Blog: 2008-08

Check Those Pilot Lights

If you have the mixed blessing of living in a typical Cambridge apartment with crappy appliances, remember to check the pilot lights of your crappy old gas range periodically.

Saturday night, I had shut my windows because the neighbor was being loud, and then I suddenly found myself waking on the sofa with a headache and no recollection of having been drowsy. I smelled the mercaptan in my kitchen, but I was groggy and it took a while for me to focus on it and realize what it was.

I don't know whether the the small gas leak had any significant effect on me, but just the same, I would recommend keeping one's pilot lights lit.

Morc

Early this Sunday morning, I've publicly archived my mothballed work on Morc, a partial implementation of Arc done by extending Scheme.

I have higher priorities, and I don't expect to do any more work on that.

Misadventures in Online News and CMS

I don't follow news like I used to, but I might start blogging about online news media oopses. They are so many, and they are often funny.

Today's oops comes from a Boston.com sidebar entry: "PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2008."

Good Samaritans

Thursday night at about 2am, I was walking briskly up Magazine St. to Central Square. I've been walking through urban areas late at night since I was 18 -- for many years necessarily on a nightly basis -- and I developed some pretty good street sense and projection. (Only been held up twice to the point that I let them show me their gun, and one of those times, I was so unimpressed with their competence that I intentionally led them onto a side street before they could make their approach, and I think I won that encounter.)

So, anyway, Magazine St. was completely deserted, and I can hear this guy coming up fast behind me, and there's very little question that he's going to try to engage me. Part of my subconscious assessment of the situation was that he knew I could run and he was coming up fast from behind, where I couldn't see his weapon, which meant he'd have to do something other than get me to see his weapon and assume I'd freeze. Not a good situation.

I'm striding along pretty fast, getting my phone out, while trying (not well) to simultaneously project that I'm aware of him, he's not a threat and/or that I would give him a dangerous amount of trouble, and that we're both just going on our ways. But he's still on me. As I'm crossing diagonally across the empty street, no cars on either side to put between us, this bicyclist guy comes down the street. I was just thinking he bought me a little time, and I was considering whether to sprint at that point. The bicyclist swerves to the suspect's side of the street, where there was trash and/or recycling set out, and I hear him loudly shatter some glass. My first assumption was that he had been carrying a bottle and had angrily thrown it into a bin of other bottles, and that he might be drunk. I turn my head, and he's stopped and is starting to turn his bike away from the curb, his bike bisecting the path between me and the suspect. And he looks at me. I scratch the stubble on the side of my jaw and keep moving. I'm still heading for Mass. Ave. with a long stride, and focused completely on the tactical situation.

I don't hear the suspect, so I turn around and can't see him on either side of the street where he should be if he was still following me. As if the bicyclist scared him off completely rather than just delayed him. It was then I realized why the perception of a bicyclist stopping to throw a glass bottle hard into some recycling seemed strange.

I decided then that the more likely scenario was the bicyclist saw me cutting quickly across the street with my phone out and a guy quickly coming after me suspiciously. In this scenario, the bicyclist had the same assessment of the guy's intentions as I did, and the bicyclist chose to stop and intervene. Whether he broke a bottle in Hollywood bar fight manner (it looked like there was a metal bin there) or simply smashed something to make a point, I don't know.

But I think I probably owe one to this random Cambridge bicyclist.

IBM ThinkPad T60 Update

Update to 2008-08-24. I forgot another important drawback to the IBM ThinkPad T60 with Debian: backlight doesn't turn off on screen blank. This is a known problem withe video device in my version of the T60, and every now and then I Google for solutions, but nothing so far has worked.

The ThinkPad T42, on the other hand, works perfectly in every way.

There's the T43 as well, but I heard something about they have something funny going on with a SATA to PATA interface for the drives. (Perhaps SATA drives weren't shipping soon enough for IBM.)

The T60 WiFi is still not working at all anymore. I'm wondering whether something in Debian changed and broke the POS that is T60 WiFi under Linux.

Tenergy NiMH Batteries Update

Update to my 2008-07-26 post on Tenergy NiMH AA batteries seeming to suck.

I received a new Sanyo charger in the mail today, and tried a set of Tenergy batteries in it. Same suspicious charging behavior I was seeing with my Powa charger.

I suppose it is possible that my Powa charger damaged the Tenergy batteries the first time through, and that they aren't all ordinarily broken.

I've ordered a set of Sanyo Eneloop batteries for my portable strobes, and am going to not use the Tenergy for photography. The Tenergy aren't even good as last-resort backup batteries, since they don't hold a charge on the shelf. I'll instead use the Tenergy for things around the household that don't need continuous power, like my electric toothbrush.

I will not buy anything Tenergy-branded again. If I need any more batteries in the near future, I plan to buy only Sanyo Eneloop, batteries of the same manufacture, or more of the same Powatechs.

I will blog once I have experience with the Eneloops, but they come recommended. They're not 2700mAh, but hold their charge very well, which makes them great for backup batteries. Powatechs in the strobes, Eneloops in the bag.

Huge Email To Do Tag Backlog

I'm recovering from an extended work marathon, and I have a large backlog of non-work emails tagged "To Do". I will be getting to those slowly, but feel free to remind me.

Fortunately, most of my friends were traveling in August, so they did not miss me. Except for the Russian academic friends who traveled to here, and who were staying at my house for several weeks. I had warned them before they flew over that they'd mostly have to entertain themselves, but their eventual Neil Time was limited to only one dinner and one afternoon coffee.

So don't be offended that I'm slow to respond to you. Even hot Russian PhD girls got blown off.

My IBM ThinkPad T60 Has Pissed Me Off

This is a quick rant that I've been meaning for some time to get around to writing as a sedate and balanced analytical article. But tonight one of the chronic issues with my IBM ThinkPad T60 just cost me close to an hour during a work marathon.

Problems with my particular IBM ThinkPad T60 setup, running Debian, include:

• Usually takes around 10 minutes and fiddling to get connected to my 802.11g WPA2-PSK wireless network, with the closed drivers, closed device firmware, NetworkManager, NetworkManager GUI, Avahi, wpa_supplicant, and dhcp3-client all working in imperfect concert. Tonight I gave up after over 30 minutes, including a cold shutdown and pulling the battery, just in case. (My imperfect Nokia phone with the POS antenna had no problem connecting.) Good thing I have a spare 50 ft. Ethernet cable.

• Tends to overheating. It always runs hot, and I get around 1-3 thermal protection shutdowns a month, even if I'm reasonably careful about what surface I set it on.

• Open source video drivers have no 3D support, and no video support.

• High disk I/O (?), such as when installing Debian, causes key repeats and possibly other problems, perhaps due to dropped interrupts.

• Keyboard is not as good as on my old ThinkPad T42.

That's the ones I can remember in this moment of unbridled fury.

I'm tempted to buy a couple old T42 units, but that would be a big hassle, and would also mean moving back to PATA drives from my personal fleet standard of SATA. When I get a chance, I'm going to try out the open source wireless drivers, and also try to see whether newer ThinkPad T-series models are better.

On a lighter note, speaking of fury, here's a quick paste from an unfinished blog entry from over a year ago:

the russian was raving about the movie "hot fuzz."

me: i thought you said that the person who saw it the other day said it was "good." not "great."

her: you have to know person who said that. she's very norwegian.

me: what's that supposed to mean?

her: she's calm and not excitable.

me: *i'm* norwegian.

her: no, you're not. besides, you are calm and not excitable.

And "Hot Fuzz" turned out to not be that great. I recall thinking that the trailer was better.

Firebug Rocks

Quick plug for Firebug.

I've been doing a lot of development with Dojo recently, and Firebug has been indispensible on several occasions. There is virtually no barrier to starting to use Firebug -- you can get a lot of benefit just doing pretty intuitive things, without actually "learning" Firebug.

Email Delayed This Afternoon

Email sent to me today after about 12:30 EDT might be delayed.

For the curious: The max connection limit on my SMTP server is being hit, apparently due to a spammer using my domain name. I took the server down when I was getting a dozen connections per second. Now that the traffic is a little lighter, I have to leave the server up while numerous other legitimate servers clear out.

The Modern Home Office of a Technologist

Checking the Interreddits while my brain warmed up early this morning, I noticed that Stefan Didak's office is all the rage.

Not one to be outdone, here's a snapshot of my own high-tech command center from February.

The one on the right is my main workstation, and the one on the left was a non-Linux setup for a client. I'm currently doing Linux work for that client, so now the second laptop only has to be hauled out for verifying compatibility with their specific Linux server flavor.

I used to be a 1600x1200 person, and last year I did the dual-head 1600x1200 LCD thing on-site for a client. (I'd borrowed the second LCD from a workstation that another consultant was using only remotely, from Europe.) However, I spent a year or two after MIT, roughing it with 800x600 laptop, so I know that I can be productive with a modest number of pixels if I have to. Lately, I'm finding that the portability benefits of a laptop with 1400x1050 outweigh those of more screen real estate.

Thunderstorms: Another Good Reason for Laptops

We've had a lot of thunderstorms this summer in Cambridge, which reminds me of yet another reason that laptop computers are great...

When a storm is approaching, I simply unplug the AC cable until the storm has passed. I can continue to work, and often even continue to use the Internet over wireless, without risking toasting my laptop and data.

My home networking gear remains vulnerable to lightning stikes to the power and telephone lines, but is protected from power outages by a UPS. The Internet connectivity is also vulnerable to downed telephone lines and other upstream problems, and tends to be interrupted several times during a storm and shortly after. Occasionally, I've borrowed a neighbor's wireless Internet.