Posting from a blackberry
Jul 07
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Just trying this out to see if it works. It’s somewhat amazing how my blackberry is becoming my primary computer all day as I’m running about with caitlin.
Blind Search
Jun 07
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The only real way to actually test out search engines. Compare the results with all of the formatting removed and location radomnized. Here’s a great site to test it out for yourself. You do a search and then vote for the site that you think has the best results.
In the early voting it looks like Bing is actually edging out Google by a slight margin. At the time of writing Bing is up 42% to Google’s 41% with Yahoo trailing behind at 17%. It’s often apparent that two of the results are quite good while the third is not nearly as good with the third place result being Yahoo.
HP Desktop Centos installs
Jun 05
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I picked up a couple HP desktop machines to beef up my garage datacenter recently and came across some very different experiences while installing Centos 5.3.
On the HP a6700f, which goes for about $500 with a quad core AMD phenom at 1.8Ghz, 4Gb memory, and a 500Gb disk, the Centos install went beautifully. I had a running linux server in a matter of minutes with everything picked up and running as expected.
Later, I had needed one more machine and was at Frys where they only had the HP a6720f. It’s a bit more expensive, but comes with a 2.2Ghz AMD Phenom and 6Gb of memory. However the install on this box was a completely different story, almost nothing worked. The motherboard is slightly different and the ahci driver couldn’t pick up the sata harddrive. The install would hang for awhile and if you checked the alt-f3 screen you could see that the driver was failing while trying to communicate with the harddrive. Using Google, I was able to determine that at the install prompt you needed to add the param “pci=nomsi”. With this the harddrive was picked up properly, but uses the device-mapper driver instead of the normal /dev/sda. I haven’t noticed any performance difference though.
After I got the machine installed on the now functioning disk I realized that the on board Gig eth card hadn’t been picked up. A trip back to Google and I found that on this chipset that the on board ethernet is not supported yet with linux. So a quick jump to amazon to pick up a Intel PRO/1000 PT dual Gig eth adapter and I had a fully functioning server.
I would definitely say that the while overall the HP “a” desktop line is great for an ultra cheap linux server, the a6720f is just not worth the headaches. Pick up the a6700f instead.
Bing’s not bad
Jun 02
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I saw today that Microsoft released their new search engine Bing and have spent some time playing with it. It’s definitely been a pleasant surprise, which is much better than I ever thought Msoft could pull off.
Of course one of the best ways to test something is to do a head to head comparison. Here’s a little site, that allows you to search on both sites at once. For the handful of test queries that I threw at the two search engines I would say it was a toss-up as to who had the best results. The test would be even better if it stripped the formatting and randomized the display so you didn’t know which was which by the appearance or location. I think in such a test Bing could hold its own.
This is actually exciting to see a real competitor appear again.
Amazon is listening
May 27
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There’s a new application at http://kindle.amazon.com where you can view all of the notes and highlights that you’ve made while reading on your kindle. This is a great first step. It is just a first step though and they need to add a bit more functionality to this application such as sending these notes out as email or editing and searching from the web interface.
Overall I’m excited to see the forward progress though.
Shuttle Launch
May 11
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I caught the space shuttle launch live on the news today and it’s a mighty impressive sight, watching live on the cameras as the Earth pulls away into the background. It’s such a crazy thing to watch, everything seems to be so close to the edge between control and disaster.
It’s a bit emotional to watch the launch live because you never know if you’re going to see something amazing or horrific. I still remember vividly being a small kid, home sick from school watching the Price is Right when the news cut in to announce the Challenger disaster. I also remember just as clearly being in the middle of a masters swimming set in Mountain View when someone ran over and told us that the Columbia had broken up. These events really stuck with me for some reason.
I have to wonder if the space shuttle is the best way to go about getting people into space these days. It just seems so complex, and I wonder if NASA truly had the ability to take a second look at space exploration if they would choose the same route with modern technology available. That’s one of the reasons why I’m excited to see things like Scaled Composites with Burt Rutan making their own attempts at space flight.
New kindle coming soon
May 06
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Just saw the specs on the new kindle that amazon is getting ready to release and I’m pretty excited. Some of the items that I’m looking forward to are the larger screen, native support of pdf, book search and annotation.
One area that the new kindle will need to improve, that I didn’t hear mentioned, is with book/document management. If you have anywhere near the limit of 3,500 documents on your kindle, you need a better way to move through them than in a straight list. Folders or tags or some way to categorize items would be a huge help.
I’m a long ways out of college now, but as an ACM member I subscribe to their digital library updates with research papers on computing topics. I’ve got hundreds of papers in pdf format that I currently print out for reading since it’s just not comfortable to read long form papers on the laptop or in the sun in the backyard. I would love to be able to put these on my kindle, but managing that many documents along with books that I’ve purchased could be a headache.
Also while I would love to be able to markup documents for later reference while studying, one concern that I have is the ability to export my markups to some other format. I took advantage of Atlassian’s sale of Confluence and Jira for $5 a piece awhile back and have set up a personal wiki for keeping track of my own notes. Even if it was a simple text export, I would want a way to get the notes that I take while reading out for later use.
Overall though, the new kindle looks like a compelling upgrade.
Discovered Peter Hamilton’s Books
Apr 29
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Came across Pandora’s Star through my amazon.com recommendations and absolutely loved the book. It’s exactly the type of Sci-Fi that I enjoy, looking at how the world could be different under different circumstances. The main change to kick the story off is what could happen if a Jobs/Wozniak style duo could create wormhole technology out of their garage. This one change is then a jumping off point for an epic look into the future.
The initial story is a two book series, but the it is also continued after a further jump into the future with the Void Trilogy. I’ve made it through the first four books of the five book series and am anxiously waiting for the last book to be published in 2010.
The beginning of the Void trilogy is a bit difficult to get through, there are a lot of changes that take awhile to get used to, but the story is definitely worth the struggle. I would recommend the stories for anyone that’s a fan of Sci-Fi.
Just discovered Bloomberg TV
Apr 29
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Being home all day I usually like to keep something on the TV while eating lunch or feeding Caitlin. I had been watching a mix of CNBC and MSNBC, but over time had become so frustrated with the lack of any real news. It seems that during the day it was non-stop commentary from talking heads that didn’t understand the basic concepts of what they were discussing. I just couldn’t take it any more.
Yesterday I discovered that one channel down from CNBC was Bloomberg TV. I was completely shocked to see that it actually covered financial news during the day. So much more interesting to watch.
I think Caitlin might be my daughter
Apr 29
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We both woke up sneezing like crazy this morning. I think we’re both allergic to the huge amount of pollen blooming out of the back yard today. Unfortunately for her, I can take Claritin and she can’t.
Macbook networking issues
Feb 14
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I noticed recently that my macbook was having issues communicating with certain websites. One site was a management portal for a customer and another was the entire suite of apache.org websites. Since I’m using the apache projects on a daily basis, not being able to access these websites is a major issue.
The behavior that I was seeing was that certain web pages would take over a minute to load each time. However, almost every other aspect of networking was working just fine. So I started to dig in more on what was going on. The issue started at approximately the same time that I had turned on encryption for my wireless network, so this was an obvious first suspect. I tried for sometime to see if there was anything on the web dealing with speed issues with WPA, but didn’t come across anything that was relevant.
A ping of tomcat.apache.org was showing that DNS resolved immediately and that there was a decent ping time of ~100ms. However, trying to load the page at http://tomcat.apache.org still took minutes.
My next test was to try to telnet to tomcat.apache.org port 80 to see how that performed. What was odd was that like the webpage, this took quite some time. As it was processing though, I noticed that it was trying to connect to an ipv6 address instead of the ipv4 address that was reported by ping.
So as a test I went into the OSX System Preferences > Network and tried disabling ipv6 networking. Immediately, all of the pages that were having issues were snappy again.
Moon over Redwood City
Feb 03
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My wife Jaimie, purchased a Meade telescope for me a couple of years ago, but I was never really able to get into using it. My eyes just weren’t meant to look through an eyepiece. While browsing Amazon recently I came across an interesting little gadget, the Meade LPI Digital Camera. It fits into the telescope instead of an eyepiece and connects to your computer through USB. It’s just a basic camera sensor that allows you to take pictures of what you’re seeing through the telescope.
Last night I booted it up and snapped a few photos of the moon and I’m pretty impressed with how they came out. It was amazing to see the movement of the moon through the finder. The software has the ability to interface with the telescope and to track objects, but I didn’t have the right connector on my laptop. Instead I just used the software’s ability to define an object in the window and then to track it across the screen. The imaging software is pretty powerful and takes several images of the objects and then combines them for a better composite. All and all, I’m very happy with the equipment. Now I’m just going to have to get a bigger telescope.
The market needs a few more failures
Feb 03
After reading a post over at Daily Kos, it seems like at some point companies are going to have to wake up and realize that they’re not promoting the type of behavior that they want to by handing out golden parachutes. Of course if we keep bailing out these companies they’ll just never get the lesson. Business is all about risk and sometimes if the wrong things happen then it’s appropriate that the business fails. It’s the job of the board of a company to make sure that these risks are minimized.
I’m not sure I agree with the concept of “too big to fail”. If the largest player in a market goes belly up and closes their doors due to some really poorly placed bets, then the market is designed to allow for new competitors to jump into the space. It would be an easy bet since it would be obvious that there was a need to fill. I would like to personally see a lot of the firms we have now in both banking as well as other industries go under. Share holders should lose everything, share holder lawsuits should go after the executives for idiotic decisions that destroyed the company, and a fresh breed of companies (that survived by not taking outsized risks) fill in the gap.
Risk taking is great, money is made off of taking well thought out risks, but if you never lose, then bad bets and bad ideas are never cleared out of the system. From the reading I’ve been doing lately on finance it sounds like there are just a whole lot of bad ideas that need to be cleared out of the financial system.
First Rain
Oct 04
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We had our first rain of the season last night. It’s always soothing and everything just seems cleaner the next day.
Google phases out referrals program the week before Chrome
Sep 02
Business, Programming Comments Off
Is it a coincidence that Google phased out it’s paid referrals program for Firefox, effective at the end of August, and introduces its own browser on September 2nd?
I was playing around in the adsense management area today and saw that the referrals area was still there. Even though there was a message that stated that it was being phased out and that the phase out date had already passed. I’m curious if the real phase out was just of Firefox and that the system will now be used to push Chrome.