massive 2500mAh capacity of the Energizer rechargeable battery doesn't mean much when the battery drains itself within a month. Take it from Mr. Lee:

All rechargeable battery manufacturers love to boast about their product's current capacity (mAh). But there is a dirty little secret that they don't want you to hear: self-discharge rate. Simply put: a fully charged NiCd of NiMH cell will gradually lose its stored energy over time. Technical papers I have researched typically put the self-discharge rate at 10-20% per month for NiCd cells, and 20-30% per month for NiMH cells. This kind of self-discharge rate is usually acceptable in applications such as digital cameras.
I bought 8 of those Energizer 2500mAh rechargeable NiMH batteries over one year ago. At first, I was very happy about the large current capacity offered by those batteries. But within a few months, I started to notice that they die very quickly in my digital camera. In fact, a set of Sony 2000mAh NiMH batteries I bought one year earlier seems to last much longer when used in the same camera.

So putting a larger number on the box is ultimately a method of fooling consumers with marketing. Where have we seen that before? Oh right, everywhere. Caveat emptor. Mr. Lee recommends the following model batteries, which exhibit much saner self-discharge rates; I've since bought a few batches of both the Eneloop and the Hybrid cells:

In general you want the "hybrid" or "pre-charged" varieties, and should ignore ridiculous claims about capacity.

The other pitfall of rechargeable batteries lies in the recharging process itself. Even if you buy the very best rechargeable batteries, if you charge them improperly, you'll get poor results.

Charging NiMH batteries is the result of a compromise. A low current is gentle on the battery and maximizes its lifespan, but a full charge takes hours. A high current will recharge the battery much faster, but put more strain on it, causing it to wear out prematurely. It also requires careful monitoring of the battery's electrical characteristics to prevent damage.
Most of the chargers on the market today use one or the other of these methods. The fast chargers, especially the cheap ones, excel at one thing: destroying perfectly good batteries, because they lack the monitoring circuitry to control the charge current and detect when the battery is full. The slow chargers are usually better, mainly because it's harder to design a really bad slow charger. Unfortunately... they're slow.

Most bundled battery chargers are junk. Given the inherent compromises of charging, you need something smart. That's why I ended up tossing my generic "rapid" chargers in favor of the majestic, glorious, and surprisingly inexpensive La Crosse Technology BC-900 AlphaPower battery charger.

Seriously, just look at this thing. It's a geek's dream. Each battery can be controlled individually, with its own real-time LCD readout, in four modes:

Charge at various rates, from 200/500/700/1000mA
Discharge at 1/2 the charging rate
Test to determine true battery capacity
Refresh to "revitalize" older batteries

You can also switch between four different readouts after the mode is engaged: time elapsed, voltage, mAh charge/discharge rate, and current mAh capacity. That refresh mode is incredibly slow-- it's basically discharging and recharging over and over-- but it really works. It can take marginal batteries from the brink of death and give them new life.

But you don't have to care about any of that; if you just drop 4 AAs or AAA batteries in the device, it will charge them fine. I spent several hours after I got it plugging various batteries in it, trying different modes, and watching it work. I'm not sure what the exact definition of geek is, but I think "enjoys recharging batteries" has to be very high on that list.

I can't recommend the BC-900 highly enough. Did I mention it comes packaged with a starter set of 4 rechargeable AA and AAA batteries, D-cell adapter shells, and a nifty nylon carrying case, too? But don't take my word for it. Read the Amazon reviews; they're positively glowing.

The gadget world may run on AA and AAA cells, but armed with a basic knowledge of NiMH battery technology and a great recharger, you too can be more than prepared to meet that challenge.

Gentlemen, start your chargers.

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