Author: matthew

So here I am at Day 3 of my current fat-loss saga. Plus factors: just changing my eating habits already deducted about four pounds from my frame. Minus side: it’s mostly four pounds of “lean” according to my fat-monitoring scale. Which means it’s glycogen storage in my muscles & liver. But hey, at least I’m going from super-saturating my body to slightly depriving it, which is good news for insulin resistance among other things.

Current weight: 246.8lbs, 30.8% body fat.

Got my account updated over at http://www.bodybuildingforum.ie so that I’m a full moderator now. Which is pretty cool, because spam was becoming pretty nasty over there!

Not a lot of spare time today, as I have a very busy day at work, but I made a goal to myself to update every day. So here I am.

So last night my family & I went to see “Megamind” at the local dollar theater together. With a total of 6 in our family, it’s really the only way to go out to a movie affordably. The only cheap theater in our part of the valley is Cinemark Sandy Movies 9. Like most such theaters, they only get the movies very late in the theatrical run. Sometimes they get them after they’ve already come out on video! But there is definitely something about seeing the movie on a big-screen outside the home that is a special experience that the kids remember.

I weighed the pros and cons of the theater:

Pros: * Cheap! From $0.75 apiece for a group of 3 or more on a Monday night or $1.00 for the first matinee of the day, up to $3.50 or so on a weekend night for a 3D feature. * Big screens. * The 3D glasses are the disposable type that are brand-new in sanitary bags, rather than the nasty re-used covered-in-popcorn-grease types used at some other local theaters.

Cons: * Usually out on video by the time it shows up in the dollar theater. * The parking lot layout is terrible. * The sound is mediocre. * The seats are pretty bad. * The bathrooms are small, and the urinals are packed very closely together without privacy partitions… and are all kid-height. * More & longer previews than other local theaters. * Shows sell out quickly, and unless you buy online (paying an extra $1 per seat), you’re stuck waiting in line outside to get a ticket. * Their online listings with Flixster and other services only show up on weekends. * Trying to get showtimes from their FANDANGO-based telephone number is an exercise in listening through advertisement after advertisement while getting nowhere.

That said… the pros outweigh the cons for a big family outing!

This is Day 2 of my ongoing weight-loss efforts. I’ve updated my Google Spreadsheet with today’s weigh-in. No real change from yesterday, but I also cheated in the evening and ate some candy at the theater. It will be neat to watch the trends fall out of the spreadsheet as I keep updating my daily weight & fat percentage.

This morning, I created a recipe on livestrong.com for “glop”, a popular breakfast at my house featuring lots of cinnamony goodness. Turns out a serving is just under 300 calories, has a decent amount of protein, and is tasty to boot. Who knew something so great-tasting could actually be reasonably healthful?

Like many people, I set New Years Resolutions this year. One of my primary ones is to lose the weight I’ve put on since August of 2009.

Those who’ve been around a while know that for about two years (2007-2009) I was really into health & fitness. I worked out at the gym every day, lost about thirty pounds, and felt great. Unfortunately, January through August of 2009 I lived through the most painful time ever in my life, and it became increasingly difficult to motivate myself to keep working out and staying healthy in the face of my overwhelming depression. By September, I’d fallen off the wagon completely, and had actually developed an aversion to the gym.

I stand today having gained all that weight back, plus a bit more.

So this morning I’m starting over. Every morning I’m taking photos, with the goal of creating a one-year composite video of my transformation. I’m also taking daily measurements, and critical to my goal is to record every bite of food I eat, even on my planned days off.

I know from experience that in one year I can drop a lot of weight. I can also put on a lot of muscle. I have the gym equipment in the basement that I picked up last year — thus avoiding the gym aversion — and I’m pretending I’m a weightlifting newbie again: just the bar, please, to start off, and I’ll work my way up from there.

I have created a Google Spreadsheet to track my macro-nutrients, weight, and fat percentages. It’s very helpful to me to have this kind of exacting statistics-tracking; it keeps me motivated.

I found last time that following the programs from Musclehack.com | The Home of Muscle Growth helped me a lot. Mark has several sensible, carbohydrate-restricted eating programs and a muscle-building program that helped me pack on fifteen pounds of muscle in a pretty short time last time around. I’ll be giving that a try again.

Wish me luck!

(I’m working on making the photos easy to post. Gotta do a few tweaks to the web site.)

People often wonder “why should I record a signal as loudly as possible when it risks clipping above 0dB?” Here’s your answer. It all boils down to RESOLUTION, and that’s why 24-bit recording — and soon, IMHO, 32-bit recording and even higher — are all the rage. A friend who is a professional storyteller is trying to engineer his own CD. He started out with GarageBand. It’s an excellent tool for general-purpose dorking around on a Mac, particularly if you’re just getting started. But if you really want excellent voice or other audio recording, not just MIDI stuff, you have to step into the realm of built-for-purpose audio tools. Pro Tools and others are great, but at $250 and up they are not in everybody’s budget.

To start with, I think Audacity might be right up your alley. Free and I think you can run standard plugins with it. The only real thing you need is to monitor for clipping. Talk at your maximum volume into the mic, then adjust your gain on the mic until the clipping monitor goes off. Clear the red clipping light in Audacity, and drop the gain just a little bit. Keep at it until at your maximum speaking voice volume doesn’t trip the clipping light on the track monitor.

You’re a bit of a geek, so I’ll explain the science behind why you want to do this. On an analog tape, you want to use as much of the tape as possible with your voice signal. Any bit of the tape that isn’t used by the waveform is background hiss.

Similarly, you only have 16 or maybe 24 bits of amplitude resolution in the digital realm. The waveform’s sampling rate is the resolution of the horizontal axis of the waveform (with total length of your piece as the total length of that X axis), while the bits are the vertical Y-axis. You want to use as many bits as possible to store amplitude data. When your waveform is too “quiet” (not as tall as it could be), you’re sacrificing thousands or millions of bits to storing silence above the top and below the bottom of the waveform. And if you apply a compressor or hard limiter, you’re “stretching” the waveform vertically, and your resolution doesn’t actually change. Just the volume.

So that means that you lose volume resolution, which with spoken works mainly affects the attack and decay of your voice. It’s part of why CDs sound so “cold” to many people (including me): they lose the high end due to sampling error (44.1KHz sampling rate), and they lose volume distinction (attack and decay are where the human ear can notice it) because there are only 65,536 distinct levels of volume in the waveform. 24-bit gives you over 16 million distinct levels. So if you record a waveform like the sample you showed me earlier that uses perhaps 1/20th of the dynamic range available, you still have as much dynamic range as you would recording in 16-bit in the first place.

Which most people will never notice.

But why put yourself in that situation when it’s so easy to do it right in the first place?

Ultimately, “how it sounds” is most important. And for many types of music where the attack and decay of sounds are not a huge deal, the loss of amplitude resolution recording the track “quietly” or with a low level of resolution isn’t that big a deal. 16 bits is OK for loud rock music, for instance.

But in my opinion, the human voice is one that is incredibly hard to reproduce accurately. Humans are attuned to the sounds of voices, just as we are to people’s faces. We already fight the battle of telling a story through a loudspeaker. A round, vibrating paper plate in a cabinet does not accurately simulate air passing over vocal folds vibrating chest and nasal cavities. Humans can clearly hear the difference between someone speaking near us and a recording of someone speaking near us. Higher sample rates and bit rates take us only so far; a vibrating plate is what captures the sound of the voice anyway. The loss of attack and decay resolution by recording a track “too quietly” just compounds this issue.

Want to know why I won’t vote Constitution party? Well, I believe our nation is a grand experiment in a secular democracy: a Republic founded upon Enlightenment principles. Ours was the first Western nation to believe — and embody in its founding documents — that the power of government springs from the consent of the governed, not from God or earthly institutions claiming to speak for God.

Here’s the preamble to the 2010 Constitution Party Platform:

The Constitution Party gratefully acknowledges the blessing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the Universe and of these United States. We hereby appeal to Him for mercy, aid, comfort, guidance and the protection of His Providence as we work to restore and preserve these United States.

This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been and are afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.

The Constitution of these United States provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The Constitution Party supports the original intent of this language. Therefore, the Constitution Party calls on all those who love liberty and value their inherent rights to join with us in the pursuit of these goals and in the restoration of these founding principles.

The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens. In such a Republic all Life, Liberty and Property are protected because law rules.

It’s hard to figure out where to start. So I’ll leave it there. What room is there for a non-Christian under a system ruled by the Constitution Party? I’m not an equal partner. I’m a person of some “other” faith granted “asylum” in the land of my birth.

No thanks. Go jump in a lake, Constitution Party. You are on my “Never voting for any of your candidates, EVER” list.

My problem with organized religion is illustrated by a small slice of a speech being given by some dude with an accent on the TV in Utah right now. He used an urban legend as if it were truth to prove a doctrinal point. Religions are based on legends formed from half-truths and inaccurate memories accepted as fact and given a veneer of respectability by the passage of time.

The specific legend he referenced is the “Nasa Space Pen” legend, in an attempt to recommend that people simplify their lives: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp . The “simple” solution of using a pencil results in sharp pi…eces of conductive graphite floating around the cabin getting into astronaut eyes, nose, ears, as well as the spacecraft’s electrical circuitry. Additionally, a pencil is very flammable in a 100% oxygen atmosphere which is a profound safety hazard… which is the reason astronauts today don’t use them.

Meanwhile, the “space pen” — research paid for by a capitalist company, not the government — is safe, effective, non-flammable, and a near-perfect solution to the problem of writing in space. But it is a very complicated writing instrument, used for its safety and versatility over the hazardous but “simple” pencil. And one in use by all astronauts everywhere because it does the job without a safety hazard.

I understand the desire to encourage people to simplify their lives. I agree with the sentiment. But using falsehoods to prove a point poisons the well of one’s entire store of wisdom.

So it turns out that the worst environmental disaster in US history — the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent spill — may be, in part, due to Microsoft Windows systems crashing. Now, I’m not going to straight-up blame Windows for this. Traditionally, BSODs (Blue Screens Of Death) are caused by malfunctioning drivers more than a malfunctioning operating system. But at the same time, to learn that the entire fleet routinely disables these Windows systems due to false-positive alerts and crashes is very, very concerning. Since when is Windows the preferred platform for mission-critical, life-saving, and possibly avoiding-the-extermination-of-all-humanity purposes?

Maybe I’m just being hyperbolic here, but give that massive methane explosions have repeatedly killed almost all life on earth before, just because it’s a 1-in-55-million chance I wish the engineers writing the software for the failsafe alarms had done a more thorough job.

Humanity killed by bad programming practices.

That would be a bad day.

Recently, a friend approached me with a short question that has a much longer answer.

“Do you think it’s really worth it to upgrade to the i3 Core processor?”

The computing industry has really stabilized over the past 5-6 years. We (collectively, humanity-wide) have bumped up against some really hard-limits in computing recently with heat management and silicon manufacturing techniques, resulting in the push to parallelize processing more: more cores, lower clock speeds, bigger caches, extracting more per clock cycle with less waste, reducing heat output and power requirements, etc. It’s been a boon for data centers, as the average cost of running these things has actually flattened out. Power requirements, while not going down, are not going up exponentially just like CPU speeds were for a while. And the power cost per GHz of CPU speed, and per GB of storage, is of course going down as we squeeze more performance per kilowatt-hour out of the systems.

So really, over the past four years, that has been the #1 improvement in CPU tech: extracting more performance for the same amount of power. Not extracting more performance as an absolute measure. Also there’s been a push to integrate Graphics Processing Units into the CPU core to enhance performance. As a result, it’s brought 3D gaming capabilities into the mainstream of computing, with lots of applications in real life that most of us rarely explored before. In addition, virtualization of operating systems has taken off like never before, as we can stuff more and more CPUs into the same form factor with similar power requirements. Even desktop users are very commonly virtualizing entire operating systems on their laptops these days. I know I do; I’m running a Solaris VM and a Linux VM on my Windows laptop at this very moment.

For the home user, though, if faster integrated graphics and extracting more work per clock cycle with better battery life tickles your fancy, then yes, an upgrade to a Core i3 (mobile), Core i5 (Desktop Mainstream), or Core i7 (high-end computing) processor is on your radar. Also, niche markets like audio-visual recording and real-time processing can take advantage of this sort of parallelized-power, if you will, driving innovation in the computing industry today. If power consumption isn’t much of a concern and you prefer discrete graphics, or if you aren’t running applications that can take advantage of symmetric multi-processing, then the i3 may not be worth the upgrade for you.

Keep smiling!

–Matt B.

Chanced across an article guaranteed to create some controversy: Women who are carrying more body fat have worse memory than those who carry less.

I received an invitation today (July 12, 2010) from Web Hosting Hub to try out their hosting service and compare it to my current web hosting provider (who shall remain nameless). There are a number of key features that I look for. Note that this list is from memory, and I didn’t check their list of features before writing it.

My Non-Negotiable Requirements:

• Very reasonable monthly rates (less than $10 per month, or $120 per year)
• Effectively unlimited bandwidth. I use a LOT of bandwidth every month between my MP3s and video files, upward of several dozen gigabytes a day. I used to bump up against bandwidth limits all the time with one former provider. I’m not hosting pornography or objectionable content, just LOTS of files and backups of configurations and files that I’ve archived but might need again.
• Effectively unlimited storage. With the 20GB or so of data on my site, I’ll want to know I never run out of room to store things now and in the future.
• Responsive 24/7 technical support via chat, email, and phone. When my site is down, or if I run into an issue, I want to know my webhosting company is aware of it pronto!
• MySQL support. I want this either on the server I’m using, or else hosted on a high-speed network.
• *nix-based hosting. My stuff works best on Linux or UNIX… not on Microsoft Windows.
• Shell access. This is critical for me. I don’t want just plain-old FTP… I want an actual shell, where I can chown/chmod files in my hosting directory, run scripts, and be able to manipulate files without having to download and upload them constantly. Cron alone won’t do; I’ve been a UNIX admin for fifteen years and want my shell!
• Support for Drupal, which requires the normal LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.
• Satisfaction guarantee. I want to know I can easily get my money back if it doesn’t work out for some reason.

As you can see, I’m quite a picky user. I know my tools, I know what works best for me with my experience and mastery of the technology. And I know if a vendor is trying to shine me on. To help me in this comparison, WebHostingHub.com provides a handy table to compare their features against their competitors.

What Do You Want?

Now, obviously I know exactly what I want out of a hosting provider. If you’re new at this game, though, WHH provides a number of guides to help you make your decision:

How to choose a webhosting provider is an overview of things those of us in the industry a long time know to look for. Company longevity, space and bandwidth, customer service, and reliability are all really important to look at. If you’ve outgrown your Blogger account or want more flexibility, configurability, and tools for your web site, you should read this to help you figure out what you’re looking for. Of course, WHH scores high on the marks in its own evaluation, but it’s still a good read.

Is Dedicated Hosting The Solution For You? is useful to help you evalute if you really need all the power dedicated hosting provides. Because dedicated hosting is so resource-inefficient, it’s much more expensive than shared hosting, but offers you almost unlimited configurability. I’ve been down that route before, and while it’s nice having the power at your fingertips, even for me — a bona-fide power-user — it was more than what I needed and I eventually went to a shared-hosting provider principally due to the price of dedicated hosting.

Should You Consider Windows Web Hosting? covers that age-old question: Linux or Windows? This is a No-B.S. evaluation of the benefits and risks of both. It all boils down to your application, as usual, and despite Web Hosting Hub being a mostly Linux shop, they give Windows a fair shake here.

Let’s dive in!

Now to figure out whether they’re going to meet my needs as outlined above, and have reasonable prices, to boot. I stepped through their signup pages. Right on the front page, I found they hit some of my non-negotiable requirements:

• UNLIMITED Disk Space & Bandwidth — a good sign!
• UNLIMITED Websites — Well, kind of expected in this day and age, but positive.
• FREE Domain Name — Cool, that was a feature of my current hosting provider that I’d forgotten about. I don’t need it right now — I already have a domain I want to put on this, waywardsun.org — but good to know.
• 24/7 U.S. Technical Support — OK, another “yay” point. Like most Americans, I want my tech support to be competent in English.
• Control Panel — OK, cool if you’re not me, gets a big “whatever”, but hopefully it has some good tools.
• FREE premium Web Builder — Meh.
• 90-Day FULL Money Back Guarantee — I might be taking advantage of that just for the purpose of this review!

I clicked through to the “See All Features” link. And there it was: Drupal support, Blogging Tools, PHP5, Python, Perl, cron jobs… OK. This looks like a pretty standard UNIX hosting place now. Good, good sign. I kept going, though I didn’t see “shell access” anywhere on the list.

Well, my usual next step is “Is there a coupon?” I know, that probably sounds weird, but one of the first things I look for is some sort of discount available for the first time period after signup. With my current provider, it was the first year for $20, subsequent years for $120 per year. Which is about what I expect. How does WebHostingHub stack up? Well, after some Googling for “WebHostingHub coupons”, I found several affiliate deals that purpoted to offer a discount, but in fact were trying to redirect your search to competing service providers. Unable to find any further discounts, I decided to choose the standard $4.95 a month deal using their regular signup.

I found an error that caused me some concern at the first signup page, though. There was a grammatical error. It reads “All account include a FREE domain registration or transfer!” As you probably know, “accounts” should be plural. This is a fairly common mistake among non-native writers, though. It got me thinking: where is this place hosted? The first thing I checked was the IP address: 173.205.127.11. Running this through ARIN, the American Registry of Internet Numbers, I found they were a US-hosted company working under the InMotion Hosting netblock. OK, so they are in the US and it looks legit, based in Wyoming.

Color By Numbers

One thing I like to do is look up the Netcraft stats on various providers to figure out what they’re running. Here’s Netcraft’s page on WHH.

Here’s what their page looked like back in 2002, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

What does this tell me? First, that they’ve been around for at least eight years doing the same business: providing low-cost shared hosting.

Chatting Up The Sales Guy

I paged one of their sales engineers from their web site on chat to see how well that worked. Within just a few seconds after submitting the form with my question, a chat box popped up, and I had a sales engineer on the line ready to answer my questions.

Matthew P. Barnson: I’m evaluating your service and have some questions: Do you offer ssh shell access to accounts? What operating systems do you use? Do you offer any month-to-month plans, or only yearly plans?

You are now speaking with Brian of Sales.

Brian: Hello Matthew.

Matthew P. Barnson: Hi, Brian. Nice to meet you!

Brian: We do not offer SSH as our account is shared hosting.

Brian: s

Brian: We bill in 12, 24, and 36 month increments. 12 months is $83.40 at a $6.95 per month price point, 24 months is $142.80 at a $5.95 per month price point and 36 months is $172.80 at a $4.95 per month price point.

Matthew P. Barnson: And what operating system are you running under the hood on the shared accounts?

Brian: We run CentOS a Red Hat Enterprise on our servers.

Matthew P. Barnson: Thanks, Brian. You’ve been very helpful. I appreciate you taking a few minutes to answer my questions. Have a good night!

Brian: My pleasure.

When you are ready to get signed up it is much faster to order over the phone with us as all online orders are held up to 30 minutes for verification and also we do call to confirm any order received through our website prior to activating the account. Please feel free to give me a call at 1-877-595-4482, or 757-416-6627 for international customers then option 9, then extension 878. We can have you setup in 5 minutes and I can also address anymore questions you may have. Or if easier you can contact me through chat by simply putting my name into the question line of the chat.

Now, it’s important to be aware of the rates. You get the special introductory rate only for your initial signup. This is pretty typical of the webhosting industry, but it’s worth your time to check out the terms of service.

The Devil Is In The Details

Web Hosting Hub’s terms of service are pretty standard. No pr0n, no spam, shared hosting means be a good citizen and not hogging the CPU or memory. I found nothing out of the ordinary. But it’s really important that you be fully aware of what it is you’re buying, and what a “FULL Money-Back Guarantee” actually means:

1. You agree to subscribe annually for $107.40 per year after the expiration of your initial promotional term. That puts them right at pretty much the exact same price as my current webhosting provider. Credit where credit is due: the company is very up-front about this recurring cost, and they encourage you to sign up for three years so that your price is locked-in at a very low rate for that term.
2. There are a number of services to which the 90-day money back guarantee does not apply. I understand why this is, but if you’re a newbie it’s really important to be aware of it. This includes SSL certificates, Free Domain Names ($11.95 per name), Dedicated IP address fees, and a few more things. If you sign up for the extras on your account, you’re going to be docked for those if you cancel before 90 days.
3. You’ll get a pro-rated refund of your remaining hosting fees if you cancel after the ninety days. If you were scared of the three-year commitment to lock your price in at $4.95 a month, don’t be. The refund policy is right in the Terms of Service in black-and-white. A pro-rated refund is a sign of a top-notch webhosting company that isn’t afraid of the competition.
4. If you sign up online, they are going to call you to confirm you are who you say you are before they allow you to sign up. In my opinion, this is a positive thing: it’s a sign of a reputable business wanting to make sure they are doing business with a real, live person on the other end.

CONCLUSION

If you’re looking for a web hosting provider with very decent fees, a solid Internet connection , unlimited transfers, and a plethora of tools to help you set up your site for a minimal time investment, WebHostingHub.com may be the exact match you’re looking for. They’re very competitive with other services, and offer a discount on 3-year paid-in-advance service that’s really hard to beat. They are also clearly offering an ethical service, are based in the USA, and don’t appear to have any hidden terms to surprise you.

On the other hand, if you already have a web provider with many of these features who meets or beats the price — or if you are a hard-core geek like me who feels he absolutely needs shell access with any hosting provider — you may want to look elsewhere. In the end, the lack of shell access was the deal-killer for me… but if you don’t even know what a shell is, or if you can live without one, WebHostingHub is definitely worth checking out.