The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I just got my first solid state disk.  It's an Imation 32GB SATA 2.5 inch drive.  For comparison, I put the disk in Caryn's desktop.  It's final home will be in a new server I'm planning to build next year.  

According to diskinfo, the disk seek times are .029 compared to 16 or so on a Western Digital Sata drive.  That was to be expected since there really is no seek time on a SSD or at least it's fairly constant as no platter has to move.  What I was most interested in was raw transfer rates.  The WD generation 1 sata drive best case was 57000 kbytes/sec whereas this new drive read over 100000kbytes/sec as well as averaged around 100000.  My newer seagate hard drive peaks at 110080kbytes/sec, but inside only reads at 51842kbytes/sec.  

The consistency of this new drive is it's best asset.  The drive is MLC, but very lowend.  I can only imagine what a high end Intel SSD can do.

At work, I've been working on some software to generate a newsletter.  The software required several formats including PDF, HTML, and text.  Each one used a different template.  The input is from RSS feeds.

For the PDF generation, we went with a commercial product called PDF Reactor.  It's a java library that allows one to create PDF documents from HTML and CSS.  It runs on top of iText and does several post processing tasks.  As part of the process, it uses one of three configurable HTML formatters.  We chose to use the default which has problems with malformed HTML in some cases.  An open anchor tag causes grief.  Since the input is random and from the internet, we needed a way to clean it up.  I setup JTidy to process the input when it's HTML.  That way the HTML is always wellformed going into the system.

 PDF Reactor is licensed per cpu core.  They do check the core count.  We tried to run it on an i5, assuming it would just not take advantage of all the features, and it went into evaluation mode.  We had to physically disable two cores on the CPU to get the system to work.  This only requires 2 lines in /boot/loader.conf in FreeBSD. 

The odd part of this project was importing from Joomla.  I had to take data from various Joomla installs, and import select categories into our new system, then create newsletters from this data after it was cleaned up and categorized.  This meant selecting all the data from Joomla's content table on certain sections and categories.  The sections were constant within the install.  I also had to take the section and categories names and tag the articles in the new system with them.  If the names were duplicates, we had some problems.  The system was overloaded to use categories as two different levels.  It's caused some complications as joomla categories are not this flexible.  

If I had more time, I would have tried to create the PDF generation from HTML myself using iText.  This is something I would like for just journal where I use iText for PDF and RTF generation now.  

I have been busy working lately.  With the weather change, I haven't felt much like using my PC.  Today, I booted up Windows VIsta to lookup a book on my ebook reader.  Five different programs started downloading updates at the same time.  When I started the ebook reader, another download began.  

I think Microsoft and Apple should develop a software update framework for their operating systems.  This framework would be usable by all software.  It would allow updates to be downloaded in turn, throttled, scheduled, and offer one place to manage them.  I'm sick of having a bunch of programs running in the background just to check for software updates.  The java update scheduler, real player, acrobat, flash, steam, antivirus, xfire, msn, ... it's just got to stop.  

There is also a security advantage to this idea.  One could go into a single application and see that all their software is up to date.  I'd also like the software to easily wait until I reboot to install.  I don't want a nag message every ten minutes or even four hours.   

I've been reading for years about the future of software.  Most people believe software as a service will take off.  In some ways, it already has.  There are a few fatal flaws with this model.  It requires trust.  Companies have the resources to purchase software as a service and then lose access to it.  It is costly, but they can afford to move to another provider.  If a home user (end user) purchases access to Microsoft Office over the Internet, they expect to be able to access it at any time.  Their child may have a report due the next day.  They maybe working from home to finish a report for the CEO on Monday.  If the software is not available due to a network outage, downtime at the provider, or a billing dispute, the home user is out of luck.  Worse yet, Microsoft could stop offering the service during the middle of the year.  They've done this with Encarta Online, MSN, and other services in the past.  What do you do if the company goes out of business?  

The antivirus industry has moved to this model effectively.  You purchase software with a year subscription now.  At the end of that subscription, your computer is no longer protected.  It's a great model for them.  Your computer may get infected during that time and then their software or another product will look like it just found a bunch of viruses the previous version could not.  Most people don't move quickly on buying new AV software and it's often hard to remove.  

My company has been considering housing our data storage at a third party location.  My concern with this is what happens if there is a falling out with the provider.  Is our data at risk?  People talk about cloud computing like it's this amazing service, but in reality it's just web hosting that might be distributed.  You're still counting on one provider to protect your data and make it available to you just as the home user is expecting MS Office to work.  It's a large risk which involves trust.  Your business future is hanging in the balance of this one provider.  What if they go out of business, get sold to a company that doesn't care about the cloud, have a network failure during a big time in your business cycle? These things can happen to a self hosted solution as well, but you can do something about it.

I'm not trying to pick on Microsoft.  I've never used office online so I don't know what it's like.   

 http://www.tvgrapevine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5865:monk-mr-monk-and-the-end&catid=53:si

Sometimes I'm amazed that my family doesn't tell me when their sick or in the hospital.  The excuses I hear are baffling.  I've come to the conclusion that they don't understand me at all.  Should I just stop caring? 

Yesterday, I went to the EMU job fair for CS and CIS.  I wasn't looking for a job.  I had to interview students for two positions.  It was a very strange experience.  A year ago, I was at that job fair looking for a job.  I had a few people I knew from EMU come up for jobs.  It was a bit awkward for me.  Some of them are good people, but not necessarily qualified for this position.  We did find a few people that  might work out.  

I just didn't picture myself interviewing people a year ago for anything. 

I ended up with three piles of resumes.  Those that could be candidates for the programming position, those that could do the tech support job, and those that I won't be contacting again.  I totally understand why people do that now.  

The most amazing thing to me was the number of candidates who didn't try to sell themselves.  I got a great deal of "I'm not good at that" or "I put that on my resume, but it's because I'm interested not because I understand..."  Wow.  There were several interesting stories, but I don't think it's all that appropriate to get specific on a public blog.   

So I finally got a call from the Apple store yesterday to pick up my iMac.  I was told 5-7 days if they had to order a hard drive.  I was expecting them to replace the hard drive.  I get there, and they have not replaced the hard drive.  They used a third party program to partition the disk and some how got 10.5 on it.  They claimed it was good to go.   I was a bit skeptical because I know how to work on a Mac myself and if it was indeed just a simply formatting problem I would have felt very stupid.  At 75 dollars, I felt a bit ripped off anyway.  I mean, they just formatted the drive and put 10.5 on it.  Why did it take 6 days to do that?  

I brought the iMac home.  It did boot into 10.5.8 and run through the setup wizard.  I was a bit annoyed already because I told the guy I had snow leopard.  My time machine backup is for snow leopard!  I noticed the drive seemed slow, but it did get on the internet and things appeared to work.  I rebooted onto snow leopard media to install snow leopard.  It failed.  I then tried to reboot and format the drive.  That failed with an IO error!  I got a bit pissed and did a format while zeroing the drive and went to bed.  That actually completed.  I started the 10.6 install and it failed after about 2 minutes.  It's obvious that my iMac is not functioning correctly.  I would assume it was a compatibility problem with 10.6 except that it worked fine since release day and the apple store employee booted 10.6 on it at the store in front of me the day I brought it in.  So either there is a massive bug in snow leopard or my hard drive is failing.  I'm assuming the latter.  

Thus apple ripped me off for 75 bucks and I'll have to rip the damn thing apart myself which I wanted to avoid.  Lesson learned: Apple store can't fix macs.  I just wonder what totally clueless people do with these situations.  I lost a week of time with my iMac and i have to go look for suction cups and torx screwdrivers today plus buy a hard drive.  I'm not happy.  

Of course we bought a new mac at the store yesterday for caryn.  She's upgrading her laptop to a new MBP.  I feel annoyed that we gave them a sale.   

Pystar lost their case with Apple regarding the sale of Mac clones.  The EULA was upheld in court.  Most people assume EULAs would not hold up in court.  You can't read them before purchase, and many including Pystar assumed that first sale doctrine would protect them.  This legal victory is a new era in software distribution because the software industry has been given the green light to write very nasty EULAs. 

I did not agree with Pystar selling Macs.  I had hoped they would previal on the EULA aspect of the case as it would have been better for consumers.

So I had a hard drive failure in my Mac today.  I looked into upgrading the drive in the iMac previously.  It involves using suction cups and some other fun tricks to get the display out.  I thought I could do it, but it would be a real pain in the butt.  Thus, I decided to get apple to do it for me.  I hadn't bought extended apple care for it, so it was a bit of a sticker shock at the store.  However, apple did cut labor costs since the system was "so new".  I bought it February 2008.  I gatherered there have been problems with 250 GB WD drives put into those Macs.  He was not at all surprised the system had a drive failure.  The new drive will be a 320GB disk so at least it's a slight bump in disk space.  I've been running on 11GB of fre space for awhile.

Call it laziness, but after the 52 screws in the iBook I upgraded, I just haven't had the joy to do this one.  I saw my old boss destroy an iMac trying to replace a hard drive.  The LCD was destroyed.  At 1200 dollars for a new lowend model, I just didn't feel like it was a good call to try it. I think this is the first time I've paid for a hardware repair ever. 

The worst part is that my mac will be at the apple store for a week.  The service rep was very nice though.  It did take us 30 minutes to speak to someone; we had an appointment too. At least he didn't charge me for labor.  At that price, I would have tried it myself.

I never expected to get a breather from work this weekend.  So far, things have settled down.  I don't know if we'll make our deadline for Monday, but there isn't a lot I can do about it right now anyway.  

I spent a little free time this week playing Wolfenstein.  First person shooters always have a way of letting me let off some steam.  

Caryn's been playing Aion this week.  We built her a PC out of some old parts and threw in a new GeForce GTS 250. The game looks quite good, but it's obvious they ripped off World of Warcraft in a number of places.  The video card performance in Half Life 2 is impressive too.  My Radeon HD 4550 crossfirex setup is almost as fast in HL2.  I think some of the AA is better in my setup, but the lighting is quite impressive with her card.  it's rather weird to watch per play another game besides WoW.  

Yesterday, I had lunch with my boss and several other coworkers at Grizzly Peak.  That place makes an awesome veggie burger.  Anyone stopping by A^2 should check it out.

I'm rather disappointed by Wolfenstein Multiplayer.  The play control is weak and it uninteresting compared to something like quakewars, ET, or even RTCW.  I've had more fun with quake live!

The graphics are nice. 

I've been using Windows 7 on two computers.  The first is a laptop.  Battery life and general usage is similar to windows vista home basic on the system. Windows update crashed on the first run and there were some errors during the installer, but after I got it patched it seems to work.

The second computer is a system Caryn and I have been setting up for her gaming.  It's specifically to play Aion and Half-life 2.  She essentially needed a "steam" system and did not want to pollute her Mac with windows.  The system BSOD'd today because of the cpu frequency adjustments for power management using EIST.  It's a pentium d 805 chip and windows 7 doesn't seem to like power management on this rig.

The directions for installing windows 7 are vague and in my opinion incorrect.  If you try to use it like windows 98 style upgrades, it works.  I think there were some problems with Microsoft's technical writers on this release.  

I wonder if windows 8 will be windows 7 sp2?  I'm already waiting for the next release and it just came out.  I feel like many people did about vista.  It's just not ready for prime time.  Service packs are a must.  

The worst feature of windows 7 isn't the buggy situations.  I think it's the click count.  From an HCI perspective, one should never need to click several times to do anything.  It's just pathetic.  Everything is hidden several clicks away from menus, to windows open in applications.  It makes task switching slow.  The vista style start menu is still there and i find it quite inconvenient.  The control panel is even more clunky and slow to find things.  

The hype behind this release has many people thinking microsoft did something innovative.  This is not a windows 95 or even XP release.  There is no big jump from vista.  I must say microsoft did learn from some of their mistakes with marketing vista, but not with the development of vista or the quality issues with vista.  

I understand how hard it is to release an operating system.  I give them some slack, but frankly the marketing push on this release has left a sour taste in my mouth for anything microsoft.  I feel that vista was more innovative than windows 7. I also feel like microsoft flat out lied to me.

The worst part is the windows 7 fan boys who keep trying to convince me that it's some amazing release.  I may grow to like it better, but it's not nearly as good as snow leopard on the Mac.  That release was a disappointment in terms of GUI improvements, but as a programmer I appreciate the under the hood tweaks.  

At the end of the day, i don't see a reason to upgrade my desktop and reinstall everything yet.  I will switch to 7 eventually, but not today.  

I played Wolfenstein for the first time tonight.  As a fan of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein 3D, I figured this would be a great game.  The play control is significantly differently from RTCW.  It doesn't feel "id" style.  I was aware of the differences before purchasing.  The game is still enjoyable even though it's not another RTCW.  

So far I've only played single player.  The in game movies and graphics are amazing.  It seems to be taking advantage of my crossfirex configuration and multicore CPU.  It detected my system as "high" performance.  I'm quite happy with the speed and graphics.  The 5.1 surround has a few quirks.  If you're facing directly at someone, the audio is very quiet.  If you get at an angle, you can hear them well through one ear (aka one speaker).  

I was quite concerned about game performance due to the terrible quakewars gameplay on my system.  This game runs much better than quakewars or ET on this system.  

I did experience a video driver crash when exiting, but the display driver recovered ok.  This maybe fixed in a newer catalyst driver. 

It's not crisp like RTCW or Half-life; everything is "blurry" or antialiased to the extreme.  

 Windows 7 does NOT install.  The product activation key does not work and they're closed on saturday!

I broke down and reactivated my account yesterday.  I seem to go through periods where I want to kill things online and they need to be furry.  Perhaps I should look for the axis of anarchy?  (the guild reference for the uninformed)    

I'm kidding about the furry animals.  

I'm sick of bad programming practices.  So many people "learn" to program just enough to get by.  They don't care if their spacing is chaotic, if it's hard to read, if some statements go across the page in one line, if they initialize big objects 10 times in a function, or even if the code is efficient.  They don't comment their code!  How am I supposed to know what it does without spending a great deal of time reading it? 

This is a problem at work.  I've been asked to modify a terrible joomla plugin.  There is zero documentation for this plugin.  The author put his name on it and some ads for his company.  I will never buy anything from him.  He's spelled variables such as wordLength as wordLenght throughout the code.  Spelling length wrong once happens, but an entire plugin with hundreds of lines?  In the database table?  

Depending on what my final patch looks like, I might submit a big diff with whitespace fixes, and code cleanup to this jackass.  If for no other reason, so he can see how to program.  

Another problem I'm seeing is with object initialization.  In another project, I see 5 calls to getContext() within one method.  This creates a heavy object for one use and then leaves it in memory for the call.  Then java has to garbage collect it eventually.  It's slow to GC and it's slow to create it.  What a waste of everyone's time.  Not just my time, but the poor guy who's got to use that shitty website.  Why take 5 seconds when you can take 30?  

Computer science professors need to require comments, and clean code or fail people.  It's that simple.  They need to learn to do this.  Some professors at WMU do that, and I think it's a good idea.

Coworker sent this to me and it's so true and funny!

I admit it: I'm a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can't control it. It's Apple. I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don't care if Mac stuff is better. I don't care if Mac stuff is cool. I don't care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I'm not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you've got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There's a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER.

Of course, it's safe to assume Mac products are indeed as brilliant as their owners make out. Why else would they spend so much time trying to convert non-believers? They're not getting paid. They simply want to spread their happiness, like religious crusaders.

Consequently, nothing pleases them more than watching a PC owner struggle with a slab of non-Mac machinery. It validates their spiritual choice. Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table.

This drew the attention of two nearby Mac owners. They hovered over and stood beside me, like placid monks.

"Ah: the delights of Vista," said one.

"It really is time you got a Mac," said the other.

"They're just better," sang monk number one.

"You won't regret it," whispered the second.

I scowled and returned to my infernal machine, like a dishevelled park-bench boozer shrugging away two pious AA recruiters by pulling a grubby, dented hip flask from his pocket and pointedly taking an extra deep swig. Leave me alone, I thought. I don't care if you're right. I just want you to die.

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I'm repelled. To them, I'm a sheep. And they're right. I'm a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I'm also a masochist. And that's why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That's why Windows works for me. But I'd never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, "Hey, have you considered Windows?" Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host "Windows 7 launch parties" to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7. The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials. So you show them how to burn a CD, how to make a little video, how to change the wallpaper, and how to, oh no, hang on it's not supposed to do that, oh, I think it's frozen, um, er, let me just, um, no that's not it, um, er, um, er, so how's it going with you and Kathy anyway, um, er, OK well see you around I guess.

To assist the party-hosting massive, they've also uploaded a series of spectacularly cringeworthy videos to YouTube, in which the four most desperate actors in the world stand around in a kitchen sharing tips on how best to indoctrinate guests in the wonder of Windows. If they were staring straight down the lens reading hints off a card it might be acceptable; instead they have been instructed to pretend to be friends. The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos "Friendchips" TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done).

It's so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment which I like to call "shitasmia". It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It's the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history. Watch it for yourself.

Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft's bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking with amusement at your hopelessly inferior OS, knowing they're better than you because they use Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard. SNOW LEOPARD.

I don't care if you're right. I just want you to die."

I just updated my catalyst to 9.8.  Now I'm getting 800 x 600 resolution whenever I try to run at the native 1600x1050 that the monitor supports.  I've been able to get it up to 1440x900 or 1400x1050 without issue.  I'm just a bit annoyed as I often have minor quirks with these video cards, and every release has a new surprise. It's a crossfire configuration on ATI 4550HDs. 

Apple replaced the printing API with CUPS only drivers in this release.  As a result, all the old drivers won't work on 10.6.  I just found out that my wife's printer is not supported by HP anymore and my printer is listed, but OS X can't find drivers for it via software update.