Category Archives: Random Whatever

Nov 17

Part of the Story of all of Our Lives

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Our lives are complicated. But we all have something in common! We all make mistakes and sometimes fail to learn from them. This is that story, simply yet fully told. May we all eventually find another street.

Autobiography in Five Chapters

by Portia Nelson

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost...
I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in...it's a habit
My eyes are open; I know where I am;
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.
Nov 18

Roger Goodell Does The Impossible – Proves that Unions Are Necessary

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I’m an NFL football fan. But I don’t have to be, and at this moment I’m not sure I want to be due to Roger Goodell’s handling of Adrian Peterson. If you read my post on the recent announcement of Apple’s CEO then you’ll know I don’t like to support companies who have leaders who do pretty major things that make me sad. Whether they make me sad by being unfair to those under their power or by being blatantly dishonest about important matters – either way they’ve broken a trust. It’s my money and my time, so why use it to support something that makes me sad?

Roger Goodell has managed to do something nobody else has been able to do. Something I never thought was even possible. Something that the party that leans more to the left hasn’t been able to do in my 35+ years. Something my college professors couldn’t do. Something my wife’s dad who was vice president in the fire fighter union couldn’t do. Goodell’s actions have convinced me of something probably every conservative would agree is a terrible idea, which is funny because I’m pretty sure that Goodell walks on the conservative side of the political line. In any case, his decisions and actions have managed to convince me of something conservatives have fought hard to discredit. He’s convinced me that unions are still important and necessary.

Now, to be honest, all this has done it upgrade unions in my mind from “completely unnecessary and counterproductive” to a slightly more elevated state of “needed and a necessary evil“, but I honestly never thought I’d see the day that such a thought would even enter my mind. What Goodell has done to Adrian Peterson is reprehensible and inexcusable. The arbitrary punishments doled out in the face of pressure from some fans and some advertisers are understandable, but still show signs of weakness on the commissioners part. I’ve yet to see him make a proactive move in any of his dealings, and his reactive ones have only come after he’s been forced into a corner. Now he’s managed to back someone else into a corner, and even though I didn’t think I’d ever say it, I’m glad there’s a union there to back up his victim. As USA Today’s Nancy Armour put it Goodell hasn’t done anything here other than try to protect what he considers to be his turf and ended up just picking a fight with the union.

If the union really wanted to impress they’d convince players to hold out on the Thanksgiving day games coming up next week. Hell, I bet the union has enough in the coffers to write a game check to every player for that missed week. That would be glorious! I could live
with it and it would probably further strengthen my new found slightly positive opinion toward unions. Of course, they might not have to. The union might win it’s grievance hearing and Peterson will be allowed to play sooner than next year. Maybe that’s Goodell’s plan anyway. This way he can act like he tried to get rid of Peterson but the arbitrator was convinced by the big, mean union and forced his hand to let
Peterson play again this year. Maybe that’s the plan. But it shouldn’t have come to that and it frustrates me that, if that is his plan, he simply proved that unions are necessary in order to protect individuals from weak leaders.

Roger Goodell has made me sad today, but maybe I should thank him (and the other owners for continuing to support him) for opening my eyes to the truth. As long as there are leaders like Goodell, there will be a need for organized protection of workers rights. I’d still rather just get rid of the bad leaders, but even if that were the plan there would need to be some mechanism for raising awareness about bad leaders when they slip through the cracks, and I’m not sure I can think of another more functional mechanism for that very task than a union…

I guess unions are probably a little bit like firearms. They can be used wrong and can cause all kinds of damage if whoever is controlling them doesn’t make good decisions and doesn’t pay close attention to where they’re pointing their power. It’s best to not wield the power at all if possible. But in the end, it’s probably better to have one and not need it than it is to need one and not have one.

Jan 07

VirtualBox – Windows 8.1 64bit on MacOSx Mavericks – error 0x000000c4 resolution

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Running windows 8.1 64 bit inside virtual box was not completely painless. I had one issue getting it started that really drove me bonkers so I’m documenting the fix. Basically it requires a command line fix. We’ll need the virtual machine’s name so open the terminal and run:

# vboxmanage list vms

It will output the names of the virtual machines and their respective guid:

Example Output: [I named my machine "asinc-win8-64-d"]
"asinc-win8-64-d" {b1a4a89f-5abe-4509-929e-5ab484f9b37b}

You’ll need the name for the next terminal command that actually fixes the problem. Note the command is only 1 line long and ends with [space] then the numeral 1. CMPXCHG16B is all one “word”. Sorry about the formatting…

# vboxmanage setextradata "virtualmachinenamehere" VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1

So after you type that you’ll need to restart virtual box. It should work after that.

Here’s where I found the info if you care. https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=50648

Mar 21

The EFF has it half right about open wireless

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I’ve posted a couple of times about my wireless network – how I have it set up, how I’ve set it up wrong before,  how I’ve decided to keep it closed, how I’ve failed to actually keep it closed, etc. But guess what? I’m back with another installment of my wireless musings. I closed it up last time I wrote, but then I opened it because it was “easier” and now I’m probably headed back to be a scrooge until I find a good solution. So here’s a bit of background.

I run an internet related business and have a pretty decent connection running into my house. For business purposes I have several people / systems hooked up to one or more routers and they all use that internet connection.  Now, the easiest thing for me to do is to just leave the wireless network open so that no one needs to know any passwords to use it or anything like that. It would make that particular part of my life much easier if everyone could just connect and me not have to be involved in the process at all. But, alas, as I mentioned previously, there are some people out there who take advantage of the open access point. I really mean TAKE ADVANTAGE OF, not just USE. So, I go from trying to do something nice (leave the access point open) to just being annoyed at people for using excessive bandwidth and reducing the amount that my servers have at their disposal to do their job.

So bandwidth is one issue, but there’s also the issue of liability. It gives me a modicum of comfort know that the EFF thinks people with open routers should be treated as an ISP – you should get the same protection. But I haven’t really seen anything that says that you WILL get the same protection. To me, this means that if someone tries to do any of several nefarious activities utilizing my network connection that I may or may not be able to claim that the bits simply crossed over my router and be released of responsibility. I may open myself up to a hassle (or worse)… and for what? It also just now occurred to me as I type this that ISPs must maintain logs of usage for a certain amount of time. If I run an open access would I be responsible for maintaining such logs of usage? I would think that it would significantly reduce people’s desire to participate in providing open wifi if they had additional regulations to deal with.

I’ve mentioned two issues with the open router question. One is the bandwidth issue and the other is the liability issue. For the bandwidth issue I’ve recently read about (you networking gurus don’t get all high and mighty with me… I try not to know everything about this stuff and really I just want something that WORKS and that I don’t have to know HOW it works… you’ve probably known about this software for years) some custom firmware [DDWRT] that you can install on routers that allows for a LOT finer control. So, for example, you could set up a list of mac addresses to get unlimited bandwidth and then limit unknown mac address (likely your guests) to a different, lower bandwidth and even apply a usage cap per mac address. I don’t know if my router can accept this software, but I’m going to look into it. Doing so would at least alleviate the bandwidth hog issues and leave me to only worry about the liability issue.

I am working on finding a “hard and fast” answer to the liability question so if any of you out there have a resource for me that answers unambiguously how things would actually work then I’d like to hear from you. Ideally it would be case law, but educated discussion on the matter would be welcome also.

Feb 24

New Router – Wife is happy, Mom is happy, I am happy, apparently neighborhood is happy

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So, I got a new router last weekend because my mom (she lives with me not the other way around) wasn’t getting hardly any signal in her room and my old router was a couple of years old so I figured there was probably some new tech that would do the job better.

I found the latest and greatest NetGear router, and let me just say “this thing rocks”! The signal is great! We’ve got GIGABIT WIRELESS capability. The range is great too… almost too good! lol.

I’ve noticed a couple of time where things just really seem to be running a bit slow as far as network connectivity was concerned. I often work late at night when, seems to me, bandwidth should be less of a problem, but I’ve found that since I got the new router that it was actually sometimes much slower! Crazy, right? Well, not really.

It turns out that when I started poking around in the admin panel to see what the deal was I found that there were quite a few more “connected devices” than the number of devices I even own much less operate regularly. It turns out that with the increased range I had apparently become the default ISP for several people in the area! This is kinda cool because it shows that it works way better (range wise). But it’s not cool because I want my bandwidth… I did not buy it for them. Plus, I run a business out of my house and I don’t need some knucklehead I don’t even know causing me trouble down the road by misusing my connection.

I spent the next 1/2 hour going through each and every page of the admin panel to make sure I didn’t leave any access means unsecured. This thing has two channels of wireless and then a guest network also. I only knew about one prior to going through all the settings! I thought about turning on logging so  I could see what the invaders were doing, but that just seemed wrong. They could have been simply passing through and some might have not even realized they were on someone elses account if their wireless had switched just because my signal was stronger. I value my privacy so I try to treat others as I would want to be when it comes to that. That being the case I simply secured all the wireless access options and cleared the logs. I’m hoping that now I’ll no longer be sharing my bandwidth with passerbys and neighbors… I’ll keep an eye on the “connected devices” for a few days to be sure, but I’m pretty sure I got it handled.

All in all, I love this router. If you have a router more than a few years old it’s probably worth looking at an upgrade. Just be sure to pay attention to your security settings (I probably accidently turned them off – I seriously doubt it defaulted to open but Ican’t be sure) and you’ll be pleased with your choice!

 

Feb 03

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Guitar Chords

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I bought a guitar today. I do not have much knowledge about playing the guitar and I bought it with the intention of learning a new skill and just having a good time with it. I’m hoping to learn to play over the next few months. As will be the case with kids mine thought I am apparently a professional guitar player as soon as they saw it and within a few minutes they were begging me to play “My Little Pony Friendship is Magic” for them. Of course, I didn’t know how, but I told them I’d try to learn it. I found this video on youtube video which is an awesome electric guitar cover of the My Little Pony song. In the comment section someone posted the chord progression so I’m well on my way. Here it is if you’re interested!

The video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=rApnYmZWnzM

A link to it in case you don’t see it above.

The chords:
(D) My Little Pony,
(A) My Little Pony
(G) Ah, (A) ah, (Bm) ah, (C#) ah
(D) My Little Pony
(Bm) I used to wonder
(A) what friendship could be
(D) My Little Pony
(Bm) Until you all shared its
(A) magic with me
(G) Big adventure
(Bm) Tons of fun A
(A) beautiful heart Faithful and strong
(A) (G) Sharing kindness It’s an
(Bm) easy feat And
(A) magic makes it all complete You have
(D) My Little Pony
(Bm) Do you know you are my
(A) very best friends (G)(A)(Bm)(C#)(D)

Dec 04

IF (by Rudyard Kipling)

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True in sports, business, and life in general:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Oct 26

My iRobot Looj (gutter robot) experience

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I got my iRobot looj “gutter robot” yesterday. I’ve been really looking forward to getting one for a while now and finally got it ordered late last week. Not bad for a delivery time! I think I ordered it on Thursday and received it tuesday with free shipping.

Include in the box were two batteries, a charging device, the robot itself including the remote, a beltclip, and two augers. It came in a nice tool case (like you might get with a cordless drill or other cordless power tools) that will allow me to store it neatly out of the way when I’m not using it so I’m liking that too.

I’m writing this because I read various reviews and some were good while others were not so much. I wanted to write it while it was fresh in my head (I just used it about 2 hours ago) because I remember thinking while I was using it that “man, I didn’t realize…” so I figured I’d give a heads up to anyone else looking to spend their money.

First, I want to say that I think this will make cleaning my gutters much safer. I hate getting up and down off the ladder. The way my house was built leaves me with what amounts to second story gutters and I just hate climbing up and down over and over again to clean them. The other option I had was to climb up on the roof and just crawl along the entire roof line on my hands and knees scraping out the gutters by hand. This required me to be way to close the edge contantl and made me really nervous on the steeper graded parts of the roof (which
also happened to be over the highest part of the roof directly over my stone patio). With this looj I was able to find one place that I could climb up, place the looj, and then let it do its thing to clean pretty much the entire gutter area on the back of my house.

It worked pretty well. The gutters got clean enough. I can honestly say that if I was paying a person to clean my gutters. I would require them to have done a better job as there was still some debris left when all was said and done, but probably 95% of it was able to be cleared by the looj. Keep in mind this is a rookie “driver” and I was in a bit of a hurry as I had to get back to work so it might have done even better if I knew what to do, but it worked pretty well regardless.

You do have to pay attention while you use it. You can’t just set it and forget it. For example, I did encounter a couple of times where the looj rolled over. Basically the auger got stuck in some mess that it wasn’t able to break up and so the robot itself just started spinning. It was amusing in a way, but not so much in that I had to go rescue it. It seemed that several times it just quit responding for a few seconds, but then it when right back to working. I don’t know if it got to the edge of the range of the remote or what… in any case it did not make the device unusable, just a little quirky.

I did have one downspout for which the auger never was able to clear out the opening. I had to climb up and clear that one downspout myself. This is still significantly less work than I normally have to do.

This first use was in gutters full of dry leaves, some acorns, and very few pine needles. It hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks so the leaves weren’t wet and the gutters weren’t wet. It took a few passes to get everything out. I plan to use it again soon after a rain (it will rain tonight and I don’t have time to do the front before the rain will be here) so I’ll be able to see which way works best. The second test will includes lots of pine needles so we’ll see how it actually handles them!

I do not think that this device will make my gutter cleaning faster. Working the looj back and forth to get it through heavier jams may actually make it take longer, but I do think it will make it much safer and require less physical exhertion on my behalf.

Cleaning the device for storage was super easy. I just turned on hose and rinsed the looj off. It was pretty “cruddy”, but nothing major and cleaned up quickly and easily.

If they make another model then I would recommend making it a little heavier (maybe 50%) and make the tread motors a little tougher.

I plan to do another review once I get a chance to try this on my gutter that has a pineneedle problem just to report on how that goes. For now though, I’m pretty darn satisfied with the value I received for the money I spent.

Sep 25

Printing from within a WinXP Virtualbox client with a Mac OSx host

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I have an Mac OSx machine on which I have virtualbox installed. My most often used virtual client machine runs Windows XP. Almost everything works great, but I was having a lot of issues getting printing to work. I finally got everything figured out though and figured I’d write it up real quick. So here’s what I did.

The first thing I would recommend doing if you have a setup like mine is to find the driver for the printer that you need to print to. Why? Because the apple software that I point you to below will install a driver by default that technically works, but it makes everything you print come out super small. [Actually, as I’m writing this is occurs to me that it may be doing this when I print because Apple assumes an HP printer in their tool, but mine is an Epson.  So maybe the default installed by the program provided by Apple will work “out of the box” for an HP printer… But I would still go ahead and get the correct driver for your printer first.]

Then once you have the driver on the client do the following (found this at virtualbox.org forum and quoted from here):

1) Shutdown the VirtualBox machine
2) Under Mac OS X

  1. System Preferences, Print & Fax, Check “Share this printer on the network”
  2. System Preferences, Sharing, Check “Printer Sharing” and Check the printer

3) VirtualBox machine, Network:

  1. if only one adapter selected and it is attached as NAT [this is the default], then add Second adapter. Make it attached as Host-only Adapter and choose the name: vboxnet0 (see note B at the bottom if you can’t find this).
  2. if the adapter is attached as Bridged Adapter, then do nothing (you have a reason to be Bridged?)

4) Start up the Vbox machine – let it adjust to added Network Adapter
5) Download and install from Apple “Bonjour Print Services for Windows” http://support.apple.com/kb/DL999
6) start Bonjour Printer Wizard and follow the menus

Note A: That wizard will allow you to print from the client using the printer on the host MacOSx machine. But that wasn’t it for me because Apple defaulted to an HP driver which caused the pages to print all tiny on my Epson. It was an easy fix though. I just had to go back and run the brand specific printer driver install (or manually change the printer driver for the printer added by the apple wizard) so that it would use the brand specific driver instead of the Apple default.

Note B: I did a fresh vbox install to test this because some people weren’t seeing the vboxnet0 at this stage. I was able to reproduce the problem and fix it based on another reader’s suggestion. All I had to do to get it fixed was go to ‘VirtualBox’->’Preferences’->’Network’. It’s probably completely blank for you if you’re reading this note. What you want to do is just click the little green plus to add a new hostonly network and it’ll add ‘vboxnet0’. Now go back and finish the tutorial where you left off and you should be printing in no time. Hope that helps.

Note C: In the comments below you’ll see a couple of readers (Jeffrey Weber and Leigh Warren) that were only able to get things working by using Bridged instead of HostOnly (see step 3 above for where this matters). The “method” I defined in the main part of the post seems to work in most cases, but there is obviously some type of setup that requires bridged rather than host-only. I recommend that you try it the original way first and then double check everything if it doesn’t work. After that if the original way still doesn’t work you might try tweaking this setting going bridged instead. Keep in mind that if you’re already bridged and everything is working then, as the original write up says, do NOT add the host-only.

Aug 28

Some thoughts on Software Patents

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I have read a lot of what I consider to be fairly convincing arguments relating to software patents and whether the courts should “allow them” or “ban them”. Before I had the insight I’m going to share below I was definitely a fence hopper, but I think I have finally satisfied myself with an answer. It takes a wee bit of imagination and a willingness to be somewhat philosophical to get there, but I think the thought process will get you there.

 

If you’ve seen “The Matrix” you know that almost the entire movie involves real people living and acting in a virtual world. If you’ve seen “The Matrix Reloaded” you’ll remember a scene where a ship is returning to realworld city of Zion and they are getting ready to enter the gates to the city. The city is very mechanical and computers are utilized to control everything, but do the people of Zion who operate the computers sit behind a keyboard? No they don’t. Instead they “plug in” in the real world transferring they minds into the virtual world in which someone (presumably other humans) has programmed all of these controls. The controls cool thing about these controls is that not only can they be laid out like a keyboard, but they can also be like a lever. It’s their own virtual world so they can build it however they want. They just need to be presented with an environment that they can manipulate to get “the job” done.

 

Now imagine current earth humans being able to allow their mind to live or work inside of a virtual world. Everything in that virtual world is actually software! Nothing is physical though it could be designed to look it and feel it. It may be designed such that your physical actions (ie grabbing a lever and pulling / pushing it) causethe software to behave in different ways, but it’s still not actually physical. How you interact with that software simply causes some state change in the outside world, but what you are interacting with IS software. Yes, the changes you introduce by manipulating the controls made available to you will cause some other software to cause changes in the outside world which will in turn cause a change to the view of the world presented to the those in the virtual world (and in the physical world). But it’s still software making it all work. The tools are software. The connections are software. The actor could even be software.

 

Once these types of systems are possible, and especially once they are common place, there could be a rush of what, in the physical world of today, we would call innovative people coming up with new widgets that can be used inside of this virtual world. These innovations will almost surely come with a price that would be paid by the programmer. In that case there would be a need for protection under some type of law in order to encourage people to create, test, and perfect them. Do we have a system that provides this sort of protection today? Yes, we do, and it is the patent system. It would also be applicable to this sort of situation considering the new types of “tools” that people would “physically” interact with inside the virtual world. All manner of things are possible in the real world today that we just knew wasn’t possible before (until someone innovated a way to do it), and the same will be true in the virtual world. Ways of doing things never even thought of will be, given the right motivation, not only thought of but implemented and improved upon. Different ways of looking at problems will cause unique solutions to become apparent. The solutions would be “obvious” once pointed out, but would be nonobvious prior. Why would someone dedicate their time to looking for alternate solutions if the answer will net them no reward? History shows us that they won’t… not to the same degree anyway.

 

Q: What about a hammer vs a “virtual hammer”? Would you really allow a patent on a virtual hammer that does the same thing in software world that it does in the real world? That seems like everything would get repatented with the only difference being that it is “in software”.

 

A: This question stems from one of the common errors untrained people make when judging patent validity. You can’t just look at the title, or the summary. Think about it. A software hammer wouldn’t be the same thing as a hardware hammer would it? Software doesn’t have physical nails to drive. But maybe a software hammer can be made such that it easy automates the binding of two or more components using a single connective module. Something that used to take 10 virtual actions can be easily rolled  up into the action of hitting the objects with a hammer. The hammer basically just does all of those steps that “physically” had to be done before and elminates them through some ingenious “piece of code”. Testing this peice of code and finding just the right tweaks for it came with a cost of thousands of lost operations (cpu cycles), mangled data, and even memory leaks that had to be dealt with before it became stable to be used in the virtual world. Why would someone give up these precious resources if it would not gain them some advantage? Now that it is done it is a easily copyable solution so what’s to stop another from copying it and using it without having put their own butts on the line? Copyright doesn’t do the trick as code can be rewritten (hell, translate it to another language and you’ll have to modify it to do so). You’re still using the same algorithm, but it obviously not the same code. Yes it is and you shouldn’t be allowed to steal the code, change the language, and call it new.

 

It is my belief that as things become more virtualized and as virtual reality starts to become both more real and more immersive that we will see more need for patents on things in the virtual world. These things are no doubt software. But they are also no doubt in need of protection.

 

To be continued… or is this one step too far?

 

And if we know that software should be patentable in the case of said eventual world, then software should be patentable now due to the simple fact that the simulation argument leads there.