Below are the 50 most recent journal entries recorded in D.'s LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 50 ]

Sunday, September 21st, 2008
9:56 pm	Random music plug: SFBC ( The San Francisco Boys Chorus showed me the Vienna Boys Choir and took me behind the Iron Curtain ) San Francisco Boys Chorus 333 Hayes Street, Ste. 116 San Francisco, CA 94102 (no relation to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition) Current Music: Ofra Haza mixed into a Gates of Delerium show from September 10th, 2008 (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
7:25 pm	Who do I know in Greece? Odd. I saw an unfamiliar number on the cellphone. I answered but didn't give my name. The voice sounded like a garbled automated system speaking in Spanish. I hung up. Then I noticed the *format* of the number on the screen. It wasn't 1-nnn-nnn-... as usual (T-Mobile's default format for US numbers doesn't fit on the phone's screen) but +3026949988 exactly like that with no spaces or hyphens. +30 is Greece. I don't think I have any family or friends in Greece. I tried calling back. Skype says the call failed -- number is invalid. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:12 am	customer nonservice: viking insurance payment processing Once in a while a company goes out of its way to lose a customer. Adam's done business recently with one such company. The government of the City of San Francisco is another. Yet another insures my car. My agent (who, for other reasons, I am very happy with and won't name here) hooked me up with Viking Insurance Company a few years ago. They wound up earning their broker fee three times for hooking me up with the same company but still saved me more than that in the long run. Viking, on its own, though, really has its head up it's corporate ass. About a year ago I searched the web and asked my agent and was unable to get a payment address to go with my policy. What I wanted to do, of course, was to punch that into my bank's Bill Pay feature, schedule twice-yearly payments and forget about it. The answer I got was that I'd get an address with the next bill. The bill arrived. It had an address, policy number, producer number and dollar amount. I punched those into the website, clicked send and called it done. About a month later they billed me again. They said the previous payment had been late and a $10.40 fee was due, this for something I had tried to schedule seven months earlier. I sent the $10.40. They sent another envelope that looked like a bill. Disgusted, I ignored it. Five months later, this time definitely not late, my bank sent the same amount to the same address with the same policy and producer notes. Two weeks after that I got email saying I had another bill-looking envelope from the insurance company. For gratuitous obfuscation they print no company name on the envelope and Dairlyland Auto on the letterhead and Viking Insurance Company only on the payment stub. The word "insured" appeared beside my name so the person watching the mailbox figured it out. "Please allow enough mail time," the multi-named company wrote. "Your payment must reach us by the Expiration Date. Payments received after the expiration date may incur an additional fee." A few days later a thin envelope arrived from Sentry Insurance. Inside? A check payable to me for exactly the amount I'd sent Viking. The words Viking Insurance Company were printed on the face of the check, along with a policy number which matched the one on the bill, digit for digit. If I was maintaining a desk I would have signed the back of that check and enclosed it with the bill and a yellow stick-um marked in Sharpie with "D'oh!" I don't have a desk currently in service. There is no accessible stash of properly valued first class stamps and since June Lockhard-Ford (510-251-3245) had the post box removed on July 16th, 2007, there is no outbound mail service here either. I checked the Bill Pay account and all the data fields are right. The policy number, producer code, payment address and payment amount on the bill match the payee record in my account with the bank. I don't have the time or inclination to fuss with replacing Viking this time around so I'll just run the money back using the ATM and the bank's website and see if Viking/Sentry/Dairyland fucks it up again. You're welcome. ( addresses ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
2:28 pm	tech: how to configure kicker's close-window watchdog? Dear LazyWeb, How do I configure kicker to give an application more time to respond to the close-window button? Rather frequently it wastes time drawing a kill-this-now? dialog when, given a bit more time, the application would have done the right thing. 'top' makes it quite clear that kicker actually slows the process by fighting the application for physical memory. I've read 'man kicker' and (konqueror)help:/kicker and have queried Google. There's nothing in ~/.kde/share/config/kickerrc that jumps out as a timeout value and 'locate kicker' buries me in 323 choices. On the other side of the coin I can usually tell when an application has really stopped responding. Is there a shortcut like control-click that brings up that kill-it-now? dialog immediately, saving me the effort of finding the PID without resorting to using killall? For the uninitiated, kicker is the taskbar/application menu/system tray application for the KDE desktop environment. Help? (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
5:04 am	smog and money, rainy day diversions "EPA's Marcus Peacock responded in a March 7 memo: "EPA is not aware of any information that ozone has beneficial effects on economic values or on personal comfort and well being."" -- quoted by Paul Keil of Talking Points Memo Muckraker Oh, really? Having to acquire a new car or fork out the referree fees every other year has no effect on an individual's economic value? Requiring refineries to adjust their formulae has no effect on fuel price? Sure, this is messy politics, sinboy, but I can't respect someone (Peacock) whose reaction to the counterargument is to dismiss it as if completely unrelated. Sinboy's post (All he ever talks about is politics. He's probably no longer healthy reading for me.) ~-=-~ It's supposed to rain pretty steadily all night and day pretty much straight through until sunset. Maybe I'll wait until Sunday to set myself as available for outside work and spend Saturday chasing leaks, fixing CUPS and finding something vaguely like a resume to send through that printing software. And maybe Jeni's party. Oooh, thunder. Wasn't expecting that. Sunday is slated to be cold and windy but dry -- perfect weather for energetic outdoor work. Then dry again until Saturday, coincidentally the day of the very next social engagement written in my calendar. ~-=-~ Why does apt-get dist-upgrade want to remove openoffice.org? Um, NO! I use that. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
4:48 am	tech: gmail offers IMAP access Google's gmail is now accessible with IMAP. ( details ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, March 7th, 2008
9:47 pm	music: Uni & her Ukelele, Tippy Canoe MUSICIAN BIOs UNI & HER UKELELE (http://www.myspace.com/uniherukelele) Uni, the neo-vintage pop chanteuse/raconteur gathered up kickpants, a rockhawk and magical ruby slippers for the first time in 2004 and her 20’s punk movement has been gathering strength ever since. On the world tour beat and in the recording studio she competes for the limelight with her prima donna ukelele “Sally Luka.” Originally a singer/songwriter for over a decade, when she met the bawdy uke she swallowed her pride and joined up for the raucous phenom that became known as Uni & her Ukelele, and having second billing has only made Sally more indignant. Having opened for the likes of James Brown, Huey Lewis, Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson, Ray Charles, The Four Tops, Tower of Power, Coco Taylor, Sean Hayes and Jolie Holland to name a few, Sally has had a taste of fame and Uni is now forced to take her to the top. Uni’s lo-fi folk-pop, first album “My Favorite Letter is U” dropped in 2006 and the response was overwhelming. Her original and sincere take on the ukelele coupled with her sweetly stirring and sometimes-haunting refrains unite to conjure the spectrum of catharsis. Her recent EP “I’m On My Way” introduced her rock-ability with hits like the title track and “Twinkle Twinkle.” This new sound gathered more love from the fans and now the word is spreading magical wildfire. Always keeping it fresh, Uni has recently gathered together a group of, super-powered, classical musicians to accompany her, and has formed “Uni & the Ding! String Trio” who’s EP “As Gold” will be unveiled this spring in all its phantasmagorical brilliance. This performer’s, pan-demographic appeal is most likely a product of her impeccable synthesis of fantasy and reality, and her ability to juxtapose seemingly incongruous moods and aesthetics. Pundits are often her heard to muse: “That chick f*$kn’ rawks!.” Uni and her Ukelele's album My Favorite Letter Is U is now available on CD Baby ***************************************************** TIPPY CANOE (http://www.myspace.com/tippycanoe) (http://www.tippycanoe.net/) Songbird and uke-slinger, Tippy Canoe, aka Michele Kappel (from Sympathy For the Record Industry's The Kirby Grips), is on a mission to bring sincere uplift in a severely down-slanted era. Her voice is a mixture of the 60's girl group sound and classic country with its own quirky nature shining through. Her song writing bears the stamp of a person who has absorbed a variety of influences. These range from 20's and 30's acts like The Boswell Sisters and Jack Teagarden to 50's and 60's performers like Brenda Lee and The Chiffons and catchy post-punk bands such as Squeeze and Blondie. The San Francisco Chronicle decided to slap her picture on the cover of their publication in 2007. The San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art included her in an exhibition on the uke and Spark TV, the bay area’s arts showcase, saw fit to zero in on the band’s brand of old-timey pop for a recent segment. Other adventures have included tours of the east and west coasts, the first annual San Francisco Ukulele Festival at Yerba Buena Gardens and one very long, hot evening in a strange tattoo parlour in Mexico. You can call it old-timey, you can call it retro, you can even make up a word and call it 20sjazzcountrydoowoppop, but whatever the moniker just let yourself go and enjoy it. “I do not fear ukuleles, I fear lack of them.” -Isaac Asimov, author. website: http://www.tippycanoe.net/ music: http://www.myspace.com/tippycanoe Spark TV Segment: http://www.kqed.org/arts/places/spark/profile.jsp?id=17140 ****************************************** For more information and to request promo CDs/imagery/interviews please contact MICHELE KAPPEL Trixie-Lark Productions 415.515.5991 mkappel@earthlink.n3t (correct the obvious typo) (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
4:12 am	misc: US monetary system, shows in SF, lightweight Linux Assorted notes and links video: Freedom to Fascism by Aaron Russo (nearly two hours) In a similar style of presentation to Michael Moore, Russo walks the viewer through the creation of the Federal Reserve and why that was a bad move, points out a few (rare) instances of an informed jury sidestepping courtroom theatre to find federal personal income tax unlawful and failure to pay it therefore not an issue, cites a few key Supreme Court decisions on the matter and quotes various people in government or formerly involved in tax enforcement talking of the gradual conversion of the US populace from owners to debtors, from investors to employees, from free to something closer to serf. He stops short of advocating any specific course of action or inaction on taxes but does draw a line at the acceptance of a Federal ID card. Calendar entries: car insurance and registration are both due this month March 6th (Thursday): 9pm, karaoke with Jen at the HiDive in SF. This is the same Jen who hosts at Mother's in SLO. I'm still dealing with a bogus parking ticket from my last visit there so won't be attending. March 16th (Sunday): 8pm, Scroobius Pip at Cafe du Nord in SF. $12 in advance, $14 at the door. [calendar | event | video ] March 17th (Monday): St. Patrick's Day. March 22nd (Saturday): 3pm St. Patty's Day observed by Rick and Fran. March 29th (Saturday): 7pm C&E party. April 3rd (Thursday): 9pm, karaoke with Jen at the HiDive in SF. I'm still dealing with a bogus parking ticket from my last visit there so won't be attending. April 5th (Saturday): RHPS with Sherice at the Vine in Livermore. April 26th (Saturday): 9pm and midnight, "Ladies' Night" at RHPS in SLO. May 1st (Thursday): 9pm, karaoke with Jen at the HiDive in SF. I'm still dealing with a bogus parking ticket from my last visit there so won't be attending. May 3rd (Saturday): RHPS with Sherice at the Vine in Livermore. May 7th (Wednesday): Fashion show produced/directed by Meekah at the DNA Lounge in SF. DeLiLinux(.org) -- Desktop Light Linux A high school friend pointed me toward this lightweight Linux distribution a few months ago. Looking through their screenshots I see a web browser in an X-windows environment running with a low system load, barely touching its swap and using about half the RAM of a machine with just 32MB. "The test computer is a 486 laptop with 16 MB RAM, and all apps which comes with DeLi Linux are running smoothly." For graphical browsing on a 486sx25 he uses dillo(.org). It doesn't ship with cookies or ssl enabled, doesn't do CSS and doesn't render fancy characters. For slightly more capable machines he recomends xubuntu(.org) which is like kubuntu but with the lighter xfce in place of kde. dumb quotes [economic] "Slowdowns tend to be harder on average people than on billionaires" -- ABC News, March 6th I'll probably add to this list. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 24th, 2008
5:21 pm	music: ukes are hot, yo SHORT NOTICE: showtime is just hours from now If you're in San Francisco and would like to watch a tall hot woman sing and play the ukulele and you know The Rite Spot and Annie wasn't so rude to you last time that you'll never choose it again then tonight's performance by Tippy Canoe might be just the ticket. band: Tippy Canoe .net (on Angelfire) | myspace/tippycanoe venue: The Rite Spot map (google): 2099 Folsom St. at 17th, four blocks east of 16th and Mission. ( show poster (227 KB) ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
4:55 pm	tech: compatibility issues with five-years-obsolete RAM Well that was good. Still on the theme of trying to triple the RAM of my (sister's) desktop PC I made another trip to San Jose Monday night to meet another seller. This guy was a nice contrast to my last Craigslist encounter. He's on LiveJournal, too: blackcat1313. He offered three SDRAM sticks, 256MB with ECC, registered, matched. He said they were backwards compatible with PC100 and was willing to facilitate my testing them on site. They didn't work for me -- it turns out backwards compatibility of SDRAM modules went out roughly when they crossed the 128MB mark -- but I did come away with a more car-friendly monitor and a bit more drive space. Digital video editing comes one step closer. Still need: ieee1394 interface (got one, but integral USB2 used VIA chip instead of NEC) DVD reader/writer (in storage) video software (and matching OS? maybe export 2GB chunks to WinXP?) reliable analog capture path (maybe firmware update for DVR, maybe capture card) Recommendations for dirt cheap video editing software, preferably for Linux, would be appreciated. That beautiful stuff I played with at the Apple store, even with a significant student discount, doesn't count as dirt cheap. For my own reference, PC133 SDRAM modules are no longer backward compatible with systems expecting PC100. PNY: PC133 Modules are NO LONGER backward compatible with PC100 Machines. and FAQs 1040, 1047 Hachiman (John): As a former technician at CompUSA, I can confirm this. This was a large problem before we found out what PNY and some of the other manufacturers were doing. // 95% of the SDRAM they sell is NOT backwards compatible. There are exceptions, and every now and then one or two RAM chips will work fine, but these are few and far between. If you look at the RAM boxes, the new PNY boxes say PC133 ONLY, and I think some of the others do as well. // Just to be safe, I'd recommend getting it elsewhere. Kingston: PC133 modules MAY NOT BE BACKWARD COMPATIBLE to PC100 machines // Systems using the 440BX, 810 or 810e chipsets should only use PC100 memory. Of course the contradictory opinion can also be found from various sources. Crucial: All PCs that accept PC100 SDRAM will also accept PC133 SDRAM wikipedia: PC133 is backward compatible with PC100. And then I went up the road to Kirsten's karaoke haunt, met Cindi and got credit for some nice things I didn't do and enjoyed the company. Bruce, the KJ, looks like Greg Junell about 7 years ago and they sound similar too. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
9:29 pm	happy new year to me and to you Happy new year to me. Thank you, Cortney and Ethan, for your full page of tiny pictures of hugs and smiles and beautiful places. <!-- stuff --> Thank you, Frick, for a lovely evening and morning of good people, hearty food and stiff drink. Thank you, friends, for *wildcard* (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
3:05 pm	rhps: Sherice is Frank in Livermore Sherice is Frank tonight at the Vine in Livermore. If your plans can overlap hers I'm sure she'd love to see a familiar face and hear some clear callbacks. her announcement, her reminder. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
5:11 pm	livejournal: does one need a disclaimer? This shouldn't have to be said. This journal is about my life, my observations, my actions, my inactions. The post last week was about my withdrawl from the Zenroom trannie crew for the January 2008 show and how, though the resulting inaction was right, I came to it for the Wrong Reason.It was not intended to tell the directors anything new about the show. It was not intended to "get Amy in trouble." Random off-topic: The version of the Burger King mascot drawn on the paper drink cups looks like Fred Flintstone at a drag party. Take a look at the pictures associated with this OK-Cupid profile: amberckerr. Scroll down just enough so you see the top of a face, down to the teeth but not to the lower lip. Looking at that picture the name Spencer Vorhees came to mind. Whatever happened to that boy and his wife? "Eeza no no knee figga doan. eeza no no knee figga doan eeza no no knee figga doan" -- radio No more hits from that particular Jamaican female vocalist, though. She was killed in a car accident according to one of the DJs on "Energy 92-7." Energy 92.7 Artist Spotlight Presents: Enur. The song ‘Calabria’ with the iconic saxophone hook was originally made by Rune Reilly Kölsch in 2002 and released in 2003, creating a massive underground hit. But the potential of the track was never realized. That is until the spring of 2006 when Rune's half brother, Johannes Torpe, got the idea to produce the track in a ragga version with Rune’s permission. On a late night in May, vocalist Natasja came to the studio and soon they had created a tribute to the original that would take Europe by storm. ‘Calabria 2007 feat. Natasja’ has become one of the most air-played songs of 2007. "Thou shalt not make repetitive popular music. Thou shalt not make repetitive popular music. Thou shalt not make repetitive popular music. Thou shalt not make repetitive popular music." -- scrubius pip Jayme and Tyler introduced me to Scrubius Pip's recordings. ( bigger copy of the same photo above. ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, January 25th, 2008
11:20 pm	zenroom: contributing to a clusterfuck Contributing to a clusterfuck. ( Sometimes it's prudent to do not (rocky video enclosed) ) By the way January's show, which I expect to watch through a viewfinder, looks like it'll be a good one. The theme is Pirate Rocky. Publicity and casting have been a bit stealthy but this cast looks pretty good: Frank: Angela Watkins (mentioned on MySpace) Riff: Kayla Banducci Janet: Amy Watkins Magenta: Jess Cheda Columbia: Kathy Haftorson Dr. Scott: Pogo Eddie: Rick Castello (mentioned on New Years Eve) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 27th, 2007
3:06 pm	Heisenberg and people Something similar to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to people too: you cannot measure *emotion* where it matters without changing it. That is all. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
10:06 pm	tech: amusing Firefox bug Someone on the Mozilla dev team doesn't understand "maximum". 59464 is less than 9216, right? ( cache info page ) (Comment on this)
9:12 pm	tech: telephone test gear at Home Depot (gjunell) Telephone wire tracing gear came up in a conversation elsewhere. Someone posted a link to an online source which seemed hardly a bargain. Anyway, I happened to see a selection of that sort of gear on the pegs at Home Depot last night. $90: classic tone generator and inductive amplifier with speaker. ($140 from pro equipment) $60: inductive amp with speaker only. Could pick up another audio source. $40: tone sender and amp but full of warnings against use on live circuits. sold as "LAN tracker". $85: 1000 feet of cat5e riser (not plenum) cable. Plastic conduit junction points might be useful as outdoor enclosures for small radio gear. "There woz a li''l' ol' lady in the park one day  she woz struggling with bags from Tesco." -- Lily Allen And the Hawaiian guy going by Pogo announces he has an account with Tessco. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
3:06 pm	tech: mounting a picture frame (failed) This is probably a question for JoSH or Tyler. I plug an Apple iPod into a powered USB hub and my Debian/KDE system sees it as a flash drive and mounts it and asks if I want to navigate Konqueror to that mountpoint. All fine and normal. I plug a PNY Attache (thumbdrive) into the same hub and the system does the same. It's removeable media, treat it as a disk and mount it. I plug a Pandigital picture frame into the same hub and the system appears to do nothing. The device lights up and shows a slow series of professionally processed demonstration images. lsusb shows it as connected but it's not seen as a disk or a video display or a speaker or a hub or anything else the system knows how to handle. ( details from lsusb -s NN -v ) Eh. Nevermind. This looks like about $1000 worth of effort for a $30 gift. [Edit] Tried Debian's binary kernel image 2.6.22-3-686. No-go. That one is rather terse with USB messages. Dec 6 17:13:13 diva-1 kernel: usb 4-2.4.4: new full speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 13 Dec 6 17:13:13 diva-1 kernel: usb 4-2.4.4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice [edit] Tried 2.6.23.6 from kernel.org, compiled from source with all the USB and filesystem modules enabled. Still no-go. Similar messages as under 2.6.20. I did not try breaking open the package and running the winXP application under Wine. For the record I never heard back from the phone support folks. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
5:34 pm	networking: nope, that wasn't it Earlier this year I noticed people were having trouble connecting to my access point. The signal strength was excellent but the associations didn't stick if initiated more than a few feet away and the throughput was horrible. Performance jumped to acceptable levels when I removed a poletop amplifier. It seemed the bidirectional amp was interfering with the AP's ability to receive. A month or so ago I noticed bad throughput on my uplink. In that case both ends have a fairly strong signal so I can sniff the exchange from a few slips away. Wireshark, processing the kismet dump, confirmed the other end was repeating itself quite a few times before my end would ACK a frame. I replaced the amplifier there too. The problem remained and I wound up breaking the amplifier -- the connector came out of the waterproof housing as I unscrewed the RF cable. Speed Test #39995994 by dslreports.com Run: 2007-11-16 04:41:11 EST Download: 627 (Kbps) Upload: 263 (Kbps) In kilobytes per second: 76.5 down 32.1 up Tested by server: 55 java User: 1095505 @ dslreports.com User's DNS: pacbell.net Compared to the average of 573 tests from pacbell.net: * download is 71% worse, upload is 39% worse Nope, that wasn't it. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
12:17 am	tech: standard definition digital video pop that into Google!, she said. dear_ayla's road trip Cool -- it's the outline of the country shifted north a few hundred miles. SF's ABC affiliate ran How the Grinch Stole Christmas this evening, as read 40 years ago by Boris Karloff. Having not seen the Frankenstein movies for a while the voice finally clicked as the voice of something else we've all heard: Disney's Haunted Mansion. Ok, so what is Digital Video anyway? Wikipedia's article on DV says NTSC DV is a sequence of 720x480 frames, each individually compressed to 1,036,800 bytes. The same source's article on NTSC states "each frame consists of a total of 525 scanlines, of which 486 make up the visible raster." Ok, so we've lost six scan lines in the upgrade. Checking the math, 525 matches (( 15.750kHz/1.001 ) / ( 30Hz/1.001 )), meaning that's the number of times the CRT beam scans from left to right as both fields of the interlaced frame are drawn. This is a 1/30th of a second frame, not a 1/60th of a second field. (  And then I delve into some of the details of video aspect ratios and pixels that aren't square. ) (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 24th, 2007
1:17 pm	retail: mexican coke made without HFCS I posted this elsewhere but it's of more use to me here. dustgrey_wings wrote at the end of February: "I wish I could get Coke with real sugar in it." You can. It's from a magical, sugar-filled, low-corn syrup using country called Canada. :) You [duckay] mention Coca-Cola brand drinks from Australia being made with real sugar. I discovered today that Coca-Cola's signature product (in the tall glass bottles, even) is also made with real sugar in Mexico. I think the case I found came from Costco. The San Diego Tribune says: The Coca-Cola bottled in Tijuana is made with sugar, and limited quantities of it show up north of the border from time to time at small neighborhood grocery stores, said Bob Phillips, spokesman for Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Southern California. and Some U.S. Coca-Cola bottlers even produce cane sugar Coke each year for Passover, since many Jewish people won't eat or drink corn products during the holiday. The company says it has no immediate plans to start producing it for a wider market. The article also says Coke feels the import creates unfair competition with its US bottling plants and tries to discourage sale of the product believed to be more expensive to produce. Methanol legislation may tip that economic balance away from favoring corn. Hungry City Guides (guidebooks) said in March of 2007: Mexican Coke has been around the states for a while and, if you know where to look, readily available—but pricey. Until now. Costco has it for just under $18 for a 24-bottle case. Costco doesn't mention Coca-Cola or other premixed fizzy drinks its website. further reading (ask.metafilter.com) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
1:47 pm	math: rolling averages In comment to a friend I wrote: My neice would call this a word problem. What I really want is to have the number of events per second over [interval, rolling, continuously updated] It seems the integer associated with each event is irrelevant. You care about the rate at which events arrive and care not about the rate at which the reported integer increases. The integer is a red herring. Exactly as specified, yes, you'd have to timestamp the events and query your store of data points each time you want to generate an average. The computation of the average should be timer-triggered instead of event-triggered because an average over the past (interval) loses its meaning when computed on older data. Doing this truly continuously could interfere with your ability to receive events. How often do you expect to update the average? How much lag is acceptable in the calculation? If you count the events in a 200mS period then the sum of the previous five counts is the one second average with up to a fifth of a second of lag. Maybe a temporal granularity of 500mS would be OK. The longer rolling averages would be computed from boxes recorded longer ago. The count of boxes (200mS slices in five minutes, for instance) will be constant and those older than the longest rolling average can be reused. Beyond the finest average can you tolerate a bit less temporal precision? Must the 30 second average be updated as frequently as the 1 second average? If not then you can combine the counts in older boxes and store fewer elements for the calculation of your broader rolling averages. I then state that the average number of events per second, across the run, is equal to the highest number divided by the total number of seconds. The overall event count is needed for the overall average of events per second. The computation you've written averages something else. Someone else commented "What your asking for is called a 'box-car average' in the literature." Searching around for references to that revealed something like my old design for noise reduction in video. What is a boxcar averager? (Archive.org) (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 6th, 2007
12:04 am	Moneypenny, Meraki, multimeter, kablooie Miss Moneypenny, Lois Maxwell, has passed away. She was second only to Desmond Llewelyn in the number of Bond films in which she appeared. She made 14, he made 17. According to Paul Harvey, Ms. Maxwell managed to make more money from the Bond films than any of the Bond actors, by virtue of her longevity. (from dafydd) "The experimental benchmark for demonstrating that humans have developed a sense of fairness is their behavior when playing the ultimatum game. If the division of spoils proposed by the first player is not generous enough (roughly 40 to 50% of the total), the second player will usually refuse to accept the proposal (giving up any hope of a gain), which has the consequence of depriving the first player of any payout as well." (quote unattributed. Used also at sciencemag.org, google search, Meraki user forum.) For the record I am no longer happy with Meraki. Just a few hours after I submitted my last post including a paragraph on how nice it is to have a fully hackable platform I found they've revised their pricing structure and web interface essentially requiring that I hack the thing to keep it useful. "i.dot.Connect" is a low end accessory line of PPA, itself a low end line carried by Fry's electronics. They have their brand on things like USB hubs and headphone adapters. One of their products is an FM transmitter to carry audio from a portable mp3 player to a car stereo. It runs on one of five channels, has a hard power switch and runs on two AAA cells or an unregulated cigarette lighter adapter. Its preset channels are 107.1,3,5,7 and 9. The instruction sheet caught my eye. What they said: WARNING: Transmitter works by car power adapter OR 2 standard AAA batteries. Transmitter CANNOT be used with both simultaneously. When car adapter is powering transmitter, REMOVE AAA batteries to ensure damage free use of FM transmitter. * Manufacturer is not responsible for damage that results from the above warning being ignored. 060927-rev. 1 What they meant: Um, we fucked up but my manager advised me to cover it up. For at least some of the units shipped with this sheet (and probably a few more before we noticed it) at least one of the following is true: Plugging in the car power adapter either introduces a short circuit across the internal AAA cells or it exposes them to a supply stronger than three volts. The former case will cause a strong pair of cells to burn through some internal conductor rendering the transmitter no longer operable on internal power. The later could lead to an explosion as warned on most alkaline cells. You're not likely to sue us because the thing is so damned cheap anyway and we're willing to bet you'll notice the smell before anything goes kablooie and before our product ignites your car. Cheap bastards. That's PPA Item number 3176, UPC 8 33250 00317 6, Fry's PLU 4855660. Here's another one. A digital multimeter has embossed into its back cover the words "CAUTION This instrument contains no operator serviceable parts. Screw removal by qualified persons only." It's a multimeter. It reads Volts, Ohms and Amps. What class of people use multimeters? Under the cover is a fuse and a 9v battery. It's easier to replace a fuse and a battery than to use a multimeter. That's Harbor Freight item number 92020. And now I can throw out both packages. Less trash onboard. Better. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
4:45 pm	mucho mistrust, love's gone behind Well that's unfortunate. Debbie Harry no longer rocks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3U_sVIIJqs She sounds like a grandmother at karaoke, carefully forcing out the words with careful diction and forced timing and always a little off key. This is someone whose airbrushed photos used to catch the morning sun on my wall before I'd leave for high school. Lily Allen, whose tracks I've enjoyed on the radio and on her myspace profile, comes closer to the original Heart of Glass than does the original Blondie though it seems she's just excited about being allowed to sing "arse" on network television. In this version heart, glass and arse all rhyme, as in most of England. In the original, glass and ass rhyme with crass, as you'd hear in Gloucester or in most of the US. According to the recording, added to YouTube in late May of 2007, Blondie is on tour. Hopefully those performances were done with a different audio engineer. ref: Lily Allen (myspace) Debbie Harry (wikipedia) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
11:10 pm	reading list: sailing I've taken a new aversion to tiny scraps of paper. One scrap about to leave my domain contains a list of recommended reading. Sail Trim by Stuart Walker. A small book, the authority on how to set sail. Sailing for Dummies by JJ and Peter Isler. Chapman's (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
4:34 pm	Fandango Apocalypse: pass [unfiltered] Ok, now what. For a few years now I've been attending the annual Fandango party at the porn palace in SF. It's become a sort of punk reunion event, a very faint shadow of The Burn but, as parties go, pretty excellent. Lots of people, two *HUGE* party spaces, two massive sound systems expertly manned all night long, video clips, lasers projecting through fog, blacklight, two bars, a jail room, seating space, party snacks, loads of kinky props and a photo booth. And the logistics afterwards always STINK. It's scheduled on a Saturday night. It doesn't really get rolling until sometime between ten and 12 and runs pretty much full bore until about 4:45. Public transit to East Contra Costa is useless after midnight and the system doesn't run again until about 8:30am. One un-punk attribute of the Fandango crowd is a lack of crash space. I've barked at that door often enough to know that it won't open. Sleeping indoors in SF after the party is not an available option. Sleeping outdoors, given that I'm not travelling with hobo gear and don't know the area that well, is also not an option worth exploring. Loitering in a restaurant for four hours is a fairly unattractive option too, and its cost is not negligible. Since learning of the parties I've bought a sailboat within AC-Transit's night service area. Instead of waiting for BART I have the option to wait for up to an hour at a bus stop, ride across the bridge and get let off just over a mile from the marina. I did that last year. The wait is cold, the walk dangerous, and the electronic key timestamps my entrance. Crashing in Oakland remains a fairly unattractive option. I could drive, though the risks, from loss of the moving supplies stored there to loss of the car to loss of liberty, outweigh the benefit. The stated purpose of the party is fundraising. Despite Liz and Steve's careful wording of the door policy this serves to suggest that my presence there hurts rather than helps the group as a whole. The owner of the venue added some terms of use that make this even more the case. Last time around this party was on my birthday. This was how I chose to begin another year on this planet. I'm thirty-mumble years old yet I was asked for ID at the door and, on the first pass, turned away. Second pass: thrown out. This after a whole day's rather effective party primping. I looked beautiful and felt like wet newspaper. BE came to my rescue but the damage was done. Like all good parties these are themed events. The theme this time around is apocalypse. Very masculine. Imagery it brings to mind includes the wanton destruction of irreplaceable tech and supplies, smoke, dust and punk-styled replicas of survival gear -- spikey belts suggesting ammunition supplies, clumpy boots and lots of black leather suggesting ruggedness. My limited wardrobe can meet that but not in a way I'd label street-safe for use in Oakland. Carrying a second outfit or bringing a car become mandatory. Then there's the element of social welcome. I don't feel it. I expect a few good people will make the trek and would be happy to see me there. Adam, Suzanne, Liz, BrianH probably among them. Ryn, Turtle, Ariel, Jax possibly as well. The vast majority don't care either way. A few would prefer I go swimming wearing lead dipped in concrete. (Do I need to add identifying photos? I didn't think so.) I started this post a few hours ago thinking I'd wind it into a request for a real invitation but having reached this point I see that isn't something I'd even be likely to accept. Before I saw the slew of reminder posts yesterday I had decided to sit this one out. Now, after a brief ripple in opinion, I decide again to sit this one out. Lunch on Sunday, perhaps? (Comment on this)
Friday, July 13th, 2007
7:36 pm	big trash day, mail via England, music from recyclables, shore crap I took a longer route to and from Burger King today than yesterday. The garbage bags along the shorter route smell strongly of Warm Death and are best avoided. Most residences have their cans out on the street, full, with overflow beside them. Some businesses have huge piles of boxes exploding out onto the street. Others are, somehow, keeping it hidden. Burger King, which you might think would be hosting a mountain of paper and cardboard, shows nothing unusual. "Monica Devincenzi, a Waste Management spokeswoman, said the company decided on the lockout because it needed to protect itself in case the union was planning a strike." (Inside Bay Area article dated 04 July 2007 02:42:16 AM PDT retrieved 13 July.) The logic escapes me. Hey, you guys, with the dirty hands and the truck driving training, you might fuck us by deciding collectively not to work for a while so fuck you you can't use our trucks for a while. Someone's pointing a gun in my general direction so I'd better shoot myself. As the piles grow it's starting to look like "big trash day" every day. How long before folks from neighboring communities start showing up at night to quietly leave their broken televisions and cat-stunk couches with the rest of it? Arlo Guthrie's lyrics come to mind. Officer Opie, I cannot tell a lie... krellan I think I have a Linux networking problem that might be right up JoSH's alley. It might take me a few days to describe the problem, though, and he's busy with paperwork for a few days at least. I have outgoing mail service through Google's UK address and incoming mail through yahoo. Neither is my usual. Don't be surprised if I miss your messages sent through the usual channels. That includes Livejournal notices. Once again the telephone gets a turn as the preferred contact point if you can't get your face within earshot of mine. On the boat everything needs to work and, ideally, to work in more than one role. The DVR doubles as a CD player. It's playing a Tchaikovsky sampler disc. I hear a clarinet backed with a piano and a distant harp and at least two violas and a violin. I've missed music. The speakers were salvaged from a Fandango/punk coordinated trash run job a few years ago. After that trip they spent some time in the bathroom of the house in Bay Point, most often playing the San Francisco Boys Chorus while I showered. The power cord became a bit frayed but somehow it still does its job. The music plays. I still need a shower. Today's project is the same as yesterday's. I want that "shore crap" out of the cockpit and in the cabin. A microwave and fridge are sitting rather uselessly on the port cockpit bench. Yesterday I got far enough down the pile that I could have given them a place to stand but decided I wanted to put them on a newly cleaned surface. Clean but not tidy. I try. Cubed ice. Kyoo-cubed ice. Cubed IQ'bd IQ'bd ice. Cube-kyoo-Q-cubed ice. Love^3 to the Amblers (YouTube). (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
3:21 pm	short questions sit in a long queue. Who am I anyway? I've been missing Rocky, and the rocky here isn't quite doing it, either. We were a bit spoiled by a very good thing at pretty much its prime. RHPS in Oakland hasn't been doing it for me, though it's on the traditional weekly schedule and about a quarter of an hour away by bicycle. It's a sad shadow of what I remmber from the theatre across the road from the Berkeley campus. UC? UA? I don't remember. Landmark bought it and kicked out Rocky. Karaoke around here is more of a drinking game than anything else. The spots that host it are far too popular for the folks who like it and with zero to one slots on the mic per person per evening there's little to no improvement. Oh, and I don't know if I ever answered a question you threw my way. On my birthday roughly 11 months ago I wrote to you and to Adam about logistical arrangements for hooking up on the Sacramento River innertube trip. My sister wanted to come too but was none too quick about making that first step. I spent the day checking my float-toy, waiting for her and mapping out various paths to spots on the river where I expected the group to be at various times of day. Adam never replied. Maybe he or his phone or the network dropped my message. Half a day later a message came back from your number: "Who r u" Fuck if I know who I am but now you know who sent that message. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 10th, 2007
12:40 pm	misinformation on Doctor Who Yahoo served up this gem today: show info SHOW DESCRIPTION Family-oriented program about a time-traveling physician. The latest incarnation of the cult hit that originally launched in 1963. Airdates: 0000 - present Well of course time travel has to be involved for a program launched 1,963 years after its first airdate. Wait. That calendar isn't zero-based. The first year was "1 AD" and the year before that "1 BC". There was no zero. And no spoon. And "physician"? "So you're a doctor, then?" "I have my moments." (Comment on this)
Friday, June 8th, 2007
3:45 pm	you make my world a better place kshandRa pasted: If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal. and while she's definitely among that group in my life the one I was thinking of when I woke up this morning was secretlyloving. The latter is someone I've never met and likely never will. She's articulate, beautiful, horny and radiantly good. Several of my friends begin their day with a lengthy series of sun salutations and other grounding rituals. The world inside my head would probably be a brighter place if I reset the night's turmoil by spending 40 minutes reading from the journal of secretlyloving. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 7th, 2007
2:50 am	stupid observations: useless warrantees, electric shock, costly fences, yahoo disclaimer Stupid, stupid stuff. Since Yahoo upgraded their service to near uselessness and Jamie mentioned an alternative a few years ago I've been a fan of Zap2it for television listings. My current network connection comes through a somewhat defective router which likes to blackhole individual hosts. This evening www.zap2it.com is on the router's blacklist so I'm back to tv.yahoo.com. Yahoo! is a local company, headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. It's serving television program listings for San Francisco stations based on an Oakland zip code. Sunnyvale and Oakland are about 20 miles apart and ten miles from the Pacific ocean. The program grid has headings in Eastern Daylight Time. Stupid. IMMEDIATELY DISCONTINUE USE OF THE SERVICE AND CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN IF YOU EXPERIENCE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING SYMPTOMS WHILE USING THE SERVICE: DIZZINESS, ALTERED VISION, EYE OR MUSCLE TWITCHES, LOSS OF AWARENESS, DISORIENTATION, ANY INVOLUNTARY MOVEMENT, OR CONVULSIONS. Stupid. Far too many things on retail shelves come with absolutely worthless guarantees. A $5 wristwatch comes with a replacement warranty that only requires one to send back the watch, well packaged and postage paid, with $6.50. Rechargeable Norelco electric shavers have replaceable blades but nonreplaceable batteries. A travel model from the same company is sized so rechargeable NiMH cells don't quite fit inside and replacement blades are not offered. Yesterday I noticed a tingle while stretching. It turns out there's a fifty volt potential difference between the computer chassis at my right wrist and the television antenna which brushed against my left arm. Which electronic engineer thought the average between the hot and neutral supply leads would make a good ground reference? In response to a giant billboard ad campain a few years ago I rejected fake free checking and opened a Totally Free Checking account at Washington Mutual. I made two deposits and one purchase, that being a box of checks. WaMu applied service fees that sucked the account dry within a few months. The State of California runs a Low Cost Automobile Insurance Program. It's more expensive and has tougher eligibility requirements than private insurance, even when the paperwork cost is ignored and the broker's fee is taken into account. Basic medical care, whether corrective or preventative, is *Really* *Damned* *Expensive* unless you're well off or absolutely destitute. If you have just enough money to cover rent this month you're S-O-L. If you're in eviction or sleeping under a bridge it's all free. Some folks who lack traditional housing seek shelter under bridges and overpasses when the weather gets cold or wet. These are the same folks who have carte blanche access to bottom-of-the-rung medical care where bottom-of-the-rung is well above that available to the working poor. Over the past few weeks an eight foot tall sturdy metal fence has been built around at least one of those overpasses. The new fence bears a sign marking the area as State property with treasspass punishable by (huge) fines, etc. Fines imposed on those without money translate into theft, jail time or both. State expense. Compliance with the posted prohibition translates to increased illness and hospital bills. State expense. Eh. Summer's here. This is California. It'll never rain. It. Burns. (Comment on this)
12:02 am	musicians: test your ear japlady found some musical tests: compare pitches, compare phrases, compare rhythms. At 500 Hz I can reliably differentiate two tones 0.9 Hz apart. Two tones 0.75 Hz apart take me several repetitions. Two tones 0.375 Hz apart sound the same to me if the second is lower. I scored in the 74th percentile (in a self-selecting test pool of 11,761 possibly nonunique respondants whose score currently averages 3.98 Hz). "At this frequency two semitones are 30 Hz apart." If your computer stutters like mine the only one that'll make sense is the first, which just beeps like Captain Pike. 63.9% accuracy on phrases? That ain't me, man. ObGeek: At 500 Hz a difference of +0.9 Hz is (88.20 - 88.04) significantly less than one sample per cycle at 44.1 ksamples/second. One sample per 6.25 cycles for the sharp, one per 6.29 for the flat. I'm in ur CD collekshun criticizin' ur Redbook. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 4th, 2007
7:05 pm	geek: Xorg likes memory too Mem: 256124k total, 252360k used, 3764k free, 1564k buffers Swap: 1028120k total, 1008876k used, 19244k free, 33544k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 10908 duncan 25 0 321m 130m 16m R 87.2 52.2 2785:03 firefox-bin 3702 root 14 -1 824m 32m 3172 S 10.9 13.1 770:07.22 Xorg 3940 duncan 15 0 134m 17m 5676 S 0.0 6.8 29:55.44 icedove-bin 6558 duncan 15 0 143m 9140 3704 S 0.0 3.6 142:40.62 wxvlc Because if you have a GB of swap space you may as well use it. [Edit: the next day]( Firefox crashes and Xorg shrinks ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
11:00 pm	rockyfluff Nell has dimples. Gregorio found this gem: LOLcky Horror. Oh, and there's a zenroom show this weekend. The usual place and time. $10 give or take $2 for half the fun, $20 for both shows. zenroom.rhps.org (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
1:34 pm	school, work and travel: Let me read this fifteen years ago. It's tough knowing What To Do. My parents covered tuition and books and, after my time in the dorms, nothing more. Financial aid wasn't even an option for the first few years. I worked for the rest -- chiefly housing and transportation -- but I worked in jobs where I knew I could get hired today. Looking back I was desperate and I suppose it showed. Making ends meet that way took more time than I had. My previously stellar academic record tanked and I couldn't fix it. So here you are. Raised in SLO, going to school in Oslo, closer to Sweden and Germany and Scotland than you're likely to be for another decade. The view from here? Thirty is not that far away. You'll be a whole lot more stable at 30 if you've finished a degree now. Do one thing at a time, if you can. Course schedules permitting, plan a quarter off. Save enough money that a train ticket, ferry ride or plane hop won't hurt. Then do a few more terms of school and take another quarter off. Contact a temp agency online and take a post somewhere you'd like to visit. Youth hostels in London are priced so you could spend time there waiting tables and still come back with more money than you started with and you'd have some experience with London. oh, lower-middle class birth right My parents called themselves upper-middle class. My siblings are damned near homeless. What birthright? (Comment on this)
12:49 am	Fanfare for the Common Man Well that was unspecial. I had two things on the agenda for Sunday. One was to find someone to work with me next Saturday The other was to go to SF for a VCR offered in the Craigslist Free section. On the first I failed completely. Nobody available. Even the backups aren't available. The one I really wanted to introduce to this work has lost her phone number. No luck on the second, either. The guy offering the VCR said on Saturday that the other person with interest hadn't shown up and that it was all mine. I couldn't get an address or phone number out of him, though, so proposed we reschedule the pickup. To date, no reply. Someone else wrote to say he was interested in the Kayak but didn't write, phone or show up. Rather late in the afternoon I took myself out to a classy dinner. Two double cheeseburgers (only mustard and onion, extra onion) a small salad and a tiny cup of water. $3.26 at Burger King. Mmm, onion. A very tall blond woman came in, headed straight for the bathroom then walked back out. She looked strong, like the Linda Lawless character, with Stephie's height and Angela Hutt's hair. In the parking lot she fussed with things in the trunk and sat beside a black woman who came in next. The black woman was also fairly tall. She came in wearing a barely-(/probably not) legal skirt and heels. The very tops of the legs are OK for beachwear but usually not seen at the Home of the Whopper. On the way out of the ladies room she had changed into a much frumpier outfit, hiding the assette and showing the empty saggy belly of someone who's recently lost weight. The other outfit was bundled up in her arm as she waited in line, ordered to go and headed back out to the same car. The two then rolled through the drive-through line, paused as I was unlocking my bicycle, and took off. BK-Theatre. As I arrived back at the marina one of Eduardo's employers hit me up for $3. Sorry, no. Sunday evening I dropped by Jerry's shop. Jerry works with wood and fabric and specializes in boat interiors. He's also an enthusiastic cook. He's recently connected a turntable and dug out a rather heat-damaged crate of scratched, cracked and dusty records. The turntable has no dust cover. The tonearm is not as free as its designer intended and the platter was never designed to address local vibration and rumble. Eh. It plays. It plays Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkle, classic Cosby routines that didn't make the best of compilations, La Femme Accident by OMD, old Cheech and Chong routines, Copeland conducts Copeland, Jim Croce, Bob Dylan and dozens more. The scratched memories make him smile. The Fanfare for the Common Man / Lincoln Portrait in particular had his attention. He pictured it playing loudly on his friend Scott's yacht as they cruised out on Memorial Day. I found it depressing. The quotes from Lincoln remind me how far amuk our system has run. Then Brian showed up and Jerry tossed some tri-tip on the propane grill and cooked some beet greens and pasta with olive oil and made some barbecue sauce for the steaks and even refused a monetary contribution when going out for liquor and cigarettes. Ok, so Sunday was good. I took up the keyboard intending to write of Monday. Happy Birthday Bob Dylan (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007
5:25 pm	Stuff: kayak, vintage television, yoga ball Buy my stuff: o Perception Dancer kayak, needs repair $40 o Packard Bell 19.5" vintage console television free (this piece has a new home.) o 24" purple yoga ball $12 o WaveRider wireless bridge/router $50 (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2007
4:18 pm	random: tab dump Notes to self: Need to have fewer tabs open. My browser is choking. inflectionpoint addresses anger. Someone else stomps waves. Meraki Mini shuns use of the slower bit rates. BBCode. Meraki Mini board photo and RedBoot startup. NetEquality documentation. Collected other Meraki-related resources. film projector bulb info: bulbconnection.com: definitions, including operating position abbreviations. GE Lamp 29360 (DCA), 150 watt, horizontal down, LCL 1.560 in (39.6 mm). Sylvania Lamp 76128 (DCF), 150 watt, base down, LCL 1.562 in (39.7 mm). eBay store Swampfox asserts that DCF replaces DEF/DCA. (Item number: 160117694989) Sylvania no longer markets DCA lamps. Linux: route and ipchains can set/limit MTU and MSS. Perfect 10 vs. Google on image thumbnails. Paul Anderson explains screenshots in Windows, MacOS and KDE. Dogs in Elk. WaveRider NCL 1135, which looks like a small PC with slots, configured as a wireless router. A friend of Maura takes stunning pictures. Right to a Speedy Trial: After five years, charges against Padilla peter out. Another awozniak. Hil, usually in poetry, writes prose. Skate, Trinity. Skate now. (b/w nude) geek: MSA hosts and ports. CrazySlutty in the shower opens with a shot of droplets on a breast. highlighted declaration of independence (requires Tribe login) differently highlighted declaration of ind. (requires Tribe login) message from hotpants mcgee (requires *my* Tribe login) Essex, recommended by Elspeth. IE CSS rendering weirdness: On Having Layout. A very clean floor (Japanese train station). kayak on Craigslist (lasting). "while being in pain can cause you to not want to even be touched, taking the step to have sex or even being more intimate can help overcome some of the depression.". [rsi.org.au] "my ass is obviously delicious, either that or it resembles a light source." Tylenol and corporate transparency. You don't have permission to access /918215.html on this server. Hrmph. Why was it open, then? Flip off the camera from within Jen's mouth. during: Mem: 256124k total, 252396k used, 3728k free, 944k buffers Swap: 1028120k total, 433252k used, 594868k free, 26716k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3761 duncan 15 0 287m 132m 8044 S 1.0 53.0 1006:46 x-www-browser after: Mem: 256124k total, 108136k used, 147988k free, 1128k buffers Swap: 1028120k total, 210356k used, 817764k free, 33364k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3657 root 14 -1 129m 21m 1424 S 0.0 8.5 1099:34 Xorg 3757 duncan 15 0 59664 11m 5644 S 0.0 4.5 7:58.52 kate (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 10th, 2007
5:59 pm	geek: konquerer likes memory It leaks! It leaks a LOT. Eh, shhh. Buy more stock in Micron and ship it. PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3651 duncan 15 0 261m 131m 16m S 36.9 52.5 46:29.82 konqueror 3543 root 14 -1 168m 15m 1616 S 8.5 6.3 19:39.51 Xorg 4120 duncan 15 0 65028 7860 3516 S 8.2 3.1 13:28.65 nspluginviewer 3614 duncan 16 0 34136 7964 6272 S 7.5 3.1 12:38.73 kded That's after about four hours. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
12:15 pm	San Francisco: free wireless mesh repeaters [ clearer map | announcement | project page ] Where SFLAN aims to meet the "last mile" networking needs Meraki.net is more concerned with the last 150 feet. And then the next 150. And so on. And so on. If you live inside the green shaded area and have at least window access Meraki is willing to send you a little mesh repeater. You don't need to have broadband though they'd not turn down your offer to donate some. They might even spring for a DSL link if your address seems a good spot from which to feed the mesh. If you have rooftop access consider tying the two networks together: Internet Archive –> SFLAN –> Meraki mesh –> your favorite park bench. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 31st, 2007
7:50 pm	noodle? Hey, rightsock, any word on Noodle? (already checked your journal and friends page -- nothing visible.) (oops. nothing beyond "on holiday starting friday morning [...] less than 7 days away" from the 23rd. See you in a fortnight.) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
12:03 am	words found elsewhere "For anonymity, we strongly recommend you do not use your real name" -- Personals signup form "this makes MySQL as secure as taping a $100 to the floor of a football stadium bathroom for safekeeping. This can't be stressed enough. Doing this is a bad idea." -- Bugzilla FAQ ""Last week, I couldn't work a suicide-bombing shift because I had to be alive early the next morning for patrol duty," Hassim said. "I was calling everyone, but I had a hell of a time trying to find someone to replace me. At the last minute, Fathi [Abd al-Khalid] agreed to take the shift. That guy's such a martyr."" -- Cop Moonlighting as Terrorist (link via breakpoint) "In what you wear I'd look better than you." -- The Gap "Partially Complete T61 Cell Phone by Sony Ericson." -- Electronic Goldmine. This is the same model as the first mobile phone I ever bought for myself. It was also the first of three to get stolen. (second|third) In each case the voice answering the stolen phone sounded black. "Included are a small phillips screwdriver, flat blade jewelers screwdriver, a back removing tool, a coin sized screwdriver, metal tweezers, plastic tweezers, soft brush and a knife to slash your wrists if the watch doesn't work when you're finished." -- Alltronics.com (Comment on this)
Monday, March 5th, 2007
9:32 pm	how to read this journal This journal is poorly organized and hard to navigate. ( my journal preferences ) Comments are welcome, even if I don't call you out by name or by photograph and even if the entry is not recent. Start here 2002: 12. 2003: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 2004: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 2005: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,... Current Music: Radio Nosferatu (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
2:37 pm	Lightning! Right here in FruitNut City! Lightning in the bay area.  Two seconds between the flicker/squawk of the lights and UPS and the beginning of a long rumble-RUMBLE-C!R!A!C!K!-rattle of thunder.  Apparently all the gear involved in my network uplink survived, including two Linksys HomePlug adapters. And here comes the hail.  Crazy stuff here, Maynard. (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
3:51 am	playing Rube Goldberg with water droplets under stage lighting It's raining. I will soon be wet. I made some good progress today on the waterproofing project. A second hoop of sprinkler pipe now arches over the boat's delaminated plywood cabintop. A second pair of ropes arches over that hoop, the members of the pair tied to each other with a mesh of thinner rope. The idea was to have the plastic pipe hold a waterproof layer up while the rope mesh held the same layer down. It's an incomplete project, of course. There are supposed to be three hoops between the masts, another two just fore of the main and aft of the mizzen and possibly more if they seem a good idea. With two in place the pattern from above is an "H-" with the center bar of the H extending beyond the middle and hanging in mid air above the boom. An H seemed adequate for getting some plastic up for tonight's rain. That sounded like a great idea until I went out to actually do it. After taking the biggest tarp out of the bag I found I was holding the upwind end of a rather bulky twelve foot long plastic streamer which suspended itself nearly horizontally in a roughly 25 knot sustained gust. I rolled the tarp into a rather messy ball and stuffed it into the cabin. Even if I got it up there aren't enough lines in place to hold it down. If your house leaks there are several layers of stopgap measures you can apply. The one I started with is analogous to stapling a big sheet of metal over the shingles. That took several hours and wound up scrapped just before the big sheet blew away. Another is to crawl into the attic and staple plastic to the underside of the roof timbers. That should funnel the leaking water to the sides and ruin the exterior walls while preserving the ceilings. I did that by adding a tarp under two existing layers known to leak. Another is to arrange buckets on hooks and shelves and to drape wet string from A to B to bring the tiny stream past C. I've tried something along that line too but it doesn't work well enough to keep the bedding dry. I've scheduled another day off work tomorrow, another day to push back against entropy. One of these days I'll build a little doghouse around the laser printer. Hopefully tonight the hair-triggered GFCI will actually let the UPSs run silently overnight. As long as the power stays on then despite being wet I can be warm and brightly lit. For the record Homeplug® gear dislikes GFCI breakers too. My current uplink goes through two of 'em and it's only sometimes faster than dialup. The loss is higher with decent-sized packets but even at 64 bytes it's high: Sent = 1000, Received = 931, Lost = 69 (6% loss), Min=19ms, Max=688ms, Avg=37ms. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, January 29th, 2007
10:43 pm	home is where the amperes flow The little things... I'm comfortably warm though no heaters are running. I'm not walking but sitting down on a pile of towels and clothing. The clothing is recently washed. I'm looking at a computer monitor. The wireless connection, used with permission, is up as usual. An hour ago I was watching Pink Panther cartoons on a two inch active matrix TFT LCD screen. I have enough privacy that I could be nude in this space without conflict. A current meter in the corner by a night light says I'm pulling 3.5 amps through a cord which runs underwater for part of its length. 365 watts, says the same meter when I press another button. I have a place to be. My name is written on the right dry-erase board in the right color. Enough people are asking me to schlep boxes and televisions that I can afford to keep that name in the right color for months. Before watching cartoons I organized a tiny cupboard apparently designed for hanging clothes while playing a Tina Turner concert video. The cupboard now holds various types of food in Sterilite shoeboxes: six quarts set aside for coffee and tea, six for chocolate, six for vitamins, six for yoghurt and another six for various nonperishables passed my way at Christmas. Tina Turner, introducing her songs in 2000, sounds like Ru Paul. I'm doing OK. I could be a whole lot worse. Thanks for asking. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 15th, 2006
12:44 am	new toy on okcupid It seems there's a new toy over on okstupid and it's been implemented with a few errors in the statistics. I suspect I'm included in the total of "others" and that the logic behind "more than 50%" is broken. Those guys are supposed to be all about the math. "MATCH ME", the new toy, asks a few questions claiming these are the topics about which a given profile's owner cares most strongly. I tried it against three profiles: who? score outscored tied with beaten by comments others? myself 87% 0% 100% 0% You outscored more than 50% of takers. 1 alisaur 75% 50% 50% 0% You outscored more than 50% of takers. 2 sexyjoodles 67% 0% 100% 0% You outscored more than 50% of takers. 1 Then I got tired of it. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006
12:45 pm	random spam Hey, I guess even a doe-eyed Disney princess sometimes gets ill. While looking for patterns in spam this morning I came across:    Message-ID: <01c71838$eac25cf0$6c822ecf@Pocahontas'ssplatters> Skipping lunch now? You're welcome. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 18th, 2006
11:47 pm	PBS is good for the soul PBS is good for the soul. Refuse to Choose With Barbara Sher!. Things not working out for you? People label you flighty? Eh, go with it, her message. I have to assume she lives with less economic pressure than the SF bay area imposes. (her site) Tonight's Trek: Space Seed. Kirk's nemesis Kahn was once Khan Noonian Singh(1). Remember the name chosen for Data's creator in ST:TNG, also a major character in the Enterprise series? I'll leave it to JOhn to expose the improvements in this version, first aired tonight. On my two inch screens most of that work just doesn't show. 1: "Khan Noonian Singh", Kirsten corrects me. Transcribing what I heard I'd written "Kahn Unian Sung". (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 15th, 2006
1:52 pm	amusing warnings and gratitude for hearing A few weeks ago, my sense of consumer confidence bolstered by a three digit math error in the checkbook, I bought a rather nice battery charger. Not a three bank Statpower marine charger but still what looks like a well engineered three stage voltage and current limited gel-cell compatible twelve volt battery charger. The manual amuses me. The unit has several modes, several rates and several battery type options. Obviously a device capable of gently charging a small sealed battery and also capable of throwing 80 amps at a starter motor can cause some serious damage when one pokes the wrong buttons. This comes up in the manual in the section on equalization, a process where a wet cell battery is deliberately overcharged to allow the weaker cells to take some charge even in the presence of a strong-looking charge on other cells in the series stack. This causes the fully charged cells in the stack to boil, releasing oxygen and hydrogen from the electrolyte. The text: WARNING - NEVER TRY TO EQUALIZE A GEL CELL, THE RESULTING EXPLOSION COULD CAUSE SERIOUS INJURY, DEATH AND PROPERTY DAMAGE. Not the the battery may explode but the explosion may cause damage. Yeah. Now I want to bring that charger and a gel cell somewhere an explosion would be entertaining. That charger is at Mom's place trying to revive or confirm as dead some batteries I have there. I expect it will confirm that they haven't held their ability to take and hold a charge. The charger in use here, topping up an old UPS battery connected to the bilge pump, is a much simpler model, a six amp automatic charger. As an automatic charger it should shut off when the battery is full . . . but sometimes it gets stuck and continues charging. Apparently that happened last night. A little LED voltage indicator showed the battery voltage exceeded 14. What I noticed first, though, was a gentle hissing sound from the battery. When I found the hiss I unplugged the charger and the hiss subsided. I'm really glad to have good hearing. The old charger failed to shut off. The little battery was overcharged. Gel-cell batteries respond to a continuing overcharge condition by leaking or exploding and if I hadn't heard the hiss, no louder than the background noise of a typical computer speaker system, I might be dealing with a stinky mess of sulfuric acid or worse. As it turned out all I need to clean up in that system is the wiring between that flakey charger and a bigger battery that can handle an occasional burst of overenthusiasm. (Comment on this)