Cracking The Shell...

Round Tuits

Last night's blog entry reminded me of something that I have meaning to do.

Several years ago, when I first started writing in this blog, I learned how to display pictures in the blog entries. This required me to:

1. Take a picture
2. Determine what size I wanted the picture to be shown in the blog entry
3. Modify the picture in software, Photoshop Elements in my case
4. FTP the picture to my blogs images directory
5. Hand code the HTML to display the image (location, height, width, border, etc.)
6. Preview the entry
7. Modify the html
8. Rinse and repeat until correct.

There had to be a better way.

During the last 24 months I recognized the better way but had stopped blogging. I stored the knowledge in my head and went on with life.

Well, last night I decided to add the picture to the blog entry and realized that not only did I have to add the picture the old way, I couldn't even remember the specifics of the old way. I had to research the directory structure of the blog, I had upgraded my software twice since the last time I resized a photo for the blog, plus I was using a completely different blog editor.

I went ahead and added the picture the old way and went to bed.

This morning I decided that it was time to finally update my process to add pictures to the blog as well as establish a proven method of transferring pictures amongst friends and family.

Of course, this meant creating a Flickr account. There are other sites out there but I like Flickr.

Now all I have to is:

1. take a picture
2. upload the picture to Flickr
3. copy the html provided by Flickr to my blog entry

Not only does the picture get their faster and is easier to add, the reader can click on the picture and view it at whatever resolution they prefer. For example, here is the veal scallopini from last night:

If you click it and view the picture at a higher resolution, you can see that the meal doesn't look have bad! The original picture from last night did not do the meal justice.

Now I would love to say that I have no more round tuits but that would laughable. I have so many things that I would like to do that if I spent all of 2007 working on them I would probably not finish everything. The reality is that it will continue to be a constantly re-prioritized queue of things to do.

On that note, I am trying to improve my efficiency, and who isn't?, and purchased a book that I want to HIGHLY recommend:

While you could get all of this information off of the website LifeHacker, this book just consolidates the information and allows for easier reading in some circumstances.

Veal Scallopini

Tonights meal was outstanding.

While the veal was great, it was the total experience that put the meal over the top. First let me explain the veal. I had a couple of options with the sauce that went over th veal. I could have used a white wine or marsala as the body of the sauce. Since I had such good luck with the marsala a couple of weeks ago, I decided to use it again with the scallopini. Once again, it really made the sauce stand out.

The sauce was really nothing more than shallots, marsala, butter, fresh lemon, and parsley. I reduced it to a syrup consistency and then poured it over the veal. I also made a simple salad to compliment the veal scallopini.

I thought I would start to give you an idea of what the meal looked like each week. Starting tonight I will include a picture of the completed meal once it has been plated. Here is what we ate tonight:



More importantly, the dinner experience was perfect. We started the evening with a bottle of table wine from Single Leaf. My wife and I talked while I made dinner. Once the meal was served we continued to talk while we moved to a bottle of ZinMan from Perry Creek. Now lest you think it was the wine that created the evening, we have gone through this scenario before. Tonight, everything was perfect. The wine, the conversation, the food, the mood, everything.

I only hope I can duplicate tonight's results in the future.

FieldsNet Server has been purchased

I ordered the components of the first Ubuntu Server on FieldsNet today. While I could have probably shopped around for the best possible deal, I went ahead and ordered everything from NewEgg because of their outstanding return, replacement, and refund policies. The  breakdown of the machine is as follows:

    ASUS M2NPV motherboard
    AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ 2Ghz
    Kingston ValueRAM 512MB DDR2 667Mhz x 2
    WD Caviar RE2 500GB 7200 RPM x 3 (RAID 5)

    Total cost with case, optical drive, and floppy(RAID install) was $1,150.
   
While I prefer Intel CPU's, I chose this ASUS/AMD combination because the motherboard incorporated on-board hardware RAID 5 and the AMD CPU is a 65 watt version. I figure that this machine will be on 24/7 so the less power it uses the better. That said, I went with the RAID 5 setup for data redundancy without the loss of speed to only mirroring the drive. This machine will be headless and I may not recognize the hard drive failure immediately.

I expect to get the components later next week and hope to build it next weekend.

Networked Printers

I have some printers that are connected to the current FieldsNet configuration via the HP JetAdmin product. These printers are not tied to any specific PC and are accessible from Windows, Mac OSX, and  Ubuntu.

All has been well for several years until recently. I'm not sure if it was the multitude of Windows security updates, the crashing of my previous router, or what, but no machine could access these printers over the network. I have a single server that has a direct connection to one of the laser printers and it is obvious that the printer is perfect working condition.

I have periodically worked on this issue in my spare time. I have tried to access the printers by their IP address and by their hardware address. I have fiddled with the many firewalls on the network. I have tried to adjust settings on the new router. Nothing seemed to work.

At best I could narrow the problem down to the IP addresses of the printers. They are set to the default IP addresses given to them when I bought them. For example, one of the IP addresses was 169.254.207.104 and my internal network is the subnet of 192.168.0.xxx. How they ever communicated is beyond me at this point, which is probably why I could not resolve the problem.

Well today, I was reading through the documentation on one the laser printers, an HP 4050n, and found that the IP address was a default and could be changed to what ever IP address I desired! So using the documentation as a guide I changed the IP address of the 4050 to 192.168.0.199 and then attempted to connect to it from my Windows machine. The network installation wizard auto-detected the printer, installed the drivers, and worked like a charm. I performed the same process to the other printer and I then went around to all of the other machines and re-initialized the printers.

I am now back in business with my networked printers.

30 Days of Blog Posts

I was really hoping that I would feel differently about my writing than I do. I was hoping that I would have discovered my blogging voice. I was even hoping that there would be more of a flow to the entries.

Maybe the fact that I started to blog in earnest during the holidays has something to do with the lack of progress. It could also be that I have yet to get over the issues that beginning bloggers have.

Whatever the reasons, I will still continue to add entries on a daily basis. Maybe in another 30 days more progress will be apparent.

Raid 5 Error!

One of the servers we use at work lost of the drives in the RAID 5 array yesterday. Yes, the damn thing died on Christmas day. And yes, the server was located at my house. I thought that I would mention a couple of things that I learned:

1) Learn how to turn the alarm off!!! My god, the piercing alarm on the RAID controller card drove me nuts! Sadly, I did not figure out how to turn it off until I was researching it while I rebuilt the array. The alarm went off for 3 hours and fifteen minutes.

2) If you are using an array for production work, have a spare drive. It just so happens that the drives we use are Seagate SCSI-3 UltraWide 80GB 10K RPM hard drives. I can not go to my local Fry's, CompUSA, or CircuitCity and pick one of those up. While I found the drive on NewEgg, purchasing it on Christmas Day and expecting the drive to arrive within 24 hours was unrealistic. At best, I could have received the drive on Wednesday, December 27.

3) Before expecting the worst, rebuild the array to see if maybe the controller just lost the array before swapping out a drive. I was lucky, this was all that was required for my situation.

FieldsNet Decisions

First off I wanted to add a couple of new requirements to the design:

11) I want to be able to send EMail to myself. These Emails would be status Emails of scheduled processes.

12) I want to have a web server running. This server would be using primarily for research and development.

Secondly, I have determined that I will use TiddlyWiki for my internal wiki software. After spending some time analyzing the different capabilities of these types of software I decided that while I do want to spend some time playing MySQL, I did not need the complexity of a database back end for my internal wiki. I will use the database for other uses in the LAN.

Lastly, I have started to price out the first of my LAN servers. I think I can build a dual processor, 1 GB RAM, 1 TB disk space machine for about $1000. Now I just need to convince the financial manager of the house. :)

Sole Meuniere with Browned Butter and Lemon

It is that time of the week again. This time I cooked something that neither my wife nor I have ever cooked. Sole.

While my end result looked no where near as good as the picture on the recipe, the meal tasted very good. In fact it was a very satisfying light meal that seemed to taste better the longer we ate it. I served it with rice and green beans.

I think that we will be adding Sole to the options available to us should we decide to have fish in the future.

I also served a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse with the meal. While my wife liked the wine, it seemed a little too sweet for my tastes. This is odd since it is characterized as a dry, medium-full bodied wine according to wikipedia.

Installation Success!

I installed the new nVidea GeForce 7600GT video card into my three and a half year old Dell XPS desktop without any significant problems.

If anyone reading this has installed cards into computers you know that there is always something that bites you during the process. For me, I had two minor issues. The first one had to do with pulling the four pin molex power connector out of the old ATI Radeon 9800 video card. It took me twenty minutes to get the damn thing out. I could not get it to budge using my fingers and could not move it with a pair of needle nose pliers. I finally resorted to a pair of full size pliers. This is something I would not have normally attempted but I was running out of patience.

The second issue had to do with seating the new card. When I looked at the new card before pulling the old card I noticed that there is an L shaped tab on the bottom of the card. I assumed, yea I know, that the shape of this tab meant that I needed to seat the card on the L shaped tab first then rock the card forward until the pins seated.

Using this knowledge, I removed the old card in reverse fashion. I rocked the card, and then pulled the card out like I was sliding the L shaped tab out of it's position. The card came out with no problems. When I began to put the new card in I could not get it to go in for the life of me. I ended up removing the neighboring SoundBlaster sound card and examined the alignment of the pins on the new card and the AGP slot using a flashlight. Surprisingly, it appeared that the card slipped into the slot just like any other card. So, I was just making a mountain out of a mole hill. I aligned the card, pressed down, and it went in like a champ.

If you read yesterday's entry, you will be wondering what happened with the AGP 4X or 8X controversy . It appears that my original ATI card was an ATI 4X AGP card and the new is in fact an 8X AGP card. Luckily, the AGP slot in my Dell accepted the card and it runs fine.

I have not performed any speed tests nor do I plan on doing any. I was never intending to run any games on this machine. (OK, I lied, I have Railroad Tycoon and Half-Life loaded on the machine, but I spend most of my time gaming on the XBox 360.) The two primary reasons I upgraded my video card was to be able to run two 24" wide screen monitors at 1920 x 1200 and to be able to watch 1080p HD video. I can do both with ease.

Now that I have a 3840 x 1200 desktop, I will need to setup my primary applications to take advantage of the new real estate. That means Outlook, Firefox, iTunes, and Remote Desktop running 1280 x 1024 on another machine. At this point I have upgraded the drivers to the latest drivers available from the nVidea web site and set up the multiple monitor setup so that I have individual desktop backgrounds on each monitor. I also only have the task bar showing on the left most monitor.

I will try and get some pictures loaded for all to see in the future.

New Video Card Part Deux

I forgot to take into account the holiday season. The video card was delivered late this evening. Sadly, it is cold and rainy outside. The video card is quite cold. I figure it is a good idea to let it acclimate before installing so I will postpone the video card swap until tomorrow. Stay tuned...

BTW, the box claims that the card is an AGP 8X card. I sure hope it works.

New Video Card

After conducting some research and concluding that I have an AGP 4X/8X slot on my motherboard I decided to purchase a GeForce 7600GT with 256MB video RAM.

I spent most of my time at ExtremeTech and Tom's Hardware. This article sealed the deal. While it was written with an emphasis on gaming, I found that my setup was so antiquated that the options were few.

I ordered it from NewEgg and it will be here tomorrow.

Wouldn't you know it

My dual 24" widescreen Dell monitors arrived this evening. I plugged in the first monitor to the DVI port and moved the existing 20" 4:3 flat panel over to the VGA port of my ATI Radeon 9800 128MB video card.

The native resolution of the new monitor is 1920 x 1200 and the native resolution of the 20" monitor is 1600 x 1200. Sadly, while I could get the 24" going at 1920, I could only get the the 20" monitor up to 1280 x 1024. There is no way I could power to monitors at 1920.

It appears that I will have to purchase a new video card. The research begins now for an AGP video card with two DVI outputs that can power two monitors at 1920. Luckily, I don't play games on the machine so I am not looking for state of the art graphics.

the resume is dead

I came across this interesting thought while reading RSS feeds this morning. At first I just read it and continued on to the next feed. All during the day, the thought kept resurfacing in my head.

Why do we create a resume? We do so to give our prospective employer the best possible image of who we are and what we can do. The primary portion of the resume displays what our past employment has been. We also list our academic achievements and any organizations we belong to. Sometimes we may list hobbies or extra curricular activities.

What does the employer look for in a resume? They are looking for what the potential employee is capable of. They are hoping to find similar experiences in whatever field they are interviewing for. They are also hoping to get a general feel for the person as a whole.

The blog has changed all that. Particularly in the tech industry, all potential applicants should have a blog. This blog should be fairly active and accurately represent what the blogger is all about. The employer will be able to see what the applicant is truly like because a blog can not be tailored to a specific job. A blog will also show the employer what the applicant is passionate about. While the specific passion is not as important, the level of passion shown will be significant to the employer.

The blog also helps the blogger. No longer will the applicant need to try and mold themselves into what they feel the employer wants. Each interview will be conducted with the individual who wrote the blog which should be the real applicant.

I would also suspect that people with similar passions will interact and employment opportunities may arise that are not tied to the existing career paths of the individuals involved.

The more I think about it, the more I agree that the resume is dead.

Three things

First off I want to say that I cooked Spaghetti Alla Carbonara for dinner tonight. This is an interesting dish in that you take a mixture of raw eggs, cheese, and garlic and dump it onto the cooked spaghetti noodles. The heat from the noodles end up cooking the eggs and melting the cheese.

My wife and I thought that the meal was good but it was the third best meal that I have cooked out of the three meals. It was still good, but the other two were outstanding. More on this later...


Secondly, I wanted to say that I spent a little time on FieldsNet:R3 (Centralizing the backups from multiple machines). I have found that Linux has the capability to securely log on and transfer files across a network. The primary commands used for this functionality are SSH and SCP. I am now reading up on these commands and will try them out on a couple of Ubuntu machines that I have installed on my LAN.

Lastly, I wanted to address the fact that I am mentioning when I cook dinner. I know that the conventional wisdom is that when a blogger talks about what they had for dinner, or their pets, or what they did at work, that they are likely not producing a blog that is worth reading.

I just want to impress on my reader(s) that I write these entries as much for myself as I do for who ever reads this blog. Writing an entry here can make it very easy for me to search for what I cooked later on down the road. Also, the fact that I am cooking dinner shows that I continue to try and expand my horizons. Now cooking dinner isn't rocket science but if I give it the attention that I give to programming, design, or any other activity that I do professionally, I can begin to understand the interactions between different foods and the techniques required to produce a superior product. Yes, I think like that when I am cooking.

Just got back

We just back home today. We spent the last couple of days out of town and I did not have Internet access. I will resume the LAN design discussion tomorrow.

Lan Design - First Pass on Requirements

In order to understand what the new LAN design will look like, I want to first determine what requirements I have for the LAN:

1) I want to have a central repository for audio, pictures, and video.

2) I want to be able to view output from the security cameras from any location.

3) I want to centralize my backups from all machines to one location.

4) I want to be able to create a single file for backup to off-site storage.

5) I want an open source development environment.

6) I would like access to my LAN from the Internet.

7) I would like to VPN in to my LAN so that I can securely browse the Internet from anywhere.

8) I would like to set up an internal wiki that contains instructions on LAN usage.

9) I want to interface the LAN with the home theater. This is for streaming of all media types.

10) I want to create a database of pictures, serial numbers, etc. for insurance purposes. This db must be accessible from any machine and be extractable from backups.

I'm sure there are other requirements as well, but this is a good start.

I will be naming the LAN 'FieldsNet'. In the future I will be referencing these requirements as FieldsNet:R1 - Rn.

My LAN

All of this research that I have done because of purchasing the dual monitors has uncovered some things that I had conveniently swept under the rug. My LAN is in a complete state of disarray.

I have MP3s, protected and unprotected, spread out across multiple machines.

I have video on several machines as well, but no connection to the main monitor.

My backup methodology is weak and does not take into account off site storage.

I have not yet consolidated my bookmarks into del.icio.us

I have no centralized password manager.

These things will have to be improved sooner than later. I have big plans and will need to get these things resolved before I add the new things over the next few months. Looks like it will be a busy December.

Magazine storage

My favorite hobby is Model Railroading and my second favorite hobby is Woodworking. I suppose my third favorite hobby is reading which ties these together. I subscribe to numerous magazines for both hobbies. I also save the magazines after I have read them

The railroading magazines contain many articles pertaining to prototype railroads, layout building and design as well as articles showing what other modelers have done.

The woodworking magazines have reviews on tools, woodworking plans, and general tips and techniques.

I now have over 2000 magazines saved.

I thought about scanning the magazines and saving them as PDF files, but after after scanning about 50 magazines and then calculating the time it would take I decided that there has to be a better way. (BTW, each magazine is between 80 and 150 pages; You can do the math...)

I also thought about cutting out the articles that I would want to keep. These could then be organized in a filing cabinet with a customized filing system. I started down the path of creating the filing system for Model Railroading but realized that this option had two flaws. First, I would rather not cut up the magazine. These magazines can be sold on ebay for about half price. There are thousands of dollars of magazines here. Secondly, I would probably have to save all articles because how would I know if I would want to refer to an article or not in five years or so.

So now I am at a loss as to what to do with these magazines. I am in the process of bundling them by year and placing them in storage containers that will be moved into our off-site storage area. This is only a temporary solution though. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Chicken Marsala

My wife and I have agreed that I would cook the Saturday evening meal each week. I had every intention of doing so yesterday but we ended up shopping into the dinner hour. I decided we should just go out to dinner instead of going home and waiting for me to cook dinner.

Since I did not cook last night I went ahead and cooked tonights dinner. I made Chicken Marsala. It was quite good. Even my wife said that it was very good. For those of you who don't know, Chicken Marsala is nothing more than chicken breasts with a sauce covering it that is made up of pancetta, mushrooms, marsala wine, and some other minor ingredients.

We had the Chicken Marsala with rice, corn, sourdough bread, and wine. I happen to really like corn which is why we had it. Corn is not something that you would normally have with an Italian meal.

Safeway sucks

As you may recall, I am now cooking Saturday night dinners. Today's dinner was scheduled to be Chicken Marsala and this required a trip to the grocery store. While we typically frequent Raleys or BelAir we decided to go to Safeway instead. They had built a new one close to our house and we thought we would try it out.

I like Safeway. I have been going to Safeway since the sixties. We currently buy products from them online and have them deliver it to our door. Well, they actually bring it in to the kitchen and will place it in the refrigerator i we ask them to. This is the first time that I have been to one of their newly designed stores.

To me, the most important part of buying products from a grocery store is the ease at which I can find the products that I am looking for. In this new Safeway they have the idiotic notion that the aisles can have little three foot square shelves located to one side of the aisle. There are usually three or four of these spread the length of the aisle. The aisles are only wide enough for two carts to pass each other with about one foot of clearance. These mini shelving units cause bottle necks in the aisles. Naturally, customers tend to stop parallel to these units causing a complete blockage of the aisle!

Another odd thing is that it seems rather dark in the store. Now I realize that most of the light in a grocery store is overkill, but the norm is to have the stores so brightly lit that they seem like sterile doctors offices. This store had one row of double fluorescent lights per aisle and the produce section was comprised of spot lights shining down on the various produce. Not bad, but very odd.

On the plus side they had a Starbucks Coffee, Jamba Juice, and a fairly decent olive bar.

Sadly, the inability to get it, grab what I need, and get out is bad enough that we will not be going back into the store. We will just order what we want from them online.

One thing leads to another

Yesterday I mentioned that i wanted to get dual monitors. As I started to research which graphics adapter to get, I found that my primary desktop machine is three and a half years old. It is still pretty stout: 3Ghz processor, 1GB RAM, WD 10K drive and the aforementioned ATI 8600 Pro graphics card. Sadly the graphics card is an AGP card.

This revelation led me to the question of whether I should get a new machine instead. While I can certainly afford one and would have no problem purchasing one if I wanted one, I genuinely feel that this one is good enough for my work in Ubuntu.

This is a first for me. While I haven't started the research for AGP cards, just the realization that I can continue to use a 3+ year old machine was quite surprising to me. I have always advocated that once a machine hit the magic three year point it was usually smarter to place rather than upgrade. I suppose there are always exceptions to the rule.

Dual Monitors

I think I have decided to get dual monitors for my primary desktop machine. I currently have a 20" 4:3 aspect ratio Viewsonic flat screen monitor. This monitor is used for all the machines on my 8 port KVM setup. Unfortunately, I have to toggle between DVI-D and analog settings when I switch between my two most used machines.

When I install the dual monitors, I will remote desktop into the secondary machine and run it full screen on one of the monitors while running the primary machine on the other monitor. When I am not actively running something on the secondary machine I will have an extremely wide desktop. When I open machines three through eight I will treat them as I do my secondary machine. I might possibly be able to remove the KVM from the setup.

The monitors that I will be buying later this week are the Dell 24" 16:9 aspect ration monitors. They run at a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 so I will be able to watch 1080p images on each. The total desktop will be 3840 x 1200!

What is interesting about this setup is that I will have to upgrade my graphics card. My current card is an ATI 9800 Pro with 128MB of video RAM. It was quite the card a few years ago when I bought it. Sadly I have not been keeping up to date with all of the changes in the graphics card industry.

I know I don't need the latest and greatest card. I will rarely be playing games. I use the XBox 360 for that. The card must support dual DVI outputs. It also needs a minimum of 256MB of video RAM and I may get a 512MB card just to be sure. I will be upgrading the machine to Vista shortly.

I suspect that I will go with an NVidea card this time. They seem to be putting out the most dependable cards lately. Of course in six months this will see saw back to ATI more than likely. I will investagate these cards over the weekend and will update this thread when the pieces are in place later this month.

James Kim - Rest In Peace

You did everything right. It should not have turned out as it did.

Gears Of War

Wow!

It has been quite some time since I played anything on the XBox 360. That is not to say that the XBox is not being used. My wife plays on it a lot.

I have been hearing a lot of good things about the new 2nd generation games that have recently come out. The one game that is garnering the most praise is Gears Of War. I just finished playing for about four hours.

Wow!

The graphics are really good and the sound is even better. The only complaints I have are centered around the design of the game. I prefer a single person shooter and this game centers around squad play.

That is not to say that I had to play with other team members. I just had to be aware of others. I could play with one other person if I wanted, but I chose to play alone.

The reason I do not like this squad play is because the squad dictates the speed of play. There are times when I feel that we should be more cautious in certain situations and other times when I feel that I am dragging the squad along because they are too cautious.

For example, when exiting a building into an urban area there is a certain amount of analysis that should be done before exiting. With a squad, they typically bolt through the door before I have even determined where to go for cover should I need it.

At other times, I can be perfectly placed when one of my team members crosses my line of fire. At this point I have to expose myself to avoid tagging my squad member.

The other complaint I have is that I hit one section of the game where I was being chased by a 'Bezerker'. This monster could kill me with one swing and my weapons had no effect on it. It could not see me but could smell and hear me. I had to lead this monster through three rooms and then get it to charge me while I stood in front of a door. Because it could not see me, it would charge at me and then break through the door allowing me to proceed.

The problem was that I had another squad member with me who would constantly get killed. When this happened I would die as well. So here I am babysitting a squad member while trying accomplish an unlikely scenario anyway.

Yes I eventually made it through but lost a lot of the enjoyment of the game during that scene.

Bottom line, this is a good game and worth the money. The second generation of XBox games are even better than the first generation and certainly better than anything that Sony is putting out for the Play Station 3.

Mike Bibby is a dumb a**

Now before I get started, let me say that I like Mike Bibby. I happen to follow the Sacramento Kings and have seen Mike in person on a few occasions outside of basketball.

But...

Today, I stopped at my local Bank of America to make a deposit and while I am sitting in my car, this brand new black Cadillac Escalade EXT with 22" rims (If I heard correctly...) pulls slowly behind me. At first it doesn't even completely pull past my vehicle but the driver realizes that I am in the car and then proceeds to pull past my car.

The Cadillac then makes a lame ass attempt at pulling towards the curb. This  attempt results in the vehicle being stopped over two feet from the curb. In fact the car is so far from the curb that when people pull up behind the car they think that it is stopped waiting for traffic to clear.

To add insult to injury, the location that the vehicle tried to park near was a 'Red Zone' and a non parking area. Maybe this was because it was the only exit available for bank patrons.

Who gets out? Well, first a member of 'Team Dime' gets out of the passenger side and proceeds to yell at the driver of the car behind them to go around and then lo and behold, Mike Bibby gets out of the driver's side and walks over to the ATM on the outside of the bank.

While he is at the ATM, my wife comes out and gets into my car. Now I can not leave because another car has stopped behind Mike's car and thinks that he is waiting for traffic to clear. I have to tell the driver that no one is in the car and that he will have to pull around the vehicle to get out.

After he leaves, I pull out and here comes Mike. He has this nonchalant look on his face like he sees nothing wrong with the fact the he just parks where ever and does what ever he wants.

Wifi on the laptop

I thought was going to be a walk in the park. I installed Ubuntu on this laptop and figured that I would use my LinkSys 802.11g wireless PC card to connect to my local area network.

Well after getting the OS installed, I inserted my wireless card and could not connect to it from the OS. After searching around on Google, I found several tips on how to get it connect but after trying all of the tips that I could find and having none of them work, I went out and bought a new D-Link 802.11g PC card.

Once I installed this card I could get the OS to see the card bit it could not connect to my network. My network uses WPA security for the wireless portion. I had to download a utility called wpa_supplicant and get it configured properly before connecting.

I am happy to say that after about 16 hours of troubleshooting with both cards that I no have wireless access to my network!

And now for something completely different...

On a whim, I told my wife that I wanted to start cooking dinner periodically. We agreed that I could cook once a week and I picked Saturdays. Today was my first Saturday.

Why would I want to cook dinner? Well, we have been watching the Food Network for years and the last couple of years I have really enjoyed the show 'Good Eats' with Alton Brown as the host/chef. We brings technology and logic to cooking. My understanding is that his show appeals to the engineering types out there which is a totally different audience that the average cooking show.

Why did I pick Saturdays? I figured that no matter how difficult the meal, no matter how time consuming the clean up was afterwards I would not be rushed. Any day during the week and work would likely interfere and by Sunday night I am already mentally gearing up for the following work week.

So what did I cook? I cooked chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and fresh green beans. Both my wife and I agreed that it tasted very good. I have to say that my wife damn near had a coronary while I was cooking though. The kitchen was kept clean during the cooking process and all three components of the meal were completed at the same time and served hot. The dishes were completed and the kitchen cleaned within an hour of the meal.

Will I do it again next week? Yes, I think I will. I had fun cooking and feel that there is much room for improvement. Ultimately, I hope to be able to casually cook a meal while drinking wine and conversing with my wife during the process. While we are not there yet, I have taken the first step.

Black Box Copy Protection

Copy protection is getting out of hand.

The big fear is that since the media, be it audio or video, is digital that the 'bad guys' can make unlimited copies of the original media and that there would be no quality degradation. This fear has caused numerous organizations to add severely restricting technologies to our CDs, DVDs, and download able content.

I think i have the beginning of a solution to this problem. It is a combination of the way the telephone industry has matured in combination with the way personal LANs have been managed.

First let me describe my Utopian household. I like to think of my house as a black box. There are several inputs, or feeds into my house. In some respects, my house is no different than any other. I have an electrical feed, a telephone feed, a water weed, a natural gas feed and a satellite television feed. I also have a garbage output feed, but that does not necessarily pertain to this conversation. I happen to also have a cellular feed as well as an Internet feed that comes into the house that not all of my neighbors have.

Using the telephone feed as an example, there is a box on the outside of my house that my local telephone company sends a dial tone to. What I do with this dial tone once it reaches my house is my business. Hence the 'black box' metaphor. What happens in the black box is unknown to the outside world. I could have a single phone hung on the way or I could have a complete PBX with multiple extensions spread out around the house.

My Internet feed as sent to me via a cable modem connection. I have a cable modem that is connected to a wireless router. Once again, the cable company is responsible for ensuring a consistent Internet connection. They have no idea how many connections I have inside my 'black box' that uses their cable modem. It could be one connection or it could be 50 connections.  This is all managed via Network Address Translation (NAT).

Since I also have a wireless connection I use wireless security so that my data can't be intercepted easily nor can anyone connect to my LAN. At any time I can connect to my router and see exactly what IP addresses are currently active. I can also see the MAC address of every piece of hardware on the LAN.

What does this have to do with copy protection? What if someone produced a hardware device that connected to my LAN that was something like a license server. What if that server managed all of the hardware and software IDs in my house?

I would envision myself going out to iTunes for example and purchasing a track of music. After paying my $0.99 and downloading the track it would be registered with this License Server. Once that happens, that track can be played on any hardware device that is also registered on that License Server. In other words I can make as many copies of that track that I want.

If I have several iPods, they all could play the track. If I want to play the track on my home stereo via iTV or my Media Center PC, they would all be registered with this License Server.

Obviously, this concept would work equally well with movies. Once I download the movie, I could play it on any device in my network. I could copy it to my portable device, say a video iPod. I could play it through my Media Center PC on my main television. I could make numerous backup copies of it if I wanted.

Now lets say that I give a copy of this movie to a friend. His device would not be registered in my house so his device would not play the movie. If I copied the movie to a device of his, when he would try and play it, his License Server would not authorize the movie.

While I am sure that there are holes in this concept I certainly think it is a technology that is possible today and this concept is something that can be the solution for artists, recording industries and the consumer.

What do you think?

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