BrenBart’s blog

So here's the thing.  I happened across a new book by my favorite author Larry Niven called 'Fleet of Worlds'.  Anybody who knows anything about known space knows that this is where Pierson's Puppeteers come from.  I won't bore you with too many details since you can follow the link if you are curious but basically they were named puppeteers because they look a bit like a three legged centaur with two big sock puppets instead of the human torso.  Anyway what struck me today after having been reading about these creatures for about 30 years is this:  Why do Puppeteers only have two head?  Everything else about them is essentially trilaterally symmetrical.

The frustrating thing about this is I'd love to hear the author's take on it but he is electronically unavailable.  That's right, he's a world famous science fiction author* who is decidedly not a technical person.  I should know, I fixed his computer for him at a convention once.**   I think in order to get to him I'm going to have to break out the pen and paper.  Well, ok we all know I'll compose the letter on my computer and print it out but I will have to address the envelope (yeah, yeah, via computer.  I hate my handwriting.) and mail it to him via his publishing house.  I must admit that I have almost no hope of actually getting a response though.  Maybe I'll use this thought as some sort of justification for attending a convention that he's part of.

Well, I'll take my dorky butt to bed now.

Cheers

*No, really.  I'm serious.  We geeks are quite earnest about this and we are all over the world.)

** This is a whole other story I'm sure I've bored most of you with at one time or another.

I know you've always wondered what Joe Camel dreams about.  Well, finally you get to see for yourself!

Snake_Tamers_Ditty_Final002

Actually, this fine picture is the artistry of Amy Crehore.

Ok, so if you've never heard of Veronica Mars it's like this....   It's a tv show on the CW that is sort of a cross between The Rockford Files, Beverly Hills 90210, Nancy Drew with a light dusting of Twin Peaks and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

It's a mystery detective show where (If you start from the beginning of the series) Veronica Mars is a high school student (Kristen Bell) who's dad (Enrico Colontoni.) is a private investigator/former sheriff of the California coastal town of Neptune.  Veronica gets mixed up in big-time criminal investigations and small-time high school ones.  In a typical tv universe coincidence they often become the same cases.

Veronica is smart, cute and often brings poetic justice to the high school cases she solves.  She has some very Buffy-esque girl power, help the helpless personality traits.  But that's not the end of the Buffy mix.  No sir!  You also have regular guest stars such as Charisma Carpenter and Alyson Hannigan.

So anyway, I finally got caught up on Season 2 and was left somewhat breathless at the whirlwind wrap-up of all the mysterious loose ends.  Then even though it was late I watched just the opening scene of the first episode of season 3.  Hot Damn!  It looks like the series quality continues.

Have you ever noticed that we often take technological things for granted?

This thought occurred to me when I was listening to The Red Hot Chili Peppers self titled album. (specifically 'Grand Pappy du Plenty')  I was wearing a decent set of scavenged headphones and noticed the way the different instruments sounded as though they were coming from different directions.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, stereo headphones are hardly new.  Get over it.  I can see how you could get the music to sound as though it was to the left, right or even somewhere in between.   But what really struck me was the way they managed to make certain instruments sound as though they were behind me.  Again, it's obviously mature technology that's been around for a while but still cool when you think about it.

It leads me to back to some well trodden mental paths questioning reality...

We perceive the world around us with our senses and everyone's senses are 'tuned' slightly differently.  It's not just a matter of something like a "normal" person and someone who is colorblind.  Too often that is simply viewed as black or white;  One can see color and the other can't.  (Don't you love puns?!?!)  However, I think it's deeper than that.  Ask any woman picking out clothes and they'll tell you that men are colorblind.  Science tells us that some people can simply discriminate light waves more finely than others so that they will see color variations that many people cannot.

Moving outside the human race, animals can smell and hear more acutely than we can.  So we naturally take it for granted that they can smell or hear things that "don't exist" to our senses.  Again though, this difference is seen as a matter of degrees.

Science tries to come up with unbiased evidence of things.  How do we know what the temperature is outside?  Some poor sod had to take a flask of mercury in a bucket of water outside in the winter and freeze his butt off until the water froze and make a mark on the flask.  Voila!  The freezing point of water.  We learned about light waves from prisms splitting white light into colored bands.  Unfortunately even the much more sophisticated instruments of today tend to center around our own senses.  What do we do with radio telescope data?  Why, we convert it to pretty pictures of course! 

What else is out there though?  For that matter what else is right here around us that we just can't perceive?  I'm reminded of the movie From Beyond adapted from an HP Lovecraft story.  The gist of which is that a scientist creates a "Resonator" that stimulates the pineal gland and...  blah, blah, blah.  Anyway, this device causes those exposed to it to perceive things that we cannot normally see.  Naturally those things don't like it and lots of people are killed.  (It is an HP lovecraft story after all!)

Despite the silliness of this example I still wonder what is all around us that we cannot taste/touch/see/feel/hear?  What is waiting to be discovered that no one has ever thought of a way to look for?  God? Angels?  Demons? Voices in people's heads?  Sock eating monsters?  Magic?

I'm not normally one to listen to country music but I'd rather listen to it than radio commercials.  So this morning I happened to hear the song 'Save a horse, Ride a cowboy'  I'd heard bits and pieces of the song before but never it's entirety.  Rap hating Country music fans out there take note:  This is a Country-RAP song.  (Let's just call it CRAP, shall we?) 

Actually, it's probably closer to what I understand to be Hip Hop rather than Rap.  My understanding of the difference between the two is that Hip Hop often contains actual singing as well as Rap.  CHH just doesn't have the ring that CRAP does!  Besides, even though it was a fun song I'm really an old school (pre 1981) country music fan.  The popular country music of today seems to hold little resemblance to what I think of as Country.  Anyway, I digress.

While this song has no obvious sound similarities to a Rap song, the basic structure and subject matter qualify it as a rap song.  It's got a fun catchy tune which correlates to a good beat in RAP.  It's all about "gettin' some" which is one of the main subjects in Rap music and there is a long 'spoken' segment.

Ok, it's not a deep and meaningful observation but what do you expect?

I picked up Om Yoga Today just before Christmas and finally tried the five minute practice. (Yeah, yeah, It took me almost a month to try something that takes five minutes. Bite me!)

I enjoyed it with certain reservations which will take some explanation.

The mental and physical aspects of yoga interest me for different reasons.

Physical - I am not terribly flexible and judging by my family history when I get old I will look and walk like Bill Ding. 

BillDings

Mental - One of the biggest reasons I've been interested in yoga is mental benefits. I have ADD and my psychiatrist once mentioned a study on the effects of yoga and meditation on ADD in kids. He knew the person running the study and she claimed that it all but eliminated most of the symptoms of ADD. 

So here is what happened. My daughter's school is doing health week and having all the kids chart their exercise activities for the week. She's in first grade now and her kindergarten teacher taught them some yoga poses last year. So she was really hyped to try yoga and of course, get a sticker on her chart. So my wife and daughter did the five minute practice first since I was putting the baby to bed. When I came out of the baby's room my daughter was all over me to have me start.  I started trying to do the poses and was surprised to discover that balance was the greatest hurdle for me.   However, an even greater hurdle was my six year old giggling hysterically and jumping around, on and under me while doing the poses.  Talk about your meditational hurdles!

So, the physical aspect was fine.  I was a bit stiff so some poses were a stretch.  (Huh?  Huh?  Get the pun?)  However the meditation was pretty much a total loss.  It was fun though!

Not a complete loss either.  Maybe in another month I'll try the five minute practice again!

Ubuntu and Linux in general has a ways to go before it's ready for mainstream desktops.

I'm a techy geek (professional and personal) and a few months back loaded Ubuntu on an old laptop with what seemed like a fair amount of difficulty. After a lot of doinking around and failing to get the pcmcia wired ethernet card working I managed to get a wireless card working. Unfortunately the laptop only had a 2gb HD so space was always tight and it would usually choke if i tried any of the automatic updates. Well, in an attempt to clean off unused features I accidentally killed the OS. Since I was really unhappy with the HD space situation I tried a few smaller distros like Damn Small Linux and couldn't figure out how to get the wireless card working in the time that I had available. Plus....well, it just had a sort of crude feel to it.

A couple days later I brought home my MSDN CDs from work and loaded XP Pro on my laptop. XP Loaded like a charm with minimal involvement from me, correctly detected the Wireless card, only used about a 800MB of install space and seems to run more smoothly and take less time to load apps than Ubuntu ever did.

Frankly I was rather disappointed by this. I had really wanted to believe that Ubuntu would be better than XP. As far as the rather limited array of Linux distros I've used it's quite nice. However, I had really expected that it would be more efficient than windows and it that just doesn't seem to be the case.

I think there are three main areas that need to be addressed in order to win the general public's loyalty.The UI, the behind the scenes install and config and the documentation.

The UI - It's important to have a nice Windozy UI for neo-luddites such as my wife. Ubuntu did a good job with that; Better than most distros I've seen and I think they are on the right track.

There are, however, issues with the behind-the-scenes install and config. As I said before, I'm a fairly technical person. I've been in the professional IT world for about ten years starting with desktop support, help desk, network admin then for the last seven years as a dba working in SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and DB2. Now, we've all worked with those IT people who we wouldn't trust with setting our VCR clock. I'm NOT one of them. For the first three years of my career I was the IT dept for a small software vendor. I regularly had software, hardware and oddball requests thrown my way with the explicit instructions to "make it work." I have a bachelors in CS but truly pride myself on being self-taught. To my great irritation after graduating with a BS in CS, I discovered that my degree provided very little in the way of actual useful skills/experience in the job market. So imagine my surprise when I start trying to work with linux and felt like I was floundering. (My professional experience is almost exclusively windows and my Unix experience has very minimal admin aspects to it.) My laptop was very drivespace challenged and the debian app loading model while very good for a neo-luddite is not very helpful for someone used to being able to decide where an application should be installed. After some head scratching and a couple of script changes I was able to install apps to an external USB drive but I had to troll the internet for ages before figuring out how to do that. To be honest, Linux is a gadget lovers dream. It's free, it's flexible and it's fun. However, as someone who used to do desktop support it's got miles to go before the average IT desktop support guy can manage it.

Finally, there is very little documentation provided by the authors of the Ubuntu distro and in fact with most distros I looked at. Working with MS products has the advantage of there being tons of documentation online. So much, in fact, that it's often a big pain in the ass to cull it down to something useful. Linux seems to rely on the user community to provide it's fixes and documentation. In many ways this is good but it has the disadvantage of missing some essential overview materials and causes at least me to be suspicious of the fixes you do find that were provided by "joe user". (Pet Peeve: Forum posts where someone has "THE" fix for an issue. Unless you are an author of the actual distro then 99% of the time it is not "THE" fix but rather simply "a" fix that worked on their particular system.)

 In closing I'd have to say my biggest disappointment was Ubuntus lack of efficiency over XP. Aren't the *IXers the ones always complaining how windows is bloated and inefficient?  Somehow I feel like I've been let down.  

I get tired of things like Zune coming out that are great hardware but then fall down on the software. In Open source software, you can write it to do whatever you want and share it. So, I wish there was a way to make an open source portable media player.

I'm not sure exactly how it could be implemented but imagine if you will being able to buy components that sort of snap together without the need for soldering. A screen, a hard drive, some sort of programable chips, whatever. (Duh, in case you haven't figured it out I'm not an electronics guy.) Or go to a website and order I want this screen with these components etc. Pay for it and a company/geek builds it and ships it to you.

Then use some tiny distro of Linux to run it. Would it be as sleek and tiny as an IPod? No. However, with your own hardware and software you wouldn't be screwed by politicians and money grubbing business people.

Ah well. Pipe dreams....

You know, people probably wouldn't hate the RIAA so much if they changed their tactics from the "Trying to make a point/set legal precedent" to one of "trying to get the recording industries fair share"

Wander with me a moment if you will...

DRM - Change the DRM so that instead of trying to block copying of media it's more of a tattletale. Periodically it informs the RIAA what songs you have, when you copy them, whatever. I don't have this completely fleshed out but it would probably entail some sort of RIAA song registry.

Then the RIAA takes the same vague sources of data that they have now and instead of suing someone they send them a bill for a set reasonable fee for each song plus a 50% "You were being bad" fine. The consumer has several options upon receipt:

1. Pay the bill - Somehow a system of what music you have would have to be registered somewhere.

2. Refute the bill - Set up an arbitration process that doesn't actually involve a court. Some third party looks at the evidence and makes a binding decision. This process would have to have some mandatory fee to prevent everyone from clogging the system. Fee to be paid by the loser or as determined by the arbitrator.  So if you do have "stolen" music and you lose, you'd pay the cost+fine+arbitration fee. Ouch! But in the case of all these other people now being sued it'd be a lot cheaper. Ooo, and if they got their greasy hands on evidence that you tried to screw with the tattletale DRM then there would be an additional fine.

3. Ignore the bill - After a certain length of time the RIAA would have the option of pursuing it like any other debt. Black marks on your credit rating, "selling" the debt to third-party debt collection agencies etc. Or if it's some massive amount of songs/money then they could sue you in the appropriate civil court.

The end result of this? A new source of income for the recording industry. Potentially it could change the primary distribution model to one of mainly media downloads. (Why leave out the MPAA?)

For music the DRM could allow you to play the song a set number of times before you have to pay or delete it. I doubt the movie industry would go for that. Maybe a set number of minutes into the movie like hotel room pay-per-view used to be? "Warning! If you continue to view this movie you will be required to pay $XX.XX or you can stop now."

I had been using Azerus as my BitTorrent client and was reasonably happy with it. It has lots of features and settings to mess with but the torrents I was downloading (Non-copyrighted material, naturally) tended to take ages and ages to complete. This didn't seem unreasonable as what I was downloading tended to contain ~22 files of ~350MB each. A further annoyance was my inability to use my computer to browse the internet while Azereus was running. Although it shouldn't have taken the entire internet connection bandwidth, I just assumed that my ISP was throttling me or that the numbers weren't as straight-forward as they seemed. So for a while I was content with download speeds averaging 10Kb/s with occasional spurts to 16kb/s.

Then I was reading an article and it pointed out that uTorrent had an extremely small footprint (~500Kb) and that it took correspondingly less memory. So when I had a chance I downloaded and installed it. HOLY CRAP! Did that make a difference. It didn't bog down my computer's memory, it didn't hog the processor and the download speed have hit an all-time high of capping out at 85kb/s. I managed to download an entire seas.... um large set of non-copyrighted files in about sixteen hours! I had been trying to finish up another large set of non-copyrighted files for fricken weeks! It wasn't a terribly popular torrent but uTorrent flashed through it in about two hours.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't necessarily thing this is because uTorrent is the greatest thing since sliced bread. However, it worked quite well for me.