The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Caryn and I went to see Ocean's 13 today. It was somewhere between the first and second films in terms of quality and plot. The ending was a little bit lame and they didn't need to explain what was happening. Andy Garcia's character behavior wasn't the best. Still, it was an OK movie. I think I liked Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer better. The genre is quite different.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19266957/

The evil sippy cup!  Filtered water is so dangerous. 

"The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies," said President Bush. 

While I don't like the idea of tax and spend policies, it sure beats the spend without paying for it policy.  See taxes pay for the government to operate.  Without taxes, there is no money to go to Iraq and we go in more debt with China who is our largest banker.  We borrow from China which is bad. 

The best solution is to stop spending, but that is unrealistic.

CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/06/16/bush.radio.ap/index.html

Caryn and I went to see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

It was much better than the first film, but seemed a bit short.  Victor Von Doom is back in addition to the Silver Surfer.  Without giving too many details, the movie deviates from the traditional ending in the comics slightly for this arc.  It is noticeably different than the 90s Fantastic Four cartoon version.  The tone and attitude of the Silver Surfer is correct.  There are a few funny moments in the film, although audience participation proved troublesome today. Don't be that guy that has to yell out at funny stuff.  Stan Lee makes his usual cameo as himself this time. 

As far as kids go, one joke in the movie might be a little inappropriate for young children that understand how people get it on.  The rest is fairly safe. There is nothing visual about that joke. 

I just published some new JJ code. Its interesting how fast I can whip out some features and how long it takes to do others. The login page now shows a list of recent friends posts and JJ site blog posts. Both need work. (top 3 or something... )

I also added untested code to ping Google and Technorati on public journal updates. Let's see how that goes.

I watched Syriana tonight.  The movie concluded, but the style left me thinking something was missing.  It made me think about a few ideas that I had not in the past.  It was also weird to see the actor who played the doctor on DS9 as a prince in the Middle East.  I still remember the Bond like holodeck episodes and the Section 31 stuff.  I've been watching a lot of Bond movies lately. 

One point I agree with in Syriana is that oil is big business.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/06/15/iraq.shantytowns/index.html

When Iraqis have to flee their homes, I think there is a problem. 

I'm still here.

I fixed the javascript on my website project and added the missing link and navigation tonight. I still need to add more of the jewel site content up. That's going to be a mess. I can't really do an rss feed file or the news section since that's dynamic code. Right now I just link to the news page on the real site. The rss feed link is broken right now since that code is down at the moment. I'll have to throw together something in PHP I guess.

My diagnosis for the Mac seems to be correct. The new IDE cables came today and aside from a little electrical tape to hold them in place, they are in rather well. The 36 inch cable was a bit long. I think 30 inches would have been optimal. So far the Mac isn't crashing when a CD or DVD is inserted in either drive. That is a very good thing. It seems moderately more stable and a bit quicker in Finder. I was able to play a few minutes of Syriana which I rented online.

I wont get a chance to play with it tonight since I've got essays to write and more homework. I don't see how I'm supposed to perform peer review. Both my site and other sites are not done. I think out of two classes, one person has it all done.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/14/180222

The judge ordered that RAM be turned over because it contains documents!  Well RAM is not long term storage like a flash drive or hard drive.  Lamers tend to use it as such but its not.  Its temporary space.  If i pull out the chips, everything is lost.  If I turn off a computer, everything is loss.  It would be impossible to have memory dumps of RAM and still have computers operate at any useful speed.  I can't emphasize how ignorant about technology this judge is.   

I'm having trouble coming up with an example, but let me try.  Imagine someone got busted for drinking alcohol underage.  The judge ordered the glass that held the beer to be turned over expecting to find beer even though it had been six months and it had been washed.  That's not the same thing, but it does point out how impossible it is.  Now imagine you had to keep an exact copy of any beverage in that glass.  How on earth could you do that?  How many glasses would that be?  Each of those would in turn be evidience and need to be turned over too. 

I bought a new USB stick specifically for ReadyBoost and it failed the test.  Testing data is available in the Event Log.  There is a way to force a device to be used anyway.

From Windows Vista Magazine:

Using the left-hand pane, work your way through the following folders: HKLM (Local Machine) -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> CurrentVersion -> EMDgmt. You'll have a list of USB devices the computer has encountered, one of which should be your USB stick. Click on it.

Here there's a few details you need to edit. Double click on Device Status and change the value to 2, then ok. Do the same for ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs, changing their values to both 1000. Exit the regedit and breathe a sigh of relief.

A few notes:

• The values should stay in hex. 
• My drive just barely failed the read/write tests.  A very slow drive will have negative impact on performance. 
• This is a hack, so do benchmarking to make sure its actually improving things.

I had another stick that is several years old pass on vista launch day but fail today.  I suspect either something changed with the stick (unlikely) or Microsoft upped the speed requirements with a patch? 

I'm having problems surfing tonight.  There seems to be uber lag.  I rebooted stargazer which helped with local sites, but there is an apparent DNS resolving problem.  Best I can tell, Comcast or a backbone are having network related outages.  I can' t get a traceroute to go through for many sites to track down the problem.  I can't get to very much on the west coast and the east coast sties are slow.  A speedtest site showed me uploading at 12kbps and downloading at about the same.  Steam tried to update at 1kbps!  I shut down all network related software on my PC and my mac is completely shut off.  I'm still having severe problems that have persisted for an hour. There isn't much activity on the router and its showing all go in the admin.  The switch is showing moderate traffic.  Most of my network tools aren't showing any bottlenecks. 

This problem is slowing down work on my website projects for class. I had to give up for tonight. I got an essay for 328 done and some page chagnes.  444 needs a lot of work yet.  I need to finish the Jewel site stuff and write the essay.  Most of the students are behind on this one.  I think a time adjustment was needed..  We had the time in the semester if we would have started earlier. 

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). -- Bill Joy 6/21/85

That's so funny since just about every computer runs Windows and no one cares about UNIX.  Plus now that Apple is certified, OS X is UNIX. 

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070613

Wow... between the two classes, I'm a bit overwelmed. I've got readings, websites, and essays. I don't think I'll get as much time as I'd like on any of them. My core website design has been done since last night, but I have to generate a lot of pages and fix a lot of links to get it "clean" for peer review. Since we're dealing with usability this time, it has to have correct links. I helped Denise understand how to do some different layout elements in CSS. One issue she had was centering content. That is a tricky matter since IE5 didn't respect auto margins. The correct approach if you don't care about IE5 is to do this:

margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
width: (some value here)

Of course this only solves horizontal positioning. Vertical centering is a nightmare. There should have been a method in CSS 1 or CSS 2 to easily horizontally center something. The W3 proposes centering by treating a block level element as a td. I think that is lame. We shouldn't use table layouts, but we have to for vertical layouts in a simulated way? Its a hack.

You're asking yourself how I can rant about this when there is work to be done. I'm waitning for 27 pages to print on my slow, lowend printer and unfortunetely its hooked up to WIndows this semester. I could do more with the websites. Perhaps I will.

For some reason, I decided to take a snap of 4 browsers running on Vista.  Opera is not installed, but I've got Safari beta 3, IE 7, Firefox 2.0.0.4 and Netscape 9 beta on there.

Apple announced Safari will be headed to the Windows XP and Vista Operating Systems. Now PC users can see what websites look like on the Mac. Beta 3 is available on their website. Contrary to Apple's claims, it seems slower than Firefox or IE on my Vista system. I've also noticed random connection failures which I believe to be a combination of an Apache bug and Safari itself. (apache httpd + tomcat 5.1.15 using mod_proxy_ajp)

I looked up Wireless Washtenaw, the project to bring free wifi to residents of the county.  The speeds have been dropped to 64Kbps and rates increased.  Its more expensive than cable or dsl.

Here is a list of ISPs that do traffic shaping or in some way limit P2P traffic.  Comcast is on the list.  I don't think I have an issue with my business connection, but some people might find this information useful.  I'm interested in hosting torrent files for MBSD isos. 

Yahoo put up a fluff piece to stop the constant rise of AAPL's stock price.  While I've been saying the iPhone is overhyped, this will effect monday's price.