Libya

Smelling like a stalemate. This is the worse outcome if it sticks around. NATO keeps sending radios and GPS units. The rebels want more air strikes and armored vehicles. People are leaving the country as quickly as they can. Migrants can get out on ships in some situations. Medical supplies and food are making it in, though in a trickle.

There is fighting in the streets between factions that both want to hide amenest normal citizens for cover. Europe is running out of ammunition. No one wants to "Put boots on the ground." because is too much of a commitment. Obama does not want Libya to be "Obama's war" though, it seems a bit late for that. Europe just doesn't like to make a decision at all.

Qaddafi's grand children have been killed in the fog of war. No, they had a bomb or missile hit the place where they were staying. How may other other non combatants have died? Some people on the ground say many thousands.

Journalists have died. This makes news. These are seasoned people who have been in other tight situations. They struck me as people who knew what time it was. Still, they got caught up and on the wrong end of weapon.

Putting spotters on the ground leads to squads to protect the spotters. This leads to logistics. Logistics leads to defencive forces. All of this leads to defensible installations. Before you know it, you are in a war. That sort of build up is exactly what caught the U. S. in Vietnam.

What is a win going to look like? If you cannot answer this question in one short sentence, you have strategic issues. This means no amount of tactical assistance of the rebels or bombing of war machines and military units will fix these issues.

The conspiracy theories say that the whole Qaddafi needs to be removed thing is because he was not part of the world banking system. Apparently he had his own banks in some fashion and that could not be alloyed by those in charge of such things.

Ubuntu 11.04 first impressions

Updated to Ubuntu 11.04. Why is it always x.04? As a developer, I can tell you that this is due to a comity of people made of developers who out rank marketing. If marketing people were in charge you would have a nice round number.

Unity

Unity is the new shit interface from Ubuntu. They are trying to hop on the tablet bandwagon. I don't have any tablets. I have computers. I prefer the standard Gnome interface that has been honed over the last ten or fifteen years. Fortunately, you can use "Ubuntu Classic" interface when logging in.

Unity Shortcomings

• Limited to four workspaces. I use ten.
• Users don't control what is on the quick icon bar down the left hand side of the page. I'm sure the developers know best.
• The only way to find programs on the "start" menu or whatever they call it is to do a search. If you don't know the exact name of what you are looking for, you are screwed. If you list "all programs" you get everything on the computer in the order in which you use them most. Thus, all those things you use once every six months will be even harder to find than usual. You can't even document where to go find them.
• I found myself instantly going to the command line to run everything. I'm a linux guy, so this is no big deal. However, on a tablet, the on screen keyboard will make this a serious pain in the ass.
• The idea of resizing windows and moving windows must be foreign on tablets because it is difficult to do so in Unity.
• I trashed my settings for a couple of hours on Saturday. I lost the title bar and close buttons for all my programs in Ubuntu Classic. Did you know the title bar and minimize buttons are "window decoration?" I do now.

I only used Unity for about an hour or so before I abandon it for "Ubuntu Classic". This is a shame. It is a nice first effort. The rough edges need to be honed a damn site before it is ready for daily use on a computer as apposed to a tablet.

Unity conclusion

It's shit. Did I say that already? I may have to switch to Kubuntu. That one lets you use KDE as your primary GUI. That is the plan if they get rid of "Ubuntu Classic" which is how you get to a more standard Gnome interface.

Ubuntu itself

Ubuntu 11.04 is an incremental step forward from Ubuntu 10.10. It is worth the upgrade because a couple of things are fixed. A couple of old bugs turn back up.

Remember me complaining about the mouse pointer size problem exactly one year ago today? I could not increase the size of the mouse pointer to my satisfaction. Well, it is back. Those bastards broke it again. This is the kind of thing that will not be fixed until the next version upgrade. Thanks Ubuntu. You have made my life that little bit more difficult.

There was an issue with gpodder that made it difficult to change the device you wanted to copy all your downloaded podcasts too. This was fixed. It was fixed months ago, but the default version of gpodder that came with Ubuntu was not updated until a major upgrade. Drag.

That is about it. I haven't had a chance to edit a video yet so I don't know if the issues with KDENLive have been addressed. The problems were build issues, not version issues. So, the version number doesn't help me much. As far as I know, it doesn't work at all. I'm sure I'll complain if things are any worse than they were before.

Overall conclusion on Ubuntu 11.04

Fedora is looking better and better.

Bin Laden

Jokes

Shouldn't have read that ULA better before installing Four Square.

The CIA couldn't find him, but Apple did.

Link

What I think

It cracks me up how easily so many people are celebrating the death of this man. Some people celebrated in the streets when the U. S. was hit on September 11th 2001. Yah, 2001. That sounds funny. It is difficult to believe it has been 10 years. I just don't feel like celebrating. It has as much to do with respect for those who gave their lives for this country as it does for my want to avoid seeming like a ghoul.

Oliver North mentioned Bin Laden back in the nineties I believe it was. I believe the term he used was "A very bad man" or words to that effect. This guy has been on the radar for a while.

I want to know if it was a deliberate targeting or if it was "Wholly shit-snacks! It's Bin Laden!!"

Is this going to cause more or less attacks on the western world? Wasn't Bin Laden about to drop dead from lack of kidney function like 8 years ago? What does number two in Al Quida think of all this? When will we get the audio/video of a rebuttal in Bin Laden's voice on YouTube?

Notes:

I wore my contacts for three days straight this weekend. I want to do this for Faire this fall. I figured it would be a good idea to try it in normal circumstances before diving in this fall. The results were awesome. The contacts were comfortable from start to finish. I don't know what the difference is between these new contacts and the old ones besides price, but it works. I thought for the longest time that I would never be able to ware contacts for an extended period (couple of days) without dealing with them. In normal every day use, it works. Wonder if the trials of smoke filled air at the camp grounds will do them in.

The Brits had a wedding. I didn't attend. It was on at 04:00 or so on Friday. I was not interested any way. I did miss the local weather on TV while I was getting ready to head to work. That was annoying. I got the info from my phone a bit later in the morning. Does every frigging channel have to ... I don't care. There was probably a billion dollars spent on the wedding and covering the wedding. I wonder how many hungry people could have been fed by that money.

I prey for the people who have lost their loved ones and property to the tornadoes that ran through last week. The death toll is over 300. The southern end of those storms past just north of where we live on their way to the south eastern U. S..

The Farmer's Almanac seems to get weather right mounts in advance. Why is the seven day forecast so frigging far off?

Social media

Facebook is all about advertising. Anyone who doesn't think so is trying to pick your pocket. They listen to what you say and your conversations. They sell this to advertisers. Don't let them lie to you. Facebook has all kinds of rules about what you can or can't say or support. If Facebook doesn't believe that a cause is Facebook compatible, it will deny it. There are something like 600,000,000 people on the service.

Facebook blocs some file sharing sites even though the content you are linking to may be completely legal. There is legal and illegal material on file sharing sites. Whether torrent or a file parking service, they are just a tool. Blocking content from any of these sites is like turning up the roads so people can't drive stolen cars down them.

No one calls. No one texts. If it were not for Facebook and Twitter, I would have no friends I stay in touch with outside of work. This is the most sad thing I can think of. It is true.

When I make a video I put it up on Facebook and Twitter. I also put it on the blog. I like the blog platform as a publisher of content because I can put up all kinds of details and links. I can embed the video and put up little applications to emphasize my point. Twitter is great for forcing people to get to the frigging point. Facebook just is. I still have not figured out what the point is besides selling advertisement and duping people in to paying money for virtual property that vanishes when the company folds.

Notes:

The days of the pocket video camera are over. Every one is using their phones. Cisco paid $500,000,000 for flip last year or so. it is dead. They are just flushing it. Flip sold at just the right time. I have a Flip. It still works. There are still some choices out there. My phone records shit video and even more shit audio. The term iPhoneogrophy has been used. It is not so much the camera as it is the photographer. It is part the camera. I would call it phonography.

You can get first run movies on some cable companies. You pay $30 for a movie that just came out. Theaters are pissed. Some say theaters will not run as many screens or retaliate in some way on movies that are available in this format. If your are single, $30 is way too high. If you are a couple with five kids, it makes much more sense. The cost of soda and popcorn alone will save you a fortune at home.

Space 1999!!

One of the podcasts I listen to is about science fiction. A presenter who is living in Japan said something like this paraphrase. As a resident in a post apocalyptic radioactive wasteland, I have to admit it is very much like living in a scifi novel. Only more boning.

Microsoft really needs to implement true soft links. Probably hard links as well. They have *.lnk files, but programs have to be specifically programmed to use them properly. If they were native to the OS, lnk files would simply work as a way to temporarily rename a folder to compress it or as a way to repoint the data files to a crappy hard wired program. When will Windows be ready for the desktop?

Has anyone else heard about this royal wedding in some European country? I only just heard something on the news. You would think this kind of thing would be hyped relentlessly. You know, to the point it drives you nuts and you push it out of your head.

The next Olympics may drop male female based competitions and at least some of the time, use hormone levels to determine what class athletes will compete in. What's next?

Have you heard of a Faraday cage? Build your own.

>Notes:

There aught to be a law that says you have to keep a running total of every dime you have spent on a device. That total has to be displayed at every boot and unlocking so you cannot hide from your total lifetime payout on that device. We have the technology. Owners of iPhones and iPads would not be so proud of the devices if they suddenly noticed $6500 after three years showing up on their screen. "I could have bought a motorcycle."

Europe is starting to look scary. It is not the invasion of people from other countries landing on their shores. It is the lack of one country to defend themselves from being over run. Italy has issues with too many people coming all at once. Italy issues temporary visas to immigrants and doesn't stop them from going to France. France has stopped trains from Italy. The idea of a "orderless Europe" is really starting to ware thin near the seems. Some say "Immigration rules have failed inside Europe." "Italy should leave the EU."

The storms that went through the south earlier this week makes me cringe. From what I can tell, most of the deaths happened east of Texas. I have a friend in north east Texas who was tweeting while the storm was happening there. She was kind of flipping out. Understandable. She made it through fine. Listening to the news talk about the destruction is depressing. The people have my prayers.

Cool chopper

This is one of those inventions that I can think of a million uses for. You could use it to inspect your neighbor's roofs and pools. You could buzz the neighborhood block party. The list is endless.

Coming home after work

Field	Data
Title	Coming home after work
Description	Today was one of those days I dreamed about after coming home from work to the family.
Tags	good day family fun boiling contacts eve Dallas mystery got to pee after work canon 940IS Houston Texas
Link	Link

Sony breach

Field	Data
Title	Sony Breach
Description	Sony had a huge breach on their PlayStation user database. I'm not happy about it and I don't have a PlayStation. http://bit.ly/jEInIr
Tags	sony playstation breach lost data trust canon 940IS Houston Texas
Link	Link

Morning

I spent most of my morning at work cleaning up a lab close to my office. The big boss comes by at 08:00 sharp and tells me he needs my help because I'm so close to the lab. He would have probably grabbed me any way, but it was a nice line.

The cleaning consisted of tarring down an entire lab full of ramshackle computers and replacing them all along the shelves. We even cut the zip ties from power strips and rerouted them. We got rid of some old computes. That is, I put them in my office and will get rid of them when I have time. We took one of the shelves out and replaced it with a couple racks. None of the same computers are in the racks. Those are different servers they wanted out of other labs.

The big boss does this kind of thing all the time. It is kind of nice because there is no veto or comity with which to appeal the move. He ones the company and what he says goes. I ended up with a big pile of power cables in the corner. Another box of power cables and using a bunch of power cables. There are an extra two or three hundred power cables lying around the place.

It took all morning. I had other stuff that had to take a back seat. That is normal. These kinds of things happen every so often.

We had to move one set of computers that our support people use. This means kicking fifteen people off and shutting down. This would take days of planning unless you have someone with basically sudo powers over people in the company to tell them to just hurry up and wait until things are back up. Then it takes about an hour.

They did some more work after I shifted to other tasks. I still do not understand what the end game will look like. I'm not sure there is a plan beyond make room in one spot and shuffle stuff everywhere else to take the overflow.

There is nothing wrong with that. It is just a unique feel. I came from a huge company that required stuff like environmental impact studies and personnel interviews for moving labs around. I remember trying to get a parking lot repaired took a year for the paperwork. "Where is the rain run off going to go?" "Are there animals living there?" "Will it cause wind or sunlight problems?" Whatever. A frigging year.

What happened today only killed about three to four hours and six or seven people for at least part of it. Honestly, it reminds me of the military. The big boss was a marine.

SSL blows

Every step of SSL certificates is like pulling teeth to me. I'm not sure why. I get the basic idea of how this crap works. It is the details that kill me.

• Buy a cert from a company.
• Who do you go with?
• Why is the price so frigging staggered all over the net?
• Why is it cheaper in other countries?
• Get a specific key off your machine from the correct software.
• Doing this is different on all servers.
• On renewals, can I use the old key?
• Give that key to the place your bought the cert from.
• Do I need to select a dedicated server or a third party dedicated server?
• They generate a cert.
• Wait until the "approve" you.
• Make sure you know exactly how it will be used because the files are customized for that service.
• Install the cert on the box you generated the key from.
• Install multiple certs including a couple that make no sense.
• The old cert is still hanging around. Do I remove it?
• Somehow coax the software you need to use the cert.
• Hold it, where are the settings for this? Does my software just need the cert attached to the web server on the box?

Every step is fraught with peril. All of these are times the number of certs you have to deal with. One of my bosses won't let me buy three or more years at a time because "We will forget to renew in time." Bah!

For example, I had to call support at our issuing company in order to figure out where the link was to renew an existing cert. It turns out I was just looking in the wrong place. It also turns out that you don't really renew a cert, you buy a new cert and start the process over again. I have to tell you that the guy had amazing patients with me. I know how frustrating I can be when I can't figure something out that I feel I should know.

Why is this so hard? Shouldn't industry make it easy for people to make their systems more secure?

A right is something you need

Daily, I hear about cops beating people or arresting people for videoing what cops are doing.

That the police force in New Orleans is "a significant threat to the safety of the public", as the DoJ says, is obvious. But the same problems can be seen all over the South, from Miami to Mississippi to Alabama; and the same nationwide, according to Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Reagan, who wrote recently: "Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public."

NewStatesman

Today I watched a video where a news videographer was arrested for videoing an arrest that happened in full view of the public while he was standing on public property. I also saw a man who was beaten for videoing cops while videoing and arrest. This kind of shit needs to stop. If law enforcement can video the public, the public should be aloud to video law enforcement. Who else is going to keep law enforcement in check if not the people they are charged with protecting?

Wifi is a joke

Wifi is a joke. I wish there were a song or a poem in me to express the epic fail that is depending one the unseen radiation that flows through hour bodies and only provides us with half a wireless experience for surfing the net. It isn't like we can take ourselves off the grid and live in a cave with all our needs met far from resources. We find ourselves only at the distance as far as we can throw our phones and only the most useless bits of existence on the internet. Let me know when they can fax me a sandwich and a cool drink of water. I'll be impressed then.

We want freedom, but only for me, not for thee. No honest person has anything to hide until they have a teenage daughter. Then, they find that even the most honest law abiding citizen has something very important to hid. Their child's privacy. You lock your door when you leave.

Tin Pan Ally

Kit is like 16 or something. I don't remember. He plays pretty damn good and not for a kid.

Drool

Canon ELPH 100

Not too bad for $200. Could be much better. Then, who would buy their higher end cameras?

If the need were to rise today to replace my existing camera, I would seriously consider this camera.

Pros

• 1080p (24fps)
• Slow motion mode. How awesome is that?!?
• Same SD cards
• Same wide angle as my current camera
• Night shot settings

Coins

• 4G limit on file size
• < 15min at 1080p
• < 24min at 720p
• Only 24fps on HD. That is annoying.
• Still only does digital zoom in movie mode.
• Mono sound
• No exterior sound input
• Makes huge files

I'm sure there are good and bad I'm missing. I like the picture quality of my Canon 940. The sound quality is not bad. The lack of exterior sound input is annoying, but understandable given this is a pocket camera. Stereo would be very nice.

The couple of poor ratings online were things like "It doesn't come with a memory card." Which, is clearly stated in the copy. Other gripes are "The flash is too strong." That can be overcome with settings if it is like my 940. Every Canon camera over exposes. Not sure why they come set like that. I forget the other one. It didn't seem important enough to remember.

Notes:

Today will be a good day. I hope.

Old adage in the law. (from memory) "If the facts are on your side you pound on the facts. If the law is on your side you pound on the law. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, you pound on the table."

Frigging wifi

Spent most of my day trying to figure out why some people have trouble accessing our email server from within the company. Isolated it down to one single access point. It might be the connector or the access point. I have to get a ladder and plug the laptop straight in to the cable to test properly. I need to wait until every one has left for the day. Some days it sucks being IT.

What does it take? Ping all over the place. Ping flood all over the place. Narrow it down to the access point. Connect a wire to the switch the access point is plugged in to and give that a try.

The longest chunck of time was spent failing to locate a windows ping tool that does a ping flood. a ping flood is the source computer not waiting to send a packet immediately after the last one. The instant a packet is returned, another is sent. This is highly telling when you are trying to find hardware on your network that is dying or failing. It basically crams the pipe full and counts the number of failures. It is a stress test. It is handy. I cannot find a windows tool to do it. There are a million windows tools that all do the same thing. They let you ping a bunch of computers until they break. That or something along that variant. That is useful as well, but not what I'm after.

Thus, I have to boot a laptop in linux. The command $>ping -f &IP;IP> slams the connection and tells you how reliable it is. I need to find some piece of software that does this in windows. Getting a laptop to boot even recent linux is annoying and time consuming. Ubuntu finally bailed me out. Even the Wireless worked. Nice. I did have to boot back in windows and reactivate the wireless transmitter. Not sure what happened there, but it killed a good twenty minutes.

Now, even a 1% packet loss can be catastrophic for databases. Microsoft Outlook is basically communicating back and forth to a huge database that is getting hit by every other person also trying to access their email. I've been over this before.

I do not have an extra fancy access point lying around. I have to revive one of the old ones. This is not a big deal. While waiting for everyone else to leave for the weekend, I put together the old swap AP and swap it with the other new AP in a rarely used office. Now, I prepare that new AP to replace the bad one. I'm not even sure It is the broken bit at this point, but I need it just to test.

I hate it when the end of a bunch of testing doesn't give me solid results. I had a hard time telling what wifi I was using. Thank goodness for iwconfig in linux.

Don't need no stinking runway!

Break

It was windy, hot and kind of humid today at lunch. It was still preferable to go out to the parking garage and just sit there listening to nothing for a couple of minutes. Sent out a couple of texts. Day dreamt for a minute. Got up and went back in. Wouldn't have traded it for a stake.

This means there was no lunch conversation to speak of. I did attend afternoon break at about 15:00. The turn out was light. My buddy Adam moved to the fifth floor and swore he would still attend tea time as we call it. I suppose he was just too busy to turn up. Still, He was missed. Mostly because I wanted to show off my REI French Press coffee cup. It is pretty slick. It does only make one cup. Even using the standard issue Folger's coffee in our lunch room, the output was pretty darn good. It is just too bad that French Press coffee is so dang bad for you. It is loaded with cholesterol.

Some people just don't know how to act. Someone in a neighboring room basically shouted a cuss word while playing a game of cards while at break this afternoon. I heard it clearly and HR is right next to my office. She was in. The odds of her not hearing it are slim. Way to mess thing sup for the rest of us heathen. They are playing go fish for God's sake. How excited can you get?

One of the topics at break was separating the sound from a DVD. I have not tried this, but I'm sure it is doable. I'm thinking any of the video editing softwares out there that support the DVD format will let you strip the video to a raw file. Then you can slice and dice to your heart's desire.

After that, we spoke of work. At what point does a specific 2 U server out pace two specific 1 U servers? This is crazy because there are all kinds of places where you have bottle necks. The 2 U only has one bus so you have to put all your data through it. The two 1 U servers will act independently from one another and allow true multiple channels. It boils down to finding the knot holes and eliminating them. It is not easy.

We also went over the large number of people taking tomorrow off. Some are taking Monday as well. Someone came in last Sunday to work and only he and the big boss were here. That kind of situation can go in any direction.