04.24.08
Posted in Meta at 3:50 pm by Matt
Nova’s Car of the Future special aired last Tuesday. I watched it online, and although it was “yet another show about cars we can’t get” type of thing, it was entertaining, hosted by Click and Clack - Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the always-funny Car Talk guys.
Here’s a quick link to all the hi-rez episodes in Media Player format:
- Hitting the Road
- Hydrogen Fuel Cells
- Towards Biofuels
- Frontiers of Efficiency
- Plugging In
- Taking Action
But the essence of the show is the same as all its predecessors: about the best you can get is a mass-produced hybrid like a Prius or a Civic.
One thing I’ve heard of for the Prius is a mod that will let you plug it in and run it further on pure electric - CalCars is one those. Toyota is supposedly coming out with a factory version - a plug-in Prius for 2009.
Hopefully my Civic will last another 100,000 miles. If not, I’ll be looking hard at a plug-in hybrid as gasoline prices continue their upward trend towards $5 per gallon.
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03.13.08
Posted in Meta at 10:59 am by Matt
I own a 2003 Civic Hybrid, the first year it was made available in the US. Both the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight had been out for a couple of years, and I had just moved to Massachusetts and a 76 mile daily commute - 38 miles each way - from Lunenburg to Waltham.
My car at the time was a gas-guzzling Ford Excursion, getting about 13 miles per gallon. It was costing me almost $10 a day to drive to work at 2003 gas prices.
So I immediately went looking for a gas-sipping car. My final 3 choices were a Toyota Prius, Honda Civic, and Honda Civic Hybrid.
The Prius was, unfortunately, not roomy enough. I’m 6′4″, and the front seat just didn’t go back far enough. The back seats in a 2003 Prius had more room than the driver!
The Civic was plenty roomy and came in at 38 miles per gallon. The Hybrid version could get at least 48 and as much as 54, and was only about $5,000 more - still almost $10,000 less than a Prius.
Although my Civic Hybrid doesn’t run pure electric, it has averaged 47 miles per gallon over its 100,000 mile life (so far). I had one major problem, covered under warranty: it needed a new catalytic converter after about 40,000 miles.
Other than that, I’ve never had any real problems. I use snow tires in the winter and it handles like a snowmobile, getting up my steep and icy 4/10ths of a mile gravel and hilly driveway with 3 inches of snow or a coating of ice. Our neighbors have a four wheel drive SUV that they’ve had to park down at the bottom, and I pass it rolling up the driveway just fine.
It drives like a new car, the interior is in great shape, and it still sips gas at 47 miles per gallon average. That’ll go up to about 49 in the summer.
If I’d have used the Excursion, I would have gulped down an extra 5,565 gallon of gasoline, costing me, at $2.50 per gallon average, $13,913!
I’m no environmentalist wacko, and I don’t “believe” that humans are responsible for global warming - a natural phenomenon. I do believe we are responsible for lots of other stupid things, like poisoning coastal waters and polluting the air.
So “carbon footprint” nonsense aside, a Hybrid is the best vehicle you can buy - save money, save oil, save your lungs… if not “the planet” 
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02.21.08
Posted in Meta, Gadgets at 11:31 am by Matt
I’ve used Palm cell phones every since they were first introduced with the Kyocera 6035. My Kyocera 7135 finally broke down after 5 years, plenty of falls, and a really wet pocket. I picked up the Treo 755p a week ago and it’s great - one sync and all my stuff is back on my phone. The 755p has a very nice 2 megapixel camera, I put in a 2 gig mini-SD card. It can take video that includes audio. I can even draw and put text on pictures.
One of the coolest things is the built-in voice dial… It’s actually voice command, and it was instantly compatible with my entire contact list. I can say, “Call home” and it just works without me needed to set it up! It will do lookups, start a text message - even run applications, e.g. “Open P-tunes”.
The mp3 player, PocketTunes, is compatible with Windows Media Player, so you can sync it easily. I haven’t tried it with iTunes yet.
It includes an A/C charger and a USB sync cable. The sync cable also charges the phone.
The only drawback so far is the Outlook sync - it’s all or nothing. In other words, you have to sync Notes, Contacts, Appointments - everything. You can’t combine, say, an Appointment sync with Palm Desktop’s contacts and memos. BUT I did have a way around it - I use my old Kyocera sync that allows you to selectively install various Outlook conduits, and that works fine. Otherwise you’ll need to purchase the Outlook Conduit upgrade.
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11.27.07
Posted in Meta at 5:07 pm by Matt
When I was about 13 or 14, I lived in Oklahoma (Moore) with my mom and step-dad. There was a big creek behind the house and several wooded areas. One of my favorite books growing up was Where the Red Fern Grows. The main character in that book had a really hard time cutting down a tree. I wanted to try it myself. I chose a nice, mostly thin, tall Aspen. It took me three days to cut that thing down. I thought it would never fall. Those woods nearly killed me, and it wasn’t a falling tree.
At Christmas, my friend James and I would climb trees and cut down the mistletoe, then go door to door in the neighborhood, trying to make a few bucks. One year, James and I, along with a couple of other boys from the neighborhood, were gathering mistletoe. At one edge of the woods, there was a field that’s about one hundred yards from a four lane road. The road wasn’t very busy – I think the county was, for once, smart enough to know that the area would grow to the point where a four lane road was necessary, so they planned well from the get go. It was the oil boom days – the state had money back then.
I was the best climber, so I was always the one up in the tree cutting down the mistletoe. It seemed to be a lean year for mistletoe, so we went further afield and ended up finding a nice tall tree on the edge of the woods near that road. The mistletoe was up high, so I climbed up. I found the plant I was looking for way up near the top branches – I was probably about three stories up. I couldn’t just drop it that far – it would break into a dozen pieces. The little old ladies in the neighborhood might still buy it, but it would be a sympathy purchase – and at 6’ tall, I was getting too big to get many of those.
So another kid that was with us started to climb up. I would drop it to him, and he’d relay it down.
Then we heard a loud POP. It didn’t really register for a second… but we all looked in the direction of the sound – the road. There was a car stopped there. A light blue car, probably made in the 70’s. It were too far to see clearly, but we could just make out two people in it, and one was leaning out the passenger side window.
Then there was another POP. This time, we were looking. There was also a small flash. A leaf right next to my ear went SWISH. This time, it registered. That was a gun going POP. That was a bullet going SWISH, and it was right next to my head. That car was shooting at us. At ME.
I yelled down to the guys, “Get out of here! That car is shooting at us!”
The kid below me dropped quickly out of the tree – he was maybe 5 feet up. I, on the other hand, was a sitting duck, 35 feet up in the air of a tree that had lost pretty much all of its foliage for the winter. However, I knew I had to escape. I looked down and instantly chose a path. Not a path to climb down, but a path to fall down. I dropped off the branch and slammed into the one I’d chosen, falling quickly from that one to the next. I was down the tree in about 5 seconds, scratched and bruised, but still alive. I ran behind a huge fallen log with the other guys and fell to my stomach. They told me that the car had shot two more times, and that they thought it had hit me because I’d fallen so quickly from the tree. I peeked above the log and the car was gone. I’d survived a brush with death, and I knew it.
Next year, I got real job.
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08.09.07
Posted in Programming, Linux at 1:34 pm by Matt
I manage a couple of sites for Intuit, including innovation.intuit.com. I recently added a new site and wanted to get rid of index.php in the URL, but I couldn’t quite remember what I had to do. It takes more than just setting the permalinks option in Wordpress, rather Apache has to be configured correctly. I finally found what I did the last time, so I wanted to document it for next time.
I tried to post a reply to just this question on Wordpress.org’s site, but you have to create an account to help someone. Lame. So I created the account. I’m still waiting for Wordpress to send me the activation email.
Anyway, here’s the fix: you must edit Apache’s httpd.conf file, in Linux, it’s probably in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Find the following lines:
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
and
AllowOverride None
and change them to:
Options FollowSymLinks
and
AllowOverride All
Restart your Apache server and you should be able to use permalinks without index.php.
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07.26.07
Posted in Meta at 11:50 am by Matt
Every family has its customs, from eating dinner at the Outback Steakhouse on Sunday nights to the family vacation trip during the summer. There are special rituals that stand out in my memory: the coming of age ceremonies that transformed my cousins and me from boys into men.
My grandmother’s farm was the focus of the family while I was growing up. We’d visit almost every weekend, often staying the night during the summer. Their property and surroundings were in Midland, Texas, near the outskirts of the city. Oil pumps and mesquite bushes dotted the dry, dusty landscape. Randy and Ronnie, my two closest cousins, lived nearby. It was our Adventure Land and could easily rival staid, packaged and sanitized parks like Disney.
There we would find snakes, mice, jackrabbits, and our favorite: horned lizards. We called them horny-toads, and they were all over the place in West Texas. I’d put one in my pocket and it would kind of flatten out. They aren’t fast like other lizards, so I could easily catch them. Grabbing one of these was brave when you were only five years old. I’d carry them around for a few hours and let them go.
Grandmother’s house had this rock and weed garden in the front where the horny toads could be found. There’s not much point in having a real garden unless you were prepared to work it to death. Nothing grows naturally around there except cactus and little boys. The garden had several old and rusty plows, and I swear there was a real “witch’s” cauldron there! There was also an old hand water pump. It wasn’t connected to anything. It just sat on the rocks, but we always tried to pump it anyway, half expecting water to come out.
My grandparents also owned wide swaths of land around their house. I remember cows, a few horses, some chickens, a mean old bull and lots of alfalfa. That’s what they mostly farmed: alfalfa. My cousins and I came to know those fields very well. We would be assigned the task of moving the irrigation pipes during the hot summer months. They just lay on the ground, so we’d have to move them from one part of the field to another. That was a real chore. I’d remove the connection collar, then slide the big pipe out. The pipes were twenty feet long and had a nine-inch diameter. They weren’t too terribly heavy – at least I didn’t dare show they were heavy in front of anyone. One of us would pick up an end to dump out the water, and possibly dump out any rabbits that may have wandered into the nice, cool, water-filled pipe. We’d carry the pipes about fifty yards to a new spot and hook them back up, then walk back to the next set of pipes and do it again. Over and over. Hour after hour. All three of us were about eleven years old at the time, and it sure seemed like a lot of work for a couple of silver dollars. We were happy to do it: you knew you were “growing up” when grandpa invited you into his truck for a day in the fields.
Once all that alfalfa turned into hay bales in the fields, I worked hauling it onto a flat bed. Attached to the trailer was a hay elevator. It picked up square bales of hay and carried them way up in the air where they dropped out of the top. Sometimes they became stuck in the top. I’d pull them out with big hooks that resembled the ones used by that homicidal rain slicker slasher guy in I Know What You Did Last Summer. I’d stack them neatly on the trailer, hour after hour, layer after layer, until I was perched on top of five layers of hay bales on a rickety, swaying flatbed and hoping not to fall into the hay elevator the next time the wheels hit a bump.
Near the fields were some rent houses that my grandparents owned. At the end of the block was an old fireworks stand that we would operate around the fourth of July. It wasn’t a big stand: not much demand for fireworks out there in the sticks. What was really cool was to light a bottle rocket and hold it until just before it went off, then toss it high into the air. If I timed it right, the rocket would gain extra altitude from the boost. If I didn’t, the rocket would be pointed randomly at the dry grass, someone’s car, the house, or the person who threw it into the air. Then there was a mad scramble to avoid the widely careening firework before it exploded. I don’t think we burned too many things down.
Grandmother’s house needed burning down anyway. It was built in the 50’s, but it wasn’t vacuumed until the 90’s, if then. The pipes were almost totally corroded away from the super-hard water. I think they pumped it straight out of limestone or something. We didn’t dare drink the stuff. Using it to brush your teeth was torture enough. I’m not sure if I got cleaner or dirtier taking a shower, but I certainly gained a nice, shiny coating. The garage was a maze of junk and mice and rattlesnakes. Going in there was an expedition.
“Flash lights? Check. Long pants? Check. Boots? Sticks?”
“Who has the rifle?”
“I got it, I got it!”
“All right then, let’s go open The Freezer!”
The backyard wasn’t any cleaner. There were random holes, snakes, flies and bits of unrecognizable metal lying around: farm implements that had seen better days. The fence was made of concrete blocks but it had no top. That made for empty holes where the blocks were with unknowable creatures lived inside. Only the bravest of us would dare to walk on or near that fence. There was a rickety old wooden gate at the back. It led into the barnyard and the fields beyond. Sometimes the bull would get into the yard. I think. Maybe that’s just vivid nightmares of the bull getting into the yard or something, but I know there were bees around the side, near the extra front porch. If you had to mow over there, well, just make sure you were a fast runner.
On the opposite side from the bees and way in the back, there was a big hay barn. When we were old enough to go exploring on our own, probably about twelve, would could walk through the field with the bull to go play in the barn. I’d stay close to the fence, but there was a problem with that strategy. The entrance to the barn faced the road, and we came up on the backside of the barn. Therefore, I had to either risk the run in the field with the bull or else climb over the fence. The climb wasn’t a big deal; it’s where I was climbing to that was the problem.
Bees. Lots of bees. Hives of bees. They were kept at the end of that field behind the barn. I guess they helped pollinate the fields of alfalfa. Maybe that hive on the side of the house was founded by Columbus Bee. All I knew back then was that: 1) Bees made honey, and 2) Bees stung little boys. However, they were near the hay barn, and although it was a good walk from the house, it was fun to play in the stacks and stacks of hay. It was also the shortest path to the gravel pit.
After working in the fields all day, we’d go down to The Pit and play around. It was big, probably a football field in length and forty feet deep. It had a mucky, yucky, water-filled end where we would swim, usually with cousins and sisters from five to fifteen. We had to wear these ratty old shoes because the bottom of the “pond” had the sort of trash you’d expect in a gravel pit: old tires, rusting re-bars and other pointy, infectious objects. There was a sort of platform (too generous to actually call it a “dock”) on one side. It was just barely possible to jump off and sort of dive into the water, but we first had to walk around out there to make sure we wouldn’t impale ourselves on something. Usually we had to aim to the side to avoid hitting an underwater obstacle, and it seems like only we twelve-year-old boys made that leap of faith. The water was only about four feet deep, and we couldn’t see the bottom.
All of these adventures helped shape the boys in our family, but there was one final exam before you could say that you ran the gamut and survived.
Grandmother’s house was near, way too near, a sewage treatment plant. When the wind was just right, which was all too often, the smell would waft over the house and fields. We boys were drawn to that place like flies to carrion. We just had to go see what a sewage treatment plant was like. It was at the outer edge of walking distance, just past one of the fields and across a highway. I don’t know why the plant drew us, but draw it did. We would talk about it almost every weekend.
“Let’s go to the plant!”
“Nahh, I saw a truck and a bunch of people when we came up. They’re doin’ somethin’ over there.”
“Let’s go see what they’re doin’!”
And so the dialog went, always discussing but rarely taking the chance until the need to visit overcame the obstacles of distance, highway and danger. First we’d plan the attack.
“Right after lunch,” I’d whisper to Ronnie, “We’re goin’ to the plant.”
“What are we gonna tell Mom?”
“Nuthin’, let’s just go to the other block and play around. We’ll head off down the road when the coast is clear.”
“I’ll tell Randy.”
It was rare that we’d attempt the trip when the wind was blowing the stench across the farm. It couldn’t really be that much worse close up, right? We’d work our way toward the plant, down the road and across the highway. It was at least a twenty minute walk. We ignored the “Keep Out!” signs and clambered over the low fence to stare at the pools of ooze before running out of stench range.
This was the pinnacle of our coming of age rituals: visiting the sewage plant and getting the blast full on. It was our final family test of manhood.
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05.02.07
Posted in Radio, Programming at 10:10 am by Matt
I’m sure there are a few people at Intuit who’ve been programming longer than I have - punching out Fortran on cards and typing commands that are waay to long in COBOL. No doubt there are some who flipped switches on a Heathkit (I only flipped switches on a friend’s Heathkit) or loaded BASIC using a tape reader.
I started programming on a TRS-80 at school, then an Apple ][. I bought a TRS-80 Model I Level 2 in 1979 with money I’d saved washing dishes. It had 16K of RAM, a cassette tape drive and a black and white monitor. It took probably five minutes for a 4K program to load from the tape.
That was when you could turn on a computer and, seconds later, see a Ready> prompt. Then you could load a program or maybe start typing in stuff from the magazine listings. I wrote Space Invaders, Klingons vs. Enterprise, Lunar Lander. My most complex program was a complete Gorf game with digital sound effects using an assembly library.
But even then, there was some complexity. Gorf’s last stage was a huge mother ship. You had to shoot past its hull shield into its heart. BASIC wasn’t fast enough to refresh the ship, so I had to learn Z-80 assembly, turn it into machine language, then how to pack it into a BASIC string. By then, my computer was maxed out at 48K and had a 180K floppy drive. I’d written a Payroll application for work that saved me a lot of time (payroll went from 4 hours to less than 2, including machine setup and tear down).
Expanding computer capabilities brought their own troubles. Netware cards and drivers, CONFIG.SYS loading SoundBlaster and CD-ROM drivers. MSCDEX running from Autoexec.bat to assign drive letters. Writing TSRs to handle pop-ups and figuring out how to handle dynamic linking.
Windows 3.1 brought new networking and sound driver headaches. Writing Windows DLLs in assembly, handling multiple and non-standard screen resolutions. 80×25 and 640×480 was no longer guaranteed.
I think that it probably seems harder now because either I’ve filled my brain to capacity or else the information on how to do things is so widely dispersed and varied.
For instance, I do some radio stuff, and last night I was at the studio trying to get a point to point T1 line up and running between the studio and the transmitter site. The station engineer was on the transmitter end: three hours of driving away. So obviously you want to get these things going so that there’s no need to make another six hour trip in the future.
Pffff… I’ve never hooked up a T1 line. I know that, theoretically, it’s a bunch of 8 bit channels all working in harmony, and it’s fast and reliable. That’s about it.
Anyway, we’ve got the T1 connection from Verizon sitting there, all locked up in a little box. You can’t really even see the lights inside the box. And I’ve got this thing called a CSU/DSU, whatever that is. RJ48 cable plugs in. Green light. Green is good, right?
This thing is also an “Ethernet bridge”. Whatever that is. Ethernet means you can plug in a computer, right? Not exactly. You plug it in, no green lights. That’s bad, I guess.
A bit of reading later (fortunately, I have a regular Internet connection in the studio, although John out at the transmitter is relying on me), and I figure out what an “ethernet bridge” is - a bit like having a 150 mile long ethernet cable, right?
Anyway, it seems we need a crossover cable. Maybe. Probably. So I go online, see some pretty, colored diagrams, and John and I started snipping wires. John’s the prepared engineer: he has a big electrical suitcase thing with plenty of snippers and tape and multitesters and other happy bits of equipment.
I go tromping, slowly, through a very dark church, into a storage/work area, hoping no one has somehow obscured the path to the light switch. Then I go rummaging around for the multitester I know existed at one time and some electrical tape. I come up empty handed: Scotch tape it is!
As we snip and tape, John makes a wry observation: “This has disaster written all over it.” Yep. “I’ll let you connect yours first, then I’ll give it a try.” Why blow out two expensive pieces of equipment in one shot? It’s a lot more fun if you do it separately.
The good ‘ol days… you plug it in, turn it on, and start typing.
So John plugs it in - green light. Green is good, right? I plug mine in. Green light. Virtual, 150-mile separated high-fives all around. Got an IP address? Yep. Ping? Works. Remote out to the cape? Yes. Audio connection settings? Working. Transmitter on and its broadcasting.
Yay, we can get off the flaky satellite connection! I’m closing up shop, listening to the return feed in the studio, when it goes silent… then cuts back in. Hmmm… Does it several more times. Yikes.
An hour and a half of running T1 line diagnostics later, and it seems our T1 line is super noisy. Every line returns errors when you run a packet test. Pings fail 3 out of 4 times. So, we’re back on the satellite. Time to call Verizon.
Tomorrow.
Oh, and to top things off, this morning I head to a friend’s house to troubleshoot his network. Comcast cable modem is working fine, but only on one computer. The other one can’t get an IP address - not even when it is plugged directly into the cable modem. Tried a hub. Still only one is getting the IP. Tried a router - even the router can’t get an IP, although the router will SERVE an IP to both computers, and I can browse the router from the troublesome computer.
So I wasted half an hour or so talking to Comcast cable (”Press the Start button….You’ll have to call your computer company…There are no supervisors available…”).
Ready>
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04.20.07
Posted in Humor at 3:39 pm by Matt
I was recently on a business trip to Philadelphia and saw a few odd things.
On the way back to the airport, heading up 476. I can’t help but notice odd things - a blessing when doing customer visits. The first thing that I commented on was all the yellow-orange signs. “Keep Alert” and “Drive Safely” and “Pay Attention” and “Caution: Bargains Ahead” and whatever.
Okay, at least one of those is made up, but Phillyzoids really like their yellow-orange signs.
Then it was all the “Lane Ends, Merge Left” or “Merge Right” (and their half-dozen accompanying signs, of course). It appears that someone got a nice little road-painting contract, plus there’s plenty of room for expansion. The very busy two lane highways have shoulders big enough to park a couple of Wide Loads with room to spare. I’m sure some of that space will eventually turn in to a mile-long extra lane that appears and disappears quickly.
Then there’s the two “Exit 1″ exits on 476. As you approach the, I think it was 95, highway, you’ll encounter “Exit 1″. Then, about a mile later, you’ll encounter “Exit 1″ again. Different exit, same number.
But the real kicker that had me in stitches was the sweet deal that some little sign maker got. Highway 476 has mile markers, or should I say more appropriately, 1/10th of a mile markers. Every 10th of a mile there’s a marker. 4 9/10ths. 4 8/10ths. The whole way. It’s not like you are going to call the highway patrol, “Hey, I’m broken down on 476 at three and two-tenths.”
The funniest mile marker? 0 0/10ths. I am NOT joking - there really was a 0 0/10ths marker. It was right after the 0 1/10ths. Or just before, depending on your heading, of course.
No wonder Philly lacks highway infrastructure. Too much money going to 0 0/10ths road signs.
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04.18.07
Posted in Meta at 1:56 pm by Matt
We recently took a fairly long drive trip to DC - 7 hours. That’s a lot for a little guy, 6 years old. We have a TV and VCP in the car.
We also have an XBOX (at home). I bought a DC to AC inverter at Radio Shack for $40. I first bought a cheaper one from Wal-Mart it didn’t work so well - the XBOX’s AC plug has a breaker on it, and it kept firing. The RS version did as well, but only when the car wasn’t started.
I used a simple RCA splitter/combiner for the audio and video and tapped into the same line as the VCP. It didn’t cause any problems and worked great. We have the DVD player adapter for the XBOX, so we could also watch DVDs.
When it came to the hotel room, however, we didn’t have a way to play games or watch DVDs. One TV had A/V inputs, but the remote was such that you couldn’t switch to it.
So, I came up with the idea to use my laptop computer. I went to a local Best Buy and purchased a $50 DVD recorder/USB device (Dazzle). I figured I’d just display the video output on my laptop.
Unfortunately, the recording software included with the Dazzle doesn’t display the incoming image full screen. But I knew some free software that could get a big image: Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder.
However, turned out there was an audio issue: the Dazzle audio input was redirected through the laptop speakers by the Dazzle software, but I couldn’t get it any other way. I tried Goldwave where you can specify both input and output/monitoring device. Didn’t work.
But I worked it out: another stop at Best Buy for an RCA to 1/8″ plug let me connect the game’s audio output to my laptop’s mic input.
So I ran a full (as possible) video screen using Windows Media Encoder (pull from the laptop setup) with audio from the mic input going out the speakers.
Also, in the hotel room, instead of the XBOX, we have a cheapo penguin-looking Super Nintendo device with 12,000 (really only about 50 different) games on it. We could play Super Mario, the old Mario, Dig Dug, Bomberman and more.
All for about $60 total (I highly recommend the Dazzle - I’ve used two other capture devices, and that’s the best so far).
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02.14.07
Posted in Bible at 12:40 pm by Matt
Today’s bible reading (if you are reading the bible through in a year) continues the design for the tabernacle instruments and such. One of these is a lampstand with six branches. On one branch are three bowls like almond blossoms, so I got wondering what an almond blossom looks like.
This image is from Valter Jacinto’s collection. His pictures can be found here.
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