The Design and Implementation of laffer1

This time, they decided to kill two of the shows I like!  Knight Rider and Life have been cancelled now for the Fall.   I don't get what's going through their minds.  The new shows look stupid.  I won't even try watching them as they'll just get cancelled.  The network doesn't keep shows running or give them time to get a base.  With Monk leaving the air after this season, there won't be a lot left to replace it for me.

Computer upgrade time! I just ordered an Asus motherboard and an AMD Phenom quad core CPU. This will replace my very festive Intel DP965LT motherboard and Intel Core 2 6420 cpu.

I bought a copy of warcrarft 3 today.  Caryn's had a copy for awhile, but since she's playing it more and I haven't played in some time, it seemed like the right thing to do. :)

I don't have the frozen thrown expansion, just the original game.  It's been fun playing that tonight.  I also installed starcraft (again).  It kind of hit me that I should play some of these games I've got around. 

Well this has been a rough week.  My mother had to go in for appendicitious to the hospital.  She's recovering at home now.

I've been working today in hopes I can catch up for all the work I missed this week.  I managed to create a test database and setup Cayenne's data model and generate classes for it.  We've been using GIT for the project.  Glad it's in Java now.

Finally, the government has started to think seriously about the security of computer systems. It's about time.  I just wish they'd get the power plant stuff off the Internet.  I'm sick of hearing about stories where key infrastructure was in danger because someone was too cheap or lazy to setup a private network with leased lines. 

Microsoft has always made a big deal about TCO (total cost of ownership) of various software products.  Lately, they've even claimed macs are more expensive.  

I recently had a discussion with my boss about the value of his laptop that he recently replaced.  I made a comment he got his money's worth because it was beat to hell and he used it constantly.  He took the time to figure out how much it cost him per day to own it.  I never thought about that before with hardware when I buy a new system.

First, I decided to compare apples to oranges... well a mac to a dell.  I bought a dell workstation in 2004 which is now running  as server.  Caryn bought a powermac g4 in 2002.  Both are workstation class and cost about the same amount of money.  Instead of comparing the original suggested retail prices or what we paid for them, I included all hardware upgrades like drives, ram, etc that we did in my calculation.  I did not estimate when the upgrades happened and do an addition technique so this is off a bit. It's probably a bit higher.  The daily cost of the powermac g4 for caryn was $1.095 a day whereas the Dell Precision 650 was $1.150 a day.  Both are over a 5 year period.  However, we still have the powermac and I used it a year after she did (not figured in) and it's sitting unused currently.  The original cost of both machines was nearly identical.  I replaced the video card in the dell within 3 days of owning it (had a firegl card that was a POS).   

Upgrades on both systems include:

Video card (both got ATI cards.. ATI AIW9600XT vs ATI 9800 (mac))  I had to replace the AIW with an nvidia which gave out on me, and the ATI radeon mac card also died taking out the power supply, logic board, and itself in the mac.  These repairs were included.

Hard drives were added to both systems.  Typically they were around $100 or less.  DVD burners were added to both systems.

Of course this is hardware cost.  It has nothing to do with software.  

Another example:

IBM Thinkpad T30 (refurb) bought from IBM about two years ago.  Cost was just under $500.  $0.685 a day before hardware upgrades.  I added ram (had it so free), plus a new hard drive with a cost of $130.  That brings it up to $0.86 a day.  Finally, the wifi card brings it to $0.952 a day!  I did not buy any software for this system as it came with windows and I've been running MidnightBSD on it primarily.

This is a whole new way to look at computer purchases for me.  

Another example: an iMac purchased ~14 months ago would cost the owner 2.79 a day.

A PC bought in 2006, with many upgrades to keep it current would cost $1.65 a day. 

 Just eating dinner right now and trying to setup a cvs mirror for midnightbsd.  Odd day so far.

I was just reading the FabBSD website.  They seem to be forking OpenBSD for use with controllers and other machinery related projects.  That means there are at least two forks of OpenBSD now, one fork of NetBSD, two of FreeBSD (plus some commerical variants and distros), and zero for DragonFly, MirBSD and MidnightBSD.  it's getting crowded. :)

At least BSD is getting popular.

I opened a trouble ticket with GitX as it does not work with 1.6.2.1 git. How annoying!

http://www.bergek.com/2008/09/21/install-git-on-mac-os-x-105/

git is a version control system used for the linux kernel, gnome and dragonfly. I recently installed a copy on midnightbsd, windows and mac os x. So far, the mac install has been the most painful. We're starting to use it for a work project as it supports better branching and merging than CVS. We have a great deal of binary files to work with and it will be far easier on that front.

On windows, it was a matter of going to code.google.com and grabbing an installer. It even integrates with PUTTY which I already had installed. It includes bash too. I rather enjoy the CLI interface although it is a tad annoying dealing with windows file paths.

The mac install requires me to build it from source (ideally) and then I got GitX which is a nice gui frontend. I think GitX should come with a copy of git (optionally).

On MidnightBSD, I just used the port. It took on the time to compile. Very quick.

I'll post again when I decide if i like it.

Everyone was freaked out about this worm.  I am concerned with what the author intends to do with infected systems, but the media scared people about their computers not booting and it didn't come true.  I feel there is an error in approach.  Next time people won't take action because they think it's a hoax.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/01/tech.viruses/index.html 

Learn more about it.

Microsoft has added some interesting features to IE8. X-Frame-Options: Deny is a header that can be sent to block clickjacking. Thus someone cannot hide your page in a frameset in IE. X-XSS-Protection: 0 allows you to disable a new feature which looks for playback of scripts in a cross-site request.

Microsoft apparently released IE8 last week. I'm in the middle of installation now. It sounds like some of the standards compliance fixes will be good long term. I suspect this may break a lot of badly written sites. Some of the fixes could make it difficult to know a site working in IE8 will work in older versions. I suspect my laptop will stay on IE7 for some time.

After attending a funeral yesterday and dealing with the aftermath of caryn's job situation, I think I'm ready for some good news.   

GET /goodnews HTTP/1.0

Caryn and I have been a bit under the weather.  She came home from work around lunch time yesterday.  I'm now feeling a little crappy like she did yesterday.  Yuck.

I managed to help her and fit in a full work day yesterday.  Things like that can be so distracting.   I also got several of the web apps up in the morning yesterday.   Most services should be working again.  Chris spent part of the day working on xfce 4 for mnbsd.  That was nice.

 Caryn and I saw the watchmen over the weekend.  It was a decent movie.  I was relieved to see that most people were smart enough not to bring young people to the movie.  It is not for children.  

I spent most of the weekend working on the server.  Some dipshit and his "hacking group" aka friends decided to annoy me and get into my server.  I found that he got in through a cgi program I had installed on one of the sites and then used wget to fetch a script from another system (his webserver?) to run further commands.  I also saw php files were modified to run comands as system.  It pissed me off not only because it made my sites and email down for 3 days, but work site stuff as well.  I'd like to send the little shit a bill for my time.  

On the upside, I've been auditing ports that I use on systems lately for newer versions, etc.

I've been testing a webapp I've been writing in IE 6 today.  It amazes me how many CSS bugs I've found to date.  However, there are also things IE can do that FF and Safari seem to choke on.  For instance, try using dojo's digit buttons with a submit button on a form.  It renders in iE, but in the other browsers it doesn't show any text and ends up as a small square.   Very strange.

As we get closer to standards compliance with some browsers, IE seems to be getting worse.  Some of the bugs are present in IE7 too.  I wish I didn't have to support IE 6.  I don't on my own sites. 

Just playing with my iPhone . It is rather interesting. Watching the dresdan files.

I've been playing Guitar Hero: Aerosmith lately.  I bought a copy used for $18.  The game is quite fun, but there are a few subtle differences from Guitar Hero 3.  First, you have to play the first two gigs to unlock the last two.  In the previous game, you could play any two of the first three to get the last one to show up.  Contrary to what I thought, the game includes several tracks that are not Aerosmith songs.  These are played by the opening act which you are (the first 2 songs per level).  

It's a fun game if you like aerosmith or old music (70s/early 80s)  as many of the covers seem to be from that time period so far.  I happen to like that sort of music.  

The game seems to take longer to load than the previous game.  I think the load screens are less entertaining so I notice.