News & Views from an Embedded Systems Designer
Technology
Score another one for the good guys!
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it will revoke an illegitimate patent on Internet subdomains as a result of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Patent Busting Project campaign.
Read the full story: EFF Busts Bogus Internet Subdomain Patent
This weeks EETimes has an opinion piece about the EU ruling against Intel, Setting the record straight on Intel. It ends with this statement I completely agree with.
There’s no question Intel has made great contributions to the industry with its technology. Now it’s time to make an equally great contribution with its honesty.
My best guess is that Intel’s sales and marketing division has made some mistakes in how they’ve handled their fierce competition with AMD. By coming totally clean right now, before they get more bad press, I think it will go a long way toward keeping the good company image they have with the public.
This is not about another Acrobat Reader alternative, it’s an excellent alternative to the $299.00 Adobe Acrobat PDF editor. For the past couple months I’ve been using the free PDF-XChange Viewer from Tracker Software Products for all my PDF editing needs. I found the UI to be as easy to learn and use as my favorite office suite, OpenOffice. The free version has all of the features many users will ever need in a PDF editor. For only $29.50 the Viewer PRO edition adds the rest of the features that are in Adobe’s product. My employer provides me with the full Acrobat product on my workstations but I’ve liked PDF-XChange Viewer so much that I bought the Pro version myself and am using it exclusively now.
Keep in mind this program is not for creating PDF’s it’s for editing existing PDF’s. For creating PDF’s I exclusively use and highly recommend the free open source PDF Creator from PDF forge.
The AMS has opened up their archives of 20th century articles to the public. Previously you had to go to a college library or pay $$ to see these articles, now we can get PDF’s for free!
This is a fantastic resource that covers all of their publications:
Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
Journal of Physical Oceanography
Monthly Weather Review
Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology
Weather and Forecasting
Journal of Climate
Journal of Hydrometeorology
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Meteorological Monographs
Earth Interactions
The archives search page is here:
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=search-simple
I was using Google Books today and spotted this new “Generate book report” link, curious what it would actually do, I clicked it.
This is what you get.
I use Linux for all my disc burning needs and have been annoyed that every time I pop in a disc something auto starts. It’s become especially annoying with a DVD-RW that I erase weekly to put on a new TV show episode for viewing on a DVD player.
Searching around all I had found was that the settings are supposed to be in the Gnome Control Center’s Removable Drives and Media applet. Well they aren’t there in modern Gnome and I finally found the answer when searching specifically for stopping Totem auto start. The settings are in the Nautilus file manager under Edit -> Preferences -> Media. It seems the Gnome developers took all the removable media settings out of the applet and put them into Nautilus but left the applet name the same, confusing. The current Gnome Removable Drives and Media applet only sets preferences for Cameras, PDAs, Printers & Scanners and Input Devices. I think they should rename the applet since none of those devices are drives or media, some of them may appear as drives but I don’t think most people consider them to be drives or media.
This is one of those posts that is as much for my future benefit as anyone else’s. The next time I wipe out and re-install Linux on the box I know I’ll have forgotten where the setting is and the Gnome applet name will mislead me.
The District of Columbia Department of Corrections received special temporary authority (STA) from the FCC to conduct a demonstration of a directional cell phone jammer designed for prisons. The STA allowed a test on January 8th for 30 minutes sometime between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. However the DC DoC cancelled the demonstration on 1/7 with no official statement why the test was cancelled.
My hope is that the DC DoC realized that using technology to render a smuggled item useless is stupid compared to preventing the smuggling in the first place. Whatever route is being used to smuggle cell phones into prisons also allows weapons to enter a prison. Even if the DC DoC hadn’t stopped the test on their own, the test would likely have been stopped by the courts.
CTIA seeks to block cell phone jamming demo at DC jail
Operation of such jamming technology is flatly illegal under Section 333 of the Communications Act, and the commission lacks the statutory to authorize violations of this congressional directive protecting the rights of authorized users of the wireless spectrum, stated CTIA in a petition filed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Moreover, the decision to authorize the demonstration made without notice to the public or affected parties, without opportunity for comment, without consideration of any evidence regarding the potential consequences to legitimate transmission of operating the contemplated technology, and with no exigent public-safety need is the very essence of arbitrary and capricious decision-making.
CTIA went to court after failing to get regulatory relief from the FCC.
While we believe that prisoners should not have access to wireless phones while incarcerated, there are other, non-interfering and legal ways to find and take the phones out of their hands, said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, VP of regulatory Affairs at CTIA. There are several companies that provide wireless detection systems that can be used by jails to identify and confiscate phones, and that do not interfere with wireless communications. As the FCC previously acknowledged, Congress has been clear in prohibiting the use of jammers in state prisons.
For the manufacturers spin on this story read this article, they don’t think that prison officials should stop the cell phones from being smuggled into the prison or find and confiscate the phones that are there. Instead the prisons should buy their equipment to make the cell phones not work, vested interest much. My feeling is that if prison officials can’t stop the smuggling of cell phones into a prison they also can’t stop the smuggling of weapons, money and other banned items into prisons. What kind of insanity does it take to think that prison officials don’t need to stop weapon sized items from being smuggled into prisons. The public will be vastly safer if all smuggling of contraband into prisons is stopped.
Assuming prison officials aren’t going to stop the phones getting into the prisons, why don’t they take advantage of the situation. They should use the currently available legal gear to monitor cell communication of prisoners, trace the call to the recipient and then have the recipient arrested for the crime being done. The recordings of the calls would be great evidence in a court to prosecute the criminals that are helping prisoners intimidate witnesses or perform other illegal activities. Nah, they’ll never do that since it would require actual work rather than flipping a magic switch like a commenter on a previous post wanted.
I have good news and bad news, first the good news. James Burke’s wonderful documentary series The Day the Universe Changed is finally becoming available at a reasonable price. Until now the only way to buy it was at $80 each for the ten DVD’s of the series that’s right $800US (although the Discovery Education Store sells the ten episode set for only $750US). Well on 1/27/2009 the complete 10 episode series will be shipping for $150US from PBS in a 5 DVD box set (you can pre-order now). Not only will you save a big wad of cash but you’ll be helping support PBS (NOVA, Nature, etc.). PBS also has Connections: 1 and Connections: 2 available as box sets at the $150US price in stock for immediate shipping. Also of note to Netflix subscribers is the availability of Connections 1, 2 & 3 right now and TDTUC will be available soon.
Now the bad news, the JamesBurkeFan YouTube channel is gone, he is protesting the copyright related takedown of another YouTube channel he was working on as RichardFeynmanFan. He sent me an email with permission to post it so, I’ll let him explain this in his own words.
This refers to “former” YouTube user “JamesBurkeFan”, which is (or was) myself. I should like to say no request was made to me to take down that channel due to any copyright issue. Nobody contacted me, and I had even been told that Mr. Burke was well aware of the existence of the channel which promoted his views and ideas without any advertising or monetary benefit to myself. Originally I had mentioned on the page that TDTUC was not available for sale to private individuals. This has changed and I was delighted to find out about it, and immediately posted a link to the purchase page on the main channel page.
I took this channel down willingly (and with much sadness) in protest for the takedown of another channel I was building in dedication to Richard Feynman. That channel was another purely educational channel which took the Feynman lectures and combined the audio with clips from the lecture notes making them far easier to understand. I made a pact with myself essentially linking the two channel’s existences (though I pretended to be two different people).
After much correspondence with the complaining party (Michael A. Gottlieb) who was really complaining on behalf of Addison-Wesley publishers (aka. Caltech*), an agreement could not be reached and the site (together with it’s fundamental [and I think novel] idea) was destroyed.
Of course YouTube and my subscribers will not know why the channel was closed. However the awareness raised by it (I have many emails and messages to verify this) brought Mr. Burke to many young people who would otherwise have never heard of him. Additionally, I believe the channel indirectly encouraged the ultimate publication of TDTUC in DVD format for sale to the general public. That was the main goal anyway and I’m glad if in some small way I helped to cause it’s realization.
Sincerely,
– Alan Carre [aka JamesBurkeFan & RichardFeynmanFan]——————
*that was meant as a joke
It’s too bad that a copyright holder would do this but it is their right. Personally I think Mr. Burkes way of acting is the right way, let the material stay up on the web as long as the poster is not trying to profit from the work and the posting is meant for global public education. But that is a decision only a copyright holder and their attorneys can make, obviously Addison-Wesley doesn’t feel this way. While I never got to see any of Alan’s work on The Feynman Lectures it sure seems like it would have been very helpful in making them easier to understand for the general public. Again personally, I think it could have driven sales of the books and audio of the lectures to the general public but then again, I may be wrong and it could have hurt Addison-Wesley by lowering sales. I also think it is too bad that Alan felt the need to take down the James Burke videos but hey, just like Addison-Wesley’s decision, it is solely his decision to make.
Somewhat related to all this, Blake Stacey of Science After Sunclipse had pointed me to Feynman’s “The Character of Physical Law – Messenger Lectures” series on Google Video last year. Checking to see if I could link to those as a consolation prize for my couple of readers, I see those videos have been taken down too.
*** UPDATE July 18. 2009 ***
Alan has sent me some exciting new information, the Feynman lectures have been purchased by Bill Gates and are being put online for free! You can read more about the story at this article from the NY Times.
An old friend of mine has been having a problem with his BFG Tech video card for a while. He’d been working with BFG Tech, nVidia and the Geek Squad to resolve the problem for many months with no resolution. The problem is black screen of death after anywhere from minutes to hours of play, especially on older DirectX games. He brought his PC to me this week and right away I was able to duplicate the problem so, I knew I could troubleshoot this issue without too many hours of work.
Googling around I learned that this GPU setup is notorious for issues with older games and that the OC in the part name means it is shipped in an over clocked state. A little tweaking of Dungeon Siege got me so that I could cause the crash in under 10 seconds consistently. After adding the nVidia system tools package so that I could tweak the card settings I first tried the non-over clocked stock GeForce 9600 settings (650 core, 900 mem, 1625 shader). This increased run time before crash but only to less than 2 minutes. The stock settings where 4 to 5% less on core and mem than the factory OC settings so next I tried lowering all three speeds to 11 to 12% less than OC (600 core, 800 mem, 1500 shader). This has done the trick, I’ve gotten over ten hours of continuous runtime without crashing. While it is sad to have to limit the speed of his card, it’s still far faster than his previous GeForce 7300 and, the game that required the higher video power works fine. So, I’m going to give him back the PC and show him how to tweak the card more in case the issue crops up during actual long playing sessions. I’ll update this post if his testing shows any problems.
I’ve been busy with too many other things to post much over the past few months. Much of my free time has been spent working on photographs and various site updates. I do my web development on a local mini-server, backup to my main Linux PC and then update the live server. In addition to the backup & synchronization utility for Windows that I use, I’ve come to rely on the synchronization utility built in to the Krusader file manager. Along the way I got tired of manually setting my original photo files read-only so I wrote a script to automate that process and compliment the other photo workflow script I wrote.
The first snow accumulation this year was later than usual, 12/7.
But the weather finally caught up with the season on 12/19 to 21 giving me over a foot of snow to move.
We found out my sisters cat, Bootsie, had worms when I went to clean up what I thought was basic hairball puke and saw a worm on 12/13. We thought he had roundworm but the tests by our great veterinarian showed Bootsie to have lungworm, poor little guy. The good news was that there is simple injection to cure lungworm but, the bad news was that we needed to have him tested for heartworm because the lungworm treatment can be bad if the cat has heartworm too. I say bad news because the test for heartworm is a blood test, a bigger needle in the leg that made Bootsie scream. He got over the blood taking fast and the tests came back negative a couple days before Christmas, a great Xmas gift. Bootsie got his lungworm shot Friday and we’re all relieved that he’s on the way to finally getting rid of his worms. Here’s Bootsie taking a catnap under the tree in a new bed he got from Santa.
Another thing that’s taken up a lot of free time the past months is work I’ve been doing on a new long term project. After living in the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor since its designation 22 years ago, I’ve decided to make an effort over the next few years to see every site. To aid in my project I’ve been creating places files for Google Earth to help me plan trips in the BRVNHC. I’ve posted the first versions of my places and custom icon files along with photos and other information on my main web site.
I’m taking vacation time through the end of the year so, I hope to finish up some of the posts that have been in my drafts folder for too long now.
Paul Hutchinson's Blog 