From PilotOnline.com
Apparently you have some officers who don’t understand the law…
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
Weirdness is extremely common. Terrorism is extremely rare. Quit evacuating buildings and arresting people for weirdness. You are wasting your time and my tax dollars.
Thank you. That is all.
Hey cool! I’ve been quoted on the ooPSLA Impressions page (hint: Ctrl-F Santaniello). Bonus points if you can find the picture of the back of my head.
OOPSLA 2006 was a hoot. If you haven’t already, check out my trip report.
The Cisco VPN client on OSX is very very functional (in other words, it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down). Shimo fixes that. Highly recommended.
Some years ago, I played Quake competitively on a national level. Back then, I always preferred to set my character’s color to bright yellow. Some folks would choose brown or green in an effort to blend into their surroundings, but not me. I wanted you to see me coming. I was still going to kick your ass, and I wasn’t going to leave you any excuses.
I’m not sure I realized it before, but this pro-competitive spirit has really stuck with me. I don’t often find this attitude in business — but when I do, it’s like a breath of fresh air.
Take, for example, David Weiss’s recent comments about office-suite file-formats (David works in Microsoft’s Mac BU). You should read the whole post, but here’s an excerpt:
Once upon a time, it was decided that we needed to move to a more open file format. XML was the obvious choice. There were and are a lot of good reasons for opening up your file format. I’m not going to discuss these at length, but one of these in particular is that folks are not forced to use your application to both read and write files that others can use. This is a good thing.
Allowing anyone to read and write your file format is a bold move because it says in essence, “We don’t need a locked-down file format to compete. The format can be available for everyone, and we’ll compete on the ease of use and efficiency of our applications. We have what we think is the best interface for reading, creating and managing Office documents, but if someone has what they think is a better way to build Office documents, wonderful, we welcome it!”
When I read this, I realized why I like this kind of thing. This is yellow-shirt Quaking. Every time I see a business engaging in some anti-competitive behavior I think to myself: wimps!
Take contracts, for example. If your cell or DSL provider was really committed to superior service, they would not lock you in. Lock-in is cowardly.
Warranties, on the other hand, are brave. If your product comes with a lifetime warranty, you are making a bold statement about your faith in that product.
I’m going to keep looking for yellow-shirts. I bet there are a lot out there.
Wireless carriers are such dinosaurs.
Here’s how it should work. I pay you money every month. I give you bits. You move the damn bits. That’s it. Just move the damn bits. Don’t ask questions, and don’t send my bits to the NSA either.
We should have nationwide wireless data, at megabit speeds, for a flat monthly rate. There should be 100 wireless providers, and when asked at a bar on a Saturday night, most people shouldn’t even remember who theirs is*.
Instead, we’ve got 4 carriers with such delusions of grandeur, that they actually exert control over the handset manufacturers. My RAZR still has a Cingular logo printed on it. Can you imagine Jonathan Ive allowing this?
Instead, they force us into “walled gardens” where we can only buy ring tones and games from them. In some cases, they will actually disable hardware features to make this possible.
Instead we have this bullshit tethering idea. What bugs me the most about tethering is that, in a network of sane design, it should not be possible for the carrier to differentiate between “normal data use” and “tethering”.
If you sell me a flat-rate plan and I figure out a way to share the service with my whole dorm, tough cookies. You should have got your damn pricing model right in the first place.
Capitalism has done a complete face-plant on this one. Whatever happened to the collective good?
* Unless they really love their provider, because of the great customer service. Ha! Imagine that!
My server uses a pair of older Athlon MP chips which do not support PowerNow. Since this computer runs 24/7, I suspect it’s responsible for a substantial chunk of my monthly power bill. Today I discovered a way to reduce the power consumption.
First, I used my trusty Kill-A-Watt to get a baseline measurement. The server draws roughly 207 W at idle:
Now for the fun part. I applied this ACPI kernel patch to my kernel and built the amd76x_pm module. This patch enables the ACPI C2 and C3 processor states, which for some reason are otherwise disabled.
A quick reboot and modprobe later, I was greeted with this:
There are a handful of warnings on the net about crashes, etc., when using the amd76x_pm code. So far, so good for me — But I’ll update this post if I experience any instability.
Update, Sunday 4:30 PM: Kernel Panic. Doh! Reboot and cross fingers…
Update, Monday 6:30 AM: Another crash. Although I didn’t mention this previously, I also enabled CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS and CONFIG_NO_HZ (Dynamic Ticks) in my new kernel. Maybe one of those is the cuplrit. I’m going to do the easiest thing, and pull amd76x_pm.ko for a while. We’ll see how it goes.
Latest Comments
RSS