My grandfather on my mother’s side passed when I was pretty young. I don’r remember when, but I do remember fishing trips, and an annual weekend in Yosemite to play in the snow.
Driving the big Ford pickup truck, with a camper on it, we would head out. And there was always an adequate supply of Necco wafers in the cab. We would probably go through 2 rolls each way. All us kids would jockey to sit in the front, and partake in the ritual.
A couple weeks ago, I was at the airport, and I spied a display of Necco wafers. I had to buy a roll for good ol’ times sake.
On our trip last week, my wife (again) dropped her laptop. After that, it stopped working. Oops.
First thoughts were that it was a failed hard drive. All my utilities failed to find it. So I replaced it with a known good drive.
It had a clean install of OS X Lion on it, and was pretty lightly used before I replaced it. I know it was good. The system wouldn’t boot. So I thought maybe that the install didn’t support her older laptop. So out came the Snow Leopard (10.6) install DVD. It failed to install. It found the drive ok, but it couldn’t properly access it. No way to write to it, and diskutility was unable to unmount the drive.
Out it goes, and back into an external case and off to my main mac. No problems, the drive behaves as expected.
Crap.
Take the original drive and put it into the external case (a generic OWC FW800 enclosure), and bam, the system boots off it fine.
So, it is either in the drive cable (unlikely) or the system Logic Board (much more likely).
Alas, it is beyond my ability to troubleshoot, or repair, so off to Apple for my wife. But I spent about a half a day fiddling with it. Oh well.
I remember seeing Brazil when it first came out in 1986. It was one of those relatively rare times when I actually went to a theatre to see a first run movie. Being a long time Monty Python fan, I was entertained on many levels by Brazil, from intellectual stimulation, to marveling at the cinematography, to the comical story line. There is something for everyone in the movie Brazil, and every time I re-watch it, I get a few new bits from the film.
I have had a DVD rip for a while, but I wanted to get a good copy. On a lark I splurged on Amazon and got the “Criterion” collection. The print is luscious, and the restoration that they did to remove the film to digital noticeably improves the experience of the film.
Set in the future, the world has become entrenched in bureaucracy, and novelty computers (tiny CRT’s behind large fresnel lenses). The story is one of love, deception, and bucking authority. Notable are the dream sequences, that add to the mystique of the film.
Jonathan Pryce, playing the lead character of Sam, does a phenomenal job as the dream weaver. Also notable is an appearance by Robert De Niro as Archibald Tuttle, a freelance heating and cooling engineer who is operating outside the auspices of the dreaded “Central Services”. A clerical error puts Sam on a collision course with the girl of his dreams, Jill Layton (played by Kim Griest).
Michael Palin in a mask
2 hours and 24 minutes long, it is a film that will certainly entertain those who “get” Monty Python humor, and who have read Orwell and Huxley.
The second disc of the Criterion edition has the “Happy Ending” version with the edits that director Terry Gillian refused to make. 94 minutes long, I thought that they couldn’t possible destroy the story line. How wrong I was. I am watching it now, and they completely destroyed the story line, and the whole essence of the film. This version was only shown on syndicated TV, and it is a pale comparison to the original print.
I bought the discs from Amazon, and as is my custom, I read some of the reviews. I didn’t expect to be swayed one way or the other, but reading the 1 star reviews was entertaining. Clearly, some people don’t get Python humor, and didn’t appreciate the film. But I was astounded by the number (29 total out of hundreds of reviews) who felt the need to do an in depth dissertation of how they didn’t get the film, and how they thought that all the positive reviews were off the mark. They probably aren’t going to like 12 Monkeys either.
Please, it is a movie that was release more than a quarter century ago, and if you don’t appreciate it, don’t watch it.
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend getting it on your Netflix list.
With all the buzz lately about the NSA revelations by Edward Snowden, and the surveillance state, I thought I would pick up my copy of 1984 and re-read it.
Set in the year 1984, it is a masterful piece of fiction that is remarkably prescient in many of its predictions, given that it was published in 1949. The two way telescreen is particularly poignant, with the amount of listening that is apparently being done by BB.
I didn’t read this, or its other kin when I was in High School like most people. I picked this up in my 30’s, along with Animal Farm, and Aldus Huxley’s: Brave New World. So I didn’t have a literature teacher guiding us through the analysis, so I was free to take my own views.
First, the world is different from the time when George Orwell wrote this. At that time, it appeared that “socialism” would sweep the world, and that there would be three major centers of socialism, Ingsoc (or english socialism), eastasia, and eurasia, that would be perpetually at war with each other. Like the Russian and Chinese form of socialism, society has been structured into two halves, the proles (proletariat) making up about 85% of the population, and the “party”; the apparatus that keeps the proles in check. Within the party, there is the inner circle, who don’t have much privation or limits on what they can do, and the rest of the party, who lives in a state of fear/hate.
The protagonist, Winston Smith works in the records department of the Ministry of Truth (minitrue), “adjusting” prior published facts to ensure that the official party line from today matches what was said yesterday.
There is a whole group who works on newspeak, a language that is used to communicate to the party. New-speak phrases like “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” are the mantra of the party, and talks about the double speak.
While I don’t think that we have devolved to a society where common household goods are rationed, and there is a black market for things like coffee and razor blades, it is hard to not see the parallels with the modern state. A significant amount of history revision is common in the political class (both parties are equally guilty), and the policy makers / “aristocrat” class seem to become ever more isolated from the plight of the common man.
I am also reading a detailed history of Europe from the middle ages to the present, and much of the societal structure outlined in 1984 is aligned with typical European societies in the past. Of course, the mechanization of production, and the shifting of power to labor, and now back to capital, is part of the shifts in society.
Along the way, Winston starts doubting the world order when he comes across incontrovertible evidence of fraud in the ruling class. From that point on, he begins with small rebellious behaviors, and escalates.
The story is a great tale of fighting the system. If you haven’t read it since your secondary school, I would highly recommend picking it up and reading it again.
I got an email in my inbox today that seemed to imply that I ‘missed’ a big announcement last week.
Well, I certainly didn’t remember any big announcement, but if I had I probably would have ignored it.
You have to wonder if their marketing team has a pulse
This startup has called themselves “Alpha Software”. Really? ‘Alpha’? Now I love playing with new and edgy things on my ‘puter, and have installed a lot of buggy, pre-release candidate, alpha quality software, but to name your company ‘Alpha Software’, that really takes the cake.
For those who didn’t grow up steeped in computers and software, the software development process has a few milestones. The “Proof of Concept” that demonstrates the capability. The “Alpha” phase which is early, not ready for prime time, and certainly likely to crash in spectacular ways. The “Beta” phase is when you are comfortable releasing it into the wild to get some early feedback. And finally “Released” which means that you are comfortable standing behind the product, selling it, and providing at least a modicum of support.
Only the brave or the foolish will install “Alpha” level code. Funny name for a company though. I think I will pass.
Yesterday was my 30th High School Reunion. I hadn’t been to any of them prior, so this was my first. I was unsure what to expect, but I did look forward to it.
I am so glad I went, because it was a blast. 30 years is a long time, and it turns out that we all had a lot more in common that we did in school (or apparently).
Great to see some old friends, to meet many more people, and to have a great time.
I will post more about this later. We are headed out to the coast for a drive and sight seeing.
You know you are an old time computer geek when you notice special numbers.
2^8 is something we geeks all know, it is the number of different bytes there are. 2^8 is 256, and the maximum value of a single byte of computer memory is 255.
2^10 is 1024. I am guessing that most kids today see that number and scratch their head wondering why the old fogeys didn’t just call 1000 bytes a kilobyte. But us true geeks embrace these.
The next number is 2^16 which is 65,536, and is the maximum number representable as two bytes (256 * 256 for those counting). I am amazed at how often I stumble across this number int he real world.
Then there is the first CPU I learned to program, the Mostek 6502. Designed to be a cheaper version of the motorola 8800, it really drove the home computer revolution in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
Two posts ago, I hit post 256. Makes me smile to mark off these milestones. I suspect I will make it to 1024, but probably not 65,536
(For the curious as to why 8 bits to a byte, and 2 bytes to a word, I encourage a google search into early computer architectures, some details on the early systems, and then try to relate it to your current laptop or tablet, and your eyes will be well and truly opened. Also read “Turing’s Cathedral” for a good narrative on the first electronic digital computer).
I have wholly embraced the eBook revolution. As a long time traveler, and SciFi aficionado, I have assembled a large collection of books that I continue to read to mark them off my to do list.
Being a fan of science fiction, I have been forced to acquire some of my books by extra-legal means. Since many of the classic tomes of the golden era of SciFi are out of print, and have no official ebook release to buy, I turn to the internet.
With few exceptions, these books are scanned and OCR’d from print, and then stuffed into a file to read. Lots of early Heinlien, and obscure authors exist only this way.
The problem, OCR still sucks. Even the best algorithms barf a lot on text and thus there are spots of garbage in many of these books.
I sometimes make it a personal mitzvah to clean up a book.
Classic example was the “To the Stars” trilogy, by Harry Harrison (his real name, not a nom de plume). It was a rather poor scan and conversion to an RTF file. It was a painful process to fix, but totally worth it, because it made the book completely readable.
However, if your book is in ePub of PDF format, you have fewer options.
Sigil, a pretty awesome open source ePub editor
The program I go to is Sigil. Provided there is no DRM, you can open and inspect the book, and fix small things. If you are savvy, you can also dive into the CSS stylesheet and alter fonts, indents, and other text properties (but be warned, some readers ignore much of the CSS codes and classes – I’m looking at you Sony Reader).
Sigil allows you to look at the text as it renders, at a split screen with the code below the rendered text, or just pure code. You can fix a lot of errors and glitches with the search and edit the code, saving back to the original file.
A future series of posts will go into depth on how to better structure the ebook.
Another good program, and one that is widely used Calibre. A library, and file manipulation program, it is open source and extensible. It makes it easy to convert from one format to another (Kindle to ePub, or LRM to ePub, and many other options.)
A nice touch is that in Calibre you can better setup the ISBN, the cover images, and get data on the book from public databases. I used Calibre to convert a collection of Doc Savage stories from the lrm format (the original Sony Reader format) to ePub, and to add good cover pictures.
In fact, most of the ebook files I look at in Sigil have signs of being converted/cleaned by Calibre, even some commercial books.
Doing this work, you find some things like:
Files which came from Microsoft Word – littered with the “class=msonormal” tag. Ugh. I don’t usually curse too much about microsoft office, but what it outputs for HTML that is converted into an ebook is a crime against humanity.
Most ebooks, even commercial, professionally edited and assembled ones, have horrible structure. Not proper links to the chapters, nor proper tables of contents. Commercial books are much more likely to get this right, but it is a disaster on the community sourced works. I am working up a process to fix that.
There are some truly shitty OCR engines out there. Even high priced, high performance engines have trouble, the second tier is atrocious. Someone once grumbled on Slashdot why there weren’t any good (free) open source OCR engines, and the answer is that because it is friggin hard, and it often becomes a lifetime’s work to tune and improve the algorithm, so the good ones are not in a hurry to be given away.
I rarely make a mission to fix an ebook, but when I do, I want to leave something that is a better experience to read.
(For the record, if there is a place to buy a book, I will always buy it, but much of what I read is esoteric, or out of print, so I am forced into alternatives. )
As a road warrior, I spend a lot of time on the road, sleeping in hotel rooms. I have learned to deal with loud ice machines, obnoxious families with kids tearing up and down the hallways at all hours, lumpy beds, and loud air conditioners. Doesn’t matter if it is a $90 La Quinta, or a $300 Hilton room, they all have warts.
Usually the one thing that grinds my gears is the bed in the room. Usually it is either stiff as a board, or completely worn out. Regardless that leads to a poor night of sleep, and a lot of discomfort (that getting older makes much worse) due to bad posture in bed.
However, I have to congratulate the Marriott Courtyard in Campbell, CA. The bed is perfect in my room. Supportive, comfortable, and I have had two good nights’ sleep in a row, a real rarity!
I will stop complaining about the slow as molasses in January elevators in Courtyards if you can make sure that all the beds are this perfect.
I am back in the south bay for my high school reunion, and I visited two places that I have always loved.
The good: Guitar Showcase
The place to go to find the finest new and used stringed instruments for the discerning player
Way back when I first started playing guitar, I was introduced to the legendary Guitar Showcase in Campbell. It is an iconic music store, and naturally has a wide selection of guitars (as well as other instruments).
They have greatly expanded the store, and added a lot of floor space. They still have their vintage room (they also put their jazz boxes there, and the PRS guitars, probably to keep us plebe’s from drooling on them) that is fun to browse. I know they will let you play many of them, if you ask, but I have never had the courage to ask.
One thing that has changed is that they have moved the acoustic guitars from the back room to upstairs. And they have a lot more. I played a cherry Taylor nylon string (felt a little strange, a steel string neck, with a radius and all), a genuinely awesome sounding 814ce (I have a 1996 vintage Taylor 814C (no electrics) that is pretty sweet), a dobro resonator, and a few of the spanish made classical guitars (I also played a mid range Yamaha classical guitar that was pretty sweet for $400).
Downstairs, I was looking hard at the Gibsons. They had a few cherry SG’s, the classic, light weight, ultra fast neck, and just gorgeous. They also had a pretty good selection of Les Paul’s. One that caught my eye was a $2200 Gary Moore signature series. I love the simple finish, and the feel of that guitar. They also had a very cherry Les Paul standard custom for $1600 that was ultra nice. Very light wear, and a truly sweet guitar.
I did manage to walk out without dinging my credit card, but I have to admit it was hard.
The bad: Fry’s Electronics
Being a geek, growing up and living in the bay area, my first stop for tech product was always Frys Electronics. From the original Sunnyvale location on Lawrence Expressway (now a few blocks north of Lawrence) to the other Fry’s, they were always clean, well stocked, and helpful (even if their workers weren’t the brightest bulbs). I bought many a stick of Ram, CPU, motherboard, or power supply there.
SInce our hotel is only a couple blocks from the Hamilton Avenue Fry’s, we swung by this afternoon. I was horribly disappointed. Lots of empty shelves. Product that is poorly stocked, and outside the TV area, it just looked ratty.
I guess I can understand that they are no longer the preferred vendor for tech odds and ends. I suspect Amazon and other online resellers are matching and beating their prices, but I was shocked at how ratty Fry’s had become. An icon from my youth/young adulthood is in decline.
