Category: The slush pile

My Eight Year Old got his first R/C plane for his birthday and we took it out flying today.

I can recommend this as a great starter plane. It’s fully assembled (except for the wings: you strap them on with a pair of rubber bands) and it’s dead easy to fly. It made four flights before coming in for a very hard landing (learner pilots need to lay off the throttle when a crash is imminent: that spinning prop does no good when it meets styrofoam flight and control surfaces) and is now needing repair.

An ideal place to learn the basics of flight would be in the old hangars at Magnuson Park.

AIM owns you.:

“You waive any right to privacy.” AOL has just updated the terms of service for Instant Messanger, which include agreeing to the new requirement that AOL owns everything you write, has the right to reproduce it at will, and that you waive all requirements for prior approval to do so.

Nice. Like I ever use it anymore, but what’s that about?

Educated Guesswork: March 2004 Archives

In two consecutive posts, Eric manages to praise Apple’s “make it work first time” design engineering and gripe about the performance of his iBook.

Now, I have an iBook as well, and occasionally I find myself staring down the barrel of the Spinning Beachball of Doom, generally accompanied by a whole lot of disk thrashing. I knew at the time that I bought a low-end consumer model and now I realize I should have stuffed more RAM in it to stave off all the swapping. (In /var/vm I have two 64 Mb swapfiles, one 128 Mb swapfile, and two 256 Mb swapfiles: some more RAM wouldn’t hurt.) Do I regret the purchase? Not really.

Being as how I’m an unemployed stay-at-home dad and housekeeper, this little gem was a good fit, but for a consultant and power-user like Eric, I would have suggested a PowerBook for, well, power. If, as he suggests in the second of the two posts, his time is worth more than $40 an hour, why buy the cheaper laptop?

This is a question I have wondered about and asked over and over again: if you spend several hours day with a tool and you make a living with it, buy the best one for the job. Not the most expensive or the newest, but the one that delivers the best value for the money. The low-end iBook represents about 25 hours at $40, about 3 days of billable work. Let’s look at some others:

* The fully loaded 12 inch PowerBook is $1,799 or 45 hours, just over a week’s worth.

* The 15 incher is a good deal more: $2,599 (65 hours).

Everyone has to make their own choices, I realize: I just wish I knew what some of them were based on. If you’re not going to be happy with the purchase, don’t make it: not spending enough and hating it is worth than spending too much.

“[Frampton]’s signal path begins with either one of two black Peter Frampton signature-model Gibson Les Pauls, a Les Paul 1960’s reissue with a TransPerformance system for different tunings, or a Suhr guitar. For acoustic work, he wields a Tacoma Jumbo JK50 or a Taylor spruce jumbo.”
“The electrics are sent to a Framptone amp switcher, which splits the signal off to four different paths. One route goes to a MESA/Boogie amp switcher that selects between a MESA/Boogie Mark IV rackmounted head powering a Hammond 147 Leslie (modified), or a MESA/Boogie Rectifier preamp. The preamp sends its signal to a pair of Digital Music dual stereo line mixers, which blend in the effects: a TC Electronic 2290 delay, TC Electronic 1210 chorus, Eventide Eclipse, dbx 1066 compressor, Ernie Ball volume pedal, Mu-Tron octaver, Foxx Tone distortion, Ampeg overdrive, and Korg DL8000 delay.

The effected signal is sent to a stereo MESA/Boogie 2:100 power amp and then to a pair of Marshall 1960 BV4xJ2 cabinets with vintage 30W Celestion speakers. A second signal route goes from the switcher to a Marshall 5OW Plexi head, which drives the famous Framptone talkbox.

A third route goes to a vintage Marshall 100W “Jose” Plexi, which is sent uneffected to another Marshall 1960 BV 4×12 cabinet. And a fourth path takes the signal to an Ampeg ET-1 Echo-Twin. Path decisions are enacted by a Custom Audio Electronics RS-10 floor pedal used in conjunction with two of tech Mark Snyder’s Custom Interface units.”

Good grief . . . . I’m sure it sounds sweet, but how complicated. And the article I linked to was about the wacky mouth bag/talk box (“Do you feel like I do?”) gimmick: Frampton has a company that makes the things . . . . I thought that was enough tonal manipulation, but evidently I’m further behind the times than I realized.

Of course, fans of high quality guitar strangling would have heard it here first.

Project Ornithopter

The purpose of this project is to achieve humanity’s oldest aeronautical dream: flight with mechanical flapping wings.

Heard a piece on this on the radio last night: watch the videos for a closer look at this contraption.

They hope to do an actual flight in April 2004.

Automatic Synonyms (Google Weblog)

Google is now using synonyms automatically on difficult searches. For example, when you search cooking octopus teacher cartoon it notes “By default, Google searches for variations of your search terms.” and returns results with the word “teaching”, not just “teacher”.

This is a variant of something known more precisely as “stemming” where the parser breaks “teaching” to its stem word “teach.” Coming up with variations is not as difficult as stemming is in the first place.

Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent: Join my cult

I’m playing with Tribe.net, one of the many social networking sites out there. It wants, as these things do, to get me to send all of my friends an invitation to join. Fair enough, except that I don’t really care about my friends. If I’ve got their email address to hand, I already know them. I want new people. So I’m inviting you, my unknown reader.

I took him up on that: you can join mine by clicking here.

For some reason, my locally installed snmp daemon decided to renumber the elements in the hrStorageTable, meaning all the attached disks were being either misreported or just plain dropped from my graphs (/mrtg/blue/index.html). Not that the new numbering doesn’t make sense but I didn’t know this was going to happen.

How to discover and fix it? snmptable is your friend. Any MIB element that is included in a table can be displayed with the entire table, making it easy to see what’s available for monitoring.
Continue reading “POLA violation: snmp renumbering stuff”

scottandrew.com

I should be, too. I suppose that means less bloggery.

Coupla things I found out today in my first day with Panther.

1. SNMP monitoring stopped. As far as I can tell, the /etc/hostconfig file now specifies
SNMPSERVER= - YES -
and the startup script was looking to match SNMP= - YES - . An easy fix.

2. I had stored all my music files in /Network/music. This was just a directory, pre-Panther. Now it’s a magic file, invisible except by the name pink.paulbeard.org:Network:music which is a link with a sticky bit set.

lrwxr-xr-t 1 root wheel 512 25 Oct 22:52 pink.paulbeard.org:Network:music

In short, it exports to other systems but is no longer accessible to local users. I’m not sure how useful that is: if you’re sharing files, you would want to be able to access them yourself. Perhaps there’s some clever loopback mounting that’s supposed to happen. My solution is to mount the directory on another machine, move all those files, clean out the exported directory and find another place to keep my music files.

Not a big deal, except it’s several gigs of disk I can neither access nor free up for other uses.