Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Computers

  • Still no internet at work

    Okay, that’s not exactly true: we got our internet service back at work around 3:30pm or so. But that still means we spent the better part of a day without.

    The problem, as it turned out, was a dead SAS unit. (I have no idea what “SAS” actually stands for; it’s basically like a cable modem for the wireless broadband nonsense.) Not the cranes at all. What’s truly irritating is that it took OneEighty two days to figure this out, and most of today for the tech to “prep” the new unit. What, are they stored in a vault under guard somewhere? Seems to me techs should have spare SAS units in their trucks, ready to swap out at a moment’s notice.

    So I spent the better part of the day in a bad mood at work, continuously fielding the inevitable “Is it fixed yet?” and “Why aren’t we up yet?” questions and basically spinning my wheels. Ridiculous. Now we’ve lost two days of productivity and I just know I’m gonna be in a bad mood at work for the rest of the week.

    Needless to say, I plan on switching us over to a hard line as soon as possible; I’ve already got some paperwork in motion. What a pain in the ass.

  • Sucks when there’s no internet

    At work, that is. Our internet connection was down the entire day. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it except wait for the tech from OneEighty Networks (née HighSpeed Communications née EmpireNet) to try to fix it. With no luck.

    The problem? Well, for starters we have OneEighty’s goofy LMDS “wireless broadband” service, which, instead of an actual T1 or DSL or other hard line, employs a line of sight microwave relay system to connect to the internet. “Line of sight” means that anything getting between the roof antenna and the transmitter on Awbrey Butte will block the signal and put you out of commission. Oh, and really foggy/rainy/snowy/etc. days can interfere with the signal too.

    (This was all set up well before I started with the company; I just inherited the problems.)

    So today it was offline, and the tech can’t figure out why, but his favorite theory is that one of the new giant metal construction cranes that went up last week is blocking the signal. Sounds reasonable, except the crane went up last week and we didn’t start experiencing any problem until today (or possibly yesterday but no one was in the office to tell for sure).

    So work sucks when there’s no internet, because it really drives home just how much we rely on having a live connection. Probably 90% of what I do requires internet access. Stupid crappy “wireless broadband.” I think I’m calling around tomorrow for quotes for a real connection.

  • 20 questions

    Okay, so I must be easily impressed. From this post on Boing Boing I found the 20Q.net site and began trying to stump the system. I can’t do it. No wonder; the guy that created the neural net (a type of artificial intelligence software) started it back in 1988, and it’s been “learning” ever since, entirely by people playing 20 questions with it. Crazy.

    I remember having a 20 questions “A.I.” game that came with the Logo programming language for the Commodore 64 (way back in the day). Same deal, it was preprogrammed with maybe three items, but as you played it, it remembered every new item you fed it and got “smarter” each time it played. The only drawback was that on a Commodore, you couldn’t really save the state of the program, so it would “forget” everything each time you started it up.

    Funny part is, I remember the first time I played it, I figured I’d stump it with “ostrich.” I just about fell out of the chair when, after about five questions, it says, “Are you thinking of an ostrich?” I was hooked, but ultimately didn’t fully capitalize on that for another few years… at the time, I simply considered it to be an exotic toy. Now I write software for a living. Go figure.

  • Bend Bulletin article: Tech Town

    The Bend Bulletin (our local newspaper) has an interesting article online today: Tech Town, a profile of the local computer/tech industry and how it’s pulling “young, technically savvy people” to the area.

    The conventional wisdom is that Bend is a great place to retire, but increasingly it is a great place for young, technically savvy people to live and work, too.

    Bend officials envision an industrial park and university campus at the north end of town. The so-called Juniper Ridge project could become the cornerstone of an invigorated regional economy based on science, engineering and innovation.

    If those companies materialize as planned, they will bring even more skilled workers to the region, workers like Marshall Simmonds, Morgan O’Neal and [Chris] Reese.

    All three pointed to the character of Bend and outdoor recreation as drawing and keeping them here. That foundation, they said, makes the region ripe for new technology companies that will need to attract talented young workers.

    The three people they profile are Chris Reese, technical director for Sony Bend (whom I’ve blogged about before); Morgan O’Neal (“a throwback to some of the early entrepreneurs of computing and the Internet. He has little formal training in technology”—is the Bulletin trying to be complimentary here? jeez), web developer with my old employer, Alpine Internet; and Marshall Simmonds, vice president of Enterprise Search Marketing for The New York Times Company by way of About.com. That’s a pretty diverse group, considering.

    Still, it’s not entirely news that Bend is a high-tech region; technology is one of the industries that’s been growing like a weed for at least a decade (along with tourism) since the older industries like logging have been waning. Even so, this part is intriguing:

    City officials and local business leaders for the last few years talked about bringing more high-tech companies to the community. Most recently, the city has been eyeing the Juniper Ridge project as a potential home for such businesses.

    The first phase of Juniper Ridge development is already in the works, the city having annexed 500 acres it owns on the northeast edge of town. The city will select a master developer for the project, but the council is working with the region’s legislative delegation in Salem to site a four-year university there that can complement a contemplated high-tech industrial park.

    Almost sounds like the play Klamath Falls made for high tech (“Silicon Basin,” anyone?)—the difference being, of course, that Bend is already supporting a viable tech industry. But what’s this about a university? Ah, I see from this Bend.com press release that it appears to be for OSU-Cascades and possibly Cascades Academy of Central Oregon. Interesting.

  • Globe

    Today at work my friend Kerry and I were talking about geography and globes, which was prompted by the Yahooligans Where in the World is? game (where you see if you know your world geography), and came up with what I think would be the perfect globe: an interactive one whose outer surface is a touch-sensitive LCD screen that has all the details projected onto it from the inside. Think about it: it’s basically a spherical computer screen, so it could always be up-to-date with new political country borders—download new data to it via a USB connection to your computer—and facts about each country; a touch-sensitive surface means you could simply poke a country to get information about it, or play games on it (find the country); it could be custom color-coded; it could be animated; you could even load other planets onto it, say Mars, Jupiter, or even a fictional one. It would have to be programmable, of course, so hackers could customize the hell out of it.

    A cursory search online reveals this: The Explorer Globe from LeapFrog. It’s similar to what I’m thinking:

    Touch the interactive pen any place on this interactive, talking atlas and learn thousands of amazing facts. Compare population and land area between say Dundee, Scotland and Oaxaca, Mexico. Find out flying times between Lubbock, Texas and Kyoto, Japan. Learn fascinating facts about continents, countries, capitals, music, currency, highest points and so much more.

    There is also a “Eureka” game mode that prompts players to find geographic points of interest (giving hints along the way) before time runs out. Up to four players can play six multi-level games with this very chatty, very challenging atlas. And it isn’t just for kids either. Everyone will have fun testing their knowledge of geography and exploring the world.

    Sounds cool. Sadly, I’m pretty sure technology isn’t advanced enough yet to come up with my perfect globe. When it is, though, I want royalties.

  • PHP on .NET

    Jeff Sandquist has a pointer to a video interview with two programmers that are writing a PHP compiler for Microsoft’s .NET Framework. The name of their project is Phalanger.

    That’s cool, I guess, if you don’t mind working in .NET. I’ve been thinking for awhile that I wouldn’t mind a PHP compiler that would create standalone executables (though cross-platform, not just tied to Windows), so this is kind of a step in that direction.

    Of course, there’s already PHP-GTK which is cross-platform. And hmmm, I notice in their February news, there’s a pointer to a project called bcompiler which lets you create an exe file from a PHP-GTK app… very interesting.

    Oops, and I notice the Roadsend PHP compiler does just what I was rhapsodizing about. It appears I’m behind the times. Though the “Professional” edition (compiles to Windows, Linux and FreeBSD) costs $399 (“Personal”—Windows only—is $89).

  • Emachine freezing

    Okay, this is fun. Our two-year old eMachine keeps periodically freezing up, typically at least once a day or more, and I was hoping someone might have some ideas as to what to do about it or what’s causing it. I can’t seem to ferret out the problem, but it often seems to freeze when doing something graphic- or sound-intensive (playing games—even Flash games, or using the scanner), or when using SpyBot, for instance (though other spyware killer software runs fine). It just freezes up, non responsive, nothing gets written to the event logs or anything like that. I’ve seen it do this in normal mode and safe mode. Often after a freeze, and a hard boot, it will freeze again while booting, right after the Windows XP splash screen and before the login screen—when the mouse pointer appears on a black background.

    It’s an eMachines C2160, running XP Home SP2, with an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ chip running at 1.72 GHz, and 256 MB RAM. Some thoughts I’ve had are problems with USB (the mouse was on USB, the scanner, printer, digital camera are all plugged in), or low power issues. Needless to say, I haven’t had any luck.

    Any ideas?

  • PHP Suggest

    Over on php.net, they announced a full implementation of a search field suggestion box:

    The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages.

     

    Whenever you type something into the search field, while having the function list search option selected, you will get a list of suggested functions starting with the letters you typed in. You can browse the list with the up/down keys, and you will be able to autocomplete the function name with the spacebar.

    Couple things I find interesting about this. First, it predates Google Suggest by a year (prior art that everyone heralding Google Suggest seemed not to notice); did Google get the idea from the PHP site, or is this more common?

    The second point is a bit more trivial, but I noticed when I was trying it out by typing in “date” that there are two additional PHP date functions that appeared in the list: date_sunrise() and date_sunset(). These are new to PHP 5. They take a timestamp, latitude, and longitude and return the respective time of day for sunrise or sunset. What’s interesting is that they are remarkably similar to two functions I had written well before PHP 5 came out. (“Written” is subjective, more like “adapted,” probably from a Java function somewhere.) However, from the looks of the manual, these new built-in functions only take a Unix timestamp, which limits the results to dates between 1970 and 2038, while my functions take any combination of month, day and year. The point? I just like to toot my own horn sometimes. :)

  • Crappy tech service

    Don’t bother buying a Brother printer. I helped to set up a new one today and, get this, it didn’t come with any type of interface cable. No USB, no parallel cable, nothing. It even says so on the quickstart instructions. WTF? Is that stupid or what?

    Speaking of stupid, or perhaps just stubborn, AOL apparently doesn’t get the hint that we don’t need their service, and has called us several times. Of course, I brought this on myself—when we went to San Diego, I installed AOL (the free trial) on the laptop just in case we needed to get online and didn’t have any other means of doing so. (Never needed it; we got a strong WiFi signal at my brother’s place.) AOL is sure trying to master the hard sell. When I cancelled, the guy tried to resell me on AOL something like three times, even after I had explained that I didn’t need it and already have broadband access. Must be following the “three NOs before you go” rule. They sure aren’t gaining any favor at our house.

  • PHP code rant

    This is a mini-rant on PHP that can be safely avoided by non geek types.

    This post over on PHP Everywhere caught my attention, vis-a-vis programming semantics and practice. Basically, inside a switch statement, someone placed the default block before the case blocks and was surprised when that default condition executed, and the “expected” case did not.

    Some are calling this a bug; I do not. This is the exact behavior I expect switch and default to display, and I always place any default blocks last in the statement, because that makes the most sense semantically and logically. I expect this because that’s how I learned it when learning C years ago; it’s the way the switch construct works and why it’s so fast.

    Relevant snippage from the PHP manual:

    The switch statement executes line by line (actually, statement by statement). In the beginning, no code is executed. Only when a case statement is found with a value that matches the value of the switch expression does PHP begin to execute the statements. PHP continues to execute the statements until the end of the switch block, or the first time it sees a break statement. If you don’t write a break statement at the end of a case’s statement list, PHP will go on executing the statements of the following case….

    A special case is the default case. This case matches anything that wasn’t matched by the other cases, and should be the last case statement.

    Seems pretty clear to me. I would expect PHP to immediately execute the default block as soon as it encounters it, even if this “cuts off” remaining case blocks below it. So quit complaining and write cleaner code.

    Okay, done ranting.