Computer Information for Everyone

Free Content - Part 2

2012-01-31T22:09:00.000-08:00

My last posting provided a little history about how we went from software pirates to music pirates and now to movie pirates. Congress has proposed legislation to help curb this piracy, but is has been put on hold for the time being. This brings up the question: Is legislation the answer? In a nutshell, no.

If you look at the software and music industries, enacting new laws didn't really help. A combination of enforcing existing laws coupled with simple technological advances like software licensing keys had the largest success for the software industry. As for music, piracy just went underground. The same will happen with movies.

Talking with one of my co-workers exposed a mindset of the younger generation that was new to me. He expressed that teenagers and young adults expect certain things to be free. If you look at the software industry, open source is a large movement that gains more and more projects every day. The same thing is happening with music. If you look at iTunes, they constantly have the free song of the week. There are also bands that make their music freely available from their websites. One would think this would kill innovation. I personally believe it has the opposite effect. If you are a commercial software company and put out a sub-standard product, there is an open source project that your customers can replace you with. That means your product had better be good enough that people will pay money for it. I see the same thing happening with music.

So what is the solution for Hollywood? My suggestion would be to embrace the Internet and don't try to litigate or legislate it. Use it as a new medium for distributing your products. While fewer people are interested in actually buying DVDs, more people are interested in streaming movies from places like Netflix. Think about it. If you don't have to create a DVD and ship it somewhere, you shouldn't have to charge nearly as much, but still be able to make the same amount of profit.

Unfortunately movies are not the end of free content. Today I saw a prototype of a new electronics device created on a 3D printer. It is only a matter of time before you will be able to download plans from the Internet and create your own Ferrari. Let's see Congress try to figure out how to legislate that one.

Free Content - Part 1

2012-01-27T19:11:00.000-08:00

I recently had a conversation with several coworkers and we talked about the new anti-piracy legislation that seems to have been put on hold by Congress. On one hand, Hollywood wants to protect their movies, and on the other, Silicon Valley doesn't want censorship, which is what they felt was happening. This brought up a very interesting discussion.

When computers first came out, there was little to keep friends and family from sharing software with each other. If you had a program your friend wanted, simply make a copy of it and he had it too. Then software companies came up with anti-piracy methods to keep this from happening. After all, why should software developers miss out on lost revenue from software pirates.

Then the Compact Disk or CD was developed. The deterrent that kept people from copying and sharing music was the massive size of one single song. Twenty years ago, 75 megabytes was huge and that only got you a single song. Back then, a 100 megabyte hard drive was considered massive. Eventually better compression techniques were created and the size of disk drives increased. Gigabyte hard drives emerged and MP3s shrunk the size of a song to around 5 megabytes. Then the same problem the software industry faced years earlier, plagued music companies. Their solution was to litigate. Sites like Napster were shut down and several high-profile offenders were slapped with huge fines and threats of jail. Unfortunately the music companies were not nearly as effective as software companies and stolen music continues to be a problem.

Now we face the same issue with movies and Hollywood isn't too happy with the music industry's success. Hard drives have continued to increase capacity to the point where countless movies can be stored on even the most basic laptop. The movie industry has enough trouble making profitable films and they don't want to loose any potential revenue. So what is their solution? Lobby Congress to enact tougher laws regarding copyrighted material. This includes creating a new police force, which is made up of Internet service providers (ISPs). Furthermore, anyone can claim a copyright which could force ISPs to suspend service to anyone with a false claim against them. If you don't like the content found on a website, claim it is yours and force the ISP to remove it. Then wait for the court system to churn through all of the false claims, which takes a lot of time.

So that is how we got to this point. What do we do now?

A Break from TV

2012-01-14T21:02:00.000-08:00

This weekend I have a guest from Japan visiting me in Utah. He came for business last week and has business at our offices next week. Rather than get stuck in San Francisco over a long weekend, he asked if he could come skiing with me in Utah. Seeing as I had already invited him when I was in Japan, I was more than happy to host him this weekend.

I didn't watch much TV when I was in Japan because I didn't understand anything being said. There is only so long that you can watch people on the screen speaking a different language before you get really bored. Rather than subject my guest to a similar fate, we have all gathered in the living room this evening and are reading, working on the computer, or playing hand-held video games. I have to say that I don't miss television.

This has me questioning the future of TV. While I don't plan to toss my idiot box out the window any time soon, I may rethink my cable subscription. Why pay a fee every month when I could pay a fraction of the cost and get better service. After all, most networks allow you to watch recent episodes of your favorite show at the time is most convenient for you. If I want to watch a movie, there are a number of services that offer downloaded or streaming content via the Internet. Perhaps I should look into replacing one of my current televisions with one that has built-in Internet features. In the past I haven't given an Internet capable TV a second though, but maybe these electronic companies are onto something.

The Power of the Keyboard

2012-01-10T20:28:00.000-08:00

There were several days during my Christmas break where I meant to create a Blog entry but was upstairs and away from my computer. Rather than going back to my office, I pulled out one of my Android-based tablets and pontificated on the day's events. You can tell which days they were because the entries are significantly shorter than the others.

Don't get me wrong, I love using my tablets to look things up on the Internet or take short notes during meetings. They are just difficult to use to create a Blog entry. While your finger makes a great pointer, it makes a lousy substitute for a mouse when it comes to highlighting text. The on-screen keyboard found on any tablet is usable, but is no match for a real one. In the end it was just easier to use my laptop.

I have a friend that is wondering if he can replace his home computer with a tablet. Unfortunately I don't think either of the tablets I have are there yet. Perhaps I should spend some time at an electronics store and see if I can't get an external keyboard. I wonder if there is a way I can win one?

Internet on the Plane

2012-01-08T14:21:00.000-08:00

Friday night I took my usual flight from Oakland back to Salt Lake on Southwest airlines. When the flight attendant announced that the plane had WiFi capability, I thought I would give it a shot. As I fly a lot with them, I am what they consider an "A-List Preferred" customer and so the Internet was free for me instead of the usual $5.

I thought I would add a Blog entry from the air, so I tested the connection speed. There was a huge latency issue, which means that there was a noticeable pause after typing in a web address before any data was returned. Once the web page started being rendered, it was fast. That was to be expected given the technology they use to provide Internet access on airplanes. I also wanted to see if I could watch a video and so I fired up YouTube. Once again, there was a pause between typing the address and getting the first screen to appear. However, once I started watching a sample video, things ran smoothly and I was impressed with the connection speed.

I felt I had done enough research and so I logged into my Blog and started to write about the experience. Unfortunately Southwest puts a banner across the top of every web page. It happens to cover the heading and toolbar for the Blog site I use. That means I could type text, but couldn't give my entry a title nor add any links. There was an "X" button that should have removed the Southwest banner. Unfortunately it just gave me an error message with an apology as why that wasn't supposed to happen.

It seemed fun to be able to use the Internet from a flying plane and the cost wasn't that bad. If I had a pressing e-mail to send or some critical research, the $5 fee is more than worth the price. My only complaint is that I couldn't use the service to write in my Blog. I'm sure that will get fixed eventually. Until then, all my entries will have to be from the ground.

My New Years Resolution

2012-01-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

Christmas break is over and now I find myself back at work in San Francisco. That means I don't have as much time to play video games and I have to admit that I am a little sad about that. The last couple of days of vacation, I picked up my PSP and was having fun playing some new games I got for it. Luckily the PSP is small enough that I can throw in my suitcase and cart back and forth between Salt Lake and the Bay Area.

Last night, I got back to the boat after a full day at the office and watched a little television while I cooked and ate dinner. Then there was nothing on that I really wanted to see so I did something new: I turned off the TV. For about two years now, I have gone back to the boat after work and wasted my time in front of the idiot box. This year I have decided that I want to watch a lot less television. When I turned it off last night, I had three hours of free time to do whatever I wanted. I turned on my computer and spent time working on one of my many projects.

I find it interesting that I spent my Christmas break playing video games instead of watching television in the evenings and that seems to have broken my addiction to the various shows I felt the need to watch. Now I have a lot more time for other things and I feel like a new man. See, there is a benefit for video games. At least there was for me as your mileage may vary.

A Video Game for my Daughter

2011-12-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

Both of my sons love to play video games and so it has been a bit of a challenge to find a game that my 17-year-old daughter would want to play. A little while ago there was a charity drive at work where we could donate $5 to a local cause and then receive three random, yet unopened video games. The titles were from a number of different studios and I found myself with some interesting games. One was a basketball sports game that I gave away to someone on a plane. Another was a popular arcade game that my boys decided to keep. The third game was one that I thought my daughter would like: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian from Disney Interactive Studios.

For some reason, my youngest son opened the packaging and gave it a shot. My daughter was so mad at him that she didn't ever bother to play the game. As I was home this Christmas break, I sat down with my daughter and played it with her. The game has been out since 2008 and includes a lot of different scenes from the movie. My daughter loves the Narnia movies and so that immediately held her interest to at least give the game a shot.

Prince Caspian is one of the few games I own that can be played in 1080i and the higher resolution allows for a lot of details in the game. There is an opening scene with a stain-glassed window that is really vivid. The game is also fun in that it can be played with one or two players on the same console. Ideally there should be two people playing at the same time, but one person works fine.

The game follows the movie where there are a number of characters working together for a common goal. You have to work with other creatures, such as giants, to accomplish your objectives. Sometimes you are trying to solve a puzzle while other times you are fighting with the bad guys. At one point in the game, we didn't know what we needed to do and were getting bored of killing the enemy. I wanted to get some help from the Internet and hit the "Start" button. That paused the game, but also gave a list of objectives. Once we understood what we were supposed to do, it became easy to complete the task.

My daughter and I played for about 3 hours and had a great time. It was a lot more entertaining than watching the movie (I preferred the other two Narnia movies). The game is rated T because of violence. It wasn't too graphic, but you do run around killing people. As it is from Disney, it is available for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, XBox 360, PC, Wii, and Nintendo DS. I would recommend it to any father wanting to spend some quality time with his children.

Need for Speed: The Run

2011-12-28T18:01:00.000-08:00

I am supposed to be off on vacation but we had a disk go bad on one of our arrays and it required me to do a bit of maintenance for the office. The process of rebuilding the bad disk is about as exciting as watching dots get painted to the screen. Actually that is what was happening and so I took the chance to crack the cover of another EA game: Need for Speed: The Run. I had my laptop logged into the computer at work painting dots on one side, and my 32-inch HD TV showing the game on the other. Sometimes it is nice to be able to multitask.

Once again, EA uses the Frostbite 2 engine for this game. It is also used for Battlefield 3. My two sons love playing the Need for Speed games and so when I was down having lunch at EA at the beginning of December, I made sure to pick up a copy of the latest installment. I have to say that I have not been disappointed. You start the game duct-taped to the steering wheel of a Porsche 911 that is getting put in a car crusher. You have to escape and then are invited to drive in a race across the United States. You start in San Francisco and then try to get to New York. The only unbelievable part of the game is that you don't take Interstate 80 the whole way. Instead, you are relegated to back roads, which makes for a better video game.

I have never played another Need for Speed, but I have seen my sons play countless hours of the different versions. The Run has a lot of the same elements: you have to make certain time cutoffs, evade police, as well as pass a number of other racers over a given distance. You also have various cars to choose from. I naturally chose the BMW M3 to start as I am sort of a fan of BMWs in real life. However it was a bit tough when I kept crashing my car, especially since I really was rear-ended in my BMW yesterday. Luckily there was no damage to my car, but still, watching me destroy a virtual BMW almost brought tears to my eyes.

Need for Speed: The Run is rated T for language, mild suggestive themes, and violence. I didn't think it was nearly as violent as MotorStorm Apocalypse but there are a lot of car crashes. I also have not heard any foul language, but I am only a couple of hours into the game. I am playing in 720p resolution and the graphics look great. I wish I could play in 1080p, but the game doesn't support it. As it is from EA, you can get the game for PlayStation 3, XBox 360, PC, Wii, and Nintendo 3DS. I would recommend this title for anyone that likes driving games. Parents just don't base game play on whether or not you will let your kids ever get a driver's license.

A Skype Christmas

2011-12-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

I thought I would take a break from video game reviews this evening and write about my Christmas. I used to love getting gifts on Christmas. Now that I am older, there are other things that make for a good holiday season. One thing that has been nice this year is having my older brother living so close to me in Utah. I spent the day at his new house visiting with him and his family.

Yesterday I enjoyed opening my gifts, but the best gift of all was being able to talk to my two oldest kids. My daughter is living near Cleveland, Ohio and my son is in Romania. With the help of Skype, we were all together as a family for the first time in seven months. We talked for over two hours and it was free. For a parent, it was the best Christmas gift ever.

Ratchet and Clank

2011-12-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

After two days of violent video games, I decided it was time to play something a little more fun and geared towards everyone. After all, it is Christmas time and that generally means time with the family. I honestly can't remember how my son got started playing Ratchet and Clank games, but it started with the PS2. I believe my brother sent me one or two games and my youngest son loved them. I thought the titles were hilarious: Going Commando, Up Your Arsenal, and Size Matters. Then the PS3 came out and the titles weren't as funny, but the games still were.

Sometimes my scouts will show up at my office and have some spare time. I ask them if they want to play any video games and their eyes light up. When I ask them what they want to play, those same eyes gaze over with confusion. Ratchet & Clank is my first suggestion and all the boys give it a shot. It is easy to pick up and play for a short amount of time, but it is also full of different missions and can last a long time.

Tonight I pulled out my copy of Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and played it with my 17-year-old daughter. She said it looked like fun as I went through the first several adventures. We couldn't play too long and this game was the perfect for the time that we had. I also have Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time as well as the new release of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. They are all very similar in humor as well as play. All 4 One adds the element of cooperation in that you and 3 of your friends can play at the same time on the same console as long as you have enough controllers. The other two titles have the advantage that they have been out for a while and can be purchased for around $30 new.

All 3 games are rated E 10+ because of alcohol reference, animated blood, crude humor, fantasy violence, and language. While that sounds like a lot, there really isn't much to worry about except the fantasy violence. The games are created by Insomniac games which is a Sony Computer Entertainment America studio. That means they are only available for the PlayStation 3 console. I would recommend the games for any family looking for a fun game they can play together.

MotorStorm Apocalypse

2011-12-21T21:40:00.000-08:00

When I first got my PlayStation 3, there were several titles that I wanted to get. I kept seeing MotorStorm and wanted a copy. Since my brother worked for Sony at the time, I had him get me the game. I have to say that it was one of my favorites. The first MotorStorm takes place in southern Utah and is a very good representation of that part of the state. I have a buddy who is an avid four wheeler and was amazed at how realistic the game was. When the next version of MotorStorm came out, I was still having fun with the original and didn't feel the need to get it. Then I had someone offer to pick me up the third installment, MotorStorm Apocolypse, for $10. So I got it. Today I finally decided to put it in my PS3 and give it a shot.

MotorStorm Apocalypse was developed by Evolution Studios, LTD which belongs to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE). Sony Computer Entertainment is the same company that makes the PlayStation consoles and so the game is only available for the PlayStation 3. They also try to show off all of the cool features available for the platform. One such feature is 3D. Unfortunately I don't have a 3D TV yet and so I didn't get to play that mode. If you have one of the new PlayStation 3D displays, you can play in SimulView. This allows two people to play on the same TV without having to split the screen.

I tried to play MotorStorm Apocalypse a week ago but it required a system update and so I didn't bother as I was limited for time. I didn't think anyone had been playing the game, but I was wrong. My son had completed the entire first day races. I tried the first race on the second day and kept finishing last, so I went back to the menu and started at the beginning. While the original title was like extreme off-road racing, Apocalypse takes extreme to a whole new level. Dare I say, an unbelievable level. You get to race around a vacant city that is experiencing severe earthquakes. Buildings are falling down around you as the race must go on. You even get the chance to race across the rooftops of skyscrapers. One wrong move and you get to fly off into oblivion. Furthermore, if you don't hit your boost at the right time, you don't make certain jumps and crash into the side of a building.

I like MotorStorm Apocalypse but prefer the original MotorStorm. It is rated T for crude humor, drug reference, language, suggestive themes, and violence. I did one full lap with a motorcyclist clinging to my front bumper. I would recommend it for anyone that likes driving games, has a PS3, and is into over-the-top scenarios.

Battlefield 3

2011-12-20T21:11:00.000-08:00

My brother used to work for Sony PlayStation which is officially Sony Computer Entertainment of America. One year for my birthday, he got me a PlayStation 2 and sent me a copy of SOCOM 2. It was a first person shooter (FPS) and was a lot of fun. One nice thing about SOCOM was that you could play against others online as long as you had a broadband Internet connection. I used to get online once a week with my brother and other family members only to get shot to death for hours. FPS games are my favorite and so when Battlefield 3 came out, I used one of my contacts at Electronic Arts, also known as EA, to get me a copy. A neighbor who was one of my former scouts wanted to play the game and so I gave him my unopened copy. Then a few weeks ago, I found myself having lunch at EA in California with a different friend and picked myself up another copy. EA has this great store on their Redwood City campus and as long as you have an employee with you, you can get copies of their products for a huge discount. If you don't know anyone that works at EA, I highly recommend finding one, simply to get some of their products.

Battlefield 3 was developed by Dice, one of EA's studios, and created using the Frostbite 2 engine. The guys at Dice spend an insane amount of effort making sure that their engine is incredibly real. I have to say they succeeded. You can do things like blow up a building and then walk through that area. While most other FPS games make you feel like you are in a maze, Battlefield 3 is not like that. Of course if you do find yourself leaving the mission area, you have a number of seconds to get back on course or risk failing your mission.

The game runs on the PlayStation 3, XBox 360, and PC. Naturally I have it for the PlayStation 3 and the matching HD TV to go with it. The graphics are incredible and so you are going to want something better than standard 480p resolution. Mine is cranked up to 720p which is the best the game can do. To be honest, I thought it was 1080p when I started playing and didn't realize it was on the lesser setting until I checked the TV.

I have yet to play online as I am just trying to get familiar with the game. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun and once again I will spend a lot of time dying.

Battlefield 3 is rated M for blood, intense violence, and strong language. It has really strong language and I wish I could turn that off. I am all for realism, but I wish I could turn on some sort of censoring so that when the players swear, you hear a beep or a substitute word. It is also a first person shooter and so killing people is part of the game. Sometimes at really close range. So far I am enjoying the game and would recommend it to anyone who likes FPS games and isn't offended by strong language.

Christmas Break

2011-12-19T22:00:00.000-08:00

Today was my first day of Christmas vacation. I couldn't help myself from reading some e-mail and responding. Otherwise I had a great day of skiing and playing video games. I have a stack of games that I would like to try now that I have some time to spare. I would like to use my next few blog entries to highlight some of these games. However before I get too deep in the reviews I thought I would provide some disclosure.

First, I work for a video game company. Corporate policy prohibits me from exposing who I work for, but it is one of the larger players in the industry. Just be warned that I might be pushing my own company's products.

Second, I get a huge discount on most of my games. I have friends at a lot of different game companies who help me get games for between $10 and $20. However I do own all of the games I will be reviewing.

Finally, I play games on my PS3. I have a pretty beefy desktop computer, but I don't use it for games. I bought my PS3 several years ago during Christmas when they first came out. I paid full price and so it was not a gift from my company nor a discounted product from one of my buddies in the industry. my personal belief is that is the best console on the market right now. You may disagree and are entitled to your own opinion, but this is mine.

Stay tuned for my reviews.

Uncharted

2011-12-17T18:40:00.000-08:00

My youngest son had a ski race in Park City today and I worked as an official. That means it was a really long day spent out in the cold. We got home and had a very nice dinner. Then my wife and daughter wanted to go and see some outdoor Christmas displays. They knew we wouldn't be interested and left us to do our own thing. We decided to play Uncharted 3.

Recently we started playing the first game in the series. Then I got busy and so my son started the second game and was able to finish without me. We still have yet to complete the first game but since we have the third one, my son opted to start it. I guess you could say that my son is tired of watching me play and wanted to move on.

It is interesting to see the evolution of the game. The first one was alot of fun because it was like taking part in an action movie. The second game added more twists and also more features. The third continues but also adds such things as muli-player so both of us can play at the same time. Of the three games, my son prefers the second. However I think that will change as we get more into this game. Either that or my son just hates having to play with his dad as a partner.

Effective Troubleshooting

2011-12-13T21:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday and today I spent several hours hunting down a computer problem in a production system at work. I did a pretty good job of narrowing down the problem to a piece of software. I changed the configuration file, upgraded to a newer version, and tried a number of other solutions only to have the problem continue.

My coworker and I were able to get the system limping along so we could sleep on the problem. We both woke up this morning with a similar idea on how to locate the true cause of the issue. It turns out that the real culprit was a database table was larger than it should be. The system was designed for this table to have a few hundred rows. Instead it had over 5 million. There was a clean-up script that wasn't running.

The first half of solving this problem meant I had to manually clean out the table. Trying to use an automated system would have brought the database machine crashing down. Once that was done, we had to get the clean-up script rewritten. That took a good part of the day, but we got it working. The total problem solution took a few hours to come up with. I just wish we had done a better job troubleshooting last night.

Christmas Lights

2011-12-12T22:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the day my wife and I decided to put up the family Christmas tree. It normally takes us a good couple of hours to set up the custom artificial tree. We like to string the lights as we put the tree together. We got about half done when the lights stopped working. Naturally we stopped to troubleshoot the them. At around 10:00 pm we decided to just go to the store and get a couple new strands of lights.

Today my wife went to six different stores and they didn't have the lights we needed. Thinking that I had all of the answers. I went out and didn't do any better. As we left the last store, my wife told me she was done and didn't need a Christmas tree this year.

Later this evening my wife was able to calm down and came up with a store that might have strands of lights. Without telling me she snuck off to a store and found what we were looking for. She was happy and we were able to get the tree set up. Now we just need to hang the decorations. Before this evening, I thought computers were the most frustrating thing on the planet. Nope, it is Christmas lights.

2011 Christmas List

2011-12-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

It is that time of year where some of you may be still looking for gifts for that computer nerd in your life. It would be easy to list a lot of expensive gifts, but not everyone has a huge budget and so I will concentrate on gifts around $20.

Gift Cards

iTunes gift card. Not only is it good for music, you can get apps with them.
PlayStation Network gift card. There are a number of games that come in under $20 and you can let your recipient pick his or her own game.
Xbox Live Points Card. Like the PSN card, you can use it to download games as well as watch movies and game add-ons.

Video Games

Ratchet & Clank (any of the them). These are always a good choice and now that SCEA has released some of them as "classics," you can find them between $20 and $30.
Uncharted 1 or 2. Sure, Uncharted 3 was just released, your recipient may want to play episodes 1 and 2 first.
Need for Speed. There are a number of different versions of these games available for a number of platforms and right around $20.

Computer Accessories

USB Key Drive. They even have ones that look like keys and you never know when you are going to need one. I keep one in my jacket and it came in handy for a friend two nights ago.
HDMI Cables. What better way to connect your PS3, BluRay Player, or Computer to that high-end TV or monitor. Nothing ruins Christmas like looking for an open store because you don't have a cable.
Solar Charger for your phone. It's green and it can charge your phone.

Sure it would be nice if everyone could afford one of those new 3D televisions, but there is no need to take the next 3 years to pay it off. A little online shopping can go a long way. Good luck and Merry Christmas.

Android Gift Cards

2011-12-01T17:53:00.000-08:00

I am in the process of putting together my annual gift guide and I started to do a bit a research on Android Market gift cards. Guess what, they don't exist. I think it is a shame because they would make perfect stocking stuffers.

When you look at Apple's iStore and compare it with Google's Android Market, they look very similar. The biggest difference though is with music. You can get iTunes gift cards from a number of retailers because most people use them to buy music. While there is some music found in the Android Market, it is mostly used to sell apps. I did see that they have a number of movies for rent and my hope is that this will spur Google to get someone selling Android Market gift cards.

There is one positive aspect of Google not selling gift cards though. I have noticed that a number of free applications found on the Android Market actually cost money at the iStore. Angry Birds is a good example. There is a "lite" version on the iStore, but the complete version is available for free from the Marketplace. Perhaps not having gift cards sold all over the place is actually a good thing. What do you think?

Bad Weather

2011-11-30T20:19:00.000-08:00

Last night I got back to the boat and there was a nice note posted on the entrance to the marina. It said that there was a severe wind warning and it was unwise to take your boat out. I wasn't planning on going sailing and so it wasn't too much of an issue for me.

There is a high to the south and a low coming in from the north. When the two systems meet, it causes an incredible amount of wind. When this happens out in the middle of the ocean, large waves get created and boats sink. Here in the protected marina, my boat is fairly safe.

Interestingly enough, my wife forwarded me a message from the marina at the Great Salt Lake that was sent this afternoon. This storm is headed there after pummelling San Francisco. The e-mail stated that only a fool would go sailing for the next couple of days. I guess they are battening down the hatches there as well.

The Weather Channel has a great website, but my personal favorite is NOAA's. You can specify a city and state. Then it shows you the weather for a very specific area. You can see current conditions as well as the forecast. Right now, it is blowing at 22 miles per hour with gusts up to 33. The NOAA site seems to have the most accurate forecast. The weather channel does have one advantage though. If there is an area getting pasted by a huge weather event, like a hurricane, they have the best coverage.

Christmas Shopping

2011-11-29T22:47:00.000-08:00

My kids are funny. They won't let my wife and I talk about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. They are always running around telling us to, "Respect the Turkey." Now that the day of feasting has passed, we can focus our attention on the biggest holiday of the year.

A decade ago, we just worried about Black Friday. Now we also have Cyber Monday, which was yesterday. When I got off the plane and into my office, my inbox was flooded with countless e-mails from every possible online retailer. The funny thing was that I had finished all of my Internet Christmas shopping. I still have one or two gifts to pick up, but they are the kind of gifts that I need to pick up in person.

As you go your own Christmas shopping on the Internet, there are some things to keep in mind:

1. Shop early. This morning I got an e-mail from FedEx saying that severe weather has hampered package delivery. This could happen again and so you don't want to assume a last-minute purchase will arrive on time.

2. Shop around. You may think you are getting the best deal at one site, only to discover you could have done better somewhere else. Doing a bit of looking will help keep you from discovering you could have paid less.

3. Shop quickly. Some of those great deals won't be around forever. When you find something you like at the best price possible, grab it. Assuming you can pick it up the next day may be a mistake. While you may be able to find it at a better price the closer it is to Christmas, you also run the risk of it being unavailable.

4. Shop with a budget. It is very easy to use your credit card to pick up all of your Christmas gifts. However you will eventually have to pay for them and you don't want to spend above your ability to pay.

Remember that this is the holiday season and it is supposed to be "the most wonderful time of the year." If you find yourself getting frustrated or angry, take some time off and relax a bit. Then try again when you feel better.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving day and I thought I would jot a quick note about what I am thankful for with regards to technology:

1. The Internet. The Internet is truly amazing. It allows us to communicate with each other over vast differences. We can send e-mails, use Skype to video conference, broadcast messages, share pictures, get directions to Grandma's, purchase Christmas gifts at the lowest cost, and find out all sorts of useful and useless information.

2. Apple. They continue to innovate and make products that really are better than their competitors. That keeps the rest of technology moving forward. If the auto industry had a company like Apple, cars would be significantly better and the world would be a better place because of it.

3. Smartphones. It took me a while to give up my regular mobile phone and get a smartphone. Now that I have one, I find myself being much more efficient.

4. Flat panel displays. I have two on my computer at home and four on my desk at work. They are much lighter than their CRT counterparts and take a lot less energy to run. Go Green!

5. Desktop and laptop computers. Let's face it, without computers, we wouldn't have the Internet. Continual computer development is what made cell phones and smartphones possible. They have also driven the advancements in display technology and are part of the reason TV technology has changed so much.

Yes, technology is great and it is what allows me to have a job. However when you put things in perspective, it doesn't matter at all when compared with the good times spent during the Holiday season with family and friends. So I am off to spend time with the people in my life.

Happy Thanksgiving 2011!

A Tale of Two Tablets

2011-11-23T16:14:00.000-08:00

Back in September I received word that I had won a computer table from CompUSA. They had a contest where they were giving out a tablet a day. When I was notified about winning the tablet, I was dubious. However it arrived last week while I was in Japan and my family wasted no time opening the box and playing with it.

Several weeks ago, I borrowed a tablet from work and so now I have two tablet computers. One is the Sony S1 and the other is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Both run the Android operating system and so it is interesting to have the two tablets side by side for comparison. You can get the same applications for both devices and so it is interesting to see just the differences in the hardware.

First, the Sony device is wedge-shaped, sort of like a thin 3-ring binder. At first I thought I would hate this ergonomic difference. The Samsung is more like the iPad and iPad2. While the Samsung is less bulky and easier to hold in my hand, I actually prefer the Sony. When I place the tablet on a desk or table, the slight tilt makes it much easier to read. It is also much easier to use with the on-screen keyboard. Point for Sony.

Second, there is a huge difference in speed. Using the two devices day after day, you notice that the Sony tablet is much faster than the Samsung. Even my kids notice the difference and have started to ask to play games on the Sony vs. the Samsung. Point 2 for Sony.

Third, the Samsung vibrates as a part of the user interface. When you type on the virtual keyboard, the device has a slight shudder that is very helpful in addition to the key-click sound both devices emit. I like this feature as I can turn off the sound and still have feedback when I am typing. Point for Samsung.

I really like both devices. It is also nice having two as one of the kids is always playing with one. It is not uncommon to go into my living room and see both tablets being used. Eventually I will have to give one of the tablets back and I am sure it will cause problems. Until then, I think you can't have too many tablet computers.

Stored-Value Cards

2011-11-18T00:22:00.000-08:00

Today is my last one in Japan. I will be taking a plane back to Los Angeles and then continue back to Salt Lake. It has been a lot of fun here in Tokyo. My parting thought before heading back to the States is the ubiquity of stored-value cards here in the Far East.

I am always using my credit card to make purchases back home. It is easier than carrying cash and then I make sure to pay the full bill at the end of the month to avoid any extra charges. The problem with credit cards is that merchants need to be connected to bank card network. Otherwise there is no way to verify that the card is valid and the transaction is recorded correctly. With stored-value cards, there is an amount physically stored on the card. When a purchase is made, the price is subtracted from the card's balance and it doesn't require any communication with a central bank.

Stored-value cards are used all over Japan. When I arrived at the airport on Saturday evening, I picked up a card and have been using it for train travel around Tokyo. Then a few nights ago, I was in the mood for a little dessert. I stopped into a 7-Eleven and bought a Kit Kat. Rather than having to use cash, I just swiped my stored value card. I have to say it was very convenient.

There are problems with stored-value cards though. There are a number different card providers and not all of them are accepted everywhere. That means I can use my Suica card for trains and convenient stores. But to get lunch at the corporate cafeteria, I need an Edy card. There is also a Pasmo card, but I haven't bothered to pick one up.

Another problem is that if you lose your card, you can't get your money back. That is a huge incentive to keep a minimum amount of money on the card and not load it up with cash. Furthermore there are some unscrupulous individuals that are running around with card readers pulling cash off people's cards. All someone has to do is bump up against you with a card reader on the train and money is transferred from you to them.

It was interesting to see stored-value cards in action. I wouldn't want to replace my credit card with one, but they definitely are faster at the check-out counter. Especially when you need a Kit Kat before heading back to the hotel late at night.

Doing it Right

2011-11-16T15:50:00.000-08:00

I am not staying at a particularly nice hotel in Japan, yet I am impressed with the features in my room. There are a bunch of tiny details that really make my stay comfortable. I don't think the Japanese woke up one day and said, "We are going to make the ultimate hotel room." Instead I imagine it was an iterative process where they asked themselves, "How do we make our hotel more comfortable than our competitors?" That is how Apple has had their success as well as Microsoft.

Nobody remembers versions 1 and 2 of Microsoft Windows. I do because I had one of the original copies of Windows 2. It was a horrible product that was a cross between DOS and the original Macintosh. Rather than having pretty icons, you had a listing of file names that you could click to access. Nobody bought it and so Microsoft realized they had to make it better. Then came Windows 3.0 and we saw that Microsoft learned their lesson. It would be nice if they continued to make things better instead of simply changing things.

Apple is similar. They released their first iPod and then continued to refine it as other competitors entered the market place. When Microsoft introduced their attempt at an MP3 player, Apple was already ahead of them and continued to distance themselves with a better product. When solid-state storage became affordable, Apple continued to offer the larger capacity disk-based iPods, but also introduced a line of smaller and sleeker ones as well.

Successful technology companies will always ask that important question, "How do we make our product more appealing than our customers?" and not simply, "How do we make money?" Now if I could just figure out how to get a heated toilet seat in my bathroom at home.

Google in Japan

2011-11-15T14:13:00.000-08:00

Visiting a country where you don't speak the language can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. This is especially true in Japan where I don't even understand the characters. When I first got to my hotel here in Tokyo, I wanted to look up some of the sights near to where I am staying. Naturally I went to www.google.com. I was immediately redirected to www.google.co.jp. The user interface is so familiar that it didn't matter. I entered my search criteria and soon I was looking at a bunch of Japanese web sites. I didn't understand a single one and so I revised my search and added the word "English". That made all the difference.

Google owns a lot of web properties (such as this blog site) and so this instant localization occurs whenever I try to visit one of their sites. For instance, trying to log in to post today's blog, I had to figure out which one of the links was "Log in". Once I got in, the system is smart enough to know I prefer English over Japanese. Figuring out how to log in was the tough part.

When I first started working with a team based in Japan, I thought it would be enough to start learning a few basic words in Japanese. I figured that the written language would be too difficult to figure out and so I shouldn't even worry about it. The more I am in Japan, the more I realize that I may want to learn a few characters as well. I've only been here a couple of days, but I think I have "Search" and "Log in" pretty well figured out.

I Miss my iPhone

2011-11-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

As I am in Japan, I have turned off my iPhone to avoid any surprise charges. It is kind of liberating not to have to carry a mobile phone with me all of the time. If anyone wants to get a hold of me, they have to send an e-mail or come and find me. However I am discovering that I am missing some of the other features of my iPhone.

I miss the map. I am in a strange new city. While I am pretty good at paying attention to where I am, it would be nice to have an interactive map, just in case I get lost. It would also make finding places to eat a lot easier. Right now, I pretty much walk around until I find something that looks good.

I miss my contact list. I have a new computer and have yet to transfer all of my contacts to it. That means if I want to send someone an e-mail, I have to have their address memorized or go through an involved process to get it. Generally I have decided not to send the e-mail and justify that it can wait until I get back home.

I miss my games. I don't play a lot of games on my iPhone, but yesterday I found myself with a few minutes to spare as I was resting on a couch. Usually I pull out my phone and play a game of Risk. Yesterday I just sat and watched a bunch of overworked Japanese engineers sleep or play with their own iPhones.

Yes, I also miss the phone. When I want to call my wife, I have to be at my computer and use Skype. If she is not on Skype, I have to send her a text message via e-mail and then she will contact me. It isn't a big deal, but there is something nice about being able to whip out your phone and call home any time you want.

Could I live without my iPhone? Sure. My quality of life isn't strongly effected by pocket technology. However, there are one or two things that go just a bit more smoothly because of it.

In Japan

2011-11-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

This month starts a series of regular trips to Tokyo, Japan. I will probably be making the trip every couple of months. I have been to Japan before, but it has been at least fifteen years since I was last here. While I enjoyed my first trip to Japan, I was only here for two days. This time I get to spend an entire week and really get the chance to see the city.

There are several things that stand out relating to technology. First is the quality of the Internet service in the hotel. I have no problem using Skype to talk to my family back home. Yesterday we did a video conference for about 30 minutes and it didn't cost me a dime. While my iPhone has the ability to work all over the world, I have turned it off after hearing horror stories of people traveling internationally and getting phone bills worth about the same amount as a new compact car. Skype works great and so that is how I am communicating with my wife and kids.

The second thing that stands out is the quality of public transportation. I arrived into Haneda airport at 11pm on a Saturday evening. I got through customs, changed some money, and caught an express train to Shinagawa where I am staying. The train left exactly on time, was clean, and easy to figure out. This is a sharp contrast to the poor public transit system in the Bay Area. Last night I was with a group of coworkers and we missed our train by mere seconds. Not more than 5 minutes later, another train came along. In the Bay Area, we would have been stuck anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes waiting. Furthermore all the signs were in both Japanese and English, which made it easy to get around. The best part about the public transportation here is that it is affordable. It cost $5 to get from the airport to the hotel whereas the Bay Area would have cost over twice as much for the same distance.

Now that I am over my jet lag, I get to spend the next couple of days in the office. I will be interested to see what other technological differences I notice between here and back home. So far Japan has been fun and so I hope I am not disappointed.

I Hate Texting

2011-11-09T20:40:00.000-08:00

I was the proverbial fly on the wall during a discussion this evening and it has caused me to consider my thoughts about texting. Before tonight I was firm in my hatred for the method of communication. You can chalk it up to all the bozos I see driving around, texting, and not paying attention to anyone else on the road. You can also chalk it up to an experience I had where my company was paying a consultant large sums of money only to have him spend all of his time texing and not doing any work for us.

Unfortunately I am old, compared to my kids, and I was informed that is how the current generation communicates. The question came up about what upper limit to the number of text messages should be set for a teenager. A father asked if 5,000 was the right number and a teen responded that it seemed high. So I asked the teen how many text messages he sent. "About a thousand," was his response. I was amazed. I only send and receive about 50 in any given month. But then look at the first sentence of this paragraph. Once again, I am old.

I guess I don't understand this new generation's infatuation with texting. I would much rather call someone and get an immediate answer to my question. Sure, I'll send a text if I am in the middle of something and need to get back to a person. However, if it takes more than two messages, it is time to pick up the phone. After all, isn't that why we all carry phones in the first place?

Video Game Content

2011-11-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

I was riding in a car with one of my scouts when I heard him talk about a new video game coming out next week. He wants a copy. The boy is only 11 years old and wants game rated "M" for mature. Normally that wouldn't ruffle my feathers as I let my sons play first person shooter games and most of them are rated "M". Then I looked at the content found in the game.

It is one of those over-the-top titles just trying to be more outrageous than the current crop of outrageous games. While the adult in me can see the humor of some of the content, I'm not sure it is the best game for an 11 year old boy. The problem is that everyone in the boy's neighborhood is anxiously awaiting the release and so he has a lot of peer pressure to get a copy. I talked with the boy's mom and she wants to get it for him but doesn't know what is in it.

I was talking with some video game testers who are familiar with the title and they couldn't believe a little boy wanted such an adult game. It contains all the biggies including, but not limited to: strong language, violence, nudity, drug use, and sexual situations. For some, that is probably the selling point of the game. My recommendation for all parents of video game playing kids is to read the the fine print of the video game rating and discover what it contains. Then if you still have questions, go onto YouTube and download a trailer or two to see some of the content. Once you are informed, you can then let your child know if you plan to get the game. As for me, I think I will avoid the one my little Scout was interested in getting.

Table Computers

2011-11-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

I am working on a project for tablet computers and so I picked one up from the office before heading out on Friday. After playing with it over the weekend, I have to say that they are a lot more useful than I originally would have given them credit. Furthermore, my 15-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter have been using it non-stop. I was glad when they finally went to school today so I can have a chance to use it.

Tablets generally come in one of 3 flavors: iPad, Android, or WebOS. The tablet I have is of the Android variety and is comparable to the iPad in size. Given my preference, I would like to try an iPad as I am an avid iPhone user. However my tablet was free and so I'm not complaining. Once I got it connected to my home network, I let my son use it and he made sure to load it up with all sorts of games and utilities. A word of caution: the same household rules that apply to the family computer should also apply to tablet computers.

While I like using my iPhone to do quick lookups on the Internet, the tablet is a much better platform. The screen is larger and easier to read. When I have to use the on-screen keyboard, it has larger buttons and I can almost touch type like when I am on a full-sized computer keyboard. My son also loaded up some of the books I am in the middle of going through. The tablet makes a great platform for reading, especially at night when I don't want to disturb my wife.

Now the real question: Does it increase my productivity? I would have to say No. While it is easier to do certain things, it is also easier to play games like Angry Birds. Last night when I should have been getting ready for the week, I was having an Angry Birds match with my son. Oh well. I just hope my company knows I am not giving my tablet back. It is way too fun to play with.

Time For a New Computer

2011-10-28T15:40:00.000-07:00

It is time to replace one of my computers again. My company has finally given me a new laptop and it is a welcome change. My old laptop was between 5 and 6 years old. While it worked well for my needs, I am really enjoying my new MacBook Pro. The only problem is that now I need to install a bunch of my old software. Considering my old laptop ran Windows and my new one runs Mac OS X, this could be a problem.

My old laptop was plenty fast for what I used it for, which was mostly reading e-mail and logging into bigger computers. It's only flaw was that the battery life made it virtually unusable unless it was plugged into the wall. The nice thing about Mac laptops is their incredible battery life. I am looking forward to that on the flight home this evening. I might actually be able to get work done instead of just reading my magazine.

The GEEX Show

2011-10-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

Saturday I spent some time at the gaming and electronics expo or GEEX show in Salt Lake. While there were a few exhibitors, the real meat of the show was in one of three areas: The LAN party, the 24-hour contest, or the center stage.

The LAN party was an excuse for all the nerds in Utah to bring their tricked-out computers someplace where other like-minded individuals could appreciate them. It was like a custom car show only instead of cars, it was computers. In order to show the real power of the machines, everyone was playing games. It was fun to see, but not really why I was there.

The center stage was where you could see the StarCraft tournament on one side and listen to video game professionals on the other. I stopped to listen to the Electronic Arts guys talk about their development process for creating the SIMS game. It was interesting, but I didn't really learn anything new.

My main reason for being there was to see what came out of the 24-hour contest. The organizers had everyone write down game ideas on little slips of paper that were tossed into a hat. Three slips of paper were then drawn and the contestants had 24 hours to incorporate 2 of the 3 items into a game built from scratch. This year the themes were: 8-bit, jewel, and disease. At the end of the 24-hour period, there were some pretty good games created. They started as simple as a text-based game and became as complex as something that could be published. I was impressed with what every team did in such a short amount of time.

GEEX was a fun event and I will definitely attend again next year. Now I just need to decide if I am going to enter the 24-hour contest.

My Presentation

2011-09-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

I gave a presentation at PgWest on Wednesday this week. I wasn't going to attend the conference but one of the organizers called me and asked me to submit a paper. So I submitted the same one I gave at last year's conference. The talk went fairly well and I was able to do something I had never done before: ignore my slide set.

Before going to the conference, I told my wife that I didn't want to give the same presentation from the previous year but didn't really have time to revamp anything. I told her I wanted to poll the audience and find out why they were at my presentation. So that is what I did. Some people were there to find out more about the subject I was speaking about while others had specific questions.

Knowing what people were interested in finding out helped me tailor my presentation. It also got the audience involved and they were more eager to ask questions. About half-way through the talk, I abandoned my slide presentation and just showed examples on the computer. I think everyone appreciated something a bit different.

Paper Airline Tickets

2011-09-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had to stay in the Bay Area for a mock earthquake drill. As luck would have it, there was an actual earthquake, albeit only a 3.2 magnitude rumble. As I didn't go back to Utah for the weekend, I decided to fly my wife to San Francisco and have her join me. It turned out to be a very fun weekend and we both enjoyed it a lot.

As with all airlines, my wife checked into her flight 24 hours before its scheduled departure. She then printed up her own ticket that she brought to the airport. For the return trip, we visited my office and repeated the process. The airline never had to print anything for my wife's flight. I have to ask myself how much the airline saves in paper and printing costs. I imagine it is significant.

Then there are applications for smart phones from most of the major airlines that don't require you to use any paper at all for your ticket. Simply bring up the app, show the special bar code at security, and then again before you board the plane.

20 years ago everyone was talking about how computers would reduce the amount of paper in the world. Unfortunately everyone was so accustomed to printing things that we saw a spike in the amount of paper used worldwide. Maybe now we should see that statistic drop. Unfortunately a quick search on the Internet doesn't provide any clue as to it that is happening or not. At least we know it is with regards to airline tickets.

Keeping Time

2011-09-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

This week has been spent rebuilding and configuring servers in our research and development private cloud at work. Some time ago, our company's IT department decided to remove a machine that the rest of us use to keep all of our computers' clocks synchronized. One of my favorite sayings is: "A man with one watch knows what time it is, a man with two isn't quite sure." This is also true for computers and so when servers in a private cloud can't decide on the time, it wreaks havoc. In our case, it brought the cloud down and all of the machines with it.

In reality, not everything in the cloud came to a halt. The servers were still out there running just fine, we just lost all network connectivity to them and so it was impossible to log into them. The only solution was to stop the servers and restart them. If they were actual machines, a power cycle (or turning them off and on) would do the trick. As they are part of a cloud system, it requires that I reconfigure them once they come back up. All of the data in the database machines was preserved and so we didn't lose anything important. Furthermore I have simple scripts or small programs to reconfigure the servers, so rebuilding everything didn't require much thought, just time.

When I found out that our private cloud had crashed because of clocks not being in sync, I was pretty upset. I wondered how a few seconds difference could have such a negative effect. I guess it underscores the importance of keeping the correct time.

Downloading YouTube Videos

2011-09-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

Last week my son asked if I could come and speak in his careers class. I wanted to include some videos and so I scoured the Internet looking for MPEGs that I could embed into a PowerPoint presentation. With the ubiquity of Flash and YouTube, there don't seem to be MPEG videos on the Internet any more. At least not the types of videos I was looking for.

Eventually I got tired of searching as I knew exactly where to get them: on YouTube. So I changed my search criteria to find out how to download them from YouTube.

Unfortunately you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. There were a lot of false starts that were just plain wrong. Eventually I was able to discover an "Add On" for Mozilla that allows you to save the Flash video file (with the .FLV extension). Once I had that downloaded, I discovered that PowerPoint doesn't understand them. I needed to convert the FLV file into an MPEG. I used the ffmpeg utility on Linux, but even that wasn't straight forward. I had to calculate bit rates and figure out the screen size. Luckily screen sizes are fairly standard and Adobe has a bit rate calculator. Once I figured that all out, I created the MPEGs from the FLVs and embedded them in my presentation.

This morning I delivered my presentation and it went very well. It took a lot longer to create my presentation than anticipated, but the kids loved the videos.

Smart Stoplights

2011-09-01T10:58:00.000-07:00

There are three stoplights on my way to and from work each day. Considering I mostly use a bike path and and am only on the road for less than two miles, that seems to be a bit much. All of the lights are considered "smart lights" in that they have sensors in the pavement to detect when a car is present. Only one of the three can be triggered by a bicycle and so I have to hit the pedestrian button on the other two.

For some reason, a lot of people think that smart lights are triggered by the weight of the car. That isn't true. Instead there is a metal detector built into street. When you car passes over the detector (basically a piece of wire wound around a toilet paper tube), a signal is sent to the smart light's computer. In California, the system actually works and lights change accordingly. In Utah, they have some sort of algorithm that was written by some idiot that never got full credit for homework assignments in college. There is a bit of a delay that can be as long as a minute. This is meant to keep traffic flowing in high-congestion area. Unfortunately it seems like a huge waste of my time at 11:30 at night when I am coming home from the airport.

I would like to propose a new for of smart light. Instead of using a metal detector embedded in the street, why don't we use the camera mounted on top of the stoplight? After all, we have facial recognition software that does a pretty good job. Shouldn't we also be able to create automobile and bicycle recognition software? One of the problems with the metal detector method is that you have to be right over the sensor. Using a camera, you could see the cars approaching and determine that you want to keep traffic flowing as opposed to instantly switching lights. In the case where there are no cars coming because it is 11:30 at night, light changes would be much quicker.

Hopefully someone is thinking about this. After all, most stoplights already have cameras on them to monitor traffic flow and accidents. I'll bet we can even improve everyone's gas mileage as we will spend less time idling and more time at speed. Most importantly, I won't have to get off my bike to hit the pedestrian button to cross the street.

School Starts Again

2011-08-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

It seems as if school starts earlier each year. Yesterday my kids went back to school. When I was younger, I remember starting the day after Labor day. I remember the school year shifting so that it started the week before Labor day as my own kids became of age. Now they are starting two weeks before.

Last night we headed down to the store to buy new school supplies. We keep a fairly well stocked stationary cabinet in my home office and so there wasn't much we needed. A few spiral-bound notebooks, highlighters, colored pencils and we were set.

It is also time to make sure the computers are set up and ready for the year. I need to update the operating system on the family computer as it is a few releases behind where it should be. I also need to make sure we have enough paper and toner for the two printers (one is color, the other black and white). It will probably be a few weeks before the first papers are due, but it is important to get these things taken care of before you are up into the wee hours of the morning helping your kid get that term paper printed. Running out of printer supplies at 1:00 am can lead to kids learning a whole new vocabulary.

Language Translation

2011-08-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine asked me to help him translate some training material from English to French. Having lived in France and Belgium for several years, I speak French fluently. Unfortunately that is not the same as being able to write fluently. I would guess I have the spelling ability of about a 3rd grader. Luckily computers are really good at spelling and so I agreed to help my friend.

While I could have loaded up the French dictionary in my word processor, I instead opted to use an online translation program called BabelFish. It has been around since 1999 but I first came across it in 2003 when it was taken over by AltaVista, one of the original Internet search engines. Yahoo now hosts the site.

BabelFish is a reference to a fictitious animal in Douglas Adams' book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By putting this fish in your year, it can instantly translate any language into the one you understand. The website works similarly. Just type in your text in English, select the language you want the translation, and click the translate button. Presto, your text is instantly translated in another window. Most of the time, it is pretty close. Sometimes it doesn't get the correct meaning of a particular word, but that is an easy fix if you understand the language. BabelFish was a huge help to my friend's project. Too bad it wasn't completely automatic. If it was, I could copy and paste the text of the training material into the website and be done with it. Oh well, maybe in the next version.

My Old Boat

2011-08-11T18:49:00.000-07:00

I got an e-mail today from an old friend. He is a yacht broker and helped me buy and sell my old boat. They say that the two happiest days of a boat owner are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells it. In my case, I was very sad to have to sell my beloved sailboat. The problem was that I couldn't justify owning it when I no longer worked in San Francisco at the time. The purpose of my buddy's e-mail was letting me know my boat is for sale again.

Looking at the photographs on the Internet brought back a flood of old memories. Most of them were good. I remember sailing her up the coast from Dana Point to San Francisco. We went through the mother of all storms and had to pull into Monterey to make repairs. I remembered how the family used to spend time on the boat and we called it "Camp Sail and Swim" because we would go out sailing or swim off the back of the boat in the marina.

Everyone I have shown the pictures to has asked if I want to buy the boat back. While there is a part of me that loves the idea, there is also a reason I chose a smaller one when I bought my latest boat. It sure was fun to see the old pictures though.

Internet Rumors and Lies

2011-08-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a full day of work and didn't have much time to do anything else. In fact, I didn't get back to my boat until 8pm and then I had a bunch of boat chores before heading to bed. So I was a little annoyed that I had to respond to an e-mail from my mother-in-law where she continued to propagate Internet rumors and lies.

My mother-in-law is one of those people that receives an e-mail with a funny story or cute picture and broadcasts it to everyone in her electronic address book. Mostly I just skim over her messages and get on with my day. However sometimes she will forward stuff that is just wrong. Once she forwarded a message saying not to open any e-mails with a particular heading. Doing so would wipe out my hard drive and destroy my computer. I had to explain to her that what she suggested was impossible, especially since I read e-mail on a Linux computer. However even Windows users were safe as the recipient would have to run an attachment sent with the e-mail to cause damage. Merely looking at an e-mail would have no effect.

Yesterday's e-mail was supposedly a reprint of an article from the Wall Street Journal about what an incompetent moron our current president is. While many in the country may agree with that idea, it is not something you are going to openly read about in the Wall Street Journal. So I did a bit of searching on the Internet. Thirty seconds later I discovered that the article was not written by the alleged author and it only appeared in an online forum of the Wall Street Journal's readers' comments. In other words, in a place where anyone could have posted the message. That doesn't exactly make it a newsworthy story. If the author and place of publication are both lies, how much stock can one put in the content of the article? My guess is that any fact quoted is also a lie and shouldn't be trusted. Yet people do.

As you are reading e-mail from friends and family, please be careful about what you believe. Not everything you read on the Internet is true. If it were, there about a hundred Nigerians I need to get back to about helping them transfer money into my bank account.

Writing a Video Game

2011-08-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

I currently work for a video game company but don't really do anything to create them. Recently I decided that if I work for such a company, I might want to write a simple game. While some organizations might discourage this, my company encourages it. Furthermore, if the game is any good, they will publish it and let me keep the majority of the proceeds. There are some limitations in that while I can use company equipment and time, I need to make sure I complete the rest of my work first. After all they hired me to look after very important database systems and not to write games.

Normally I head back to Utah on Friday nights. This weekend I am staying in the San Francisco area instead. I have completed my CERT training and needed to spend this morning going through a skills test. It was fun being able to put out a real fire using a fire extinguisher as opposed to just talking about it. There were lots of other things I got to do, but I was done a little after lunch. So what do I do with the rest of my weekend? I figured I would start writing my game.

There is a hard way to write a video game where you create everything from scratch. Then there is an easy way where you use a video game editor like Unity to help you create the game. I like the easy way and so I downloaded Unity and am playing with it today. I don't expect to create a game in a single weekend but I do hope I will have a good idea as to how long it will take. Now I just need a simple idea for a game.

Effective E-mail

2011-08-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

This morning I got an e-mail that was forwarded from my mom. The message was announcing dates for a family reunion on her side of the family. There was no other information provided, only the dates and that information about hotels would be provided at a later date. The first question I asked myself was, "Where is the family reunion?"

I fired off an e-mail back to my mom asking for the location and she reminded me that it would be in Santa Cruz, California. E-mail is great in that it is almost instant and very close to free (as in no cost to use). The problem is that it also makes us lazy. When you had to send invitations to family reunions using the postal service, you made sure that you answered all of the "W" questions: Who, What, Why, Where, When. With e-mail, you can quickly fire off an invitation and if you forget something, send out a correction. Text messages are worse, but that is a subject for another day.

Taking the time to reread an e-mail and making sure it has all of the important information will help your recipients greatly. If the original sender of the e-mail had simply gone through the "W" questions before sending the message, I would not have had to take extra time to get clarification. After all, my wife's family is also planning a family reunion and I am having a difficult time coming up with ways of avoiding the both of them.

Saving Electricity

2011-07-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

I used to leave my computer on all the time. One nice thing about Linux is that it doesn't require the nightly reboot like Windows used to (and maybe still does). The only problem with never turning off my computer was how much electricity it used. I never really quantified the numbers until recently. I was amazed at what I found.

Since I work out of town during the week and am only home on weekends (except for that one week a month that I get to work from home), I started turning off my computer on Sunday nights and didn't turn it back on until Saturday morning. The next time I got my electrical bill, it was $5 less than the previous month. Now there are a lot of things that can influence electricity usage and so I waited with anticipation for the next bill to arrive. This time it was $20 lower. Then summer hit and my electrical bill goes though the roof because of my air conditioner. However, I noticed that my electrical usage was lower for the same time over the previous year.

So how much money am I really saving by leaving my computer off during the week? Looking at my current electrical bill, I see that I am paying between 8 and 11 cents per kilowatt hour. I know that my computer sitting idle draws about 2 amps at 120 volts. Multiplying those two numbers together will give you 240 watts. So running my computer for about 4 hours is equal to 1 kilowatt hour of electricity. Doing some more arithmetic shows that my computer is off for a total of 5 days or 120 hours. Multiplying 240 watts by 120 hours equates to 28.8 kilowatt hours of electricity. If I use an average cost of 9 cents per kilowatt hour, I see that I am saving myself $2.59 per week. This works out to about $10.36 every month.

So the savings are not as huge as I originally thought. How come my bill seems so much lower? There must be other factors such as a general concern for the environment. At about the same time I started turning off my computer, I may have started working harder to turn off lights that were not in use. Looking at the electrical bill for months that I use the air conditioner, I have noticed that even though the average daily temperature is the same this year over last, I have gone from 68 kilowatt hours per day down to 43. That is huge! Not only is my computer a work device, it is also a space heater. Sometimes being "green" is a great way to save a little "green."

Virtual Private Networks

2011-07-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

Recently I worked a deal with my current employer that allows me to work from my home in Utah one week a month. While my home is in the Salt Lake area, my office is in the San Francisco area and requires that I travel every Monday and Friday. This is the week I am home and I have to say it is a welcome change.

Computers greatly facilitate working from home. Since I spend most of my time in front of a screen in the office, it only stands to reason that I could just as easily spend that time at home in front of a similar screen. The only thing missing is the interaction with my co-workers. Fortunately for this week, that is a bonus as I have some software development to do and really don't want to be bothered by anyone.

Security is a key part of my job and so one of the technologies that allows me to work from home is a virtual private network or VPN. When I first start my computer in the morning, I have to run a simple program that asks for 3 different passwords. One is the usual password I use to log into the network when I am in the office. The other two are groups of numbers. The first number is a personal identification number that I have memorized and the second comes from a small electronic device I keep on my key chain. It generates a predictable-random number every 30 seconds. Once everything is entered, I click the connect button and my computer looks like it is part of my work network. My connection is only good for 8 hours. At the end of that time period, I get automatically logged off.

I like being able to work from home one week a month. It gives me more time to do those things that are normally done in the evening, like playing catch with my son, or replacing the fog light bulbs in my car. However there is a weak link with my VPN configuration, if I ever forget any of my passwords or lose my key chain FOB, I won't be able to work. OK, I don't really worry about my passwords, but I do worry about that little FOB. So far it seems fairly indestructible as I have accidentally taken it swimming and discovered it is waterproof. For the record, it wasn't an accident that the FOB was in my pocket, it was an accident that I went swimming wearing my street clothes. Sometimes that happens when you live part time on a boat.

Disneyland

2011-07-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

For the past two years I have managed to miss my youngest daughter's birthday. This year I needed to do something special and make it up to her. Instead of having a party or getting her a big gift, my wife and I took her to Disneyland for two days. There were no siblings, just her. I was surprised that a 17-year old would want to spend her birthday with her parents, it involved one of her favorite places and so I was happy to oblige.

I have to confess that it has been a decade since I have been to Disneyland. In 2005, I took the family to DisneyWorld in Florida for a week. It was fun, but the kids actually preferred Arches National Park two months later. After being gone for so long, it was a fun return. My daughter reverted to a pleasant 5-year old that loved Daddy, yet was old enough not to complain nor have to use the restroom every 5 minutes.

What does Disneyland have to do with computers? Well a lot has changed in the past 10 years. When it came time to get tickets, there was the usual Internet searching for the best deal. We determined that we wanted Park Hopper tickets so we could visit both Disneyland and California Adventure on the same day. The best deal for two days turned out to be at SweetVacations.org. You can pick up a 2-day park hopper ticket for $125. That is almost $75 off the price from Disney's ticket office. Basically you register on their website and they send you a confirmation e-mail. Bring the confirmation e-mail on the first day of your visit with cash to pick up the tickets. They don't take credit cards, but at those savings, it shouldn't be a problem. Our tickets worked great both days we were there. When we were done, we just returned the tickets back to the office where we got them.

The next change that I saw at Disneyland was with all of the smart phone apps. If you have an iPhone, go to the app store and do a search on Disneyland. You will get a number of free and paid apps that provide real-time information about lines in the park. Suppose you have just finished at Pirates of the Caribbean and don't want to wait too long for your next ride. Simply pull out your app and it will show you wait times for the Haunted Mansion or the Indian Jones ride. Of course these things only work if you are also willing to post your own wait times as you stand in line. However, that is a small price to pay for maximizing your ride times.

Disneyland claims to be the "Happiest place on earth." When you have little ones crying in line, it is tough to believe, especially when you are paying $100 per day to be there. Now that I have experienced Disneyland with an older child, never having to wait in lines, and having spent close to half of regular costs, I find it much happier.

Internet Music

2011-07-13T11:19:00.001-07:00

Lately I have been listening to a lot of music on the Internet. It makes me wonder how much longer traditional radio stations will be around. While I doubt they will all disappear completely, I do believe we will see a number of them cease to exist. After all, how many "Top 40" radio stations do we need in one broadcast area?

I started going to the Internet for music because I was tired of listening to the same songs over and over on the radio. The first place I went went was Pandora which is like an Internet radio station. You can listen for a number of hours each month for free as long as you are willing to also listen to advertisements. One nice thing about Pandora is that you can specify what types of music you hear. If you don't like a song, simply click on the thumbs-down icon and you will never hear it again.

Pandora is great when you want to hear different music than you might already have on your iPod or in your MP3 collection. Many regular broadcast radio stations also have an Internet presence and allow you to listen to their content even though you are half-way around the world. However, what about those times when you want to hear a specific song? For that, my preference is YouTube. If you bring up another browser tab, you don't even have to watch the music video (some of which are really awful).

YouTube has been a lot of fun lately. There were some songs that I remember hearing on the radio when I was a young kid and I have been able to listen to them again. I was really young when the Bay City Rollers released "Saturday Night" but I remember that it was very popular. I also remember C. W. McCall's "Convoy." I can't help but laugh when I go back to listen to some of those old songs. Some are still good while I can't understand what I found appealing in others. However, it is fun to take a walk down memory lane every once and a while.

Tablet Computers

2011-07-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

When I first graduated from College 20 years ago, several computer manufactures announced tablet computers. None of them sold very well and it seems the idea was shelved. Then Apple announced the iPad. It was a huge success and now it seems everyone has a tablet computer, including the company where I now work.

Last night I found myself coming up with reasons to purchase a tablet computer. I have to travel once a week and would love to use one on the plane. The problem is that while I can rationalize all of the cool projects that I can do, the tablet would really just get used for games or watching movies. So that has me wondering if I should just get a portable game unit. I already have a Sony PSP and it doesn't get used much any more.

No, the appeal of a tablet is that it can be used for more than just game playing. That is why the iPhone and other smart phones have been so successful. You always carry your phone with you and to have it do more than one thing. On vacation with your family but left your camera at the hotel? Use your phone's to take a picture. On a long flight and are tired of reading your book? Watch a movie on the small screen or play a game. Maybe instead of getting a tablet, I should just get a newer phone.

Road Trip

2011-06-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

I have decided that I no longer need a car in California. At least not for the summer. My boat, where I sleep is only 4 miles from the office and I need to ride my bike daily as I am getting too fat. I don't really go anywhere else and so cycling is a perfectly acceptable form of transportation.

Yesterday I used a frequent-flyer ticket and flew my 17-year-old daughter from Salt Lake to San Francisco to help me bring my car home. It was her first time flying alone and she was a bit apprehensive. When my wife dropped her at the airport, my daughter's fear was gone and she jumped out of the car at the curb-side-drop-off area. She then got to visit both Los Angeles and San Francisco airports.

I picked my daughter up at SFO and we headed the short distance back to my office where I finished up a few things before our long drive home. The last thing I did was a quick search of traffic using traffic.com to help me determine the best route out of the Bay Area. I'm glad I did because the San Mateo bridge was a parking lot. Using the Bay Bridge instead saved me lots of time.

As we head into this summer driving season and you find yourself starting from a major metropolitan area, take a look at traffic.com. You may find that the shortest route from home, isn't the quickest. It sure saved me a lot of grief.

Relearning C

2011-06-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

The first computer language I learned was BASIC and I was in the 8th grade. It was fun to get the computer to do various things but I really enjoyed my next class which taught me Pascal. When I got to college, I learned a few more computer programing languages including C. I would have to say that C remains as my favorite language for a number of reasons.

Recently I started a new personal project and have chosen to do it in C. I thought about using something a little more modern like Python or Perl but need something that compiles to an incredibly fast program. The tradeoff is that I will have to spend more time writing code. It also means I will have to relearn many of the things I have forgotten about C.

C is one of those languages that has a lot of flexibility but also has a lot of pitfalls. Today I was working with pointers and made a minor mistake on the syntax. Because pointers are so flexible, the syntax was correct, I just wasn't getting the results I was expecting. I used an Internet search engine to look up various examples with no success. It turns out, I needed to include some parenthesis around one small section of code. I came up with the solution after thinking about the results I was getting for a while. Then things started working correctly.

Some might be discouraged by such an experience, but not me. I just realized that I need to do some relearning and that is one of the reasons I started this project. It is my understanding that colleges and universities have moved towards teaching Java instead of C and I think that is a mistake. If it was up to me, everyone would learn C as their first computer programming language. There is something about having to work hard to get your program running. It has a bit of a learning curve, but allows you to write complex programs that run really fast.

I Hate Foo Bar

2011-06-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

The other day I was reading through a computer coding example and was confused by the words "foo" and "bar." I'm not sure how those two words crept into our vocabulary, but they are fairly ubiquitous and I don't like them. I know they are two words that don't really mean anything and are meant to be placeholders for other information, but I wish authors would stop using them.

If I was to write an example SQL query and wanted to use foo bar, it would look like this:

SELECT foo
FROM bar
WHERE gobblygook = 'more gobblygook';

While it is an example that shows the proper syntax of a SQL query, it is not nearly as easy to understand as the following:

SELECT employee_names
FROM employee_table
WHERE salary > 100000;

I don't have to translate that "foo" could also be something concrete like an employee name or that "bar" represents a table of employees. Simply by using examples that everyone can understand greatly improves readability and makes things much easier to understand.

In this age where everyone can be a published author (like with this blog) and you find yourself creating examples. Don't use "foo" or "bar." Instead, use real words that everyone will understand, even if they are just supposed to be placeholder words. Oh, and don't use "gobblygook" either.

Internet Learning

2011-06-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was riding home from the office when I got a flat tire on my bicycle. I have changed countless flat tires, but last night was one of the worst.

Wednesday is the day of our weekly office ride. We do an 11-mile loop around Foster City. To make it harder for myself, I do it on a mountain bike. Otherwise it would be too easy. After last night's ride, I did a bit of work at the office and then started the ride home. I had a wonderful meal planned as soon as I got back to the boat because I was very hungry. I was so hungry, I thought about raiding the vending machine before I left the office. Once I got the flat tire, I regretted not spending a few quarters.

One thing about fixing a flat tire is that you want to have a nice place to sit down. I walked a ways and found a park bench in the shade. Once I was comfortable, it didn't take long to patch the tire. I was amazed at how quickly my tire-changing experience returned even though I haven't had to patch a tire in over a year.

On my ride into the office this morning, I was glad to see that my patch was good and the tire was still holding air. I also thought about how there is no substitute for practicing what you learn. The Internet is a wonderful tool that provides all sorts of teaching tools. You can learn how to adjust the gear-shifting mechanism on your bike or how to repair a flat tire. Just remember to practice what you learn.

Where Am I?

2011-06-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

It is nice to finally have summer here in the Bay Area. I rode my bike to work yesterday and then again today. With the high prices of gasoline, the bike is a huge money saver.

I was about a mile into my journey this morning when I came across a guy sitting on the ground with his really nice racing bike next to him. As I passed, I noticed there was a lot of blood on the pavement. It didn't take too long for my brain to register that the guy had been in an accident and probably needed some help. I stopped and turned around. When I rode up to the guy, I noticed that he had a huge gash in his chin and was on his cell phone trying to get one of his buddies to come pick him up.

The accident victim seemed glad that I came back to help and had me talk to his friend. While I knew where I was, I didn't know the names of any of the cross streets in the area. I pulled out my iPhone and pressed the "Where Am I" button in the map application. Then I zoomed in to read off the nearest cross streets. As we were on a bicycle path, we had to walk down a small path to get to the nearest road. We waited a couple of minutes for the friend to arrive.

Lately I have thinking that I don't need all of the features of the iPhone and could probably get by with something much simpler. However, today I was glad I had it and the simple "Where Am I" feature came in really handy.

Nutrition Facts

2011-05-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

It is important to teach your children how to budget money. I have a college-age daughter and a college-age son that have different ideas of what that means. They are polar opposites. My son can save money, while my daughter can't. In an effort to help my daughter, I have tried to lead by example. She has $40 that she can spend each week on food. As I am in California during the week, I thought I could show her how easy it is to do.

I leave my house in Utah on Monday mornings at O-Dark-Thirty and catch a plane to the Bay Area. When I arrive, I hit the ATM and get $40 for cash. I use that cash during the week to buy food as well as transportation to and from the airport. Generally I go shopping on Monday night and try to cook all my own meals. Sometimes that works well and other times am running from work to another activity and have to resort to a meal-on-the-go.

I really do try to eat healthy, but sometimes I find myself at the McDonalds drive-thru ordering a couple McDoubles (two patties of beef with two slices of cheese on a hamburger bun). At a buck each, it is a very economical meal. Especially if you leave out the fries and soda. When I get tired of cheap hamburgers, there is always Taco Bell with their 89 cent tacos among a plethora of other fast-food choices. This begs the question of how healthy fast food really is. Here is a list of restaurants with links to their nutritional data:

Arby's
Burger King
Carls Jr.
Dairy Queen
Five Guys Burgers & Fries
Hardees
In-N-Out Burger
Jack in the Box
Little Caesars Pizza
McDonalds
Pizza Hut
Subway
Taco Bell
Togo's
Wendy's
White Castle

After compiling this list, I can see why obesity is such a problem in the United States. Even if you are eating "healthy" sandwiches at Subway, you have to leave off the mayonnaise and cheese and who does that? Nutritionally bankrupt food is really cheap and costs less than healthy food. No wonder we are so fat as a country.

Staying Current

2011-05-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

It is important to stay current with the technologies you use on a daily basis. This is especially true of the ones you use at work. As I am a database guy that works mostly in PostgreSQL, I make sure that the PostgreSQL website is always present in one of my browser tabs. I also make sure to read all of the entries from Planet PostgreSQL.

Normally I can just skim over the postings. Today was different. There was a great story from Josh Berkus about racing to create a database with a billion tables. While that would be a database administrator's nightmare, it was interesting to see the results. Josh didn't succeed in getting to a billion tables as the machine crashed before then due to operating system limitations. It did make it to the 4 million table mark. I would be interested to see how many tables could be created on a system with fewer limits, but would have to slash my wrists if I ever got put in charge of a database with over a million tables.

The second interesting posting of the day was from Robert Haas at EnterpriseDB. While I used to work at EDB, Robert came after I left and so I don't know him other than from his blog. He talked about some of the performance optimizations the PostgreSQL developers are thinking of adding to version 9.2. I have to say I am impressed if they actually are able to make them work. Some of the projects for which I am responsible, require extreme database speed. Anything the developers can do to make it faster, make me happy.

Not everyone is a big fan of databases and so I don't suggest that you immediately go out and read up on PostgreSQL. However I can recommend that you find quality websites relating to the technology you use at your job and read them daily. It doesn't take much time and will help you keep on top of any new features that you might just need.

Solving Two Problems at Once

2011-05-24T17:12:00.000-07:00

I had two goals when I started my work day: Upgrade a commercial software product and create a very complicated report. I will be able to get both done, but it has not been easy.

I started working on the software update first. It didn't take long to run into a problem and I knew I would. We have a complicated environment at work and one of the pieces of software we use didn't take this into account. That means we have to make some minor tweaks and modifications with the help of the product's technical support department. I got as far as I could and then put a call into support.

Since I was in a waiting pattern, I started collecting data for my complicated report. It would be nice if I could write a bunch of code and let the report run on its own. Unfortunately I have to gather the data for each month of a 3-year period by hand. Each month requires an increasing amount of computer time to run. While the first month only took 2 minutes, the last month is taking closer to 20.

At about the 6th month mark, I got a call back from technical support and we worked for a while installing the latest version of their product. Naturally there were times where the technical support engineer and I were waiting on the computer and so I would go back to my report and get data for another month or two. Eventually we got everything working. The only problem was that the upgrade required me to go back and set up all our user information again. At least I was able to hang up the phone and do that on my own while I continued working on my report.

When I started the day, the software update was my main focus. When I was waiting, I switched my focus to the complex report. Once I could continue with the update, I changed focus again. This cycle repeated itself throughout the day until the update was completed. Now I am working solely on the report. When you think about your computer doing multiple things at the same time, that is exactly the process it uses to switch between tasks. Now if I could only find something else to do while I wait for these final months of the report to complete, I'll be a happy camper.

Computer at the Dentist

2011-05-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Last week I broke a crown. I hate to admit that one of my teeth is covered in a porcelain shell, but it is true. I guess all that candy I ate as a child eventually caught up to me.

I immediately called a friend that is a dentist as I was out of town and needed to know if I had to take care of it soon or if it could wait until I saw my regular dentist in Utah. As the exposed tooth wasn't that sensitive, I was fine. Yesterday I met with my dentist and the crown replacement was a modern miracle.

In the past, crowns were a two-visit process. First they put in a temporary crown and you had to be careful how you ate for three weeks while the permanent crown was being fabricated from an impression they took of the original tooth. When the new crown came in, it was back to the dentist for another day of drooling because of a numb mouth.

This time, the dentist removed my busted up old crown and then took a picture of the remaining tooth. He used a 3-D computer program to design a new crown to fit over the tooth. There was a bit of shaping to make sure it fit between the adjacent teeth. Once the tooth was designed, he electronically sent the specifications to the lab (conveniently located in his basement). The lab machined a new crown out of a block of porcelain and it was ready 10 minutes later. I then had the new crown gently placed in my mouth to make sure it was a perfect fit. There was a bit of fine tuning the dentist was able to do with his drill and then it was sent back to the lab for polishing. 20 minutes later, the new crown was cemented in my mouth and I was good to go.

The whole process took a total of about 2 hours. Most of that time, the dentist was working with other patients. It killed part of my morning but was well worth the wait. I don't have to go back and that has me singing praises. After all, who likes to visit the dentist?

The Last Lecture

2011-05-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

Last night I was feeling a little frustrated with the computer and so I decided to search for “Funniest YouTube Videos”. I find that watching funny videos is a great way to get myself laughing and feeling good. There were the usual videos that appeared and then I stumbled upon Time Magazine’s list of YouTube’s 50 Best Videos. Naturally there was some duplication of things I had seen earlier, but it was a long list and so I started going through them.

One video that stood out on the list was “Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture.” I had read about how this university professor had been diagnosed with cancer and was shortly going to die. Until now, I have resisted watching the video because I didn’t want to be reminded of my own mortality and mistakenly thought that would be very apparent. Boy was I wrong. The title of the lecture is something along the lines of how to accomplish your childhood dreams. Randy does a great job of outlining his own childhood dreams and then how he went about making them reality. He then talks about the satisfaction of helping others achieve their childhood dreams.

I would have to say that it was a great lecture. While I only watched part of the other videos on Time Magazine’s list, I watched all one hour and sixteen minutes of Randy’s. While I have managed to live out some of my own childhood dreams I definitely learned a lot. I even forwarded the link to my own nineteen-year-old son who is preparing to move to Romania for the next two years. Hopefully he appreciates the sage advice.

The Game of Mafia

2011-05-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

My Scouts love to play a game called "Mafia" when we are sitting around the campfire. It is a guessing game where innocent players try to figure out who the mafia members are before getting eliminated from the game. When you are gathered around the campfire, a narrator has everyone close their eyes and he assigns you as mafia or innocent. There is generally a ratio of 5 innocents for every mafia. Once the players are assigned, everyone closes their eyes again and only the mafia open them. They then quietly decide who to eliminate using hand gestures and signals. The narrator then has everyone open their eyes, says who has been eliminated, and then allows the group to discuss who they think is mafia. Once a consensus is reached, that person is eliminated from the game.

In an effort to get people from the various groups in our department to talk to each other, we are playing mafia at work. It is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it. It takes a bit longer in the office because the mafia gets one vote per day as does the public. That means only two people get eliminated from the game each day. With over 30 players, that makes for several weeks of play time. All voting is done via e-mail and we have a score board in the cafeteria.

It is interesting to see players come up with elaborate algorithms and spreadsheets to try and deduce the bad guys. Coworkers will ask each other if they are mafia and then gauge if the other person is lying. I have to admit, I find myself talking with people I have only passed in the hallway. The goal of the game is working. If you find yourself at a job where nobody knows anyone else, see if you can't start up a game of mafia.

Sifting Through Data

2011-04-13T16:55:00.001-07:00

Today I found myself looking at a large amount of information in a database. I wanted to limit the data returned and so I enlisted the help of the substring function. There were thousands of rows of data that contained the word "mapping." I didn't want to see those rows in my query. So I asked the database for all the rows that didn't contain the substring "mapping". That gave me the information I was looking for and I was able to move onto my next project.

I was busily working when a coworker came up and asked me to change the data in another database. She started describing the problem and it sounded like it was going to be a huge task until I realized that it could be simplified with the use of the substring function. Basically I needed to remove the first 4 characters of one database field and replace it with a 5-character word. As I had been using the substring function earlier, the syntax or way of using it, was fresh in my mind. The SQL command looked similar to this:

UPDATE the_table
SET the_field = 'abcde' || substr(the_field,5)
WHERE another_field = 'xyz';

Going through the statement, the first line tells the database what table to update. The last line says we want the update to occur where a specific field is equal to the string "xyz". The second line shows the use of the substring or "substr" function. I didn't care about the first 4 characters of the existing string and so I started at position 5 (SQL strings start at character 1 while C programming language strings start at character 0, which can be confusing). I then concatenate it with the replacement string of "abcde". The two vertical pipe symbols represent the concatenate function in SQL.

The statement worked fine and I was free to get back to my other task. Amazingly I have not had to worry about the substring function for quite a while and I found it interesting that I needed it twice today.

Unwanted E-mail

2011-04-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Every morning I log into my personal e-mail and have about 25 messages waiting for me. All but about 3 of them are daily broadcasts that I have signed up to receive. Lately I have discovered that I don't really read a lot of them and so I have started unsubscribing from a few.

My real job is dealing with computers and so I have about 10 different e-mails I get on a daily basis related to information technology. About 5 of those are duplicates and so I unsubscribed from half. The other half I find myself gleaming some level of information at least weekly and will continue to sift through them. There are one or two other daily e-mails from places where I purchased goods and so I have opted to be removed from their daily flood of specials.

The interesting thing to me is what I have decided to keep. One of my favorite daily e-mails is from Steep and Cheap. If you are into camping, hiking, skiing, climbing, and just generally hanging around outside, you should sign up for their daily e-mail. They have incredible deals on outdoor equipment and I have managed to get some great skis for a very low price. Furthermore, the guy that writes the daily e-mail is incredibly funny and worth two minutes of my day.

There are the usual messages related to scouting, ham radio, and skiing. Sometimes they are important and other times I delete them without even reading the messages. As I only have a limited time to spend reading e-mail, the fewer messages I get, the more time I have to devote to the e-mails I do read.

Time to Update My Password

2011-03-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of days, my Windows machine has been warning me that my password is about to expire. Today I finally decided to change it. I have three different passwords that I have used on this machine already and I was hoping to just recycle one of them. Unfortunately Windows keeps track of my last five passwords and so I couldn't. It was time to come up with something new.

Previously I mentioned using an old locker combination and this crossed my mind. I wanted to do something a bit different and so I decided to try something else. I am sure others have the same issue and so I thought I would write about some ideas for coming up with memorable passwords.

Passwords should be a word or phrase that you will remember but are impossible to guess. You should also never use a word found in a common dictionary. So how are you supposed to remember your password if it is not in a dictionary? This is where you get creative.

First, I like to come up with a hobby or interest such as football. Then I choose a word or phrase longer than six letters associated with that interest such as:

touchdown

Next I replace certain letters with numbers that look like letters. I am always confusing the letter O and the number zero and so that is a good starting place. You can also replace the letter E with the number 3 or the letter L with the number one. Doing this leads to:

t0uchd0wn

I also like to capitalize at least one letter in the password. This leads to:

t0uchD0wn

I also like to include at least one special character. The "at" sign or @ is always a good replacement for the letter A, but I don't have any of those in my example. We could add an underscore between "touch" and "down". My personal preference is to add an exclamation point after such an event and so my password might look like this:

t0uchD0wn!

Now if I was to go back and create a password cracking program, it would take a lot of different permutations to guess this one. That makes it a good password. Throw in that it is easy to remember and I am ready to use it.

Now comes the full disclosure. I do like football, but not enough to use "touchdown" as my password. So if you ever try to break one of my passwords, it won't be this one.

Tax Preparation Software

2011-03-28T22:12:00.000-07:00

Last week I was able to carve out some time and complete my federal income taxes. As I work in California but live in Utah, I have to file in both states and got them done as well. That makes for a lot of paperwork.

A lot has changed since I first started doing taxes several decades ago. I used to fill them out by hand. Then a little company created a software package to help make the job easier. I continue to use Turbo Tax to this day. It is a great piece of software and I recommend it if you prepare your own taxes.

The beauty of tax software today is that it immediately files your paperwork with the appropriate agencies and dramatically reduces the time it takes to get your return. This is great for someone like me who will be getting money back from the Feds and the state of California. The sooner I get my money, the sooner I can use it to pay the money I owe to Utah. One week after filing, I received my first of two refunds. Now that is fast.

Technical Support

2011-03-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

I have had a busy week at the office. There was a problem with our data warehouse and it was up to me to fix it. I knew I must have changed something but couldn't figure out what I did. So I called technical support.

Not all technical support departments are created equal. When I worked in Oracle's technical support many years ago, I got a feel for just how tough that job could be. You have to know the product intimately and for a product like our data warehouse, that can be a daunting task.

Amazingly, I got a live technical support representative on the phone and he stayed on the line until the problem was solved. His first questions was the same one I had been asking myself: What changed? I couldn't think of anything I had done that would cause the problem we were having. The rep set up a WebEx session so he could see what I was describing and we then started running through one or two exercises. It didn't take me long to remember that I had added something to the database earlier in the previous week and it took 5 days for that change to manifest itself. 30 seconds later the problem was corrected and the data warehouse was fixed.

The technical support rep never solved my issue. I was the one that discovered my mistake and was glad to figure it out as quickly as I did. However It sure was nice having someone else on the other end of the phone with which to discuss my problem. I'm sure it would have taken a lot longer to figure out if I was on my own.

Too Much Data

2011-03-10T20:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I started a database report and let it run all day. When I was ready to leave work and the report was still not done, I let it run overnight. I figured if I came in this morning and the report was still running, I would try to figure out what the problem was and see if I could fix it.

I got into the office this morning and the report was still running. I had to have the report done this afternoon to send to management. I had no faith that the report would complete by the time it was due and so I started looking into other methods of creating it. On the off chance my report was going to eventually complete, I let it run.

Most modern databases are fairly smart, have efficient algorithms, and are pretty good at figuring the best way of doing things, but they are not perfect. I was able to come up with another way of getting the information and discovered an assumption I had made about the data was false. Instead of asking for a subset of the data from a single source, I was asking for all the data from multiple sources joined together in such a way that was overwhelming. Discovering this problem allowed me to finish the report and get it out on time.

This whole experience underscored the importance of not making assumptions.

Simple Solutions

2011-03-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago I discovered that I have two databases with overlapping data. That means they both contain copies of the same data. Unfortunately one of the databases has been getting updated while the other one hasn't. There are two possible solutions: one is to require the data to get manually input to both databases, and the other is to write a little program that updates the updates the second database when something changes in the first. The trick is to figure out which solution will work the best.

Writing a little program means more work for me. Not only do I have to write the program, but I also have to test it and then maintain it. Having someone manually update two databases is simple to implement but is more error prone. The gating factor on which solution to use boils down to how often updates are made. Looking at my particular situation, I will most likely be writing the automatic program. So when would someone choose the manual process?

The best example of leaving something manual is with annual reports. Perhaps you have sales figures for each month and each quarter. Since the annual report is a simple matter of adding the figures from the quarterly reports and is only run once a year, that can often be left as a manual process. This is especially true given the cost of an administrative assistant vs. computer programmers. Now if I only had an administrative assistant.

E-mail Lists

2011-02-25T10:04:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I received a nasty e-mail from somebody wanting to be removed from an e-mail list. The e-mail went to everyone on the list and wasn't very polite. I belong to several e-mail lists and this is not a unique occurrence. It seems that once a week someone will finally get fed up with receiving so much e-mail and ask to be removed from the list. All of these people must be complete idiots because that is not how one unsubscribes.

If you are not familiar with e-mail lists, they allow people to use a single e-mail address to send information to a group of people. Perhaps you are interested in sailing in Utah and want to be included on the list. Simply sign up and you will receive all sorts of news and information from others with the same interest.

At the bottom of most e-mails distributed by e-mail lists are instructions on how to remove yourself from the list. Generally it involves sending an e-mail with the subject of "Unsubscribe". Sometimes there is a special e-mail address that must be used, but the instructions are pretty clear.

One would think that if a person is smart enough to register for an e-mail list, they would also be smart enough to un-register. Unfortunately that isn't always the case and it can be really annoying to the rest of us on the list. So if you find yourself getting a bunch of unwanted e-mail from one of these lists, do us all a favor and read one of the entire messages. Chances are that you will discover how to unsubscribe yourself and not come off looking like a moron.

12 Hours of Snowbird

2011-02-17T16:48:00.001-08:00

I will be heading back to Utah a day early this week so I can participate in the 12 Hours of Snowbird. One of my coworkers and I will start skiing tomorrow evening at 7pm and ski all night armed only with headlamps and a healthy supply of M&Ms. There are about 15 other teams that we will be competing against to try and get the most vertical feet skied in a 12-hour period. I just hope my legs hold out.

I got an e-mail about 6 weeks ago announcing the event. At first I thought it would be fun and so I showed it to one of the guys I work with. He is young and made me immediately sign up as his teammate. Naturally I did. Now I am committed to giving up a night's sleep in my own bed to participate in this folly. To be honest, I am kind of excited.

I was the start referee at Snowbird for a ski race and got the chance to talk with one of the 12 Hours of Snowbird organizers. His big concern was that we would get a lot of snow the night of the event. If that is the case, then they will have to cancel it due to avalanche danger. Right now, the weather report says there is only a 20% chance of snow. That shouldn't be enough to stop the all-night-ski-a-thon. I wonder if I will have enough gas in my tank to ski any the next day?

Foreign Languages

2011-02-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I watched a World War II movie on Hulu. During the course of the action, several US soldiers took refuge in a French farmhouse. The woman is there all alone with her daughter and thankful to have the Allied protection. Naturally she only speaks French and tries to communicate with the guys that only speak English. It was fun for me to watch because I speak both languages fluently. It didn't occur to me that there weren't any subtitles until after I was done with the film. I imagine that it must be a different experience for those that only speak English.

Right now I am in the process of learning Morse code (and have been for quite a while). While it isn't a different language, it fells like it sometimes. I am using a program called "Morse" to help me. As I sit and listen to the dits and the dahs, it makes me wonder what is being said in the movies that have bits of Morse code. I understand that most of the time, the code is nothing at all. However every once and a while, it is real and there is a message hidden in there. The original movie about the Titanic called, "A Night to Remember" used the actual code sent from the fateful ship. If you understand Morse, I'll bet that would add to the experience.

Going back to the WWII movie I saw last night, there was also something else worthy of note. One of the German soldiers was my roommate when I lived in Strasbourg, France. He was able to help me learn French and so I had to laugh when I saw him in the German uniform. It is a good thing he didn't have a speaking part as I'm sure it would have come out with a French accent.

Document Store Databases

2011-02-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

Today I am doing some testing on MongoDB. We are getting ready to launch a new project and so I have spent the first part of the month getting things configured. I now have our staging area completely set up and ready as the rest of the software comes online.

Most database software like Oracle or PostgreSQL is relational. That means data is stored in tables and those tables can be related to other tables. If you have a PERSON table with five attributes (e.g., last name, first name, gender, etc.), those same attributes are stored for every person in the table. MongoDB is a document store. This means that you can keep track of different attributes for each person. You may store that Jimmy has green eyes and not care about that for any other person in the database.

The reason we are using MongoDB is because of its speed. While we can get 1,000 transactions per second out of Oracle or PostgreSQL, we are getting 25,000 from MongoDB using equivalent hardware. That is a huge difference.

MongoDB also has the ability to automatically partition the data to run on separate servers. If your database starts getting too big, simply add another server and the data is automatically partitioned onto it. Then when you go to look for Jimmy's data, both machines look through half as much data so you get even more speed.

Of course MongoDB does have a drawback. For starters, there are not really any reporting tools. In our system we will be doing nightly pulls of the data and inserting it into a PostgreSQL database. Then we can run reports on a daily basis using tools like BIRT or JasperReports. There is also a bit of a learning curve for database administration. However these issues are a small price to pay for such speed.

Software Define Radios

2011-02-01T19:32:00.000-08:00

I have found my new favorite website. It is www.websdr.org and allows anyone with a Java and Javascript enabled browser to tune into a personal ham radio. You don't have to have an FCC license to use it because you are only allowed to listen and not transmit. However for someone interested in learning about amateur radio, it is a great tool.

The technology that allows each user to individually tune the radio is a software defined radio (SDR). That means that there is an antenna connected to an analog-to-digital converter. The converter listens to the entire frequency band and the user uses software to focus in on a small section of that band. Otherwise it would be impossible to listen to all of conversations at once.

One nice thing about SDRs is that you can create a waterfall display. That makes it really easy to see where others are talking and tune in. On a conventional radio, you are stuck tuning yourself or using an automated scan. It is cumbersome and noisy, not to mention it takes forever to find anyone having a conversation.

When I came across the website, I thought the waterfall display required expensive radio equipment that I couldn't afford. Then I looked into one of the sites and saw that radio receivers are only $20. Now that is really amazing. I may have to get one.

Open the Floodgates of Spam

2011-01-21T09:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was working on a problem at work and was stuck. Rather than continue to spin in circles, I decided to post my issue to an online forum and see if I couldn't get some help from the experts. Immediately I got a response asking for more information. In the process of providing the information, I figured out what my problem was and was able to get it fixed without any additional help.

When originally posting my problem to the forum, I was asked to provide my e-mail address. This was helpful because as soon as someone asked me a question, I was sent a message. Unfortunately there are a lot of programs on the Internet looking for valid e-mail addresses.

I woke up this morning and checked my e-mail. So far I have only gotten one Spam message promoting Viagra, but I imagine there are more to follow. In the future I need to remember to use a throw-away-e-mail account for such postings.

I Got It on Video

2011-01-19T19:34:00.000-08:00

This last weekend my two kids had a ski race at Jackson Hole in Wyoming. I enjoy skiing there but it isn't the best place to hold a ski race. It is tough to stand on the side of a wonderful mountain waiting for kids to flash by you when you could be sampling one of the greatest mountains in North America.

This weekend it was unseasonably warm and instead of being freezing, we had to contend with rain. We also had to deal with constantly changing conditions. One minute it would be sunny and the next it would be raining or snowing.

On the last day of the race, it looked like we would have good weather and be able to get all the racers down the hill safely. Then there was an issue with the timing computer. The person that normally runs timing wasn't there and the new one kept having problems. When it came time for my son to ski down the mountain, there was a course hold because of timing issues. We waited for him to come skiing down for quite a while. During this time a series of clouds rolled in and visibility went to zero. At the worst time of the day, my son was sent down the mountain. Not only was it snowing sideways but a cloud descended on the course and you could barely see the next gate in front of you.

I stood there on the side of the mountain wondering who would let a bunch of 14-year olds race in white-out conditions at 40 to 50 miles per hour. It was a miracle nobody got hurt. I tried to get my son's run on video, but the camera kept trying to focus on the flying snow. All I got was a white screen with the conversation I had with my daughter as my son skied past us.

My son finished his run safely and we packed up to head home. Luckily somebody saw the foolishness of the race and they cancelled it for the rest of the racers. I think it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt and so that was the wise thing to do.

The moral of the story is that proper computer training is important even in ski racing. My kids' race was plagued with timing issues that should have been worked out long before the competition even started. Trying to figure out computer problems at the same time you are holding an event is impossible. If my son hadn't been held at the start for 45 minutes waiting for these issues to be resolved, they could have gotten all of the boys to the finish long before the storm rolled in. Then everyone would have gotten a fair shot at doing well and that is what racing is all about.

Holy Cow, It Worked!

2011-01-13T16:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote about constructive procrastination and how I was thinking about solving a problem while I was writing the blog. As soon as I posted the entry, I went to work using some of the ideas I formulated. Ten minutes later my problem was solved and I was moving on to my next project. I should procrastinate more often.

Today there were no problems with my new project. I am reworking something I did a few months ago and took such good notes the first time that I had everything working quickly. I really like having good notes handy.

This brings up the topic of how to best keep notes. Usually I keep a paper notebook. Lately I have found that it is much easier to cut and paste information into an electronic document. It saves a lot of time over writing things down. I can also cut and paste out of the document and into the programs I am using, which saves even more time. Then to make things really easy, I just store all of my notes in a directory called . . . you guessed it, "notes." The name of the file is what the note is about. It really helps to streamline things.

My Tomcat problem took longer than expected to solve. My notes helped me finish my next task quicker than expected. Now I find myself on schedule and ready to begin the next project. I wonder if I can really claim procrastination as a tool that helped me solve a problem?

Constructive Procrastinating

2011-01-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

There is an item on my list of things to do that is causing me problems. I have been working on it for the past two days and am not making any progress. It is a problem with Tomcat and while there is a lot of documentation for the software, the information is mostly worthless. Faced with pouring through more online manuals or playing video games, I am leaning towards the video games.

I really should be working right now but am taking a break because I am procrastinating. My hope is that making this blog entry will give me some insight into the problem at hand and that I will be able to figure out what is going wrong and make it right. So far it seems to be working. I am already making a mental list of the next steps to try. The trick is to write the list down and go attack the problem.

When I find myself working on a problem for too long, I stop being productive. At that point it is nice to take a step back, do something useful, and then go back to the problem. If that doesn't work then it is time to ask one of my coworkers. Hopefully I get this solved before then.

Scout Troop Websites

2011-01-07T21:28:00.000-08:00

Last night I attended the monthly Roundtable for the Boy Scouts of America in the Pacific Skyline Council. The focus of the meeting was websites for scout troops. It was well done and I learned a lot.

The first presenter came up and showed his Troop's website. It was done using Adobe's Dreamweaver several years ago and looked pretty good. Unfortunately it was very technical and none of the Scouts even wanted to learn how to modify the information. That means that it is a task for Scoutmasters, assistant Scoutmasters, or technical parents.

The next presenter had two sites: one for the Pack (Cub Scouts) and one for the Troop. The Pack's website was more mature and done using Joomla. It was very functional and looked like it meets the needs of the Pack quite nicely. He then showed us the Troop site that was doine using WordPress. While it didn't have the depth of the Joomla site, it looked much easier to administer and there was interest by the boys in being able to maintain it.

The third presenter showed us his site which was created with Troopmaster. It was impressive because it integrated with their software to keep track of the boys advancements. As everyone knows, an Eagle Scout is a big deal and anything that allows parents and leaders to streamline the process is very welcome. Of the 4 technologies shown this far in the evening, this was definitely my favorite.

The fourth presenter showed a site created with Google Sites. It lacked the Scout tracking integration found in Troopmaster, but was very easy to use. I came home and recommended that my wife might want to consider it for her small custom sewing business.

Before the meeting last night, I had heard about all of these products but hadn't really given them much thought. It was a real eye-opener to see them in action and how people are using them to send out scouting information. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Volunteers and Websites

2011-01-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

I was able to take close to two weeks off during Christmas and am just now finding time to get back to the blog. It was very nice to be at home for two weeks and not have to worry about anything but skiing. Other than a very mild case of frostbite on the end of my nose, it was a great vacation.

Next week Snowbird will be hosting its first race of the season and I am responsible for coordinating volunteers. Once I get everyone lined up, my wife takes care of them during the race to ensure everyone knows what they are doing. Last year, the Snowbird Ski Team implemented a website to enlist the help of volunteers. If you want to help with a race, just go to the team's website, click on the "Volunteer" link, pick a race, and sign up. The site sends me a message and I put your name in the appropriate place.

The website is a great idea as I have the ability to recruit volunteers long before the race happens. It does have a downside though. People will often sign up early to reserve a spot at events. Then as the deadline approaches, they discover that something else has come up and they can't make the race. Yesterday three different people canceled on me. Now I have to try to find replacements at the last minute. Anybody out there going to be at Snowbird next week and want free passes?

The Importance of Training

2010-12-20T17:36:00.000-08:00

It is amazing at how many people think they are an expert in something only to find out that they are really more of a novice. This weekend I got to participate as an official in a ski race. Normally I get assigned as the start referee, which is a lot of work. Saturday I was a simple gate judge with a twist. The twist was that I was on a headset with the start and finish. I have done that before, but only once. It was my job to communicate any crashes on the middle of the hill outside the view of the start or finish officials. Sounds like a piece of cake, right? Wrong.

The first race of the season generally has a lot of racers and so it was an all-day affair. I would watch skiers come down the mountain and as they passed, I was to give the racer's number and that they "cleared" the drift road, which was where I was standing. A typical conversation would sound like this:

Starter: Racer 1 on course, 2 holding in the gate.
Me,once racer 1 got to my spot on the hill: 1 clear of drift.
Next checkpoint, once racer 1 got to his spot on the hill: 1 clear of slalom start.
Finish, when the racer passed through the finish line: 1 through the finish.

Again, this sounds rather simple. However we could have up to 4 racers on a hill at the same time, staggered at 30-second intervals. That meant that racer 50 was crossing the finish line at the same time 51 was going past the slalom start, 52 was going past me, and racer 53 was leaving the start gate. Therefore it was important to use as few words as possible so you weren't talking over someone else. Furthermore it was important to use the right vocabulary.

During the course of the day, a skier missed a gate and started hiking so he wouldn't be disqualified. The racer behind him quickly approached and passed him. That means that racer 52 was in front of 51 and I used the word "passed" to indicate what had happened. Timing was able to make the necessary change in the computer so that racer 52 was given the correct time as was 51. Without this communication, both racers would have the wrong time. After the passing, I used the word "passed" with the next racer instead of "cleared." After all, the racer did pass my spot and I had the word "pass" on my mind. This confused timing because they thought two more racers had passed each other, which wasn't the case. Using the wrong vocabulary created confusion and I had to correct the error.

In my defense, it was the only mistake of the day but highlighted the importance of proper training. How many of us are eager to tackle a new project or try something innovative on our computer. Sometimes we have the proper knowledge or training and can do okay. Other times we know just enough to be dangerous and really screw things up. I hate it when I do that.

Don't Shoot the Messenger

2010-12-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

When I first started flying between Utah and California earlier this year, Southwest had a flight that left Oakland at 6pm and got into Salt Lake at 9pm. It required me to leave my office at 4 and I sort of had an evening at home. Then Southwest moved the flight to 7pm, which put me in at 10pm. I got to stay at the office until 5pm but sort of ruined my Friday nights. Now Southwest has pushed the flight back to 8:15, which puts me in after 11pm. That totally ruins my Friday evening.

Today is the first time that the flight goes home at 8:15 and I wasn't too happy about it when I made the reservation. I thought about going on the Delta flight, which leaves at 6:15, but wanted to remain loyal to Southwest.

I just logged onto Southwest's website to see if my flight is going to be on time this evening. Right now it is 2 hours late. I won't be home until well after midnight. I checked the FAA's website to see what airports are experiencing weather delays and San Fransisco (SFO) is the only one. That means that Southwest is having problems or at one time during the day, this plane made a stop at SFO and it screwed up the rest of the day's schedule. The net effect is I am not a happy. Sometimes the Internet brings bad news and it is important to remember not to shoot the messenger.

Benchmarks

2010-12-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

Today is the first ski race of the season for my youngest son. I wish I could be there at Park City watching. Instead I am stuck here in California working. The most important goal in this first race is to finish. Doing so helps with races later in the season.

My job today is running benchmarks. We will be rolling out a new product in the next couple of months and I need to make sure our infrastructure will support it. I am starting the day running speed tests. Later I will work on some reliability tests to make sure we can weather hardware and software failures. These benchmarks are sort of like the ski race my kids are participating in at Park City. The race doesn't really count for much other than to make sure they are in racing form and ready for more important races later in the season.

My daughter was also supposed to be at the race but got in trouble. She hit her brother after being warned repeatedly that it would keep her from this first race. She got home from school a few minutes ago and asked if she could go skiing at the resort near our house. My wife informed her that she was being punished and should work on homework. She knew she wasn't going to be allowed to race, but not being allowed to even ski today is really too much. If she had known that, she would have hit her brother harder. When I heard that, I just had to laugh.

Late Night YouTube

2010-12-15T10:53:00.000-08:00

Last night I got interested in watching some YouTube videos and wound up staying up past midnight. Normally I am not a fan of YouTube, but found some rather interesting submissions and couldn't help but watch. My search started with "Emergency Communications Trailers." After following several links I found a 35-minute video that I just had to watch (divided into two parts).

The video wasn't really a video. It was just audio of radio communication between air traffic control and an airplane. The pilot had passed away, leaving the sole passenger to fly the plane. This is a scenario you see in a lot of movies about commercial flying. The YouTube video is nothing like the movies, which isn't really that surprising.

The first thing I noticed was how calm the passenger was. You don't really notice he has a dead guy sitting next to him until he makes a comment about it right before landing. That would probably freak out a lot of people.

The other thing I noticed was how much radio traffic was taking place. Air traffic control would talk with the passenger and then have to redirect 4 or 5 other pilots to another channel. Then he would talk to the passenger again. That is something that never happens in the movies.

Eventually the plane gets directed to an airport with a really long runway and the passenger is able to safely land. However you can hear his voice climb in pitch the closer he gets to the ground. This is one situation where everything works out well considering the circumstances and it was riveting. Considering how much garbage is on YouTube, it was nice to find something so worthwhile.

Teamwork

2010-12-14T10:57:00.000-08:00

This morning I began documenting a project I just started. I am using a new product called Eucalyptus and want to write down the steps I went through to get everything running. Then if I have to go through the same steps in the future, I won't have to figure it out again.

As I was adding comments to my notebook, I turned past a number of entries for new products I have learned this year. While there are the usual notes about PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other databases, there are also notes for MongoDB, BIRT, Fabric, and other software. I wish I could say that I discovered all these products myself, but that would be a lie. The reason I am using them is because of various people I work with and their recommendation to help make my job easier.

I used to do consulting and had my own bag of tools. While I would work with others, rarely would they make recommendations of other products that might help me out. Now that I am in more of a team environment, there is an open atmosphere of sharing. I find this to be a refreshing change and am enjoying the chance to add to my toolbox. So if you find yourself struggling with a particularly nasty problem, seek out a trusted resource and see if there isn't another tool out there to make the problem go away.

Global Warming

2010-12-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

Those who believe in global warming will point to the weather here in the western half of the country as proof. Those who don't will point to the weather in the East. Since I am in the West, all I can say is that it isn't fun to watch all this early snow melt. It is tough to ski when there isn't any snow.

Saturday I had a great day of skiing at Snowbird. My wife and I were first into a large bowl and had a nice run of untouched powder. By the time we hit the bottom, there were others following our tracks and so it was impossible to circle around and have the same experience. That didn't keep us from finding little stashes of powder throughout the rest of the mountain. Yes, it was a great day and I hope to have more like it throughout the year. Snowbird is fortunate in that they have elevation to help combat the warm temperatures. While they had fresh snow, places like Park City had to deal with rain.

I got back to the office today and asked if anyone else had gone up skiing. A coworker had thought about it, but Tahoe was just too warm. A look at the Squaw Valley website which showed that it was in the 40's and snow was melting fast. In fact, Squaw only has an 18-inch base. In Utah, that would mean a lot of exposed rocks. It has been so long since I have skied any of the Lake Tahoe resorts that I am not sure how bare it is, but I don't plan to go there any time soon. That is too bad because Squaw Valley is one of my favorite places to ski.

Ski resorts used to have a phone number that you could call to get weather conditions and I'm sure they still do. However now it is so much easier to go to the resort's website and get the same information. Often times there is even a live picture or two so you can see for yourself if the report measures up to your expectations. Unfortunately 18-inches of snow just makes me depressed. Hopefully the weather predictions for a cool down are true and we will have snow later this week. Otherwise there are several websites I won't be visiting only because it is too sad.

Time to Clean my Desk

2010-12-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

You can tell when I have been incredibly busy as my desk doesn't get cleaned. I was looking at my desk in the office this morning and thinking that I really need to clean it up. I have mentioned before how a good work environment is critical to helping focus on a project. This morning I have some extra time and so I will clean up my desk.

I am trying to figure out why my desk gets so messy. Part of the problem is that I think I am afraid to throw anything away. The moment my trash has been emptied is exactly when I realize that I shouldn't have thrown something away. The sad thing is that what I really need is a note scribbled in the margin of an unimportant and unrelated paper.

Another reason my desk gets so messy is that I take a lot of notes. Generally I try to use an engineering notebook for all of the important stuff. If I know I won't need the information in the future, I will write on a yellow tablet and then throw it away when I am done. Unfortunately I will write one of those super-important and unrelated notes in the margin and end up keeping the paper and cluttering my desk.

Finally I like to create piles. If I don't know what to do with something, I will put it in a pile of other stuff I don't know what to do with. It is a practice that drives my wife crazy. She will walk around the house questioning me about piles of junk in various corners. Eventually the piles get moved to my office which is where they needed to go anyways. I guess that means I am good at getting my wife to clean up after me. Now I just wish she would come hang out in my office at work.

Company Benefits

2010-12-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

Today was a good day to be at the office. The company I work for was giving away all sorts of free swag. OK, technically it wasn't free. I had to make a $5 donation to a charity and then they gave me a grab bag full of cool stuff. I got some sweet T-shirts as well as a bunch of video games. If I had bought the games in a store, I would have spent around $250. Of course I didn't get to pick the games and neither did any of the other employees around me. That led to a lot of trades taking place as we all got different titles.

This is one of the benefits that is often overlooked when deciding where you want to work. Back at Oracle, we might have gotten T-shirts, but nobody really had a consumer use for their product. It would be like bringing home a drive-shaft to a 1987 Ford F-150. While someone definitely has a use for such a gift, it isn't going to get the kiddies excited to see under the tree on Christmas morning. Yep, I definitely work for a company with lots of cool products.

This got me thinking about other cool companies. I wonder if Apple has such a practice and they give out iPads to all of their employees for a nominal donation to a local charity. Ok, maybe not an iPad, but how about an iPod? REI would be another great place to work if they gave out free stuff. With all the camping I do, I would definitely be happy with most anything they carry.

You don't suppose GM gives away cars at Christmas do you? They did have to get bailed out by the government recently. . .

World Clocks

2010-12-08T14:50:00.000-08:00

Several people from my office have been traveling all over the place because of conferences. It is always difficult to remember what time it is in the various timezones throughout the world. My watch can tell me the time for all timezones, which is helpful when I am doing a lot of traveling. However it is a little cumbersome because it uses 3-letter airport codes to indicate the timezone. For instance, LAX represents the pacific time zone. Most Americans know that SFO (San Francisco International Airport) and LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) are in the same timezone. But what about ANC (Anchorage International Airport) and HNL (Honolulu International Airport)? And what about daylight savings time?

In reality, it doesn't matter what the exact time is when you are trying to call one of your coworkers in Japan. What really matters is if the sun is up or if it is the middle of the night. The best tool for that is a world clock which shows a map of the world with night areas colored darker than day areas (as shown in the image above).

There are a number of free world clocks that work on Windows, but I wanted one on Linux because that is my primary system at work. Doing a quick search on one of the Ham radio sites (because Ham radio guys use world clocks to determine the best frequencies to use) led me to Sunclock. It is a free program that can be found at ftp://ftp.ac-grenoble.fr/ge/geosciences/sunclock.

The program comes as source code and so you have to compile it. There are some simple instructions that come with the download and most Linux users should be able to get it working with a minimum fuss. If you run Linux and do business all over the world, this application is indispensable.

2010 Christmas List

2010-12-07T11:13:00.000-08:00

I love this time of the year. The news always talks about how some adults get depressed at Christmas time and I can see how that can happen. However I love exchanging gifts. I also use this time of year as an excuse to get new toys for myself by justifying that it is for the family. In thinking about what I would like this year, I decided to make my list public in case there are others that can benefit from my Christmas list.

Less than $20
My kids often ask me what I want for Christmas and I know they don't have much money to spend. In reality I would rather have them save for college than buy me expensive toys. So this is probably the most important price range on my Christmas list. Some ideas are:

Memory cards, you can never have too many of these
USB thumb drives, great for backing up important pictures and documents
12 Volt car adapter to USB charger, great for keeping your iPhone fully charged
Noise canceling headphones, what a steal at $19.99
Mouse pad with a really cool graphic, mine are always getting worn out
LED Flashlight, great for looking behind the computer
A 50-pack of blank DVD's, make sure to get the kind that match the DVD writer (+ or -)

Less than $100
This price range opens up a few more gifts but starts getting out of the range most kids can afford. Perhaps two kids can go together to get Dad a gift.

Good computer toolkit, I am always looking for a screwdriver
Spare charger for my laptop, so one can stay at home and the other at the office
DVD or Blu-Ray movie, fun for the whole family
A 1 TB hard drive, to add to any computer system
External hard drive, great for making backups
Battery backup system or UPS, for when the power flickers

More than $100
This opens up a lot of possibilities. However it is Christmas and not "Winner of the Lottery Day," so you shouldn't really spend more than $1000. Furthermore these gifts should really be for the whole family and not just one individual.

3D Television, you can get some bundles for less than $1000
Playstation 3, it is also a Blu-Ray player
Color Laser printer, great quality and the toner doesn't dry up like with ink-jet printers
Gas-powered generator, for when the power is out for a long time
1080p Video projector, when a 50-inch screen isn't large enough

There are some great buys on all of these ideas and so don't be afraid to scour the Internet for the best prices. And remember, don't spend too much. It isn't much of a Christmas if you are still paying for it in July.

The Fear of Impending Doom

2010-12-03T10:38:00.000-08:00

I would have to say that I am generally a very optimistic person. I am always hoping that the best will happen and try to shrug off all of those preaching impending doom. When all of the talk of global warming became popular, I read Michael Crichton's State of Fear and appreciated his scientific approach to analyzing what is really going on in the world around us. Let's be honest, the scientific community is often wrong, but never in doubt.

Last night I had the chance to attend a Roundtable for Boy Scout leaders. The topic of conversation was winter camping. It was refreshing to listen to the wisdom of others and not be the one teaching the class. Of course I did put in my two cents about the importance of eating a Snicker's bar before going to bed (your body needs fuel to keep warm while you sleep). The primary message in last night's meeting was the Scout motto: Be Prepared.

It is essential to be prepared for realistic disasters. I do a lot of reading on Ham radio forums and there are some preparing for the end of the world while others are worried about a simple 3-day power outage. While I applaud those preparing for the apocalypse, I think it is much more realistic to prepare for the power outage. So what does that mean for the regular computer user? Take a look at some realistic scenarios and plan accordingly.

If you keep important records on your computer that might be useful in the event of an emergency (i.e. medical information, phone contacts, etc.), make sure that you have a way to power your computer in case of an outage. Laptops have the advantage of having a battery without requiring an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Being able to keep this information on your iPhone (or similar device) is even better.

Lightning strikes have a tendency to destroy computer equipment and so it is a good idea to turn off and unplug your computer during an electrical storm. Unfortunately those inexpensive surge protectors will do little regardless of what their warranty says.

Most importantly you should back up the data on your computer. Katrina-type storms happen once every hundred years. You are much more likely to suffer a hard-disk crash or a dropped computer. If you have your data backed up, then you are that much quicker to being productive in the event your computer breaks. This means doing regular backups as data has a tendency to change. I am missing three years of photos because of a crashed hard drive. I hope that doesn't happen to you.

A New Home for Old Gadgets

2010-12-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

If you are like me, you probably have a bunch of old cell phones and used computer equipment lying around the house. I was one of the first people to start carrying a cell phone and when it came time to upgrade, I got a credit for returning my old one. For some reason, the carriers stopped their upgrade programs and so I have a box with all of my old phones. Every once and a while, a Scout troop or school fundraising group will drop by asking for old phones to recycle. While I don't mind helping them out, it would be nice to get some real cash for my old gadgets.

Last night I was getting ready to head off to bed when the news mentioned a story about a company paying for old computers, monitors, cell phones, and other electronic gadgets. I decided it was worth staying up a bit to see if it was something I could use. It was and now I can pass that information on to you.

If you go to www.gazelle.com, you can find out how much your old junk is worth. My son's phone died and is using an old Treo 650 that we had lying around. I did a query to find the value of the phone and discovered it is worthless. I thought back to my last phone that I was using before I got my iPhone 3G and that was a Motorola Razor. I did a search to discover that it is also worthless. Each time I searched for a worthless item, Gazelle offered to recycle the device responsibly. That is nice, but I want cash.

I looked at my iPhone 3G and wondered how much it is worth. I am interested in upgrading to the iPhone 4 and want to know how much I can get for my current phone. I plugged in the numbers and discovered it is worth $104. Now we're talking. At that price, it could be worth it to get rid of my old phone and pick up a new one. This gives me an idea for Christmas . . .

A Case For Twitter

2010-11-29T19:24:00.000-08:00

I have never been a fan of Twitter until now. I have always thought it stupid that the public would waste time following celebrities 140 characters at a time. I still feel the same way, however, recently I have seen some legitimate uses for the service.

At the end of September, there was a fire in Herriman, Utah. It became known as the Machine Gun Fire because it was started by practice rounds at a National Guard firing range. The dry grass and high winds caused the fire to spread rapidly and endanger many homes. Naturally the cell phone service in the area quickly became overwhelmed as people tried to check on loved ones and news media tried to inform the public. It was interesting to watch the news and see the news try to explain what was happening while anyone in the Salt Lake area could see the massive fires burning on the hillside.

In the end, the residents were evacuated with the help of reverse 911 (where the local government sends a message to every home in the area). A second tool that was incredibly helpful for sending information was Twitter. The news outlest and residents could get up-to-date information simply by logging onto Twitter.

Fast forward to this Thanksgiving weekend and Utah was supposed to have a major blizzard blanket the area on Tuesday. The massive storm turned out to be a dud. Then it started snowing Sunday morning at 3am. I got up and shovelled the walks. It continued snowing all day, through the night, and didn't let up until today. When I left for the airport this morning to catch my flight back to California, there was two feet of snow in my front yard. I had to shovel the walks again. Naturally there was the question of if the kids had school.

We turned on the TV, but there wasn't any news about school closures. We turned on the radio, but all they wanted to do was play songs. We even turned on a computer and checked if there was any news. The first place my wife visited was the superintendant's Twitter feed and it said something along the lines of "Thanks to our diligent staff, parking lots are cleared and school will be held."

While most kids would be disappointed to discover that school was still being held, mine breathed a sigh of relief. They know that a day off today just means a day taken away from their Spring break. It is amazing how such a small message was the information needed to continue the day's activities.

That Was It?

2010-11-24T10:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote about how a big snow storm was supposed to hit Utah. I stayed up watching the traffic cameras and checking in on the family. My wife and kids were safe watching a movie and didn't give the storm a second thought. I got a call right before everyone headed off to bed saying that there was only 4 inches of snow on the driveway.

I woke up this morning and checked in with the family before they headed up to Snowbird for some skiing. My wife said that there wasn't much more snow this morning than when they went to bed. That's it? Only 4 inches of snow? My wife did mention that it was incredibly cold and so the salt on the roads wasn't melting the ice. That can make for tricky driving but I don't think it justifies all of the lead-up to this storm. The weather service kept saying it was going to be a 4-foot storm. The mountains only got 9 inches. That barely justifies bringing out the new skis.

It will be difficult to trust the weather service the next time I hear that a huge snowstorm is rolling in. I'm sure others feel the same way. Unfortunately that means that when the big storm really does clobber the area, we will be unprepared. Awe who am I kidding. The next time I hear about a big storm coming, I will get excited and hope for tons of snow. That's what skiers do.

Waiting for the Storm

2010-11-23T14:26:00.000-08:00

I am in California today but my family is back in Utah. There is supposed to be a huge storm rolling in this evening. The National Weather Service has been predicting this storm since Sunday and been using terms like "a significant storm like we haven't seen for several years." I'm not sure if that means it is a once-in-a-decade storm or once-in-a-century storm. Or if it just means "a really big storm."

The storm has been getting so much attention that my son was told not to come to one of his University classes today, to give him extra time to get home before the storm hits. It is only a 30 to 40 minute drive for him, but several of his classmates will be driving many hours to get home for the Thanksgiving break.

I have a keen interest in this storm because I will be flying home tomorrow and don't want to be stranded here in the San Francisco area. The Internet has been very helpful in keeping me abreast of the weather situation. While you may be tempted to look at www.weather.com, the best weather site is really www.weather.gov. It gives you all sorts of weather and travel advisories that are very useful.

While it is nice to get weather forecasts, there is a lot to be said for simply looking out a window. Unfortunately I am over 500 miles away and looking out a window isn't an option. If only there was a camera in the Salt Lake area that is connected to the Internet. More importantly I need one looking outside. Traffic cameras are a pretty good resource and you can get to a huge list of them for the Salt Lake area by going to www.utahcommuterlink.com. The site has a map showing all of the traffic cameras in the area and it is really easy to click around Salt Lake and see where it is snowing and where it is dry.

Finally, I want check and see how air traffic is backing up. Sometimes I fly Delta and sometimes I fly Southwest. Both carriers have websites where I can go to see if specific flights are delayed. Southwest's is a little easier to use because it will allow me to select flights between two cities without having to know the flight number. Delta requires knowing the flight number, which isn't too difficult to get. A more general place to go for getting an idea about delays across the country is the FAA's site. It shows a map of the United States with the major airports represented by a colored dot. Green dots show that most flights are on-time, orange dots may have weather or other delays greater than 15 minutes, and red dots indicate delays of an hour or more. Moving your mouse over the cities brings up a balloon with information as to why the airport may be experiencing delays.

I talked to my wife earlier and she said that the news is telling people to avoid travel if they can. It will be interesting to see if the storm really hits with the fury that has been predicted. When it does, I should be able to see it from the comfort of Sunny California.

Bad TV Reception

2010-11-22T19:38:00.000-08:00

It is tough watching TV this evening. On the sailboat I don't have cable or satellite and have to pull my television signals from the airwaves.

When I set up my HD television, I was surprised at how many stations I could get. On a good day, I can receive about 75 channels. Tonight I am getting 4. There are a number of factors that contribute to good television reception. I would expect to have great reception this evening and then I remembered I walked down a steep ramp to get to the boat. That means it is low tide and I am sitting about 8 feet lower than usual. Antenna height is probably the biggest factor for good television reception.

When I look at today's tide tables, I can see that low tide was at 5:48 pm (or 17:45 as it is listed on the table) and that it was 0.9 feet below the average low tide. No wonder the ramp down to the boat seemed so steep. Now I just need to figure out a way to get my antenna higher in the air. If only I had a large pole connected to the boat with a rope on top that I could use to raise and lower my antenna . . .

Random Numbers

2010-11-18T13:39:00.000-08:00

Today is one of those days where I am putting together a bunch of sample reports. The reports contain fictitious data and serve as a starting point for management when they are trying to figure out what they want in a report. I may start with a bar chart in the sample report and then management will decide they want a line graph instead. Figuring out what management wants before I spend a lot of time fine tuning the report saves a lot of headache in the end.

My reports are all database driven and so it is important to populate the database with realistic-looking numbers. One of the tools I use is an existing report that I have printed and hanging on the wall of my office. When that doesn't work, I resort to random numbers. I just hate trying to make up numbers on my own.

Creating a random number with a computer is seemingly not a trivial task. My son discovered this with one of his programming assignments recently. They are using an algorithm provided by the professor, but it has one major drawback: the numbers aren't so random. If you call the function once, you will get a specific number. Then close the program, rerun it, and you will get the same number. In order to get a truly random number, you need to "seed" the algorithm with a true random number.

It may not seem like a serious problem until you truly need a random value. This is what was happening with my younger son in his ski races last year. He seemed to get stuck with the same bib number when start order for his group was supposed to be random. The software used to determine random start order was putting the same kids at the front of the group and the same kids at the back of the pack. For the kids lucky enough to be at the front of the pack, they had better snow conditions. My son, on the other hand, got relegated to the back of the pack and had to deal with ruts up to his armpits.

As with most seemingly complex problems, there is an elegant solution to having a computer generate random numbers: read the milliseconds from the computer's clock. When I explained that to my son working on the programming assignment, he couldn't believe there was such an easy solution. Now I just need to pass the information on to that bonehead who wrote the ski racing software.

Don't Believe Everything you Read

2010-11-17T10:26:00.000-08:00

Every morning I get an e-mail from Steap and Cheap, a website that sells outdoor equipment at ridiculously inexpensive prices. Included in the e-mail is a paragraph or two that is generally funny and always entertaining. Today was about the giant island of plastic that has accumulated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the mainland US. This is one of those stories where I will just have to disagree with what we are being told.

If you do a little searching on the web, you will find all sorts of stories about plastic accumulating into an island out in the middle of the ocean. Some say the island is about as large as the state of Texas while others claim it is twice the size of the United States. One thing they all agree on is that it is about 1000 miles West of California and 1000 miles North of Hawaii. I don't think it is a coincidence that relatively few people have the means to visit such a location. Unfortunately for the environmentalists, I have been there and can report first-hand as to the reality of the situation.

First, yes there is a lot of garbage in the middle of the ocean. When I sailed from Hawaii to Los Angeles, I saw a lot of man-made stuff in the water. However, there never was an island of it. We would sail past a single grocery bag and then see something else 30 minutes later. Considering we were only going about 7 miles per hour, that equates to a lot of junk in the ocean. We really should be doing a better job of disposing our garbage.

Second, yes all that plastic can be harmful to marine life. I understand that sea turtles like to eat those plastic shopping bags because the bags look like jelly-fish. However there are all sorts of marine life that depend on that garbage. It was not uncommon to see various fish seeking refuge from the birds underneath some of that rubbish. Once we came across a fishing float that we wanted to keep as a souvenir of our trip. We plucked it out of the ocean only to find it was covered with crabs, algae, and other marine life. It was like an entire miniature eco system thriving in the middle of nowhere.

Should we be doing something to keep our garbage out of the ocean? Of course we should. Should we be alarmed about the garbage collecting into a huge island? Nope, there is no island. If you don't believe me, look out the window the next time you fly to Hawaii. I would be amazed if you see anything other than lots of water.

Finding Bugs

2010-11-16T10:20:00.000-08:00

Recently I purchased a new Ham radio. It isn't anything special, just an inexpensive hand-held unit used to help with local events or emergencies. This new radio has the ability to program 128 memory channels using a personal computer. The application runs on Windows and presents you with a spreadsheet-style interface. You fill out specific parameters for each of the memory locations and then upload the information to the radio through a USB cable. This is much simpler than entering all of the information by hand using the radio's cumbersome menu system.

I don't think the software to program my radio was ever fully tested. It took me a good hour to figure out how to use it. Now that I have figured it out, it is really simple to use. The problem was that you have to do things in a certain order. If you don't then the software freezes or refuses to communicate to the radio. It was frustrating while I was figuring it out and I almost sent back the radio.

Testing is very important and something that I have to do on a software project I am working on in my spare time. Since I spend most of my evenings away from home, I have three or four hours a night to work on the software and it is coming a long nicely. When I was home in Utah this weekend, I took the opportunity to show it to my wife. I noticed several problems during the course of my demo and was able to get them fixed immediately.

Most commercial software companies have formalized methods they use to ensure their products live up to expected levels of quality. One method is using someone who didn't write the software to test it. For smaller organizations, such as a guy working on software in his basement, garage, or boat, the demo to spouse or kids can serve a similar purpose. If only the company that wrote the software for my new Ham radio had been so careful. Then I wouldn't have blown a Friday evening trying to figure out how to get their software to work.

MySQL vs. PostgreSQL

2010-11-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

The PostgreSQL community recently had PgWest, which is a conference where users and developers gathered together to learn from each other. It was held in San Francisco, near where I work and so I submitted a paper to present. The paper was accepted and I spent a day at the conference. I would have liked to stay for all three days but had a project back at the office that required my full attention.

One of the sessions that I missed was on the differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Both are database management systems and are freely available. MySQL was controlled by a single company and then was purchased by Sun, which was then purchased by Oracle. PostgreSQL is a community project with developers all over the world. I would have liked to attend the presentation as I use both MySQL and PostgreSQL for my job.

Looking at all of the online traffic generated by the presentation, I really wish I had been there. I get the feeling that it was a bit like watching a cat thrown into a room full of hungry dogs (MySQL being the cat and all of the PostgreSQL fans being the hungry dogs). I have to sit back and laugh at all of the contention the one presentation has caused. It reminds me of the movie, "Monty Python's Life of Brian." The movie takes place in Jerusalem during the time of Christ. There are several Jewish groups opposing the Roman occupation. One is the "People's Front of Judea" and the other is the "Judean People's Front." Instead of working together to rid themselves of the Romans, they fight against each other.

PostgreSQL and MySQL are both open source databases and can be used without any licensing costs. They may have different architectures and methods of development, but they allow users to run complex database management systems without the burden of heavy fees required to run Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or IBM DB2. Maybe someday the two camps will stop arguing long enough to figure out they are on the same side and stop trying to steal each other's users.

Then again MySQL is now owned by Oracle . . . who charges large sums of money to use their "other" database product . . .

The High Cost of Windows

2010-10-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

Now that my son has a much larger hard disk on his MacBook, he can put more stuff on his computer. One of his classes at school requires a program that only runs on Windows. I suggested he pick up a copy of Parallels which will allow him to run Windows at the same time as MacOS X. The only problem is that he would also have to purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows.

In full disclosure, I gave up on Windows many years ago. When I buy a new computer that isn't a Mac, the first thing I do is repartition the disk so that a small portion is devoted to Windows and then install Linux on the rest of it. I find Windows to be slow, boated, buggy, and susceptible to malware. On my latest computer, I haven't even tried to boot into Windows and I have had the computer for over a year. When my son informed me that he needed a Windows program, I wanted to help him find the best way to get it running without screwing up the rest of his computer and that is why Parallels makes sense.

In the process of upgrading his hard disk, my son decided to buy a new copy of Mac OS X. It cost him $30 and was well worth the price. The latest version doesn't take up as much space as the previous version and also seems to run faster. As a full-time student, my son can get a copy of Parallels for $30, which isn't too expensive. Then came the shocker: the high price of Windows 7. Since my son doesn't have an existing license for a copy of Windows, it will cost him $199. If he wants to upgrade a copy from one of my machines where I don't use Windows, it will still cost him $119. I guess Microsoft has to pay a lot of money to all those people who think Windows 7 was their idea.

My son is a pretty smart kid and decided that $119 is just too much money and will opt to use the computer lab at school. Sure it isn't as convenient as working on his homework in his apartment, but $119 buys a lot of pizzas.

Doing Things in Parallel

2010-10-27T21:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a busy day at the office. I had to migrate data from one computer to another. It was a lot of data and I knew it was going to take all day. Unfortunately it couldn't all be done at once and had to be done in chunks. As I wanted to be as efficient as possible, I looked at how I could do things in parallel.

The first process was to export a subset of data out the database on the first machine. That took about 5 minutes. Next was to compress the exported data and that took a minute. The middle step was to transfer the compressed data to the new machine and that took the bulk of the time at 20 minutes. Once on the new machine, the data was uncompressed (another minute) and imported into the new database (another 5 minutes). If you add up the time for the entire process, it amounts to thirty-two minutes. Unfortunately there were about 20 data segments to move. Doing it 1 segment at a time meant I would be at it for over 10 hours.

Having done this once or twice before, I knew that I could start the process on future data segments before the earlier ones completed. Doing so would reduce the time to complete the job from over 10 hours to less than 7. Of course that meant I would be busy the entire time. However it was worth it to get the task done more quickly.

Now the question is: What does the process look like? Easy, the first segment requires that I export the data and compress it. That took 6 minutes. Then I needed to transfer it to the new machine. During that transfer, I could start the next segment and eliminate 6 minutes for each of the remaining segments. I could also start the data import of the first segment while the following segment was transferred. That eliminated another 6 minutes per segment for 19 of them. If you do the math, there are 6 minutes at the beginning and 6 minutes at the end. Then there are 20 segments at 20 minutes each to transfer. That amounts to 6 + 6 + (20 x 20) or 412 minutes, which amounts to 6 hours and 52 minutes.

That is a nice reduction but you can see that it is not 50% of the original 10 hours and 40 minutes. That is important to remember the next time that someone tells you a computer with two processors can do twice as much. While it is a good goal, it isn't always practical.

Learning MySQL

2010-10-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

I originally started today's entry with the title "I Hate MySQL." However I realize that I don't like it mostly because I don't know it very well. In an effort to be more fair to MySQL, I toned down the title a bit and publicly acknowledge that I have some learning to do.

For those that don't know, I prefer PostgreSQL to MySQL. I use PostgreSQL daily and it is my database of choice on any new project. I also know the Oracle database well and have used it in various production systems. Unfortunately it is rather expensive and PostgreSQL will do 95% of the things Oracle can for a lot less money.

Today I have to administer a MySQL database because of performance issues. I have about 8,000 rows that I need to move from one table to another. This involves inserting them into the new table and then deleting them from the old. You would think that given the rantings of many MySQL followers that such a task would be simple and quick. Unfortunately the application that I am using references two other very large tables which complicates things a lot. I started this move yesterday at 10am and it still hasn't completed. There are tools that allow me to see what is happening in the database and the delete seems to be running longer than one would guess. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to speed things up.

During my frustrating morning, a friend sent me a link to a very funny video where two stuffed bears are discussing MySQL vs. PostgreSQL. The language is very crude and so I won't post the link here. However it did put a smile on my face.