Craig Berry

A post on a web-design-related mailing list to which I subscribe pointed out this site for an ecumenical Christian group.  It has the distinction of featuring the most spastic, overdone, unintentionally amusing Flash intro I've ever seen -- and that's a pretty high bar.  Enjoy.  I'm not responsible for any unwelcome neurological effects.

I am now the proud owner of a T-Mobile G1, also known as the "Android" phone after the Google operating system it runs.  This thing is just amazing.  I'm sure I'll be discovering features for weeks...and then I plan to start coding for it.  But right now, I'm just relieved that I can finally hold my head high when fellow geeks start bragging about their cell phones.  Up until now, my phone has been just slightly superior to a pair of coffee cans linked by string.

And for those of you who get the reference:  Now, like any self-respecting Ita, I have a super-jeejah. 

My graphics system on the home machine finally died completely, after several months of working under threat of violence about two times out of three. So on Friday night I bought a really spiffy new graphics card, took it home, and installed it. Nothing happened. Blank black screen. And no triumphant "Windows is starting up" sound...in fact, a suspicious lack of disk activity.

Now, understand: I hate and fear hardware. Many years ago there was a piece called "Real Software Engineers" bouncing around the Arpanet, and the line that most rang true for me was "Real software engineers don't trust hardware. They prefer their systems to be virtual all the way down." Software is deterministic. If you do X, Y reliably happens. There's no condideration of static electricity, or connectors working loose, or pins getting bent. Hardware spends most of its time trying to break.

So, returning to our story...my conclusion after a good night's rest was that the monitor was probably actually to blame. It's hard to tell the difference between a monitor problem and a video card problem, after all. So today, with the assistance of the lovely belladonna93 , I headed back to Best Buy and picked up a new monitor...a fairly nice one, with a 16:9 aspect ratio and astonishing contrast. I got home and got it set up and plugged in.

It didn't work.

An old hardware-techie friend of mine used to talk about how inexperienced people would "let the magic smoke out" when they made ill-advised attempts to open their PCs up. That phrase was very much in my mind as I once again pulled the case open, this time to swap in the old video card again. I figured that if the monitor had in fact been at fault, the old card might be okay...less spiffy than the would-be replacement, sure, but it might work; maybe there was a defect with the new one. Hope springs eternal.

I got everything put back together and plugged in, turned everythign on, and was overjoyed to see BIOS startup messages appearing. My joy decreased abruptly when a single line on an otherwise blank black screen appeared: "Boot disk not found: Insert system disk and hit ENTER to continue."

Great. Some static charge or humidity fluctuation or phase of the moon during all my rummaging around in that case had let out the magic smoke. I was just about to give up and start trying to figure out how to get it to a repair shop. Then I decided to take another look in there, just in case the problem might by some long-shot chance be obvious.

Well, guess what? It was obvious. One of the two ribbon-cable connectors to the system disk had fallen out. I couldn't tell you why there are two, but it was obvious that there had been two, and one was hanging loose nearby. I plugged it in, got everything set up again for what felt like the twentieth time, powered up and....

IT WORKED!!! And the new monitor looked incredibly good, too. I paused to install its drivers, then went to drink coffee and ponder. You see, now I had a working system, with a nice new monitor, and some prospect of having it all remain in working order. But I also had a $200 super-swank graphics card lying on my bed, which I would really really like to use. Should I risk another trip into the forbidden zone to try swapping it in again? Maybe I hadn't seated it properly before, or maybe the disk cable problem had been subverting everything.

Finally I decided to go for it. I swapped it in, did the reconnect-everything drill, and...zip. Blank screen. No sign the system was even booting successfully. Terrified, I swapped the original card back in. Everything worked fine.

Time for more pondering. Was the new card bad? Had I skipped some crucial setup step? I read the manual...no help at all. I began searching around on the web for troubleshooting tips. Nothing that seemed immediately relevant. Lots of people talking about installing new power supplies for closely related video cards, though....hm. What was my power supply rated for? 400W, according to the housing. What did my new card want? Check the packaging...uh oh, there it was.

The card, an nVidia 9800 GT, wanted 400W just for itself.  Suddenly the whole thing became depressingly clear.  With the new card installed, there wasn't enough power to go around, so it didn't even try booting.  The old card (an nVidia 8600) apparently needs a lot less power.  (It's certainly much smaller and lighter than its big brother, which tends to correlate with reduced power demand.)

All this brings me to my question to the hardware geeks among you.  I can find plenty of ads for higher-capacity power supplies.  Is it reasonable for a clumsy novice like me to try to buy and install one?  Or is this a job I should farm out to a professional?

Since the actual hyper-volatility of the stock market apparently wasn't sufficiently exciting, some sort of glitch afflicted Google stock right at the close of trading today. Check out the low price. Apparently this incident is under investigation.

After Hours: 410.50 +69.07 (20.23%)  Sep 30 5:10pm ET

The cable installation went smoothly on Saturday.  We're now getting all data services -- TV, phone, and internet -- through one pipe.  The net bandwidth is 10Mbps down, 1 up.  That, my friends, is what we professionals refer to as "screamingly fast".  My spine tingles every time I watch the progress bar on a download.  Yes, I'm a geek, I know -- but I'm a very happy geek.

The first modem I ever used on a home system carried 1200bps (on a good day, with a tailwind, downhill).  It's rather awe-inspiring to realize that home connection speeds have increased by a factor of roughly 10,000 -- four orders of magnitude -- over the past 25 years.

I'm in the process of setting up utilities for our new place.  I got a bundled package of cable, phone, and net from Time Warner Cable.  For a little extra, I'm going to have 10 Mbps downstream service, and 1 Mbps up.  That's about ten times faster than my present service.

Now the tricky part...some people swear by TWC, some loathe it, and there seems to be little pattern to the difference.  I gather it's a luck of the draw situation.  So I'm really hoping we're on a good block, and installed on a good day.

Well, not quite the oldest in the world -- I know people who have email addresses that date back to around 1983 -- but at 16 years, "cberry@cine.net" is pretty darned old.  Thus it is with a certain regret that I announce the impending retirement of that address (and the equivalent "cberry@cinenet.net").  This won't happen tomorrow, or maybe even this year, but the end is coming.  I've changed my outbound email to default to my new preferred address, "cdberry@gmail.com"; please change any address book entries, links, and so forth to use that.  Please note that it starts with "cd"; "cberry" is an entirely different GMail user, who will be very confused if he or she starts getting deluged with requests for information about OTO web issues and EGC policies.

Meanwhile, those of a particular geeky sort will be as delighted as I was by The S stands for Simple, a withering and funny critique of SOAP technology in dialog form.  Having banged my head against SOAP several times over the years, most recently just a month ago, this really hit home.  Enjoy.

Last weekend I mentioned to a few people that I'm working on a project called "Vox Dei" which turns English-transliterated Hebrew words into music according to Paul Foster Case's note correspondences. A very preliminary, not-ready-for-prime-time version is here.

I'm mostly putting this out there to see if it works for other people; you'll need Java 6 installed to even give it a try. If anyone has Java 6 but can't make it work, please let me know.

I'm evaluating a product for use at my day job which proudly boasts that it offers an "Application-oriented API".  Given that API stands for "Application Programming Interface", I'm finding it difficult to picture a non-application-oriented API.

Oh, wait, I forgot Win32.

In a dust-up over software patents, the Microsoft platform strategy manager for South Africa said:

"There is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity."

I'm expecting Microsoft to send me a cease-and-desist order for Achad any day now.

I just unsubscribed from a Rosicrucian mailing list after a week, in large part because its denizens relentlessly top-post and fail to trim quoted text when replying -- even if they're replying to a thirty-message digest.

I am reasonably sure that the true representatives of Frater CRC will exhibit much better netiquette when I find them.

An errant spy satellite is due to re-enter soon; it's big enough and has components tough enough for parts of it to hit the surface, and contains toxic chemicals. So apparently the Navy is planning to blow it up with a missile.  I find it amusing that the story's headline says that the satellite will be "shot down".  No, it's already coming down, and blowing it up won't make the pieces de-orbit all that much faster.  Rather, the idea is to disperse it into pieces small enough and spread out enough to pose no threat to us ground-dwellers.

What I find particularly interesting about this situation is that they plan to use a Standard Missile 3.  I worked on the Standard Missile 2 project at General Dynamics, way back in the day, and I don't recall it having enough range to catch something roughly a hundred miles up.  I guess version 3 was quite an upgrade.  Our running joke on the Standard Missile team was that the Navy should order a version that could be launched from submarines, which we would then designate the "Substandard Missile".  Hey, it was pretty funny at the time.'

It was a busy weekend.

Saturday, I attended an excellent "Psychology of Initiation" workshop at LVX Lodge.  The best moment came as we were discussing the behavior of repressed individuals, those incapable of expressing some aspect of their personalities.  An attendee asked, "What is the opposite of that called, where people dump personal details on everyone around them with no sense of appropriateness or self control?"  With no hesitation, another attendee replied "LiveJournal".

Saturday evening laurellady and I drove down to darkest Orange County to pick up madelineusher for her winter break.  It's still not quite sinking in that my daughter is halfway through her freshman year of college.  I've found that everything about raising a child is like that; you finally get used to their being at any given stage just as they're moving into the next one.  You always feel like you're behind the beat.

Sunday was mostly devoted to computer tasks for myself, for my day job, and for the OTO, in roughly that order.  The task for myself was scrubbing the last remnants of the Ubuntu dual-boot configuration off my PC.  This involved booting from the Windows CD and using the recovery console, which is a rather nerve-wracking experience.  To get to the tool I needed, I had to ignore several "For the love of God, turn back before you destroy your system!" warnings.  When I finally ran fixmbr, it gave me little information about what had happened, so when I went to reboot the system, I was prepared to see no change, or (more likely) a disastrous error.  However, for once Murphy was on a coffee break, and XP came up smoothly without the GRUB boot selection menu along the way.  After that it was just a matter of recovering the abandoned partitions previously used by Ubuntu, which Partition Magic made trivially easy.

The day job tasks revolved around our ongoing fight to improve performance.  I had a sudden insight based on some odd test results we collected on Friday, and dove deep into Tomcat connector-configuration documentation, our source code, and examples on various technical forums as I gradually put together a new and radical hypothesis about where our "lost" throughput is going when under heavy load.  The new configuration resulting from hypothesis is under load testing right now; please cross your fingers.

Finally, the OTO work involved handling the usual small requests -- address changes, content tweaks, and the like -- along with some long-overdue system maintenance activities.  I also did some more thinking (and reading) about my medium-term goal of migrating the public site from Perl and Mason to Ruby on Rails.  I think Perl will remain my favorite language, but modern practice is leaving it behind.  And Ruby was built by Perl zealots, so most of the same aesthetic values are there.

My next big decision is whether to work on completing a paper inspired by my "Humor and Initiation" talk for the NOTOCON proceedings publication.  I have the material organized, and I could easily have something ready for the 12/31 deadline.  The trouble is that a lot of other commitments are competing for that time.  I also don't know whether I can both strip out degree-sensitive material and convert a humor-filled presentation from spoken to written form and still have anything left that's worth saying.  I need to decide by Wednesday...maybe I should find my lucky coin.

I was feeling glum and tired on the bus to work this morning, listening to random music on my mp3 player and not liking anything I heard.  Then it played the live version of "The Song Remains the Same" by Zep, and suddenly I was smiling, tapping my foot, and struggling not to sing out loud on a crowded bus.  It's amazing what the right music at the right time can accomplish.

That segued into "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider, which made me grin for other reasons, but let's not go there. :)

I updated every driver I could think of on my home PC last night.  It seems like the lockups are happening mostly during heavy graphics usage (watching flash videos, playing Second Life), so I was especially careful to update and test my graphics card driver.  All checks out perfectly.  Now the waiting begins.

I could have saved a lot of typing in my last post by just linking to today's xkcd comic.

I had a relatively calm and happy four-day weekend.  It started well with a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner at laurellady's parents' place in darkest Riverside County.  During the drive out there we introduced madelineusher to the cheesy glory that is the musical Chess.  We're not sure whether our car works if people inside aren't singing along enthusiastically with loud music; it's never been tried.

The remainder of the weekend mostly involved catching up on sleep and working on various computer projects, with a commando shopping raid on Westside Pavillion on Saturday for variety.  During the many hours I spent in front of my monitor, I got mostly caught up on various OTO updates and fixes, solved a lingering sound card driver issue on my new PC, and spent an inordinate amount of time puttering around in Second Life, enjoying the enhanced environmental rendering provided by the new "Windlight" client.

As a result of that puttering, the Cathedral of St. William Blake in the Isles is ready for visitors; it's not done by any means, but it's close enough to be presentable.  If you have Second Life installed properly, clicking this link will take you to a web page from which you can click another link which will open your Second Life client and present you with the opportunity to teleport there.  You'll arrive just west of the Cathedral, on the next small island over, so you can see the whole facade.  There's no bridge to the Cathedral; you'll have to get virtually wet (or fly) to reach the Cathedral steps.

The other big software news is disappointing: I'm over Ubuntu.  All was going reasonably well with it until last Wednesday night; I'd had some disturbing signs of instability, but nothing bad enough to put me off.  Then I was offered the chance to install a boatload of automatic updates, and naturally took it...and the update process froze in the middle, completely locking up my computer.  I finally had to power-cycle it, and when Ubuntu tried to start affter that, I got a screen full of random video with a half-off-the-screen warning box saying something about "operating in low video mode".  I tried booting in recovery mode, and it still didn't work correctly.  Finally, after a lot of reading and a couple of questions posted to the Ubuntu forums, and with great trepidation, I decided to try a from-scratch reinstall of ubuntu.  I booted from the Live CD, then started the install tool, where I planned to either revert to a single Windows partition as a fresh starting point, or figure out how to reuse the existing partitions.  But I needn't have worried about that decision, since the installer locked the entire system solid at the 33% loaded mark.

Sorry, rodneyorpheus, but I just don't think Ubuntu is ready for prime time; it seems like more effort has gone into UI eye candy than system plumbing.  Reading commentary on the web, I find I'm not the only one to reach this conclusion; here's one pithy example.  I think began to lose faith when I discovered that gcc comes preinstalled, but you need to apt-get a separate package to get the standard C headers.  There's no coherence to this system, no architectural vision; it's a bunch of very interesting pieces thrown together with little thought to the whole.  If anyone can recommend a more coherent Linux distro, I may give it a try.

Meanwhile, my next task is to figure out how to safely uninstall the debris of Ubuntu, recovering the partition and removing the dual boot controller.  The latter will be the trickier task of the two.  I'm thinking of it as a distorted echo of my favorite line from "Battlestar Galactica: Razor", which we watched on Saturday night:  "Get that thing off my boot sector."

Fresh off the AP wire:  Student Slain to Death Near U of Chicago.  I didn't realize the writers' strike included journalists.

I'm having a good time scientifically tracking down what's hanging my home computer.  It's been a classic "divide the problem space" exercise.  It happens in XP but not Ubuntu, so it's not the hardware.  It happens when running dissimilar foreground applications, so it's none of those.  That leaves background apps, so I started disabling half of those and seeing what happened.  A couple of slices later, I think I've nailed it -- and I'm sad to report that the current prime suspect is BOINC, the platform on which SETI@Home runs.  Since disabling that two days ago, I haven't seen a lockup (knock wood).  There are reports on the web about similar (mis)behavior under XP Pro with a dual-core processor, too.  With any luck, this means my machine will be stable in both XP and Ubuntu from here on out.

Meanwhile, my day job is in an uproar over performance issues with our product.  Everything's fine most of the time, but periodically it slows to a crawl...and nobody can figure out why.  There's evidence that we're seeing several unrelated or loosely-coupled problems, none of them reproducible with any test case we've tried so far.  In the best Murphy tradition, they seem to hit most often during critical demos.  In a further WTF odditiy, they seem significantly more likely to happen around 11am PST.  (Yes, we've checked for competing cron jobs and the like...nada.)  So I've been at the office late, and seeing httpd config files when I close my eyes.  I sure hope we nail this down soon; it's driving me crazy.

It's hard to believe that in only 10 days I'll be flying to Houston for the next Kaaba session.  I'm really looking forward to this one, for some reason, even more so than I do normally.  As usual with Kaaba, I wish there were more free time to explore the host city; I've never been to Houston before, and I love wandering around new places.  But at least I'll get a taste.

Finally, a bit of good news: laurellady is updating her journal again, after a long hiatus.  She's done several good posts recently.  Enjoy.

So now that I have my networking problems solved, I stayed up way too late playing with Ubuntu Linux last night.  So far, I love it.  I'm a Unix guy from way back, and have used plenty of Linux servers in my day job, so I already know most of what I need to know about the system; this allowed me to concentrate on playing with cool toys. :)

So far, my favorite bit of eye candy is how (once you enable the advanced desktop graphics option) windows are "rubbery" when you move them around; you grab the top bar and drag a window, and the whole thing deforms a little, with the ungrabbed end lagging behind, then, wobbling into place when you stop moving the window.  It's subtle but visually very appealing.

But my favorite single moment of last night's exploration came when I tried playing an mp3 from my music library.  The pre-packaged player doesn't come configured for mp3 support, but the doc provides instructions on how to install that option.  So I followed those instructions, and early in the install process I got a warning popup.  "Oh, great," I thought.  "Here we go into incompatible-driver hell".  But no, that wasn't it...what the popup was warning me about was incompatible ideology.

You see, mp3 is a closed, proprietary format, and thus truly free software (in the special sense of that term used by the free software community) can't use that format; it's encumbered by intellectual property requirements which are incompatible with the purity of free software.  But Ubuntu will happily install non-free software.  However, it first warns you that you are about to commit a sin in the eyes of Richard M. Stallman and His One True Church, and gives you the opportunity to repent by clicking "Cancel".  After due consideration of the state of my soul, I proceeded with the installation, which worked flawlessly, other than inflicting a lingering sense of shame on me.  Of course, RMS wouldn't see that as a flaw.

Ubuntu maintains a list of the ideologically impure software it has been made to install; currently mine mentions that mp3 package, and also an Nvidia graphics driver I installed later on.  I can't help imagining that list appearing on a scroll to be read at a GNU version of the Last Judgment, with RMS on the throne, and perhaps ESR interceding to save me if my sins are not too grave.

rodneyorpheus's power-line networking solution to my wifi woes worked like a charm.  I'm posting from Ubuntu on my now fully functional battle station XP/Linux PC.  I'm using a pair of Netgear units, an XE103 and 104.  They just plugged in and worked, no muss, no fuss.  I love it when technology does that.  Thanks, Rodney!

I still haven't replaced the Linksys WUSB300N wireless network device that (a) doesn't work at all with Ubuntu and (b) periodically locks up XP.  rodneyorpheus helpfully directed me to a page that provides Ubuntu-compatibility information about wifi cards, but I'm finding that I can't decide on a replacement even with that information.  The data on that page is inconsistent and of varying freshness, and some of the cards getting good marks there are roundly panned by other wifi reviewers.

So, I'm asking again here: If any of you have personal experience with a PCI or USB wifi device on a machine that dual-boots Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10, please share your knowledge in a comment.