Are You Popular? (1947)
Duck and Cover (1951)
House in the Middle (1954)
A few minutes ago, a neat-looking laptop in an reseller ad caught my eye, but as soon as I saw the HP brand, I became apprehensive about the laptop's quality, and my interest sank. Reflecting on this reaction, I realized how badly the HP brand was damaged in my mind by Carly Fiorina's tenure.
I used to know HP as a developer of quality-built, innovative products. First-class electronic test equipment, scientific calculators, computers.
A couple months ago, I repaired someone's custom-built PC. Turned out that they'd originally bought a $1500 HP PC, and quickly went through three warranty replacements from HP. (One of which reportedly arrived with the hard disk drive bouncing around inside the case during shipment, smashing up up other components.) So HP gave her her money back, and she had a friend build her a system with much better specs and mostly top-quality components. Fast-forward to about a year later, and her system is suddenly stone dead, so I'm called in. Turned out that she'd retained the HP keyboard from her warranty exchange nightmare, and that the HP keyboard's logic had gotten fried when the PS/2 connector was jostled. (Did we see this coming?) I loaned her an IBM keyboard, and she was back in business with her non-HP PC.
So I did a post-mortem on the HP keyboard, to see if it just had a blown fuse. Now, I've opened up dozens of keyboards for cleaning during my "poor grad student" years of refurbishing equipment, (including el cheapo keyboards that sell for $5-$10), but never have I seen such creative parts and materials corner-cutting as in the HP keyboard. Especially since the keyboard was unusually clean inside, and the logic looked like a dab of epoxy on the PCB, I found no likely cause other than shoddy manufacture. I filed the incident as reinforcement of my image of HP's demise, and filed the keyboard in the trash.
See also 2005-02-12.
I went into the hardware store to get some caulk. As I'm striding purposefully towards the shelf in the back where they keep it, a well-groomed male employee with a high-wattage smile pops up and asks cheerfully if he can help me find anything. It was like he guessed which shelf I was headed for, and was trying to trick me into blurting out "I need some caulk" or "I'm looking for caulk". "I think I'm all set, thanks."
The ISO 8601:2004 PDF file costs CHF 124 (currently approx. USD 105). I've sent them a request to make the PDF file freely available, to encourage the use of this (rather large and complicated) international standard.
I've been working from 8601:2000, which is not the latest version. See 2005-03-28 for the most recent weblog entry.
DVDs I've seen recently (thanks to Netflix and to being under the weather for a while):
Good:
"Shawshank Redemption"
"Battle of Algiers"
"Network" (Faye Dunaway is hot as hell, and I'm not gonna take this anymore)
"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"
"The Player"
"Grosse Pointe Blank"
"Citizen Kane"
"Seven Samurai"
"The Godfather" (not the best film ever, as some claim, but good)
"Brazil"
"Manchurian Candidate" (1962, good, but some of the acting is criminal)
"Manchurian Candidate" (2004, great complement to the original)
"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (visually great, technically notable)
"Ghost In The Shell" (not bad for anime)
"House of Flying Daggers" (not as good as it could've been)
"Chinatown" (a little overrated, IMHO)
"Star Wars: Episode II" (terrible dialogue and plot, CGI-human character interaction is still bad, but anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s wants to see Yoda kick butt)
"Colossus: The Forbin Project" (should be watched as a classic, even if it's cheesey)
"This Is Spinal Tap"
"Sex, Lies, and Videotape" (therapist voice was great)
"Being John Malkovich"
OK:
"Zatoichi" (Takeshi Kitano's, very slow, gory video game blood SFX, musical numbers were dumb)
"Frequency" (good soft s.f., but a little too Disneyified with weepy/sentimental excess and deletion of the great Frank & Shep confrontation scene)
"Logan's Run" (too long and cheesey)
"But I'm a Cheerleader" (amusing, but could've been a lot better)
"Buckaroo Banzai" (like a pilot for a TV series destined to be a cult classic, but dumb as a standalone film)
"Fargo" (good, but too overrated)
"A Few Good Men" (good issue, but another Tom Cruise character)
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (dumb, overrated)
"Time Bandits" (overrated)
Bad:
"Disinformation: The Complete Series" (steaming pile of complete and utter horse dung, compounded by pretense otherwise, Richard Metzger is a lightweight and a sellout who should never work again, only arguably interesting bit was Howard Bloom monologue)
"Enemy Mine" (total Disney)
"9 1/2 Weeks" (visually good, but music video, poor as the apparent softcore psych drama, and someone should tell smirking Mickey Rourke that no means no)
I've started a list of filmmakers and actors whose work I boycott because I find them offensive or harmful as people: Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwartzeneggar, Roman Polanski.
Someone was complaining of Wendy's Frosty "sitting heavy", so I found the ingredients hidden in a PDF file on the Wendy's site. Turns out it's not just corn syrup solids:
FROSTY: Milk, Sugar, Cream, Corn Syrup Solids, Whey, Nonfat Milk Solids, Cocoa, Dextrose, Guar Gum, Cellulose Gum (thickener), Mono and Diglycerides (emulsifiers), Carrageenan, Calcium Sulfate, Disodium Phosphate (buffering agent), Vitamin A Palmitate, Artificial and Natural Flavors.
I've started Bothton, an announcements-only email list intended to reach most of the Boston-area Lisp users. For more info, and to subscribe, go to: http://www.bothton.org/
Hormel was also interested in the [Broadway brand placement] deal because "Spamalot" was conceived as a musical that would appeal to men, particularly younger men, who are a particularly desirable demographic target for Spam, Mr. Vorpahl said.
—Stuart Elliott, "On Broadway, Ads Now Get to Play Cameo Roles," New York Times, 2005-04-21
Are they quite certain they have the right demographic?
The DVD release date for "House of Flying Daggers" isn't til tomorrow, but Netflix is shipping it to me today.
The only nits I have to pick with Netflix so far are: 1. the weekends and 1-day shipping mean that if you watch one DVD a day for 3 days in a row, you often won't have a DVD for the 4th day; 2. the $18/mo. is slightly higher than I'd like, and will probably mean that I cancel my subscription once I've caught up on all the films I want to see; 3. if you report a DVD as damaged and ask for a replacement, there's no way to cancel that replacement, even if won't ship for another 2 days.
IFFBoston 2005 starts this Thursday.
Released the first version bencode.scm, a little Scheme library for decoding part of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (or pirate-to-pirate) protocol.
We all know what drives technology adoption.
Slightly before noon today, a mobile billboard criticizing Biogen Idec was parked on Main St., near MIT Building 68. The message appears to be part of a labor dispute. There were no protestors at this location, and the truck pulled out and drove off before I could approach the driver. The sign did not include a URL — perhaps an oversight, or perhaps because the negative publicity is intended to be temporary. I couldn't find any news articles on Biogen labor disputes.
If anyone wants to follow up... the truck turned onto Ames St., perhaps headed for a lunch-hour protest at a Biogen building or some more visible location.
A dangerous strain of the flu virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 1957 was sent to thousands of laboratories in the United States and around the world, triggering a frantic effort to destroy the samples to prevent an outbreak, health officials said yesterday. [...] "This virus could cause a pandemic," said Klaus Stohr, the World Health Organization's top flu specialist. "We are talking about a fully transmissible human influenza virus to which the majority of the population has no immunity. We are concerned."
—Rob Stein and Shankar Vedantam, "Alarm sounded on flu virus at labs," Boston Globe, 2005-04-13
Speaking of the endless stream of accidents in handling really nasty biologicals, BU is still trying to build that BSL4 lab in Boston. Check out this page: http://bluebeard.bu.edu/legtoolkit/index.html
See also 2005-02-23.
Here's quick notes on a simple method of data recovery from damaged floppy diskettes.
A friend of a friend had kept all her school papers on a 3.5"
floppy that had suddenly became unreadable by Windows. I noticed a crack in in
the top face of the floppy's plastic shell, near one edge, as if the floppy had
been flexed and the shell pressed hard against the medium. I first tried to
access the floppy's filesystem using mtools, just in case the
floppy was actually good, but it wasn't.
Then I tried to dd an image of the floppy, using a
512-byte blocking factor, which failed after 8KB. There seemed to be only one
bad block, and I got the rest of the image by using the skip
parameter to dd.
I could've tried to reconstruct most of the filesystem and recover the MS Word files whole, but I didn't know of any tools to help repair whatever FAT variant the filesystem used, and I had no means of testing any reconstructed MS Word files.
I decided to extract all the text from the filesystem images, and hand the student a large ASCII text file, from which she could copy and paste the latest versions of large blocks of text into new MS Word files. I figured this was faster and lower risk than attempting to reconstruct the fs. The extraction from the filesystem image was mostly accomplished in a large Emacs buffer, with some keyboard macros and manual inspection, along with a quick filter written in Scheme when Emacs 21 character set magic was getting in the way.
If I had it to do over, and wasn't in such a hurry, I'd use
dd_recover and attempt to manually patch in the zeroed bytes, til
the filesystem could be mounted and copied successfully.
If you've never had a vestibular disorder, I highly disrecommend it. In my opinion, the pain of a bad earache is preferable to the dizziness, nausea, cognitive impairment, etc. of something like labyrinthitis.
I was mostly out of commission for about six weeks, after rather unpleasant symptoms abruptly hit me full-force, and I went through a battery of various expensive tests that confirmed I was in all but perfect health. The brain MRI was nice enough to point out a sinus infection, and we think I just have a companion inner ear inflammation, so now I'm on a run of antibiotics.
In the end, $4 of Sudafed PE plus $12.95 of amoxicillin seems to be all that was ever required (knock on wood). If so, the thousands of dollars of tests provided peace of mind but delayed the actual treatment.
Really, that I should get an infection is entirely unfair. I'm vegetarian, I take my vitamins, I wash my hands, I'm in great physical shape, I've never smoked anything, about the only alcohol I drink is red wine (and lightly), I usually wait for the Walk light before crossing, I shun cellphones, and I make a practice of getting a solid sleep every night. Truly unfair, and I shall be registering a complaint with the proper government authorities.
In time for the 2005 Boston Marathon, I managed to fix the rocker switch on my Canon PowerShot S10. I broke the S10 around 2003-03-05, and noted on 2004-04-18 that Canon would've charged $150 for the repair. Since I couldn't find a service manual, here's a few notes on what I did, in case someone else is debating someday whether or not to risk opening their S10.
First, rest assured that you can open the S10 without the assembly bursting, as the back half of the shell comes off pretty easily. The back shell is held on by 11 phillips-head screws, none hidden. One of my flat jeweler's drivers worked OK. Be forewarned that there are at least two different sizes of screws. To avoid screwing the wrong holes, I drew on a sheet of paper a diagram of all the screw positions, and placed loops of tape on each, for holding the screws as I removed them.
So, to disassemble the S10, first remove the CF card and the two batteries. Then remove all 11 screws, placing them in turn on the corresponding positions of your diagram. Finally, with the camera sitting on its front, with the bottom of the camera facing you, gently lift the back half of the shell up from the camera's bottom, letting it lever from the camera's top edge. Somewhere roughly around 45 degrees in this movement, the back can be detached from the top edge easily.
Once I had the camera open, I was surprised to find that the microswitches, plastic tabs, PCB, etc. all appeared fully intact. Puzzled, I turned to the best embedded systems person I know, Jasmine, who told me to look for deformations in the case. I couldn't find any, so I looked harder, and then spotted an unlikely curvature that I would've thought a certain screw would've prohibited. I flattened this out with my hands, and reassembled. The rocker once again works fully.
I should've fixed this two years ago, rather than going all this time without zoom.
I haven't yet found a Linux DVD player with controls I like. For
now, I'm using GXine. To facilitate finding the right frame for screen
captures, I changed the left-arrow and right-arrow key bindings to jog backward
and forward by approximately 1 second. (I didn't immediately see whether or
how Xine would let me navigate one frame at a time.) The changed part of
~/.gxine/keybindings is:
<KEYBINDING>
<DESCRIPTION>Back Approx. 1s (Custom)</DESCRIPTION>
<COMMAND>if (!vdr('FASTREW') && !is_live_stream()) {
play(0, get_time() - 1100);
pause();
}</COMMAND>
<KEYVAL>65361</KEYVAL>
<STATE>0</STATE>
</KEYBINDING>
<KEYBINDING>
<DESCRIPTION>Forward Approx. 1s (Custom)</DESCRIPTION>
<COMMAND>if (!vdr('FASTFWD') && !is_live_stream()) {
play(0, get_time() + 1100);
pause();
}</COMMAND>
<KEYVAL>65363</KEYVAL>
<STATE>0</STATE>
</KEYBINDING>
Released linux-proc-apm.scm 0.2, which works with PLT 299/3xx and does not work with 20x.
Couldn't find it Google, so captured (and brightened up) the Foreign Affairs in-flight magazine centerfold from Dr. Strangelove.
See also 2004-12-15.
Refine section 215, which allows the F.B.I. to obtain a rubberstamp court order giving it access to Americans' medical, business, library and even genetic records without probable cause. The bill would preclude investigative fishing expeditions by requiring some individualized suspicion.
—ACLU press release, "Bipartisan Legislation Would Fix Worst Parts of Patriot Act While Maintaining Key Law Enforcement Powers," 2005-04-05
So, does that mean a search warrant, or not?
See 2004-12-18 for why I'm skeptical of the ACLU lately.
This is just notice of my claim to the Emacs Lisp symbol
depeche-mode.
depeche-mode is part of depeche.el, which
is intended to provide a tight integration between Emacs and various Scheme
implementations. It bypasses the cmuscheme.el and
comint.el used by Quack.
PLT users on Unix/X: the exp-tagged code in CVS
has MrEd looking a lot like the GTK2 default theme.
If you have other tweaks to better match GTK2, it'd be good to submit them as change requests now, in hopes of getting them into v300.
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