Barnson.org

Our move from Tooele to Riverton has not been without its traumas and dramas. Establishing entirely new friendships is part of that. I’m affable enough, but I really miss my old friends and find it a little harder to make new friends than when I moved into my old house ten years ago. But at least in my case I have one easy way to make friends: my interest in model aircraft. We are passionate, close-knit community, and have a wonderful organization to unify via the Academy of Model Aeronautics.

So the closest club field is a huge field behind a schoolyard, used by the Intermountain Silent Flyers. They are a sister club to my main club, the Ute R/C Association. I went to a competition with them today, and despite only four fellows competing, I had a blast. And there were donuts.

Sailplane competitions are an entirely different animal from the usual “fun fly” competitions I’m used to with the Utes. With the Utes, it’s a different format every time: an egg-drop this time, a climb-and-glide dead-stick competition the next, and perhaps a balloon-pop or limbo after that. With the IMSF, it’s all about flying for a certain amount of time — using only the wind and thermals to keep you aloft, as there are no motorized competitions in this club — then sticking the landing within a certain radius of a marker.

These IMSF folks track their points throughout a flying season, and give kudos (and modest rewards) to the winners. They are serious about their goal, and although it sounded boring to me at first, it’s really not dull at all. The winds are ever-changing, and each flight is unique. You have to think on your feet, manage your energy, and above all be observant of changing conditions to react accordingly. The difference between sailplane thermal-duration contests and just flying a powered airplane is… it’s like the difference between shooting hoops with a buddy where each of you has a basketball and you’re just putting up shots to show off and goof around, versus playing 1-on-1 with money on the line or perhaps a full-court game.

It’s challenging, sporting, and a heck of a lot of fun. Even though I feel as if it’s slow-motion compared to the speed demons I’m used to racing around the flying field, it’s still a great time and the guys at the field couldn’t have been more friendly.

Well, maybe if they’d told me where the donuts were.

I am a chronic late-run-movie-watcher. That is, I wait until something is a new release on DVD, or else very late in the theater, before seeing it. I’ll maybe pick up one movie every few months in the theater; the rest, I wait until the furor has died down and enjoy watching at my leisure.

But before I break into my review of “I Am Legend”, I must first comment on the environment in which I watched this movie. Yesterday, our new Samsung 50-inch Plasma TV arrived*. I spent WAY too long monkeying with the thing, but I finally got the image pretty much where I wanted it for composite, VGA, and broadcast input. I need to buy a nice antenna, though, so I can pick up some of the several dozen HD TV stations in our area.

Suffice to say that watching a scary movie in the dark on such a large screen is transforming. It turned a movie that I’m sure would have just been “Ho-Hum, that’s fun” into a freaky experience that made me take two bathroom breaks due to the suspense.

So, my review of I Am Legend? Fun movie, pretty scary, watch it in the dark on a big screen with the sound turned up for maximum effect. Make sure your black levels are beautiful.

My ancient DVD player showed its age a bit on this film. There are several very dark scenes, and if I turned up the brightness enough to distinguish the dark colors from one another, the overall image was washed out. The black levels on this TV are BEAUTIFUL with an HD source like over-the-air or a Blu-Ray player, but a DVD player from 1999? Yeah, it doesn’t do the job right.

However, now that I have a big screen, I can see the difference in the mastering quality of releases. They did a fine job with the DVD release of I Am Legend. It’s much better than many among the sampling of DVDs I compared it against, and on-par with the latest Disney stuff (which seems to have some of the clearest mastering among anything I own).

So if you like scary movies, but aren’t big on gore, I Am Legend is probably right up your alley like it was mine. I liked the movie a lot, and am certainly going to watch it again before it goes back to Netflix.

And when I get a Blu-Ray player one day… this will probably be one of the first discs I test it against. Particularly the scene where Sam chases the deer into the building. That scene was intense and claustrophobic, I loved it!

(* Yes, I know this is a 720P Plasma screen, and people will tell me that I should have gone with 1080P, or LCD instead of plasma, or 120Hz, or projector. See my previous post on this topic. The viewing distance for this TV is 10-14 feet; for human eyes to see the benefit of 1080P, I would need to have had at least an 80″ screen in this room. That’s too rich for my blood unless I went with a projector, and in such a bright room during the day a projector’s just not an option. (With 720P and an average viewing distance of 3x screen size, I can get away with 40-52″ screen and still have a wonderful viewing experience for average content. One day, I may do a projector out in the garage or basement for a more THX-compliant experience. But for now this screen is so much better than my old 27″ CRT that there’s simply no comparison.)

Well, it made national and local news: Child Pornography Sting: Task Force Raids Homes In Salt Lake Valley.

The only thing that made me want to blog about this is the bit of a clip of an interview with — if I understand correctly — our local Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, with something along these lines:

We were able to track down the, uh, suspects through a months-long intensive effort to locate them using their IP addresses. That is, their Internet Provider address…

I’m certain I didn’t get the quote exactly right because I just heard it on the radio twice in the same day. But it bugged me because he took the time to explain what an IP address was… AND DID IT WRONG!

It’s “Internet Protocol” address, you clueless baboon.

Yeah, look, OK, I understand he’s not a techie. But he’s on the phone doing interviews claiming to have helped track these folks down, and barely has the slightest idea what he’s talking about. What he should have done was refer the reporter to someone competent.

The real problem here lies, however, in what calling this an “Internet Provider” address implies. It implies an attitude by law enforcement that these addresses must be given to you by an Internet Provider of some sort… a commercial entity that leases you an IP address temporarily.

It completely ignores the fact that Class C address space was freely given out to individuals prior to 1993. My friend John owns a netblock. He doesn’t use it, as he hasn’t found a provider willing to route the netblock for a reasonable fee, but he owns it free-and-clear. And in the up-and-coming IPv6 space — a new standard which should solve the “running out of addresses” problem for a millenia or two — IP addresses will be permanently assigned to many devices, following them throughout their lives and expiring when they finally die or are retired.

Anyway, you can have an IP address without having an “Internet Provider” to speak of. You can set up a private one in your home. You can run one over a VPN. Your provider doesn’t give them to you, and other than the DHCP records provided by a few willing and compliant ISPs, they can be as ephemeral and temporary as your mood, or as permanent as your favorite jacket. I have owned, cared for, and managed Internet Protocol addresses for virtually all of my adult life. No “Internet Provider” need be responsible for them.

I started an entry covering the whole child pornography weirdness in the USA, then left off because I think that’s a topic all on its own…

Next to Florida, Utah is the USA’s scam capital. Once again, it boils down to an abuse of trust for someone with a shared religious background:

An Ogden businessman pleaded guilty Monday in one of the largest fraud cases ever in Utah…Authorities said Southwick, 62, promised high returns on commercial real estate investments. They said he traded on his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to gain investors’ trust.

For background, there is an article from last year first exploring Southwick’s Ponzi scheme.

From where I sit, if I ever hear someone appeal to my faith — or anybody else’s, for that matter — as a reason to trust them, it sends my BS-O-Meter blaring in my head. It’s a bit distracting sometimes, but worthwhile to listen to.

Best book ever to avoid being taken in by a good sales pitch: Robert Cialdini’s Influence: Science and Practice. It reads a bit like a textbook, but it is mercifully short and provides a tool-chest of influence identification and management that will serve for a lifetime.

Thanks to MADB for the link today.

I went to dinner with a good friend the other day who mentioned that he was concerned because a coworker had said he was “creepy”. In celebration of this hilarious — I mean, distressing — event, I decided to compile a list on “How to be the creepy guy in your workplace”.

First, a definition!

Creepy (adjective)

1. producing an uneasy fearful sensation, as of things crawling over one’s skin
2. strangely repulsive

How to be the creepy guy at work

1. Find any excuse to talk with female co-workers. Do not put the same effort toward the males.
2. It’s much creepier if you are married and do the aforementioned.
3. Stare at her chest while she’s talking.
4. Stare at her privates while you talk.
5. Stare into her eyes. It seems as if the conversational norm in the USA is to look into the eyes while listening, yet while speaking one is expected to glance away periodically. Break this norm, and you’re creepy.
6. Stare at any other part of her body while you talk to her. Staring is just creepy.
7. Talk at great length even though she doesn’t reply.
8. Ask questions about someone’s at-home schedule and living arrangements.
9. Stand or sit very close when talking. Around arms-length is the appropriate American conversation distance; cut this about in half to be really creepy.
10. Buy her stuff. Giving gifts to several co-workers in an egalitarian fashion isn’t creepy; if you just give to the females or one female in particular, it is.
11. It’s more creepy if the stuff you buy is totally inappropriate. An Epilady or skin-tight leather catsuit — particularly if it’s perfectly her size — is really creepy.
12. Ask other people about certain females in your office. The fact that you talk about them when they aren’t there is creepy!
13. Compliment her appearance. “You look nice today” is way too generic to be creepy. Complimenting something unusual can be creepy, but there’s a very narrow line between creepy and gay. Gay: “Wow, I love that anklet, where can I buy one?” Creepy: “Those pants are very tight on you, but they look nice.”
14. Lie. Nothing’s creepier than regularly lying to co-workers, enough that they can’t trust what you’re saying.
15. Have some obsession that you talk about at work all the time. In a rare case of male-male creepiness, one of our security guards used to talk about how much he really loved his guns, and how much he hated his job and co-workers. Once again, there is a fine line, this time between creepy and postal.
16. Be obsessed with what other people think about you. If you are worried about being creepy, you will be, so worry a LOT!
17. Flirt with people both out of your league and far younger than you. Nothing is creepier than an older man hitting on younger women.
18. Pay just a little bit of attention to the way you look, but not enough. If you make it clear you’re a slob, you’re just a slob, not a creep. If you dress nicely all the time, you’re dressing for success. Dress just nicely enough to look like you’re trying, but not so nice that you’re succeeding.
19. Wear clothing that is too young for you.
20. Be anxious, all the time. This alone may be enough for people to think you’re creepy. Don’t take anti-anxiety medication, though, that may just make people think you’re not creepy anymore!

Now, if you manage to do all of these, I think you’ll pull off the title of Grade-A creep without difficulty. If, however, you are guilty of only a few — for instance, staring at her boobs all the time — you may not be creepy, just over-sexed.

Rod Meldrum, president and CEO of High Country Gourmet Foods, with the stated mission of helping “many thousands of people prepare physically for the second coming of the Savior, through food storage,” is a man on a mission: to prove that the Book of Mormon is consistent with US geography and DNA evidence.

So far, his book/video tour has included LDS stake centers and ward buildings in St. George and Wellsville.

His interpretation of the events toward the end of the Book of Mormon, with a climactic battle near the Great Lakes region of what is now the United States, is consistent with LDS Traditionalist views. However, in recent years those Traditionalist views have been at odds with scientific evidence regarding DNA lineages of Native Americans which do not show any evidence of Jewish heritage. In light of this evidence, many LDS scholars have adopted a “limited geography theory” that the peoples spoken of in the Book of Mormon in fact inhabited only a small area of Central America. Meldrum’s standpoint puts him at odds with these LDS scholars. I will be interested in seeing how this plays out.

Simon Southerton, noted molecular biologist, author, and former Latter-day Saint, said in a forum posting:

…his interpretation of the DNA evidence; however, is deeply flawed. He evidently bases it largely on the presence of the X lineage, which occurs at it highest frequency in Algonquian tribes (Cree, Ojibwe, Cheyenne, Kickapoo, Shawnee etc.) from north eastern North America. There is an ancient version of the X lineage among the Druze from Israel. But a much more closely related X lineage has been found in the Altai from southern Siberia, the same population with the highest frequency of the A, B, C and D lineages.

I don’t pretend to fully understand that, but it seems that if I actually knew what I was talking about, I might be suspicious of the unlikely conclusions drawn by Meldrum as Southerton is.

What I find more interesting, though, is that if Meldrum’s findings were really consistent with science, wouldn’t he be touring talk shows and publishing in scientific journals rather than giving lectures to faithful Latter-day Saints in stake centers? I mean, finding abundant Hebrew DNA in Native American tribes would be a truly revolutionary development that would challenge current pre-Columbian history and science to the core.

We have some food storage in our really over-sized storage room from High Country Gourmet Foods, I think. The word “gourmet”, despite being in the name of the company, is not really something which appropriately describes food which can be stored indefinitely at room temperature. Similarly, the word “science”, despite being at the heart of Muldrum’s argument, is not really something which appropriately describes his apologetic campaign to the faithful.

I fired up my computer this morning and wanted to some some packet analysis to try to reproduce some behavior I’d seen on my network at work. Lo and behold, my computer was generating GOBS of traffic. Constant, bandwidth-sucking traffic that was affecting other computers on my tiny little 1.5mbit broadband connection.

First suspect: Viruses. GRISoft to the rescue! Nope, machine’s clean.

Next suspect: Bittorrent still running? Nope, nope, it’s not set up to turn on automatically, and it’s only used when downloading large stuff like, for instance, ISO images of the latest Linux distribution or the IRCHA 2007 DVD (legal download, you know).

But it sure looked like BitTorrent. I mean, the traffic was all UDP, and all coming from the same port on my machine and going TO the same port on my machine: udp port 21600.

I dug into Control Panel. I modified my firewall policies. The traffic continued unabated. Finally, I found a little applet in my control panel called “DNA” which was supposed to “accelerate” content on my behalf, and, according to the laughable description, would not affect my computer or network otherwise.

Yeah. Right. I could tell it was having a profound affect, and had been wondering why my network was always saturated, my laptop fan kept running all the time, and my other network communications — like backing up my web server — were running so slow.

Sorry, BitTorrent, I understand you guys are trying to go legit through this content-delivery service, but your DNA client is evil. Why?

1. It installs along with BitTorrent without explicitly being installed by the user.
2. You don’t describe what DNA is or what it does. When someone downloads BitTorrent, you just get a “Download BitTorrent with DNA Acceleration” link… and no description of what DNA Acceleration is supposed to do.
3. You use the full bandwidth of low-bandwidth subscribers without their consent. Sure, “consent” is buried somewhere deep within an End-User License Agreement that nobody reads.
4. There are no configurable options to throttle DNA. This alone would go a long way toward helping me feel better about helping you be legitimate. If I could say, for instance, you’re allowed to use 20 kilobits a second, maximum, I might feel better about running your software.
5. There are no configurable options to limit total amount of data transfer. Beyond a certain amount, I’m charged per kilobyte of data on my cell phone connection. If I connect through my mobile phone, DNA still begins sharing data with other people, saturating that little tiny pipe and costing me money.

So how can BitTorrent make DNA less evil? For starters, set some more user-configurable throttle and connection options in the control panel, like “enable DNA when I’m on this connection, and disable on this other one”. Also allow users to set the maximum allowed transfer per given interval, and the maximum total bandwidth DNA can consume. Finally, make it explicit how DNA will hobble my connection, and give the user some reason to want to install it regardless.

And put an icon into the taskbar. Really. The fact that it runs totally transparently with no sort of visual indicator sets off my “malware alert” siren.

Something that would be helpful is to give some sort of visual indicator — perhaps a taskbar icon — that DNA is working, and notify users when they are accessing accelerated content. And if a user has throttled their DNA connection, have a pop-up notification from that same icon that, if they didn’t throttle DNA, they could have experienced this content even more quickly.

Fundamentally, the lack of disclosure is troubling when it comes to this software. On the plus side, however, it’s trivial to deinstall BitTorrent DNA.

In absence of other options, that’s exactly what I did.

Now my laptop runs cool again, my other downloads are running at full speed again, and my Vonage VoIP phone connection isn’t skipping anymore. They got one thing right, but “easy uninstall” probably wasn’t on the top of their priority list.

This morning in staff meeting, we took a few moments to correlate on the dates for decommissioning and aging “IBM Blade Center”. These are stalwart little units that we’ve used for years. At just 8U (approximately 14″) high, you can stack six of these in a standard nineteen-inch 48U rack.

These things give off heat like a $@^#)$*^&!). I mean, seriously, you stand in front of a wall of these guys, and you’re freezing your privates off from the amount of A/C required to keep them cool, while if you stand behind them, you’re bathing in sweat.

Their strong suit, though, is how much “rack density” you gain. Each Blade Center holds 14 blades. That is, 14 fully-functional computers with somewhere between two and eight Intel Xeon CPUs at 1.6 to 3.0GHz apiece, at least 6GB of RAM, and around 150GB of hard drive space.

That’s up to 84 fully-functioning computers — in the same league as today’s higher-end desktop computers as far as processing power goes — in a space smaller than your broom closet.

These Blades are also extraordinarily manageable and easy to work on. IBM did a great job designing them, and we’re sad to see them go to be replaced by a bunch of 1U servers which aren’t anywhere near as rack-dense or easily maintainable. The new units, however, have the virtue of being the corporate standard due to extreme discounts from a major retailer. And the fact is, these new boxes are much faster than the aging Blade Centers. Downside: they are much less rack-dense, and due to heat management issues, we can’t fit more than 14 in a single rack, rather than the 84 we could run from IBM.

I’m not entirely excited about the replacements, as you can probably tell. In my gut, it feels like we’re “vendor swapping” simply to keep some bean-counters happy, and exchanging to an inferior tech because it’s easier than trying to push through a purchase with a vendor who doesn’t have a favorable sales relationship with us.

Anyway, a cost that needs to be factored in when planning large-scale computing infrastructure is power usage. Fully-loaded, these blade centers consume more than 5,500 watts of power (perhaps 2200 or so on average because these are older/slower units). That’s about the same usage as a five-ton air-conditioner unit, but these things run ALL THE TIME and don’t cycle on and off like an AC unit. Plus, in the summer, you need to run an AC unit just to keep these bad boys cool.

But, hey, if there is not much of a market for a unit, occasionally my employer makes older machines available to employees for a discount or for the price of “you haul this 200 lb monstrosity away”. I have an old Sun E4200 in my garage awaiting conversion into a refrigerator from this very sort of deal.

If I wanted to actually run this unit, though, and use the 14 computer embedded in it, how much would it cost? Well, the equation is 5.5kw * 24 hrs * 7 days * 4 weeks * .08 = right near $300/month just in power costs to run the beast. Maybe as low as $150 if you’re running older/slower blades.

Ouch. I pity the small company who will end up buying this unit at a deep discount if they don’t plan for the power cost.

I have been a user of OpenOffice and its predecessor, StarOffice, for over a decade. I began using it occasionally around 1995, and by 1998 I used it to the exclusion of Microsoft Office wherever possible. It worked well for my mostly-lightweight word processing and spreadsheet needs, and I got very used to it. I fell in love with certain features, particularly the “export to PDF” feature that was sorely lacking in MS Office, and the multitude of exportable and importable formats.

As my skills have grown, so too have my needs. I’ve learned macro languages and formula manipulation in OpenOffice now, and take advantage of a number of other people’s templates that also use these features. At Sammy G’s behest, I began experimenting with Google Docs. I think it’s a fantastic collaboration platform, but unfortunately its lack of support for OpenOffice/MS Office-style macros made it a deal-killer for maintaining some of my spreadsheets.

An example spreadsheet is my budget. It lives on a laptop at my home, and gets backed up to an online repository after every major change. There have been a number of times that a financial question has popped up while I’m away, and I’d like to pull up my budget to consult and figure out where we are at financially. Unfortunately, my current config allows that only as much as I am content to have a read-only copy of my budget on my screen… there’s no way to coordinate writes except saving it back to my online repository, and remembering to update the local copy when I get back to my laptop.

Enter: Ulteo. Could this be the answer?

(Credit to Chris Lejeune for the link.)

Some months ago, Justin told us about the upcoming release of Sweeney Todd. Well, I finally watched it.

I found the show brilliantly scored, with voices that didn’t quite live up to the sweeping soundtrack, but sung with honesty. Many touching moments, with macabre humor.

I found, though, that once Todd launches his campaign of homicide, I lost interest, and just got alternately bored, grossed out, and found the plot pretty predictable. I knew who the old lady was within moments of seeing her, and also knew she was doomed from the start. Perhaps I’ve just seen too many movies… but although I really enjoyed the music, I just wasn’t swept away by the movie.

What about you?