The wind is blowing, but as of right now there is nothing tremendously interesting going on – just rain and wind and we still have power. It’s flickered a bit, but is otherwise stable.

The garden has been going well so far. The pea crop was bad – largely my fault, as I underplanted. Plus, that batch of seed seemed to have a pretty poor germination.

The rest of it has been fine – squash and corn were fine, the pumpkins are looking good, as are the onions and potatoes.

Beer is good, carboys are full, and phase 2 of the beer system is complete (phase 1 was 4 kegs with ability to tap 1. Phase 2 was 4 more kegs, with the ability to tap 4. Phase 3 is bringing the taps out of the refrigerator so that they’re proper bar taps).

We’ve decided to keep chickens, starting next year. MyPetChicken.com has a pile of interesting breeds. Liz found a fairly over the top chicken coop, which we’ll be hiring our neighbor to build. He builds houses, and this coop is more “small house” than “shed” or “coop”. That and the economy is pretty down, so he’s available, and building it ourselves will end up taking a couple of months of weekends.

I also picked up a new video card to add to the computer my brother gave me for my birthday. Right now, we’re playing a lot of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and I’m planning on gearing up for Battlefield 3. This requires an upgrade to Windows 7, which I’, not particularly looking forward to, as I fear it will break a good portion of my existing games. My brother, for example, claims that he’s not been able to get Mechwarrior 4 to work.

I think that I’m going to preemptively partition the drive to multi-boot, likely using xosl as the boot loader. That way I can still play games on XP (even after it goes unsupported) if need be. The working theory is that XP will be a fallback if I can’t get it to work in Windows 7.

Anyway, pictures behind the cut. ASUS card with ATI Radeon 6870 w/ 1GB of RAM. It’s a little absurd.

Growing up, I had a Tandy 1000TX. It was a good machine, in many ways a lot better than the actual IBM machines – the video had more colors than just the 4 color CGA, while being backwards compatible with it. It had dedicated joystick ports (these were round, and looked like the keyboard ports of the time, as opposed to the later 15 pin trapezoidal joystick connectors), and a much better sound chip. I was surprised, however, to learn later that they were clones of the IBM PCjr. I actually acquired one of these some years later, as part of a drop off of a pile of equipment, but it was missing all the peripherals which went with it, so I scrapped it.

Still, an interesting piece of history.

• Woz now has live plants
• Heater cables are now routed so the case fits correctly.

Finished Aquarium - Front

Finished Aquarium - Side

Woz!

Lizzy finishing up the iMacQuarium

All set up

It's Woz!

We’ve since added a heater and a bit of terrain. I’ll take pictures once we route the wires correctly for it. However, in order to do so, we need to empty out most of the water, and we don’t want to disturb Woz quite yet. He got a little cold a couple of nights ago, and we want to give him a few weeks of nice warm temperatures before we go rearranging his world.

This was a kit from Jake Harms. The instructions were very detailed, but the process does take some time. Of course, he has ready-made ones already built, so if you don’t want to spend the time, it might be worth ordering one.

After many years of exclusively buying Seagate drives, I convinced myself that all current hard disk manufacturers are basically of the same quality. Therefore, I should be shopping on specs and price, not brand.

As such, I bought a 1TB Western Digital drive.

It didn’t last a week. It didn’t even get into service. I ran badblocks on it, and it didn’t even make it through that before the servo blew and it couldn’t move the heads anymore.

I looked up their RMA support, found that they had a “ship me a replacement and we’ll hold your credit card until we get yours back”.

Fine and dandy.

Fill out the forms, get the drive, package mine up… no shipping label. WTF?

Contact their RMA service – apparently I’m on the hook for the shipping back to them.

So, Western Digital’s customer service sucks, and I won’t be buying from them anymore.

(Note that I can’t comment on Seagate’s customer service, because all of the drives of theirs which I’ve had have at least lasted until the warranty period expired).

See? They had a pricing structure for available memory versions on 32 bit systems which basically organically falls from the general “we had to add PAE to hit more than 4GB of memory” and they didn’t want to lose that, so they added it to later versions of Windows. Specifically:

• There is no technical reason for server 2008 to have a tiered memory structure of 32GB/128GB/2TB
• There is no reason that Vista Home has tiered memory limits of 8GB and 16GB, and that it requires Business to hit 128GB.
• Windows Server 2003 has an even greater number of variants.

Meanwhile Linux can address 64TB of memory, though the various chipsets may limit that.

Of course, there’s Arduino, which is a nice little embedded micro which has analog and digital I/O’s. Decent, functional, basically bare metal.

As a minor step up, Freescale is doing these tower systems, which are kind of a step up – beefier CPU, etc.

The thing which kills me about these is the cost. I mean, they’re like $100, and have nowhere near the hardware of a bog standard Intel Atom Little Falls board.

The kicker is that the Atom boards lack any type of ADC, and looking around, dedicated boards for that are another $100, which is just silly. Where are the Intel atom based protoboards designed for embedded devices? I mean, you could do a board like that, sell it for $200, and undercut the ARM protoboard market by 50%.

• Does the Hacker Ethic Harm Today’s Developers – Ironically, I tend to agree with the article on both counts. A lot of American programmers lack discipline and a commitment to quality. Let’s face it – code audits, documentation, QA, and testing are not exactly sexy work. On the other hand, in my experience, a lot of Indian programmers can’t make a design decision to save their lives. The right way (in my opinion) to do it is to be the conscientious engineer, and then go home and hack on stuff where the QA bit doesn’t matter quite so much and you can play a little fast and loose.

• Why Linux is Not Ready for the Desktop – Some of this is right. other stuff isn’t. But, it deserves some commentary. In numerical order:

0. Just because proprietary software will not go away (and I agree) does not mean that Linux is not ready for the desktop. As desktop penetration increases, more software will be ported, and therefore this does not hold water.

2.1 The same criticism of a lack of stable GUI API can be applied to Windows as well – Win32, MFC, WinForms… and that’s just the ones MS came out with.

2.2. Slow GUI – I’d love to know what GUI you’re using. XFce, Gnome and KDE are all just as fast (or more) than Windows XP on the same hardware.

3. All the problems across Linux distros. This is the homogeny argument. The problem with “one size fits all” is that it doesn’t work. The reason I use Linux is because I can make it work the way I want. I can’t make Windows or OSX work the way I want. The flip side to the “lack of a common packaging format” is the same issue with Windows. Up until .msi, there wasn’t a common Windows installer format – it was all custom .exes. Even with the .msi stuff, there is still no central software repository and/or tracking of updates on all managed and installed software. It’s up to each program to do its own thing, which leads to a complete and total friggin mess.

4. Need to configure everything via GUI – why? I don’t have this requirement, and I’m the one using it.

5. Lack of software – the crux of this argument is “Linux isn’t popular, so it has no software.” Of course, since the article is why Linux won’t be popular, it’s a completely circular argument. It won’t be popular because it doesn’t have software, because it isn’t popular. Look, the software for it is getting more and more varied and better and better every day. I am amazed at how much better this stuff has gotten recently.

5.3 Bad drivers – Windows has bad drivers too. Remember the 98 to NT changeover? Nothing worked. Vista is supposed to be just as bad, and now with the DRM stuff, MS can actively kill your hardware as the result of bad drivers. All those BSOD issues back in the day? Yeah, most of those were bad drivers too.

5.3.1 A lot of WinPrinters don’t have Linux support – While I’m sure this is true, I haven’t had a problem. That and I remember when I upgraded to NT and my printer which used to work under NT no longer did.

5.4 It is impossible to watch Blu-Ray movies – Really? Why? (I honestly don’t know).

5.5 The audio/video codec problem – All operating systems have this problem. The difference is that other companies are willing to build the cost into the cost of the OS. Or, you can take a free OS and pay the $5 for the codecs. Or, just use free formats.

6. and 7. Bad quality in the kernel and general bugs – That is what distributions are for. They do the testing. Good distros have good testing.

8. Poor interoperaibility between user and kernel space, namely that it takes awhile for user tools to come out which use the new kernel stuff. Or, to put it another way, you get lots of cutting edge stuff which might not be completely ready. So, what, would you rather just not have them because it’s not completely polished? I’d rather have new stuff to play with which might not quite work, but is still cool, and have the option to use it. But, that’s just me.

Most of the last points are either valid, or rehashing of the above. Arguments about “no standard thingy across all distros”, etc.

And then there’s this:

©2009 Artem S. Tashkinov – All rights reserved. No reproduction of any kind is allowed without express permission by the author.

That’s completely lame, dude, but whatever. I didn’t copy your stuff, just responded by the numbers.

• Severed Fifth – Jono Bacon’s solo metal project. I’ve not listened to the album, but the idea is interesting.

• Matt and Trey given signed photo of Saddam Hussein – Basically, the US Marines made him watch the South Park movie. I find this absolutely hilarious. But, then again, I’m a little odd like that.

• Bacon plasma cutter – Awesome

• Newsweek article about a poor girl who was killed in a car accident. This, though tragic, is unremarkable. What is remarkable, however, is the fact that the photos of the crime scene made it on to the internet, and the family has been working to get them squashed. While I feel bad for the family, I can’t really agree with the idea that the laws should be strengthened to “fix” this. See, this is being painted as a “the internet is bad” thing, but, theoretically, if someone were to take out a billboard and put it up, that wouldn’t be illegal either, I think. While it is the height of scumbaggery, I really have issues with changing laws to stifle free speech – as objectionable as that speech may be.

• And then there’s this review – Now, Liz and I bought this kettle. We followed the instructions (boil with vinegar, then a couple of times with plain water). Our water here is very good, and I would detect off flavors – I don’t. There is nothing wrong with the one we have – but we have the plain stainless steel one, and this reviewer had the enameled one, so maybe that’s the different. But, here’s the kicker: at the end, the reviewer goes off as follows:

If capitalism is such a wonderful economic system, why does it seem to churn out defective products like this almost routinely? Of course, when we find ourselves mired, as we are now, in a nasty global recession that might devolve into something even worse, we have much greater grounds for challenging the leading economic ideology of our time.

The markets are filled with crap because people buy crap. Just look at computers – most of the hardware is complete and total crap. Hell, Microsoft has a whole ad campaign about it – Don’t buy expensive, well built Macs, buy cheap crappy generic Windows laptops where the screen will break off, the CPU will overheat and cook itself to death, or the flex in the case will be so great that it will dislodge chips on the motherboard. (I notice that they’re not pimping T-Series thinkpads.. likely because they’re out of the $1k price range. (Oh, and before folks mistake me for a Apple fanboy, while I like their hardware, they still don’t make a 15″ laptop with a high enough resolution screen, and OSX doesn’t work for me).

• Let’s hear it for the last bastion of freedom.. oh wait – Okay, so there are two UK racists who are posting holocaust denials, racist writings, etc. on a server in California. They are arrested, because saying hurtful things is apparently now illegal in the UK, so these guys fled to the US seeking asylum.. where it was rejected on the grounds that “… the men hadn’t shown they had been persecuted in the past or likely to face future persecution.” So, apparently being arrested for social views is not persecution? If you believe that, I have some nice oceanfront property in Utah I can sell you.

• This dude is allergic to WiFi But it may not be real – No kidding. Look folks, there’s so much crap out there from random radiated emissions (radio towers, your microwave, your TV, your cell phone, your wireless phone, etc.) that you can’t be so in-tune with the 2.4GHz spectrum that it causes you pain. Of course, this could just be sensationalizing and/or getting facts wrong, but even aside from that, there is this outstanding issue of there being a TON of radiated crap out there. You’d be dealing with this from birth, and getting the wobblies every time sunspots flared up…

I think that’s about it for now. Time to head to bed.