Mentioned Elsewhere

Okay, I was reading scrollback from a chatroom at work and saw this phenomenally cool video (that kind of makes me wish I was still 20 y.o.) Probably best viewed with volume off, there's just the camera operator's commentary and a few honks from passers-by.

Props to Vinsh for sharing.

Uncle's Day -aka- Cub Lake Trail

CUB LAKE
Originally uploaded by MERLIN08

My neice Jessica invited our family along with part of hers for a pre-Father's Day hike in RMNP. We hiked along the Cub Lake Trail which starts in the meadow and works its way up to Cub Lake. I'm now calling the day before Father's Day Uncle's Day in commemoration (though there probably already is an Uncle's Day according to Hallmark.)

Summertime

Today was glorious, warm, sunny, and summery. It was so nice out when I got up, I went out to "flush" the backyard of canine detritus. That was quick as it had been done recently. This was prep for mowing. However, it looked like string line trimming needed to happen, so I grabbed my trusty B&D whacker and went to work... After cutting for a couple minutes, it dawned on me that 6am* might be a bit early for the fam and the neighbors... :^) So I set down the whacker and had some breakfast. But it does illustrate how glorious today was.

As I was eating breakfast, I noticed birds retrieving dog hair from the back deck welcome mat. I grabbed some video equipment to record this (as last summer there was quite a pecking order established between a few birds competing for materials that was hilarious.) Unfortunately, by the time the gear was gathered and aimed, the birds had given up.... Maybe tomorrow.

I did ultimately get five hours of yard work completed before lunch. And followed that up with a high school graduation (air conditioned!) And then a bit of tool shopping to replace the worn out string trimmer. I picked up another B&D trimmer. I went for battery operated this time so that we don't have to string power cords all over the yard. (I don't think gas-powered are all that good for the air.)

And now, blogging from the coffee shop during a thunderstorm. Northern Colorado, late May, delightful.....

*I regularly wake up before 5:30 a.m. to feed the spoiled rotten Shih Tzu.

Presidential Memorial Day Observance

I found this nugget:

[President] Obama is not retreating on Memorial Day. Instead of visiting Arlington cemetery, Obama and the first lady will participate in a Memorial Day ceremony at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Ill., about 50 miles south of Chicago. Moreover, not every president has spent Memorial Day at Arlington. In 1983, President Reagan was at a summit meeting, and the deputy secretary of defense -- not even the veep! -- placed the wreath. Nine years later, President George H.W. Bush passed off the wreath to Vice President Dan Quayle. And in 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney took on the wreath mission, while President George W. Bush was in Texas.

References:

http://www.cem.va.gov/cems/listcem.asp list of National Cemeteries (why not visit one near you?)

http://www.cem.va.gov/ includes the info on President Obama's visit to Lincoln National Cemetery

http://www.cem.va.gov/MemorialDayVisit.asp

Fort Logan National Cemetery
4400 W. Kenyon Avenue
Denver, CO 80236

Blog Post-A-Day, NaNoWriMo Redux

As anyone (anyone, please, throw me a bone, anyone?) who reads this blog knows, I epically failed at the "blog-a-day" for 30 consecutive days plan last November. However, the long days (sunshine from 5am to 9:30pm) are motivating me to blog again. No promises (or even plans at this point) on frequency, but hopefully MORE than once every half-year.

Middle of Nowhere Update

I went back to Albin over the weekend. Prior to that, I sent my son up there with a Cradlepoint router and a Verizon Wireless USB EVDO cell phone modem. This particular Cradlepoint has an external antenna. Once again it worked fine. And by worked fine, I mean if you were in the garage with it, you got a great WiFi signal from the Cradlepoint (and its MIMO rigging.) However, the garage is detached and 40+ yards away from the house. Within the house, the signal only penetrated 1/2 a room--so you had to be almost staring out the garage-facing window to use the WiFi-Cell router.

I had brought a Netgear wireless router and about 50' of Cat5E. However, the reason the Netgear was scrapped became obvious. Although the WiFi on it was working fine, the WAN port apparently was not. So, I got a nice signal from the Netgear but a signal to nowhere.

And on that note, I'm full circle--back to the middle of nowhere. I don't plan to return to the hinterlands for a while, so I've terminated the Verizon Wireless account. (As always, Verizon Customer service was quick, knowledgeable, and efficient--no joke.) There was at least one other bit of good news. There were many other folks at the family reunion, many sporting AT&T phones, mostly iPhones, and they were able to get a cell signal much of the time at the north end of the house.

Toy or Tool

I've been looking at getting a new toy/tool and am leaning towards this one:

Asus Eee PC T101MT.

This machine comes from the long line of eee pcs from Asus. This one is a Tablet computer--so it's not just a "pad", it's also a computer. It does have a few shortcomings, primarily that it is limited to 2G of RAM. It's also a bit tricky to convert it from 160GB HD to an SSD (rumors of 16 screws to do so.)

However, it does run Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and that (with a few tweaks/fixes) enables about everything except a fully functional multi-touch and pressure sensitivity. I'll likely keep this multiboot. If you are one of 'doze kind of people, bear in mind that the Starter edition is pretty much a non-starter on this box and you'll need to pay the Ballmer for something more (or re-read that first line: IT RUNS LINUX.)

There is a promotional video here and a "hands on" video here (but a bit long.) I think if I purchase this, I'll do a "hands on Lucid" video for teh Intartube.

Nanu Nanoo Nanowrimo

NaNoWriMo (National Nobody Writes Month?) is on and although I'm not entered into that fine group of folks and have no intent to crank out a 50000 word novella this month, I thought I'd use their inspiration as my own (albeit 19 days late) and try and crank out a blog-a-day for 30 days.

This idea came to me yesterday so I'm counting my start date as 2009-11-19. (And unsuprisingly, I already have another thought to blog so want to get "mental" credit for two consecutive days.)

Oh and for those of you dereferencing the title, here's the obligatory Mork &Mindy links:

• Nanu Nanu!
• more IMDB
• photo/fansite
• Mork calling Orson

... and, jftr, it's National Novel Writing Month--not really Nobody Writes Month.

Laptop Display Attracts Flies

Okay, I've not heard of anyone else complaining of this--but my laptop screen REALLY attracts flies. I've never had a machine do that before. (This is probably my 15-20th different laptop.)

This particular unit is an HP Mobile Workstation, the HP EliteBook 8530w. It's a very nice machine--it just has this one peculiarity.

I'm blogging this primarily for folks to weigh in if they have seen something similar. Please email me or post against this blog entry if you are having a similar problem (with any notebook or laptop or netbook.) Thanks.

laptop.flies@dowdberry.net

Now, where did I leave that swatter.

The Middle of Nowhere

I took the MiFi to PhilBurn Pharms, northwest of Albin, WY. Yes, this is one of those middle of nowhere places.

I set up the MiFi in the detached garage and got a very nice EV-DO signal--1Mb down, 400 Kb up. More than sufficient for this type of remote access. However, I noticed the signal / connection varied a lot depending on unknown factors (though potentially my location with respect to the MiFi.)

After the successful garage test, I tried to connect to the MiFi's wifi router from the house. There are 50 yards are so from the house to the garage. No joy. My laptop couldn't make a solid connection to the Verizon SSD over that distance. I then repositioned the MiFi within the garage trying to get a connection to the house. No location provided a connection.

The next step was to try the MiFi itself in the house. The MiFi never saw an EVDO signal. I could generally get a low grade 1xRTT signal (19-90k at times), but that is no better than dial up (which is already available in the house.)

The garage is situated south of the house on slightly higher ground. Anecdotally, some folks were able to get cell phone coverage on the south end of the house or on the porch steps at the south end of the house. So I next positioned the MiFi on the Southeast corner of the roof of the house. Bingo. This provided an EV-DO connection (albeit somewhat slower than the garage's connection.) It also was a bit flakier than the garage connection. I might get an EV-DO signal long enough to run a dslreports.com test but then have it decay to 1xRTT immediately thereafter. (The signal type is reported by the MiFi web gui.)

I then proceeded to try the other three corners of the house and the ridgeline on the north and south sides of the house--no joy. Only the southeast corner of the roof would pickup a signal. Also, it seemed vary dependent on how the MiFi was oriented. No signal at all at times and a flakey signal at best. At this point, I tried to regain a strong signal in the garage. No luck. It appears to be very, very transient and spotty. Here is the Verizon wireless coverage map. Select Broadband and V-CAST and see what coverage is near Albin, WY. Lot's of pockets where there is no connection and nothing much north of Albin more than a mile or so.

It's also difficult to assess where there cell towers might be located as there is no clearly defined direction from the map.

MiFi -- Wifi via EVDO

Well, nothing but kudos for the folks at Novatel and Verizon Wireless for coming out with the MIFI 3G Hotspot. Works like a champ here at my office and at my home. The real test will be the middle of nowhere. I'll give an update then.

The short story is: works as advertised. It does seem to require Windows or Mac to perform the initial activation via USB but works fine providing WiFi and DHCP afterwards. (It will connect wifi prior to being activated, but you have no uplink.) Also, you can view some statistics/configuration information via the MiFi's web interface with any device after it gets a dhcp lease.

More about this new toy later.

Webby?

I don't get the webby awards. I probably never will. There were sooooo many categories I didn't even have the patience to scroll through the list.

The name of one, Wordle, did intrigue me. By referencing this blog, it generated the following image:

HP delivers!

I don't often (ever?) blog about HP, but just today they did something blog-worthy. My son has a 2510p laptop. It started making a really weird noise a week or so ago. I found out about it a week ago. It was clearly a hardware problem related to the fan. (It sounded like a cross between a dying cow mooing and a sheep bleating.)

We called HP support. We bought the laptop with a 3 year extended warranty. Their voice menu sent us to hold but after about 6 minutes a human answered. I described the problem and offered to boot up the laptop so she could hear it. Upon hearing the fan noise, she immediately said "Yep, that's a hardware problem. I'm overnighting you a shipping container. We'll have it back to you in a week."

HP had it back in less than a week. Nice. That this came on the heals of a fiasco with my neice's Acer Aspire laptop (which is essentially a brick now) made it even sweeter. Thanks HP.

Mouse Traps Man

We live on the outskirts of town, not far from the mountains in Colorado. We've seen deer, fox, elk, etc in the neighborhood and in our own backyard. Once, I even saw a bear cub. Of course, we're somewhat urban as well, so we also have our share of squirrels. Moreover, there are lots and lots of bunnies in our neighborhood and as a result there are also reports occasionally of mountain lions.

However, I've never heard of any of these critters ever attacking people. Perhaps they might attack the occasional dog or cat. And, I certainly wouldn't have my toddler playing outside after dark upon reports of a cougar sighting.

Now however, there has been one report of dangerous animals: mice. Mice, a general nuisance and sometimes a public health hazard, are not known to take down humans. Sure, I've had my finger nibbled on in the middle of the night--a most disturbing phenomenon. But hardly life threatening. Today however, I went to check the traps distributed throughout our house as we've been seeing/hearing mice again for a few days. (They are driven indoors during the winter.) At last, we've killed one with the classic claptrap, spring-loaded mousetrap. I finish my cup of coffee and prepare to haul the critter to the trash. I grab an empty plastic grocery sack (classic re-use) and pick up the mouse, trap and all and head for the dumpster in the garage...

and it starts moving...

I nearly have a heart attack. Anyone who knows me, knows I'm prone to being easily startled. Seriously, I thought I was going to die from the fright. I could see it now, in the Rodent Reporter:

Mouse Traps Man

In local news, a mouse named Lazarus gave his all for the cause today. He, a longtime resident in Loveland, CO, trapped and killed a man today. He feigned his own death by deliberately catching himself in a mousetrap. However, he did so in such a way that he was not mortally wounded. Then, he waited for the unsuspecting homeowner to return home. He lay very, very still, in classic dead mouse fashion--akin to an opossum. As the homeowner proceeded to dispose of this "dead" mouse, Lazarus begin wriggling and moving... triggering a fatal heart attack in the startled homeowner.

Sadly, Lazarus did not survive the incident. The homeowner crushed Lazarus as he fell to the floor. And from this, the second "death" of Lazarus, he would not arise.

Lazarus is survived by an unknown number of kin. Funeral arrangements are being made by Waste Management of Northern Colorado. There will be no viewing. In lieu of flowers, please send cheese to your favorite charity in Lazurus' name.

Kino is keen! dvgrab is <bang head> keen too!

Kino, the digital video (dv) non-linear editor on open source platforms (but notably Linux) is really keen. It will find your camcorder if it's plugged into firewire and start using it for capture.

This pretty much "just works". Life is good.

Perhaps you decide you need to be using dvgrab--after all, you're just recording the video--not really trying to edit or view it (after all the image is already displayed on the back of the camcorder....)

so:


dowdberry@longplay:~$ dvgrab grabname
Error: no camera exists


Okay, specify the camera....


dowdberry@longplay:~$ dvgrab -card 0 grabname
Error: no camera exists


(Do that about a dozen different ways. Try it as root. Pass in /dev/raw1394 try to stdin /dev/raw1394... still nothing. Read the manpage for dvgrab. Re-read the manpage for dvgrab. Re-re-read the manpage for dvgrab. Google for about an hour. Look at the strace of kino and dvgrab... nothing. Learn about testlibraw. Re-read the dvgrab strace. Re-read the kino strace.)

Finally, closely reading the kino strace shows this CLUEFUL snippet:


write(2, ">> Starting Capture", 19) = 19
write(2, "\n", 1) = 1
write(2, ">> AV/C ", 8) = 8
write(2, "Enabled", 7) = 7
write(2, "\n", 1) = 1
write(2, ">>> Using iec61883 capture", 26) = 26
write(2, "\n", 1) = 1
open("/dev/raw1394", O_RDWR) = 6
write(6, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\4\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 52) = 52


<Cluebulb illuminates!>

Hmmm, I saw something about "avc" in the dvgrab man page....


dowdberry@longplay:~$ dvgrab -noavc -card 0 junk
Warning: Cannot set RR-scheduler
Warning: Cannot disable swapping
Capture Started
^C"junk002.dv": 8.81 MiB 77 frames timecode -1076813608:-1076813816:-1209659343.195702400 date 2008.11.29 12:15:43
Capture Stopped

medberry@longplay:~$ file junk002.dv
junk002.dv: DIF (DV) movie file (NTSC)


Woot!

Now... what was I going to do with that video? Oh yeah, dvsource to dvswitch to dvsink

Trick or Treat Early

I live in a contested state--Colorado. This year, for the first time ever, I begin to understand what New Hampshire or Iowa must be like during the primaries. We've had pollers call. We've had push-polls call. We've had city party offices call. We've had county offices call. We've had state party offices call. And of course, we've had national parties call. None of this is really that out of the ordinary, just an increase in call volume over years past.

However, this year has seen something new. Door-to-door canvassing by the presidential, senatorial, and congressional candidate parties. No--Barack, McCain, Palin, and Biden haven't made the rounds themselves, merely their faithful. So, this isn't really the same as New Hampshire or Iowa. The presidential tickets have all been in the neighborhood though (and Barack is in town today.) However, we've had our doorbell rung sooooo many times this year we had to put up a notice on the front porch to cease and desist. It was just like Halloween--almost as soon as I had re-focused after one doorbell ring, another would occur.

Perhaps we should just have made two buckets of campaign pins and held them out for the trick-or-treaters to take one of their choice. They do all come in costume of course (well, with lapel pins, hats, etc.)

Kids, don't dress up as any politician this halloween and expect to get the prized chocolate candy bar--we're tired of that already. Do something far less scary--come as a chainsaw toting villain, blood-dripping vampire, or blood-curdling, screaming banshee. I can't take another politician.

Infalmible

in·fal·mi·ble (ĭn-făl'mə-bəl)
adj.

1. appearing to be infallible but only in appearance as there are corner cases where failure is inevitable
2. a mumbling of the word infallible, see: infallible
3. a misread of the word infomumble a portmanteau of information and mumble, where mumble is frequently used as regular expression meaning "match whatever makes sense beyond this point."
   

Twofer

A second post today--woot, it's a twofer.

I was asked to play a game this morning, a very simple word ladder. Go from FOUR to FIVE in 7 steps (6 in-between words). It's a pretty straight forward puzzle.

And that got me to thinking--I love solving puzzles like that and lots of other related mind games. And everyone at work knows it. They can get me distracted sooooo easily. Good thing I'm not a teacher or I'd never make it through a lesson on time.

Recently, I was asked (not really as a puzzle but....) "How would you test this software? It's a command line oriented program call randy that is supposed to take as input the size of random data to produce on stdout." I thought about it for a few minutes and at last a light bulb went off: Compress the results. If they are incompressible, it's evidence leaning toward the randomness. (Now that's not exactly true--even all zeroes could be random.)

The person who asked the question hollered and nearly fell out of her chair. You know why? That's not what she was worried about. She didn't think anyone could determine in white box format whether or not something was generating random data--she never even considered the possibility. (She merely wanted someone to send gibberish input to see what happened and to ensure when you asked for x bits, you got x bits.) But I saw it not as an interview question or quality assurance question--I saw it as a brain teaser. And brain teasers have brain teaser answers.... and if you want to measure for random, the brain teaser answer is to measure the results for compressibility. (At least in my mind.)

This is perhaps the geekiest posting I've ever blogged. I suspect I've been inspired by my cohorts and reading literature. Just for Fun by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond is the book I've just finished. I'm trying to teach my son how to do fractions (including complete factorization) and I work with people who send me puzzles--at least one a week and oft times more. Thanks HP.

Get Firefox 3

Anyone who has ever asked me to work on their computer in whatever way has heard me eschew Internet Explorer and recommend Firefox. Now, Firefox has been updated to version 3. Well, that will occur on Tuesday June 17.

On that day, Mozilla Foundation (the makers of Firefox) would like to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in one day. This could be a really self-defeating goal as it may saturate the Internet. I've agreed to participate though and will be grabbing 3 or 4 different varieties of Firefox that day: Windows XP version, Linux 32 bit, and Linux 64 bit for certain. Additionally, I'll have a raft of Ubuntu machines that will be doing "automatic" updates to the final release version of Firefox 3 that day. (I've been running the beta and release candidates of Firefox 3 for some time.)

FF3 has a variety of enhancements and improvements over FF2. And it is vastly superior to Internet Explorer. If you are running Opera 9.5, I've got no comment--you know what you're doing.



And holler if you ever want to try Ubuntu -- or grab it here:

Get Ubuntu

Dorothy, Dorothy

I've been dwelling on the recent tornadoes that hit our area last Thursday and the tornadoes of my youth.

I grew up in southwest Kansas. As you can see from Tornado Alley, I was smack dab in the lane. Southwest Kansas is a flat, somewhat barren place. You can see forever as a result. One summer, I forget which, a girl came to town for the summer to stay with relatives. I don't recall her name or the particular summer at all. I do recall having a crush on her. As we were walking to the ballpark that summer, I commented that there would be a storm and the rain would hit in about 45 minutes. She scoffed. "How can you possibly know it's going to rain in 45 minutes?" she asked. I pointed to the southwest sky and said, "You see that storm front? That's 45 minutes away from here. The prevailing winds are always from that direction and when you can see it in that direction, you know you've got 45 minutes." You can use that time to a) walk home from the ball field, b) bring in your laundry from the line, c) dry off and walk home from the pool, or d) get to the edge of town for a better view of the storm. Actually, none of those things really take 45 minutes as the town was about the size of Berthoud, CO. And, I let my mom take the clothes off the line. Typically, these storms--especially those based off of supercells--bring a storm of dirt just ahead of the rain. This makes for very mud splattered clothes.

But back to those tornadoes. I saw tornadoes, and supercells as a kid--mostly in the distance or sometimes only second hand--my vision wasn't very good in those days. My folks would talk of the storms and their destructive power. After one such tornado (in the late spring, early summer, but it seems school was still in session), we drove over to see a trailer house that had not moved an inch--well, the base of it hadn't. This particular trailer house had been sealed up--likely no one was at home. Consequently, it over pressured and exploded. The air speed of a tornado causes a significant vacuum to form. The contents of that trailer were strewn around locally and the tires that were in place on the roof of it (and the roof itself) fell neatly onto the floor of ths structure. The walls--exterior and interior--were unidentifiable from the rest of the debris.

During our recent storm, the Thompson school district (along with the Poudre and Weld county districts) held "tornado lockdowns". I'm not entirely sure why they call this a lockdown--though it probably refers to not switching classrooms or leaving the building. The children were kept inside and moved to interior rooms (without windows) in the school. When I was very young, K-2, we frequently had tornado drills and when we actually had tornado warnings (usually after a sighting) we'd resume the tornado drill position--lined up in the hall facing the west wall and crouching/bowing to some imaginary goddess of destruction. Our hands over our head in the "kiss your crotch goodbye" position. I'm not sure if the school districts here in Colorado still use that position or not.

Another thing I remember from my youth was in a particularly bad storm, moving from our house (which had no storm shelter nor basement) to the church. We didn't go to the closest church, but rather a couple blocks to OUR church. However, our neighbor who to my knowledge never attended church went with us. As a child, I struggled to understand why we could invite a "stranger" to our church for protection from a storm but that we weren't fit to go to the closest church ourselves to seek shelter. I suspect it was a parental pride issue though I've never discusssed this with my folks.

Today we do have a basement--however, it's not clear how we'd ever know to descend therein. I've heard there was some reverse 911 last week--but not with enough warning prior to the descent of the storm to be effective. Back-in-the-day, we watched a lot of TV. The thing was almost always on, sucking our will to live. So, when the stormcasters noted that there was a tornado watch in effect or more pressingly, a tornado warning, we'd almost always know about it. The Emergency Broadcast System would kick in and make the pronouncement and the news would typically scroll along the bottom of the screen the areas effected and any sightings. Today, we don't watch TV. Moreover, we seldom listen to the radio. The radio stations at any rate are rarely locally operated so its not entirely clear what effect they would have even if we had them on. I have heard an EBS on NPR/KUNC, so perhaps that would be of some value. Our time is spent watching canned (DVD, VHS, Youtube) video and surfing the net. Perhaps I should add that at least one child spends every waking moment playing MMORPGs. None of these are conducive to early warning. My in-laws, bless their souls, have a NOAA radio. And, if I were truly concerned, I'd be sporting a NOAA in my kitchen as well. Surely, it would have been non-stop emergency radio excitement on that device last week.

Last week, I was able to contact my eldest son via cell phone and tell him to "duck and cover." He thought I'd blown a head gasket but apparently enough other folks got similar phone calls the kids (who had only had a half-day of school and were goofing off) finally took it seriously and went to the basement.

I seem to be done rambling--I've made no links to tornadoes, tornado alley, home towns, EBS, nor stations. I mostly just wanted to stream of consciousness this thought out. I guess I'll tag this melancholy nostalgia. A quick check shows that wikipedia is familiar with tornadoes and their ilk--for more info, head there.