Author: stewart

No doubt these reveal something about my character, deep or shallow:
Happy Halloween Cover of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face because of this I gave Sam a Stylophone for Christmas.
Rikku Cheeta drawing all of her stuff is great
The Big Snit I wish Sawing for Teens was still on.
Making vacuum tubes at home The title says it all.

At SC09 in Portland, I stayed at the Marriott downtown, which was a perfectly fine hotel, except that the restaurant and bar seemed to close at 10PM.  What’s with that?  WiFi was $10 a day.  As I’ve noted before, there is an inverse relationship between the expense of a hotel and the quality and ease of use of its Internet access.
I was in New York City two weeks ago, and stayed at the Millenium Hotel at UN Plaza.  Don’t bother.  They no longer have ice machines!  This is just such a basic requirement of hotels that… I can’t go on.  In any case, they don’t have WiFi, they have wired Ethernet for $12 per day.
A few days ago, I was in Baltimore and stayed at the La Quinta BWI.  The WiFi was fast, free, and easy.  These guys have it <almost> right.  There is a browser intercept screen, but it does not ask you to register. All it does is ask if you want to join their email list (no), and then it lets you on the net.  There was no problem playing You Tube videos, which usually kills hotel networks.
I was really quite impressed.
In any case, the inverse relationship still holds.  Millenium (expensive hotel and bad Internet), La Quinta (inexpensive hotel, free  and good WiFi). Marriott, somewhere in between.
I’ll note, however,  that you can see a <lot> of WiFi networks from the 36th floor in Manhattan.

I am an avid reader of xkcd.  Recently a cartoon on Movie Narrative Charts appeared. My immediate reaction, of course, was to search the Minuteman Library Network for an available copy of the time trave movie Primer.
My favorite quotes:  “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.” and “The best mathematicians are the lazy ones.”
Win and I watched the movie the other night, and I came up with this appreciation, in the style of xkcd:

I’ve tried to stop following the T-mobile / Microsoft Sidekick disaster, in which all customer’s data has been lost, but I can’t.  It is an example of schadenfreud.
So far, the word is that Microsoft embarked on a SAN upgrade without an adequate backup, or perhaps without an independent backup.  Sidekick devices are thin clients, which keep data only as a cache of the truth, which is on the server.
Thin client is an idea which periodically pops up. The reasoning behind thin client seems to take two forms: thin clients need less hardware, so they are cheaper, and thin clients are easier to centrally manage.  These days I suppose there might be a third issue, which is that thin clients are more secure, because they don’t contain your data when you are not there.
The “cheaper” argument really hasn’t made much sense for the last decade. Storage has been following the usual technology curves, and has become incredibly cheap. Processing power as well.  It just makes no sense to make the client stupid on the grounds that it saves money.  A related argument has been that thin clients are quieter than thick, because they can be made fanless.  We now have flash storage that is very low power.
The “centrally managed” argument has a place in the enterprise, in which IT can “provision” a workstation remotely, and employees can “hotel” by taking any available cube.  This argument doesn’t seem to apply to mobile devices like laptops or phones, however, because they usually are assigned to one person for an extended period. It definitely doesn’t apply to non-enterprise devices.
The security argument is a red herring, I think, and one that is easily corrected by a decent encrypting filesystem.  Yes, a stolen device would be susceptible to offline attacks.
Another issue is availability.  We are not always connected, at least those of use that depend on wifi and crappy cell phone networks.
I think that techn0logy trends and connectivity argue for local data. I want copies in the cloud, as backup, and available for computations out there, but I want local access as well.
My personal digital footprint now hovers around a Terabyte, and is only that large because I’ve been gathering digital copies of home video.  I have, I think, about 4 copies.  I can’t keep it all inside the laptop or iPhone yet, but I can keep all my historical email, all software I’ve ever worked on, all music I own, and all photos I own with me at all times.  I also have 10 or 20 gigabytes of public domain books, just in case I need something to read.
In a few years, all that will fit in my phone, and a few years after that, I can have the video as well.  Vernor Vinge got this right in his Marooned in Realtime, with a “pocket database” that could hold one’s digital footprint, plus plenty of reference material.
I think there is also an argument that the Sidekick architecture failed to adapt to technology trends.  Thin client might have made sense when Danger was starting, back in ought-two or whatever, but it doesn’t make sense now, with multi-gigabyte flash chips nearly free.

I have a Trendnet print server between the LAN and an HP1320 USB printer.  The printserver speaks LPR, among other things, and I set up Cathy’s Vista laptop to print via an LPR port to 192.168.166.7, queue HP1320, and it worked fine.
After a rework of the network infrastructure, the printserver moved to .167.39, and acquired a DNS name on the internal network of studyprint.stewart.org.
To make printing work again on the Vista laptop, I created a new LPR port to studyprint.stewart.org queue HP1320 and all was well.
Yesterday the laptop stopped printing.  Jobs were queuing locally.  From a command prompt window, I could ping 192.168.167.39, but I could not ping studyprint.stewart.org.  Aha! DNS problems.  However Firefox and IE worked normally for names outside the LAN.
I tried nslookup, and it works fine.  studyprint.stewart.org resolves, as it should, to 192.168.167.39.
Then I discovered that I could ping “studyprint” but NOT “studyprint.stewart.org. I presume because the DHCP server told it the default domain was stewart.org.  There is really no excuse that the fully qualified name doesn’t work.
At this point, I remembered that Vista is not my fault, and hardwired the printer port to 192.168.167.39.  Printing works again.
Dear Microsoft.  How is it that you cannot make DNS lookups work reliably? How is it that nslookup works fine but ping does not?   It is really too bad that C has some sort of Mac allergy.
Did I mention that the Trendnet printserver speaks Bonjour?
I think it is supposed to speak windows networking as well, but I’ve never gotten it to work.

Hot water stops itching.
This is not well known, but here are some links:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/394710/how_to_stop_the_itch_of_poison_ivy.html
http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2005/10/18/hot-water-for-itches/
Scratching really doesn’t work.  After a few minutes, you want to scratch again, but hot water really does work, for hours.
Evidently, itching is caused by release of histamines from the skin.  Hot water causes the skin to release the whole reservoir at once.  This causes a truly weird sensation for a few seconds, but after that, the area won’t itch for quite a while – hours – until the histamines build up again.
The water has to be rather hot – not full on hot (140 at my house) but hotter than feels comfortable.  Experiment.  You will be a happy and itch free person.
I use this technique with poison ivy or mosquito bites.