Subsidies

"It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon; which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to."
Franklin P. Jones

I don't know why this struck me as very funny this morning.

Friends with Vista

After nearly a year, I finally decided to figure out what I could do to make my Vista laptop a bit faster. The memory is maxed out at 2 Gigabytes and it has a dual-core AMD CPU. It had always been very very slow in completing trivial tasks, like opening a browser or the control panel. Copying and moving files took way too long, and I just never approached my problem with logic.

A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend about my experience with Vista so far, and mentioned to him that I didn't think it was a problem with Vista, but a hardware issue with my Gateway laptop. "It runs very hot," I told him. "The hard drive activity never stops. I just don't think the machine was designed well enough to support such a heavy OS." I'd never seen Vista so slow on any other computer, so why the hell is it pokey on mine? And what in the dickens is going on with my hard drive?

Then it hit me. Constant hard drive activity is an indicator of (1) a virus or crapware, or (2) an indexing service. Google Desktop search was deployed with the computer when I bought it; part of Gateway's image, along with all the other garbage like BigFix, AOL , and the Office 2007 90-day trial.

Having been a student of Vista before and during its release, I remembered something about Google and Microsoft having fits about desktop search. It seems that Vista includes its own indexing service to speed up searching, and Google was having a hissy over users not being able to choose a desktop search engine. The Windows Indexing Service is on by default, and I don't think any manufacturers have changed that in their production images. And it just so happens that Gateway included Google Desktop in every computer they released with Vista, and therein lies my problem: two indexing services, constantly running on my poor little 5400 RPM notebook hard drive.

After some thought, I decided I'm a fairly organized fellow and don't have the need very often to search for a document. Most of what I access anyway is on the network, and those locations aren't indexed by default anyway. So away went Google Desktop. Though I love Google, I have no need for that program on my mobile station.

And for that matter, I canceled the Windows Indexing service. No need to pick sides, you know?

Then for a final pick-me-up, I had Vista optimize the graphics for performance, which took away all the eye-candy and effectively made my desktop look like Windows 2000. I'm fine with that.

Oh, and one more thing: I shut off the UAC. Those pain-in-the-ass messages one gets when he tries to install a program, "Windows needs your permission to continue," are gone. I can now run a command window without specifying to run it as Administrator. I can change IP settings with fewer mouse clicks. A little bubble message when I log on warning me that User Account Control is turned off is the only annoyance I have now, and I'm sure that with a simple registry edit I can get rid of that too. Maybe I'll post it later.

I must say this little bottom-end laptop is pretty damn speedy these days. NetBeans opens in under 60 seconds. Outlook opens in under 5, and boot times are at their lowest since I got it. This doesn't change anything about the inevitable change to a Mac when I can afford one, but it certainly makes me more comfortable in delaying it.

HD Coasters

It's in all the latest news, so I might as well chime in on it, too. HD-DVD is dying, and fast. Since Warner Bros. announced that it is dropping it from its DVD release formats in January, Netflix said they're not going to place any more orders for movies in HD-DVD. Then today I read that Wal-Mart is phasing it out. Seems like there's a clear dominant format finally.

Geez, before I can even finish writing this, Toshiba calls it quits. Forget I said anything, then. I guess it's really over. At least I didn't get the Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD player. Now there's 300,000 pissed-off people if you ask me. Hell, it took me until 2001 to buy a DVD player. Sometime next year I'll have a Blu-ray device, but not now.

Why Doesn't This Make Sense?

Microsoft Takes a Swing

Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo - Washington Post

This actually came as a surprise today. Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Preposterous!

That could change a lot about the web, but something smells. Microsoft is a huge company, and little-old Google seems to have them grabbing at straws to figure out how to catch up. I can look at any place on the web that Google produced and tell you exactly why their advertising makes so much sense. Why their e-mail works so well, and no user has to pay for it. Why they have so much available for free.

It's simply because they have but one reason: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's it. There are no software revenue projections, nothing to give the shareholders a hard-on, nothing about providing a service at a premium. Just to organize the world's information. This has been their goal since Sergey tried to download the Internet (or was it Larry? ...not important). Sure, they sell stuff. Useful stuff (except the lava lamp) even, like the Google search appliance and SketchUp Pro. But that is not their main business driver by any means. They're spending millions every year to scan books from libraries and make them searchable. They have a vast collection of scholarly journals and papers from around the world, and one may also search inside any of these.

This is just a taste of what Google is doing. They are successful because of something I don't have a name for, but it is something along the lines of know what you're doing and do no evil.

Most of you know that this blog is driven by the Blogger engine. I pay nothing for it, and it works much better than some of the other tools I've tried. Google probably bought it, but it has improved much over the years and it has never cost me anything. The funny thing is that there aren't ads all over it. Sure, there are ads on this site, but I put them there; they aren't some mandated advertisement justified for making my blogging free, it's just free.

No one has mentioned so far that Gmail doesn't inject ads into every message sent. It's just regular e-mail. The advertisements shown on the side of the Gmail window are only text-based, and they're usually relevant to what my e-mail is about. That way the advertising works. And if it works, people pay for it. So Google is king.

Microsoft and Yahoo! (and AOL, for that matter) are not because their interfaces are so heavy and the ads are very annoying. Their infrastructures are likely not as efficient as Google's (who else uses a hundred thousand servers?) and their business models are not in tune with what people want.

Okay, I changed my mind. Yahoo! and AOL are in the entertainment business. Microsoft is in the software business (I put that together all by myself!). Google, however, is in the search business. Does anyone remember when a Yahoo! search looked eerily familiar, as if the results of that search were the same as a Google search for the same string? It's because they were. Yahoo! used to use the Google engine for its search until just a few years ago.

The business of the web is changing, but there's no way I can predict anything. I only get feelings, and I'm usually wrong because business is definitely not one of my strong interests. If the major search engines are reduced to two, though, it could get pretty damn nasty by 2010. I'll likely not keep up with this subject, but it may be interesting nonetheless.

Netflix Errors

You'd never guess what I found today in my DVD player, so I'll tell you: Night at the Museum. This comes as a surprise only because I sent an envelope back to Netflix last week that should have had this disc in it. I suppose if I haven't heard anything from them in three weeks, they can just keep whatever movie I sent them and we'll call it even.

I am posting this here because someone might Google that question and will perhaps find an answer here. I wonder what will happen with the DVD, but this experiment was not intentional. Here are some questions folks may type into the search engine:

• "What happens if I send the wrong movie back to Netflix?"
• "Will I get in trouble if I keep a movie from Netflix and return something else?"
• "What if I got a movie from Netflix, kept the original, and sent a copy back to them*?"
• "Will the FBI knock on my door if that happened?"
• "Should I hide my stash?"

Seriously, though, I'll try to report what happens if anything does happen.


* I doubt I did that.

Windows Home Server

I've written earlier about a Dell PowerEdge SC440 Server I have that I couldn't find anything to do with.

I would like to announce that my quest for a task is over. May I introduce Windows Home Server:

You can add one of these to your home network with ease, and it takes care of file duplication and backups automatically. In my opinion this is the best product for consumers that Microsoft has come up with in a very long time.

The architecture is based on Windows Server 2003 (the startup splashscreen tells us that), which is a proven operating system as it is in use very widely throughout the enterprise market. If you use multiple Windows systems and/or have an Xbox 360 that you want to access videos and pictures from, this is your answer. HP has them for about $599, but you'll need a second hard drive for the duplication capability. The two-hard disk model is $749, and that's two 500GB hard drives, plus room for two more. If that somehow is not enough, it accepts external drives as well.

If a disk fails, you'll get a message. Simply replace the drive and start the server again. It automatically rebuilds the disk and balances the storage.

You don't need a monitor or keyboard after it's set up. Just put it in a closet and plug it in to the network. Install the client software on each computer in the house, and go. Backups run at night, and everything (if you so choose) placed on the file server is duplicated (if so capable).

You can even access your Home Server from afar. With a little bit of configuration, you can access your files on the server and even upload new ones from anywhere you might find yourself. I have already found this useful.

Rehberg Technology can also provide, configure, and install the Home Server.

Quote

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on."
-John F. Kennedy

Andrew Olmsted

I learned yesterday from Scott about our mutual friend and former Army Company Commander, Andrew Olmsted, was killed in Iraq on January 3, 2008. It came as a bit of a shock, and then I found myself simply staring at the computer screen with a gaping mouth.

I read his final post and realized that he did quite a bit of thinking before he went to Iraq. This is probably much more than would have gone through my mind on the way over there. He always was a thinker, whether he had a doctorate or not (he didn’t, by the way, but no one could tell). Andy recited every crewmember on every Apollo mission one time in the middle of the desert. He was very well read and seemed to know something about anything that entered into conversation. I always admired that about him.

Andy was left-handed.

He had a pretty dry sense of humor, as he himself admitted. I remember one time, though, Andy, Scott, and I were in a van in the field and Scott (then Andy's driver) said something he probably shouldn't have (probably about the Red Sox). I suggested to CPT Olmsted that Scott do pushups with his feet on a very high table. He took my suggestion, and Scott probably remembers this too.

He was very biased toward Coca-Cola.

I served as Andy's driver for about the last year of his command of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1/68 Armor Battalion, 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson. I hated most of my time in the Army, but what time I enjoyed was that I spent in the company of the more intellectual members. Andy was one, if not the most intellectual I ever encountered during that time.
He signed my leave so I could go get married, in spite of my failing the last PT test.

He had great integrity. In the middle of the National Training Center, when no one else was around, the two of us sat in full MOPP-4 for about an hour because it was part of the simulation. Take into account it was the warmer part of the year, in the Mojave desert, wearing up to three layers of clothing that covers the entire body including the face, and no one else was looking. We were even inside a vehicle and there we were, covered head-to-toe and sweating like we've never sweated before. He did it because it was the right thing to do; because it was necessary for training as a soldier. I did it because he told me to.



The last time I saw him, he was just out of Active Duty and working as a car salesman. This happened to be at the same place I worked right out of the Army, too (though I bet he lasted much longer than I did). We met for coffee that night, and I remember him explicitly mentioning that he’d started blogging. He seemed like it was a big thing, and I never imagined he’d enjoy it that much.

Thoughts come to me today as I read the stories about him and the comments from family members, friends, fellow soldiers, and readers worldwide, but I can't really describe them. I teared-up reading the last of his Final Post, when he spoke of Amanda. I remember him describing her as "drop-dead gorgeous."

Andy’s death weighs heavily on me, mostly because he is the first person I knew personally who has been killed in Iraq, but some of it is because he was out there trying to help. The more I read, the better I feel about what he was doing when he died, and what he thought of it. And if he was comfortable with it, so am I.

So long, Andy.

More about Andy can be read on this post at Obsidian Wings.

More Than Meets the Eye

I invested money this Christmas for my nephews, but it doesn't do much for the excitement factor when there's nothing to open up under the tree. They're in love with Transformers as many children this year are and in light of that, I went looking for a Transformers toy. Being in a small town with no branded chain store other than the dollar-type, this morning I shopped online for some ideas. My natural choice was amazon, which has never given me any trouble. I found the Bumblebee transformer which turned out to be the same size Transformer I played with in the 80's. The price? $44.98.
The reviews say that it's actually priced around $10 at brick-and-mortar stores (probably $5 20 years ago), and this place is ripping people off. It's a third party seller, named "Waityn4JC" (is price gouging Christ-like?) and apparently the Amazon marketplace sellers are not held to any kind of ethics codes. In my humble opinion, Amazon should really stay away from allowing people to do this, but hey - it's America. They'll do their part to make a quick undeserved several-hundred-percent markup, and I'll do my part to find something else that doesn't feel so much like rape. I love this country.

Marketing Director

Hello World,

Since the success with our first customer, I have decided to expand my empire and hire* someone to make Rehberg Technology known throughout the South*. I'll need a special person (preferably local) to buy this shirt and wear it for a solid month, outside, during daylight hours. The qualified applicant will also be encouraged to show people how to buy their own shirt of my design. The shirt truly shows what I feel and is an illustration of, well, what popped into my head this morning. Now go shop, or apply* for the position.




Interested parties should e-mail a resume and cover letter with Marketing Director in the subject line to inquire@rehbergtech.com. Individual will be paid solely on commission.



* not really.

Update: Due to the price on the shirt mentioned above, I have discontinued it. Looks like I posted too early. Hell, I can't even get the shop activated for some reason (my impatience might be the problem). Would someone let me know when they see any products in the store? Thanks.

This is a test post.

This is a test post. I am sending this text from my phone via e-mail to a special address at blogger.

Did it work?

Update (from a computer): I am limited to a 160-character message from that phone. Not too fantastic for blogging. But it did work, and I have a new way of blogging to the world from an underground imprisonment (if that were to ever happen). Good to know.

More Java Fun

The TV-as-monitor fad went out this week. I really just need that machine to do more than I make it do, so I'm getting ready to throw XP Pro on it and replace my current desktop.

Besides, I couldn't read the screen from the bed anyway.

School has been interesting and I'm sure you'd like to read all about it, so:

Java is a little less intuitive than the .NET platform. Programming things like default actions and which element gains focus is a little harder in Java. In fact, I haven't figured it out. This weekend I had to write a program that accepted a list of names while ignoring duplicates, then allowed the user to search for a name in that list. Easy, right?

The flow of the program was easy: Accept a name or a list of names, put them in a list, then turn around and allow the user to search for a name in the list. The project was to have us use the LinkedList data structure and its methods. Very easy in design, but I got hung up on something so simple as sending the signal when the user was done typing names. I couldn't do this simple little procedural program, so I decided to do a full-fledged desktop application.

It's called (for lack of a better name) Name Reader.



Way easier to manage the input with an event-driven model rather than a command-line-based procedural program. The user puts a name in and presses the "Add" button, and voila!



When the list is big enough (or whatever), they can search for a name from the search box:



If the name is in the list, it will say so and give a position number. If not, it will also say so, but give a button with the option to add that name to the list.



Genius, huh?

Actually, I don' t think so either. I wish I could come up with something really grand so I can join the club of cool programmers. I have all the books; I just need that pinnacle of expertise that says "I have arrived!"

Anyway, here's the project file (NetBeans) if you want to look at it and improve upon it.

Horizontal Thoughts

I'm writing tonight to see how much I can think to tell my audience as I lay in bed with a wireless keyboard and gyroscopic mouse, staring at my beautiful TV/monitor. Looks like I got it all worked out, but I can barely read the screen from across the room and there's a significant delay between the keystroke and the appearance of the letter on-screen.
I'm really just up late because I can't figure out Java multithreading (or multithreading in general) enough to complete a project for school due Monday at midnight CST. So if anyone knows how to write a multithreaded chat server in Java, please contact me soon. I have several questions for you, including these:

1. How can more than one client connect on the same port number?
Never mind. I just figured that one out. The server can listen on a port and has exclusive rights to that port. The number of connections on that port matters only to the program listening.

2. How do I create a thread pool with an ArrayList and then pass a Runnable object to it? I don't see a method to pass the object after instantiation.
Update: I got that one figured out, too. You don't pass a Runnable object - just extend the Thread class and fill your ArrayList with those. Worked for me. To stop the thread, set it to null. To start it again, pass it what it needs and then call .start().

If you want to see that code, here is the Client, the Server, and the ServerThread. It's not pretty and there are some errors when you close a Client, but the multithreading works.

I realize these are not questions for my typical audience, but hey - what else should I do in bed at this hour?

Insert Title Here

These new LCD televisions are pretty neat. I finally broke down and bought one a couple of months ago and the idea just hit me this weekend to put a computer behind it. I have just the machine.
I've had a Dell PowerEdge SC440 on my desk with no monitor for several months. It's an overpowered, underused machine, so I gave it a DVD+R drive and set it behind the new television in the bedroom. The audio already goes out through a PC speaker set, so why shouldn't I complete the package?
So now I have a blazing-fast Fedora Core 7 box with a 32" widescreen monitor, right in my bedroom. I'm still working on the wireless keyboard and mouse part, but so far it's fun. I've been ripping DVDs with HandBrake and looking for ways to have this machine become a media center of sorts.
The one thing I enjoyed about this project was the wireless Ethernet bridge I installed in under 10 minutes. I used the Linksys WRT54GL employing dd-wrt to create a network link without running a single wire. As a bonus, I can now connect the Xbox to the Internet (but I still have no need to).
In the near future, we'll upgrade to Fedora Core 8 (released last month) and see what there is to see. Until then, try to find something you like to do in your own bedroom.

Great Laptop For Sale

This is just getting old.



I was consolidating files over the network today and just had to take this screenshot. Vista has its drawbacks, but this is crazy. So...

I have a perfectly good Gateway MT6451 notebook computer for sale. $500 takes it. I'm switching to Mac as soon as possible, because I'm simply tired of waiting for things to happen and downloading hacks to make things work. I just want a computer that works as advertised and has more built in that I can use.

I don't mind Apple's non-compatibility with older systems. They did it that way because no one uses them anymore, so why bog the systems down? It's what many people do - like outgrowing clothes. You don't have the same shirts in the closet that you had when you were five, do you? And if so, do you wear them? Exactly.

And the price: the MacBook and iMac will last much longer than the average PC in terms of hardware and software usability, so I don't mind the $2K price tag. I want three new Apple computers: two MacBook Pro laptops, and one new iMac. I could easily squeeze $6K into a powerful new Windows desktop and new monitors, but I'd rather have three working computers for that price. Plus, they run Windows too. It's a no-brainer.

Why I don't have an iPhone

I want a device running Android.

Good Quote

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." -Mohandas Ghandi

It's not something I live by; I just read it this morning when it displayed on Gmail.

And It's Our Fault

Iraqi fisherman nets shark 160 miles from sea | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

The story was pretty interesting until I got toward the end. Then it got funny. From the article:

"Tahseen Ali, a teacher, said there was a '75 percent chance' Americans had put the shark in the water."

I'm not sure what the hell they're teaching at West Point, but I have an inclination to believe sharks aren't mentioned, even in psychological warfare. I find it interesting that in even such an odd occurrence, the Iraqis believe it's our fault. They blame everything bad on Americans.

If you were religious (not saying you aren't, but play along please), and in the same position (foreigners having invaded your country and blown up half of it, let's just say) wouldn't you be quite angry? It's a stretch to blame a shark's presence in the Euphrates on the United States, but I can begin to see where they're coming from.

This is the Coolest Thing About the Internet

It's not that the latest technology can bring us all together, communicate with each other instantly around the world, or provide opportunity where there was once none. It's that in 2007 I can let my daughter learn a little bit in the same method I did.

It's like a friggin' time capsule.