Author: matthew

For those who don’t know, Kurt Vonnegut died last night at the age of eighty-four. I have only read bits and pieces of his writing, but it was landmark for its time.

Some quotes from “A Man Without A Country” (thanks to Steven H. for finding them):

“Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?”

“Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want: a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything. What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them. Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man. A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit.”

“Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

And so it goes.

As a child in school, I vividly remember watching multimedia presentations that went something like this:

“Magma exists just below the crust of the earth…” {BEEP!} {flip} {pause} “The crust of the earth rides on this magma, islands floating on a sea of molten rock.” {BEEP!} {pause} “These crustal plates, as they are called…” {click of a pause button} “Matthew, please flip the projector to the next slide!” “Oh, right, sorry…” {flip} “…grind against one another causing earthquakes, volcanoes, and massive ocean waves called tsunamis…”

Yep, the good old days of the flip-slide projector. Well, today I ran across a nifty YouTube video in the same vein which talks about the massive monkey population of the planet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=447527&in_page_id=1770

This reminds me of the red dog who used to use street-crossing buttons in Gaithersburg. He’d trot up, reach up to the button, press it, wait patiently for the “walk” signal, then trot across. Pets are much smarter animals than we give them credit for, I think.

Particularly Happy. He’s scary.

Sorry slow posting over the past week, I got a sinus infection, and then the flu on top of that. It was gross and I was miserable.

So we went as a family to see Meet the Robinsons this past Monday. Unfortunately, my wife was feeling ill with the same aforementioned gross affliction I suffered through, so she stayed home and I hauled four kids up to the Cinema 6 here in Tooele.

What a great movie! For the first twenty minutes or so, I just thought the movie was… well, bizarre. In particular, the introduction to the Robinsons was absolutely surreal and vaguely reminded me of the terrifying video sequences from Dumbo which gave me nightmares as a child. (That subject is blog-worthy on its own, I swear the Disney animators were tripping out on something when they did that one.) But shortly thereafter, the story became more engaging as you begin to be able to put the pieces together for who is who, and the story very satisfyingly allows the audience to make the conclusions just a few moments before it’s explicitly divulged.

Nice. I like it when a movie can do that and not rely on a trick. Subtle clues, added together, then validate the conclusion your audience just arrived at. Slick.

As before in “The Bathroom Stall“, I hauled the boys off to the restroom after the show. Our youngest is currently resisting potty training… when he’s angry or unhappy, he likes to express his displeasure in a way that he knows will get some reaction, namely by peeing on the floor.

You know, this situation reminds me vaguely of the situation we are in in Iraq. For years, we attempted to deprive Saddam Hussein of the ammunition he would use to oppress his people, but at the same time provided him the raw materials (Oil For Food) he needed to maintain basic sustenance. Well, that was enough to keep him armed and ready, too. The situation with my son is like that. We do our best to deprive him of ammunition, but he can always make more, no matter how he has to scrounge and scrape to do so.

Anyway, the boys started to line up and do their thing, but Elijah (my middle son) decided at the last moment to use a stall rather than the urinal.

“Hey, Dad!” he shouted from the stall, excited. “The water’s blue!”

“That’s great, son,” I said as I smiled apologetically at the other fellows milling about waiting for their kids to finish, too, and rolled my eyes a little. A gentleman relieving himself at a urinal glanced my way and offered me a sympathetic grin with eyebrows raised.

In case you’re not aware of the rules of men’s urinals, receiving a smile from a stranger standing at a urinal is disturbing and an explicit violation of rule number twelve: “Always look at the wall. Looking down means you do not know what you are doing or that you are obsessed. Looking at someone else is threatening.”

“This is so cool, dad!” came the excited five-year-old voice from the stall. “I’m peeing a lot lot lot, and the water’s green now!”

Urinal-looker turned to me and said jokingly “So is he learning his colors, or did you feed him something special?”

Weirded-out, I just chuckled nervously.

“Dad, you have to come look at this! I made my pee turn green!” he shouted.

By this point, the entire bathroom was looking toward the stall. Any hopes of salvaging the situation and respecting the rules of the urinal were dashed, so I reluctantly trotted over to the stall, congratulated Elijah on what a great job he did making the bowl green, and herded the kids out to the car.

I did a little writeup on Apple’s move to the Intel x86 architecture over IBM’s POWER architecture for a mailing list I’m on. I’ve heard numerous theories bandied about for why Apple moved, and after a lot of reading and digging, here’s my theory.

On Tue, April 3, 2007 1:10, Rich said: > IMHO, this is probably the biggest reason Apple moved > to the Intel architecture, so programming for the > machine would be easier, and more software will be > available over time. It’s probably also true that > this type of strategy will take years to make any real > gains.

Not quite accurate. Apple has had a version of Mac OS which runs on Intel architecture internally since they began designing Mac OS X in the late 1990’s. It’s been occasionally “released” (leaked) and squashed since then.

The basic problem was financial and supply-chain management. Motorola could not produce the POWER chips (a derivative of IBM’s POWER architecture as part of the AIM — Apple, IBM, Motorola — alliance) in sufficient quantities to keep up with burgeoning demand due to lack of fab time. They also couldn’t produce the chips at a low enough cost. IBM stepped up to the plate in an attempt to keep Apple using POWER-based chips (IBM’s design) with fab time at their under-used fabs. Eventually, Motorola dropped out of the picture entirely, and IBM picked up manufacturing entirely. IBM, however, also could not keep pace with the release of massive numbers of consumer units. Their POWER4 fabrication facilities were sized with the server market in mind (much fewer, higher-margin sales), since IBM uses Intel chips for their desktop lines. Additionally, IBM could not keep up with the pace of advancing chip speeds and diminishing power requirements which Apple wanted.

The curious thing was, IBM had the spare fab capability to handle Apple’s demands. It was available and unused, but the time was scheduled and sold to a company who IBM was not willing to bump in order to provide more chips to Apple. This other company was going to place massive demands on IBM’s fabrication facilities with even more units of POWER4 chips than Apple could project sales of in their wildest dreams, and IBM would not budge on the fabrication projection.

Thus Apple was faced with a problem: 3-month or longer lead times on their processors if they stick with the PowerPC (now Power4) architecture. Intel had been courting Apple for some time. They had spare fabrication capacity due to a falling-out over a major contract with a large company on a next-generation console. With the arrival of IVT — Intel Virtualization Technology — and the lower-power dual-core Pentium M chipsets (now called Intel CoreDuo2), they had a winner. IVT would allow seamless virtualization of the legacy POWER-based Mac OS X applications at nearly-native speeds, and the Pentium M finally had the horsepower to keep up with what the POWER chips could do at similar clock speeds and power requirements.

The bonus to developers was much more of a perk than a requirement. Ultimately, Apple went with the supplier who could give them what they needed to support their stupendous growth after the release of Mac OS X and the iPod; neither Motorola nor IBM could.

And that major competitor, that large company who booked the fab time with IBM, was the same company that ditched Intel for their next-generation console. That company is Microsoft, and the console was the XBox 360.

And now you know… the rest of the story.

I wrote this up as a reaction to a recent discussion regarding how Apple is growing tremendously in PC sales lately. Here are my thoughts.

My most recent laptop purchase was a Mac (for my spouse for college). Major factors influencing my decision:

1. Fewer “tech support” calls from my wife. This has been a BIG win for me. Since purchasing the computer in December, she’s only had to ask me for help about a dozen times. Compare this to much more frequent requests on the PC, and I’m happy. It “just works” for her.
2. Great battery life.
3. Very light.
4. Nice screen (a bit small-ish, but very viewable from many angles).
5. Runs UNIX under the hood, and all the usual UNIX tools are there, though the filesystem layout is a little bit weird. I’m a UNIX geek, so I dig the operating system.
6. Very fast. Once we upgraded to 2GB of RAM, this little box task-swaps better than anything I’ve owned… including a quad-processor, 2GHz, 16GB of RAM Windows-based beast that I ran at work for a while.
7. Very attractive. My Dell Inspiron 9300 looks like a big, boxy hunk of plastic next to the sleek MacBook.
8. After-the-sale support is important to me because I see so many failures on a daily basis in my job. Once you include the 3-year service agreement, a similarly-configured Intel-based Dell and Intel-based Apple are very close in price… in my case, within $20 of each other for a nearly-identical configuration.

That last bit, IMHO, is a huge part of what’s fueling their current market penetration. As long as it was more expensive than the competition — mostly Dell — it was the domain of enthusiasts. At an equal price point (or lower, in some cases), it’s a very competitive platform.

Anyway, after getting the new Mac, I fell in love with some features of it:

• The power cord. Why on earth doesn’t anybody else use this type of magnetic lock to handle power cords? I’ve seen way too many laptops fail the same way: someone trips over the power cord, and then it yanks against the circuit board inside and you can’t charge your laptop anymore. It’s a problem on my current Dell, worked around by doing gyrations with maneuvering the plug until it stays.
• Nothing bulky hanging off anywhere, and no strange shapes where the display meets the chassis. It’s smooth and slides easily into a bag.
• Magnetic-locking screen catch. I have owned a half-dozen laptops, and the screen catch always ends up breaking after 2-4 years. I’m a hard user, I know, but using those same rare-earth magnets to hold the screen closed is superb innovation.
• Very positive-action keyboard that doesn’t seem prone to failure.
• Intuitive mousing on the keypad. Hold + drag == scroll.
• Trivially easy to work on and do most upgrades. Memory replacement, for instance, involves no tools. That’s cool.

I agree they need to streamline the file-sharing to Windows bit. Right now, you have to go into your configuration screen and read the IP address and full UNC path to the share, then type it in on the other computer… ugh. I know Samba can join a domain and show up in the browse list… why can’t my Mac?

A few other annoyances, but for a work PC, I’d pick a Mac again next time. For my games, though… that’s a tough sell.

–Matt B.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2045021,00.html

The gist of this article: The UN calls for mass circumcisions in Africa to slow the AIDS epidemic after weighing evidence indicating that circumsicion reduces infection rates dramatically. The AIDS pandemic is overwhelming in many parts of Africa, often resulting in multiple families living under one roof due to the death of family heads.

Now I’m conflicted about this… 1. The evidence is conclusive: Circumcision dramatically reduces infection rate for males who have sex with infected females. It doesn’t stop the men from transmitting the disease, nor does it appear to have any effect on men who have sex with men, but it reduces their chance of infection.

2. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a bit of “correlation is not equal to causation” going on. Is it possible that circumcised males tend to come from a different sexual tradition than the uncircumcised? What I mean is, is it possible they tend more towards monogamy?

3. I’m generally opposed to mandatory circumcision. My boys aren’t circumcised. I’m leaving that to them as a decision they can make on their own as a teen or adult. Mainly, this is due to my bad experience with the procedure at 7 years old (which I won’t go into) and my feelings that baby circumcision is a barbaric, unnecessary procedure.

If there is strong scientific evidence that circumcision reduces AIDS infection rates by 60%, should it be mandatory — or near-mandatory — like inoculations are in first-world countries?

P.S.: I am immensely entertained by the name of the doctor advocating this course of action: Kevin de Cock. I’m so immature.

So I’ve spent the last five days totally incommunicado down in Arches National Park. We had a ton of fun with the family, but the highlight of my visit boils down to one photograph…

I just had to share:

Role-player baby shirt.

That’s a person who takes their role-playing games seriously… I love the charisma score on that little guy!

Tell me, how in the world do people with absolutely zero technical clue get hired by one of the largest software companies in the world?

Today, I parked my butt in my Kyphosis-inducing office chair to stare blankly at my monitor for another day. But this day was unusual: I had well over 1,000 email messages in my box on a thread regarding our company’s ESPP. Apparently, employees realized enormous “phantom gains” on the stock due to hold times while eating from the employee-stock buffet, and the perky IRS hostess just handed them the bill.

I wish my waistline were “phantom gains”. That way I’d be happy that at least I could blame someone else for global warming.

Now, as far as the email thread goes, this kind of inbox barf-o-rama happens from time to time. I use mutt as my mail reader, and deleting all the replies to a thread which I know I have no interest in is as easy as pressing “o, t, shift-D”. That means “order by thread, then delete the thread”. Yeah, it’s nerdy, but so am I, and so are a lot of other people. Fact is, the nerds won. Deal with it.

Anyway, one of our staffers sent out a very politely-worded email. He explained:

1. How to remove yourself from a mailing list.
2. The proper use of “reply” versus “reply all”. Basically, “don’t reply-all unless you have something useful to contribute to the discussion.
3. A reiteration of “don’t click reply-all unless you want to make yourself look like an idiot in front of 5,000 people.”

His articulate, carefully-worded, brief email elicited the following responses, replied to all:

“remove me” “remove me too” “take me off of this list” “If you want to be removed from this list, this is something you have to do yourself. Log into [our email management tool]… and unsubscribe yourself from the list. Please stop replying back to this list, it is going out to 1000s of mailboxes.” “REMOVE ME IMMEDIATELY!!!” “please remove me from your list asap”

One intelligent response… which basically told them what the original email told them in the first place. Apparently people everywhere see what they want to see, and nothing more.

Where are reading skills? Maybe they need a job with a little less technical focus? Or maybe some good old-fashioned hard work skills. I mean, I know not everybody can have a great job, but come on, if you’re going to work for a software company, don’t have crappy email skills. It’s not like a thousand random emails are going to make you declare email bankruptcy and delete everything to start over.

That’s my rant for the day. Thank you.