I thought perhaps, I could gain a greater understanding of the direction of oil (and thereby gasoline) prices, if I added a news box for the term “oil” to my Google Homepage.

Not so much.

Factories of insanity playing on your vanityas they distort your sense of self
Telling you what you need and how to succeed as they steal all of your wealth
Probing your mind, trying to find how to scheme on you best
From programmed schools with Devilish rules putting you to the test

It’s doing it again.

In fact it played two Last Poets tracks this morning. What kind of a day is going to be, oh Zune?

RADAR, SONAR, LASER BEAMS
JETS, TANKS, SUBMARINES,
MEGATHONS, H-BOMBS, NAPALM, GAS….
All this shit will kill you fast
All products of the Mean Machine

Don’t get me wrong. Revolutionary music is always win. In fact, it may be the only music truly worth anything, because beyond just entertainment it is an attempt to make a strong message. This is no doubt why in high school I was listening to Franti and Paris while others were listening to Color Me Badd and Boyz II Men. (Well, I listened to those too, a little.)

But it has this way of jarring your morning.

Senator Maria Cantwell’s office (D-WA) just today responded to an email I sent her office in July about FISA.

The response was on-message, and Cantwell voted against the FISA bill, etc., and no, she’s not up for re-election, so… it’s not as if the timing was questionable. Just… reeeally slow.

Heh, they even apologized for taking so long to respond.

(more…)

Dear robber baron executives,

All that offshoring to India really turned out to be a great idea, huh?

A few months ago we added a G3 350 iMac to our home network. Ever since then, we started seeing network blips, where our WRT54G would occasionally reset itself. It didn’t happen often enough to see a correlation. Over time it got worse, but not debilitatingly so, but we’d managed to suspect the Mac was at fault. Since the WRT54G had a real bad habit of “losing” its static WAN IP setting whenever it blipped, we went out and replaced it with a new WRT54GS. Things seemed to get somewhat better though not completely; there was still periodic problems when the Mac was being used.

Well, the user of the iMac went away for a week, came back, rebooted — which kicked in an update to MacOS 10.4.10 — and the network started having fits, the WRT54GS resetting itself every three minutes to the point that nothing of any practical value could be done on the network as connections kept getting hosed. The short-term solution was to pull the Mac from the network (though the problem was pronounced most when the Mac was surfing).

Over the next day or two I wracked my brain trying to think up options. I didn’t want to get a new router. I considered hubbing the network between the modem and the router, hooking the Mac straight into the hub (we have a spare IP from our ISP). But I couldn’t find my hub. I did find our old BEFSR41. And I thought, just for fun, why not see if the BEFSR41 hooked into the network will at least isolate the Mac’s damage to a second subnet.

So I wired the BEFSR41 straight into a free port on the WRT54GS, set it up as 192.168.2.* (instead of 1.*), and plugged the Mac into that.

It all works great now. I don’t know why. And I don’t dare update the FW on the second router.

The model names are all Linksys home routers. WRT54G is a 4-port wired/wireless device, as is WRT54GS; the latter claims to have some sort of enhanced speed. BEFSR41 is a wired-only 4-port device.

So you’ve got a program that spits diagnostic output, but may take a while between actions. You don’t want to have to sit and watch it to see how long it takes, but it doesn’t provide timestamps.

Pipe the output to this perl one-liner:

perl -ne ‘print “[”.time().”] ” . $_’

You will get output a la:

[1160497217] Resolving kradeleet.com… 209.216.203.249
[1160497217] Connecting to kradeleet.com|209.216.203.249|:80… connected.

If you eschew Unix timestamps, try

perl -ne ‘print “[”.scalar(localtime).”] ” . $_’

which cleverly provides:

[Tue Oct 10 09:33:58 2006] Resolving kradeleet.com… 209.216.203.249
[Tue Oct 10 09:33:58 2006] Connecting to kradeleet.com|209.216.203.249|:80… connected.

Unfortunately, better timestamps in Perl take us out of one-liner territory. You could try

perl -ne ‘printf (”[%5\$d/%4\$d/%6\$d %3\$d:%2\$d:%1\$d] %10\$s\n”,localtime,$_)’

(the slashes are necessary for the shell to avoid expanding the $’s as system variables)
But this will give you:

[9/10/106 9:29:19] Resolving kradeleet.com… 209.216.203.249
[9/10/106 9:29:19] Connecting to kradeleet.com|209.216.203.249|:80… connected.

which is the wrong month (January=0, October=9) and weird-looking year (real year - 1900). You’ll have to twiddle the output array of localtime() to fix these (as everyone who uses localtime() inevitably does).

You remember in high school, the clique of smug bastards who picked on, belittled, and fucked around with everyone not like them?

Seattle’s just like that.

(To its credit, rfjason was banned from the LJ Seattle community ages ago, and meetups have been cancelled for fear of his disrupting them. Which is exactly the sort of reaction he gets off on, unfortunately, to the point where it is an obsession.)

BB - Wired - VB

Both myself and now R have discovered the value of the cellular modem for when WiFi is simply not an available option.

Myself, I recently started a new job in downtown Seattle, which brought with it the ability to eschew a painful driving commute as I was taking into Bellevue, and replace it with a less painful (and employer-paid) commute by bus. This new commute method gives me a certain amount and quality of free time superior to that available in my car. My previous job, in telecommunications, introduced me to the Sierra Wireless Aircard, a voice and GPRS data capable PC card. With an unlimited data plan ($20/mo added to a voice plan) from T-Mobile, you can use this to get on the Net anywhere you can get decent cell signal.

R started borrowing the AirCard for long car trips over the mountains, which works out well as our route is solidly covered with cell towers. She recently purchased her own (they sell on Ebay for as low as $55 used and $65 new for the basic model).

I’ve cell-modem’ed before, on the Amtrak years ago, using a cable from my old ur-smartphone Kyocera 6035. That was at the crawling 14.4kbps of Sprint’s CDMA2000, rather than the more accomodating 56K of GPRS.

What I like best about the GSM modem is the SIM card model of service activation. With GSM, we can simply take our SIM cards out of our regular phones, and pop them into the AirCard. With a non-GSM wireless modem, you’ll have to add the modem as an additional device on your plan.

Sure, nearly all modern phones with data capability can hook into your computer via a cable. But the cable is non-standard, and often an optional accessory, not to mention you’re now struggling with two devices and a loose wire, trying to keep the phone steady, and plus, you’re eating your phone battery to power the data transmision. A PC cellular modem does away with all that.

Now that I have the AirCard I can do new and exciting things like blogging from the bus.

In 2009, all American TV stations will be required to shut down their analog broadcasts and transmit their signals in digital only. If you don’t have a way to receive digital transmission by then, you’ll be picking up static.

Now, if you haven’t felt the need in the past few years to upgrade your TV to a digital model, like the “droves” referred to by FCC chairman Jonathan Adelstein, you may end up one of them. The FCC is confident that digital will take off, because people are already scooping up HDTVs. The actual number of sales is not mentioned. (How many of you have digital-ready TVs? If so, is your whole home converted?)

I grew up near some pretty poor neighborhoods in the early 90s, and I knew of at least one household whose only TV was a 13′’ black-and-white. People like that aren’t going to be upgrading to digital. Sure, they probably don’t still have B&W, but they probably don’t have digital, either.

If we believe television is a important medium, not just for entertainment but for culture, news, and public information, then it is important that television be accessible to as much of the public as possible. DTV won’t do that, not even by 2008.

To their credit, a few legislators (including the populist tease McCain) have put forward the notion of a digital converter subsidy to aid the transition specifically for low-income viewers. Meanwhile, though, he’s pushing for acceleration of the cutover to digital.

Why not let broadcasters keep analog next to their digital signal? Well, Congress wants the spectrum back, in order to give it to wireless. This is not entirely a bad idea, given the increased demand (and reticent implementation) of wireless high speed data and voice, though we have a hard time imagining that the TV band is the only place to get the spectrum from (already high-channel UHF is being reallocated).

Oddly, there is no such push for terrestrial digital radio, forcing radio broadcasters to trade in their analog signal right for a digital one. Satellite radio and HD are progressing, but not due to regulation, and not without extra carrots (e.g. being commercial-free), and even still, not really doing as well as they would like.

Developments in the DTV debate have introduced an exception for the requirement of trading in the analog signal. If the stations can get the FCC to rule that dropping analog in the market will cause a “consumer disruption“. Which will likely happen in larger markets — which are, pretty likely, exactly the same markets that have most demand for more wireless spectrum.

Incidentally, this is where it could spell the end for terrestrial TV. In Asia, where 3G is the rule, not the exception, (in some cases, literally) wireless-based entertainment, including what is awkwardly called “cell phone TV” is the killer app for wireless (as opposed to video telephony, which try as it might, hasn’t been able to sell anyone for over 40 years). As of right now, most major cell carriers have some form of 3G available in major markets (T-Mobile is planning it for 2007). In Asia, cellphone TV is a broadcast market on par with cable and satellite in terms of demand and attractiveness. Were this to catch on in the US, it may give DTV a run for its money. (As it currently stands, Cingular’s high-speed service specifically outlaws all of the high-bandwidth services that 3G is basically meant for.)

Meanwhile, municipal WiFi is becoming a hot item, especially for many struggling exurbs and bedroom communities looking to (re)vitalize their downtown areas and office space markets. If ever implemented effectively, this could introduce the feasibility of mobile IPTV. Add in the current number of homes with PCs or Internet applicances, and Internet-based IPTV could also jump into the fray against a recently and reluctantly converted terrestrial broadcast industry.

So, there is probably no need to kill your television. It may very well simply self-destruct.

Regarding all the buzz lately about NSA collecting wireless phone-call records en masse from telephone companies: I happen to work with some telecom people, and heard a couple of fairly disturbing things from one of them recently:

“Actually, the government’s had these agreements with the landline companies for a long time. When telephony went wireless, the agreements went with them.”

and:

“That information has never been secret. We’ve thought it was, but it never was.”

The most disturbing part is how that last line was delivered. It wasn’t in a tone of “we’ve really be duped by our government (and should do something about it)”, but of “well, we were wrong all along… oops, our mistake.”