It's About Time (for Nothing)

Well folks, it's here. Windows Vista will be released to corporate customers and OEM distributors today. As of this morning, Dell is still offering a free upgrade to Vista if claimed by March 31, 2007. I would begin looking for the pre-loaded Vista systems next week.

As one would expect, Microsoft finally decided on early 2007 to release Vista, but couldn't resist the temptation to get it on the street in some form for Christmas. Just like the PS3 craze, the Xbox 360 last year (plenty to go around this time), and the new Elmo that says your name. Of course, in this case Microsoft will have no shortage of Vista licenses for the OEM folks, and Dell can push out thousands of computers in a day, so don't get in a hurry.

I said more than a year ago that I'd start saving my money and order the first Vista system from Dell, but I have since changed my mind. I previewed the Release Candidate (RC1) on my home system and did not see an immediate benefit. Drivers for only one printer was included, and support for the cheap one (a DeskJet 825C) would never be seen. I'd just have to buy another one.

I couldn't move the Deskbar (Windows' answer to Google Desktop) to the other monitor. So there it was, stuck on the right side of the left monitor, smack in the middle of the entire display.

The current pricing scheme is going to cost too much for home builders. The answer to this, my friends, is Ubuntu.

And the proposed (final?) licensing scheme totally sucks. I haven't read it, but according to reports, I can buy a license off the shelf and install Vista on one machine. If I build another computer to replace the first one, I can install Vista on that second machine, so long as I remove it from the first. After that, I'm screwed. No more re-installations. That means if the motherboard takes a crap in the second machine, I have to buy Vista again.

I think I've decided to get a MacBook Pro, and keep my home-built XP/Ubuntu dual-booting desktop. If my customers want to know how to use something in Vista, I'm sure there's a good book about all that's new, and that doesn't cost nearly as much as a new computer. I'm not sure as to how many questions I might get anyway. With any luck the question of the year will be "How do I go about switching to Linux?"

Update: I was wrong about the OEM suppliers. Only the corporate edition is out today; all home users still have to wait until January 30. The Zune issue is probably still on the table.

America's Responsibility

My Political Science final consisted of a short essay to answer this question:

What is America's responsibility to our fellow man, and should we use American foreign policy and intervene in world events?

I hope I answered the question, but this is mostly my feelings. Here we go:

America’s first and foremost responsibility is right here, inside our borders. It lies with the homeless on our streets, the struggling entrepreneur, and the single mother. America should be very concerned with all of its citizens and their well-being. This includes the care, supervision, and education of our children, the number of people in prison and just how they got there (beyond the guilty verdict and into the why), the affordability of our food, the quality of our health care, and the future of our energy.

Our responsibility does extend, though, past the green acres of the territories of the United States and beyond those with the proper paperwork. Just as every individual has a social responsibility to the other people around him, the United States has the implied task, as the richest nation in the world, to care for the unprotected. The women and children in Darfur who are mercilessly beaten, raped, murdered, and mutilated on a regular basis are in dire need of help from any nation with the means to do so. Before the genocide, these people did nothing but live happily surviving with each other.

We do belong out in the world as good Samaritans, but only as such. Only to protect and help the vulnerable should we be there. Not to reform their government and oppress the people; only to keep them alive and productive, and give them hope. To let them live as they wish, in safety, comfort, and freedom as a people. The developed nations should step in, stop the killing, provide for their own mens of education and well-being, and leave the people to their own accord.

Our assistance to the people in these troubled countries is a measure of the United States' own success and heightened solidarity in our national security. To quote Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope, “Globalization makes our economy, our health, and our security all captive to events on the other side of the world. And no other nation on earth has a greater capacity to shape that global system, or to build consensus around a new set of international rules that expand the zones of freedom, personal safety, and economic well-being. Like or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to have to help make the world more secure.” Obama, p. 304

Politicians tend to believe that if we don't help these countries in need, our world inside these borders, where our homes and friends are, could crumble. If we leave alone the civil wars, brewing terrorism, crumbling economies, and radical genocide, evil will spread throughout Earth and destroy what freedoms we have made for ourselves at home. Senator Obama also quoted President Kennedy in his inaugural address, supporting this claim: “To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required – not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Obama, p.314

So if we want to help the world, one country at a time, we should. Nobody likes to be oppressed or tortured, or to lose loved ones based on the radical beliefs of another. There is a standard of simple, uninterrupted life that we can help sustain, and it is our duty as humans to take that part. The flow of global society depends on good ideas, especially those that help the masses, and the United States and its allies should never miss a chance to make one real.


Reference: The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

The Inland North?

I always copy things that Scott does.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

I can't imagine how we sound the same, especially since he's from Iowa and I'm from South Georgia. As long as he doesn't say "eh" all the time (he now hails from Minnesota), we'll get along fine.

Dynamic Image Generator

Type in your phrase and it will put it below the old classic Quaker Oats "Ha Ha" man. Great for pranks or just funny pictures in general.

I'm surprised I have never used digg.com until yesterday. Man, I'm behind the times.



read more | digg story

Evil Twin

This is a new one. I never thought of placing a wireless access point near another commercially-available one and giving it the same name. This one's pretty tricky.

When the unsuspecting user (a clueless wealthy person in many cases) logs on to the fake AP, the attacker goes to work, undetected. The victim drinks his coffee and checks his stock portfolio, assuming that everything is safe.

Education is a big thing. Equally important is the energy level needed for the user to care about whether the connection is secure. Many people just don't know how to be safe, and when told don't take the time to follow directions. This must be taught or we'll see many more stories like this for years and years. Until they learn.

read more | digg story

49times.com

I own a new site: 49times.com.

Don't expect an answer to "What is the significance of 49 times?"

I just thought of it and decided to find out if anyone had registered the name. No one had, so I did.

And it's now a wiki. It is driven by the same engine that drives Wikipedia, so I feel comfortable in its existence at least. There is absolutely no purpose as of yet and I doubt it will ever grow. So go there and write something - we can all at least try. I expect to create a forum for my own interests, and maybe folks can join me. It doesn't have to be as serious as wikipedia, so maybe we can live a little.

I expect comedy, idea sharing, how-to's, and other things related to exploring and learning. Go now.

And if you're in the mood for some really good humor, get a glimpse of what Microsoft would do if they bought Firefox: www.msfirefox.com

I Know my Public IP Address. Can You Find Yours?

I finished a cool little script yesterday and I am quite proud of myself, even though there's one part I just completely took for granted, hacked at it and made it work. But it does.

At home I have what's called a dynamic IP address, as most residential customers do. This means that one's public IP address can change depending on the ISP's needs and the customer's usage. If you leave your modem off for a week, you are almost guaranteed to be issued a different IP address than the one you had before.

I often like to get back to my systems at home for whatever reason (eventually I'll be able to turn the lights on and off remotely - a few work now). To do this I need the IP address that my ISP has given me. Knowing that it could change, I needed some way to know what it had changed to. Therein begins the logic: I know that one can go to www.whatismyip.com and see their public IP address. I also know that I can write a program in Perl to surf the web and look for stuff. I put the two together and employed my 10-year-old Compaq to run the program every day.

It actually sends it to my Gmail address, which is then filtered, tagged, and archived automatically. I don't have to delete the message every day - I can find the latest message in an instant, and access is mine.

The finished file looks like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

#Title: IP Sender
#Author: Ben Rehberg
#Version History:
#02/14/2006 Creation
#
#11/20/2006 Finally got that regular expression right
#  to extract the IP from the web page.  Done.
#
#########PROGRAM DESCRIPTION###########################
#
#I want this script to check whatismyip.com every
#morning and e-mail me with the address.



#variables and settings################################
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,
$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst)=localtime(time);
$mon+=1;
$year+=1900;
my $date="$mon"."/"."$mday"."/"."$year";
my $url = 'http://www.whatismyip.com';
my @recipients = ('spaminator@benrehberg.com',
'daily_crap@techpickle.org');

#begin program code#####################################

use LWP::Simple;
my $content = get $url;
die "Couldn't get $url" unless defined $content;

$ip = "I can't find it.";

if ($content =~ m/(([0-2]?\d{1,2}\.){3}[0-2]?\d{1,2})/){
$ip = $1;
}
#print $ip;
#print $content;
#print $date;

require Mail::Send;
$msg = new Mail::Send Subject=>"Your IP Address for ".$date;
$msg->to(@recipients);
$fh = $msg->open;
print $fh "Your IP Address this morning is ".$ip;
$fh->close;

So there it is. Feel free to copy this and use it for yourself. I provide no warranty and assume you know what you're doing if you choose to take it. Be advised that you will have to install the Mail::Send and LWP::Simple modules in order for this to work. The LWP library was already installed on my system, but I had to get Mail::Send from CPAN. Just follow the link and the instructions.

Questions? Feel free to comment with them or e-mail me.

Update: I forgot to tell you that you must drop this file in /etc/cron.daily so the system will run it on a schedule. Also make sure you make the file executable (chmod 755).

Filibuster

Ever since the mention of a filibuster back when John Roberts was appointed, I've wondered just exactly what a filibuster is. I heard the term once in high school and it seemed fun to say. And with my overwhelming interest in today's politics, I never got around to looking it up anywhere. I did, however, come across a good explanation in Senator Obama's book today on page 80:

The constitution makes no mention of the filibuster; it is a Senate rule, one that dates back to the very first Congress. The basic idea is simple: Because all Senate business is conducted by unanimous consent, any senator can bring proceedings to a halt by exercising his right to unlimited debate and refusing to move on to the next order of business. In other words, he can talk. For as long as he wants. He can talk about the substance of a pending bill, or about the motion to call the pending bill. He can choose to read the entire seven-hundred-page defense authorization bill, line by line, into the record, or relate aspects of the bill to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the flight of the hummingbird, or the Atlanta phone book. So long as he or like-minded colleagues are willing to stay on the floor and talk, everything else has to wait - which gives each senator an enormous amount of leverage, and a determined minority effective veto power over any piece of legislation.

Now we know what a filibuster is. You're welcome.


                

Automated Horticulture

Beth and I kill plants. It's what we do, what we've always done. In Colorado they fell to the cat. When we got to Georgia and left some potted plants outside, even with the rain and good sunshine they still wilted and proved our investment in them unwise.

When my grandmother died there were enough houseplants delivered to start a small nursery. I ended up with two of them, and we only water them when we notice that the leaves are pointing down. There's no other way we'll remember.

I got Vol. 8 of Make magazine (really cool, by the way) a few days ago and finally found something in it that 1. I could use, 2. I can afford to build, and 3. I have time to do. I shopped for and built the prototype today. I guess I could tell you what it does:

It automatically waters the houseplants every day. It's a simple system (mechanically, anyway) that displaces air in a bottle and forces water out, through tubes and on to the plants. The air is forced in to the bottle by an aquarium air pump and the pump itself is turned on and off with X10 controllers.

So the pump can be operated by a PC interface or by handheld remote. I haven't gotten to the PC interface yet; my CM17A X10 PC interface device crapped out and I'm waiting on another one to be delivered. I will then probably be using HeyU on Fedora Core 6 installed on my wonderful 8-year-old Compaq Presario 5155. It's my utility machine on one leg, but it does a fine job of running scheduled tasks. If there are any more advancements on this project, I'll be sure to post them.



                

MS Word: Hidden Text

This is a short article on using the hidden text feature of Microsoft Word. I will be using Word 2003 for my examples. Now, everyone (we hope) knows that one can just open Word and begin typing to create a document. Only that much is given.

My secretary, Amber¹, has typed a letter to Jim Morrison (the new one) who wants to build a studio near the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia². She created two versions: one with the text I directed, and one with a long paragraph in the middle telling Mr. Morrison how glad the Southerners are that he has chosen South Georgia as his recording home. Amber wrote it hoping I would choose her version to send the music star. She only had to type one document:


She printed that one, and selected the paragraph that she knew was inevitably bound for deletion:



With that text selected, she simply used the keyboard combination Ctrl+Shift+H and the text was hidden:



Amber printed that one as well, and submitted them to me for review. This saved her quite a bit of time as she only had to type one document.

To show the hidden text, Amber uses the Show/Hide button on the standard toolbar. If that button is not shown, it means that it hasn't been used in a while and has been hidden to show the other, more commonly used buttons. At the right end of the toolbar, there's a symbol to show these hidden buttons:



Anyway, that button will toggle showing the hidden characters. Not only does it show the hidden text, but all non-printing characters such as spaces, tabs, and newlines. This is particularly useful in editing documents and aligning text with margins and such:



I hope you have found this tutorial somewhat entertaining and educational. Since I can't regurgitate the latest news, I'll resort to thinking up small bits like this from time to time.

<sub>1. I neither have a secretary, nor do I know anyone named Amber.
2. I made this all up.</sub>

Web Science

Techdirt reported the other day about The Guardian taking Tim Berners-Lee's quotes from an interview out of context to make something sound more interesting for its readers. I found a NYTimes article that was actually more believable. That one talked also about a field of study that interests me and I had no idea it existed or was emerging. From the article:

Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.

I would like to know more about this "services science." It sounds a bit like what I already do.

Oh, and if you take the words from the inventor of the World Wide Web, twist them, and publish it on your website, expect to hear from him on that same medium.

Good Comedy is Scarce

I read this joke today at Comedy Central, and it's the best clean one I've heard in years:

Turtles and Picnics and a Minor Tragedy

Three turtles, Joe, Steve, and Poncho, decide to go on a picnic. Joe packs the picnic basket with cookies, bottled sodas, and sandwiches. The trouble is, the picnic site is 10 miles away, so the turtles take 10 whole days to get there.

By the time they do arrive, everyone's whipped and hungry. Joe takes the stuff out of the basket, one by one. He takes out the sodas and realizes that they forgot to bring a bottle opener. Joe & Steve beg Poncho to turn back home and retrieve it, but Poncho flatly refuses, knowing that they'll eat everything by the time he gets back.

Somehow, after about two hours, the turtles manage to convince Poncho to go, swearing on their great-grand turtles' graves that they won't touch the food. So, Poncho sets off down the road, slow and steady.

Twenty days pass, but no Poncho. Joe and Steve are hungry and puzzled, but a promise is a promise. Another day passes, and still no Poncho, but a promise is a promise. After three more days pass without Poncho in sight, Steve starts getting restless. "I NEED FOOD!" he says with a hint of dementia in his voice.

"NO!" Joe retorts. "We promised."

Five more days pass. Joe realizes that Poncho probably skipped out to the Burger King down the road, so the two turtles weakly lift the lid, get a sandwich, and open their mouths to eat. But then, right at that instant, Poncho pops out behind a rock.

"Just for that, I'm not going."

Isn't that fantastic? What one expects sometimes is completely different.

Breakin' Out

Those boxes publishers stick in long magazine articles with catchy sentences to make you read it,

And then my leg fell off!

I've heard, are called "breakouts." Those boxes are easy to display with CSS, rather than creating an image with the text in it. It's really only a div element that has its own margins, padding, background, text, and font properties. It can float right or left or take up the whole column (for those articles with thin columns).

In your CSS document, create an entry something like the following:

#breakout_left{
  width:200px;
  text-align:left;
  font-size:14pt;
  font-weight:bold;
  line-height:1em;
  background:#cccccc;
  float:left;
  margin-right:20px;
  margin-top:20px;
  margin-bottom:20px;
  padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
}

This defines the div element as a section that will expand vertically (down) and have the properties you give it. If you don't like the background color, change it. If the font is too big, just make it smaller. Anything can be adjusted in the breakout this way; if one were just to create an image to display, there would not be nearly this much flexibility. With Blogger, you must use the "Edit HTML" mode:

Just create a div element such as the following:

<div id="breakout_left">Some text in the breakout!</div>

and it will follow the styles set in your style sheet. For those of you who know CSS, this is a simple concept. I don't claim to know CSS (I get very tired at browser compatibility) but when I was approached with this "breakout" task I knew just what to do. I hate images. Google doesn't index the

If the font is too big, just make it smaller.

text inside an image (yet). It's better to have the site more dynamic anyway, and accessible to programatic alteration.

If we changed this site to include DHTML or even AJAX later, it would be easier to change these breakouts with easy commands rather than manual manipulation. This is the way of the web. Tutorials on CSS are available here, here, and here. More available through Google.