It's kind of annoying how it's nearly impossible to get any sort of a decent phone without a camera built in.
A few years ago, I was working the night shift in the datacenter underneath the VEC (formally midlux) at the GM Tech Center.
Cameras were very strictly forbidden, due to prototype parts lying all over the place, and I needed a new cellphone.
I had a simple list of requirements:
Had to have bluetooth
And act as a modem to get a computer online via at least GPRS
Had to be somewhat open, and allow me to install my own applications
decent speakerphone
NO CAMERA
I found two phones which matched what I was looking for.
One was an "Executive Model" where they removed the camera, added a shiny metal case, and added $600 to the price.
The other was a N-Gage.
And that's how I ended up with a phone that looks like a taco.
It can be a very harshly punished crime - For example, Michigan's Statute 750.355a (Indecent exposure) contains the following:
If the person was at the time of the violation a sexually delinquent person, the violation is punishable by imprisonment for an indeterminate term, the minimum of which is 1 day and the maximum of which is life.
I'm glad they set that maximum - it would be unfair to the other prisoners in the cellblock, if they had to keep the person in the cell for a couple of years after they died.
A lot of the time it's like that, you only need it once. And at least in C++/Qt which is my favorite, I haven't seen any way to hint to the OS that this file SHOULD NOT BE CACHED.
fadvise with FADV_SEQUENTIAL|FADV_NOREUSE on the file handle should do what you want.
He was talking about his book - you can see a video of his talk here.
You can see more talks by various authors here.
You might also want to check out the engineering talks that have been made public.
Are you proposing that a single SAN storage net span multiple (remote) physical locations?
It's pretty common - at a previous job, all of the disk arrays at three main sites kept themselves in sync using SRDF over a metro area network. The intent was, that even if one site was completely destroyed, the survivors could quickly return to work without losing any data.
At a previous job, about once a month I had to make a support call which was rather awkward for both myself and the person on the other end.
I was working onsite, doing night shift break/fix for a large manufacturing company, employed by Large IT Company #1.
After a couple of years, LITC #1 lost the contract for the datacenter I was working in to LITC #2, so I switched employers, keeping the same desk, hours, and job. LITC #1 still managed user accounts, authentication, and other tasks.
Once a month, around midnight, all of my access would go away. When I called LITC #1's helpdesk to check on my login ID, they would be friendly, and we would chat a bit, until they pulled up my account info, at which point they would get very evasive and uncomfortable, and I would have to ask the question:
"Is my account disabled, and flagged 'DO NOT REACTIVATE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! NOTIFY SECURITY!'?"
Sometimes they would answer yes, sometimes they would just hang up, but all in all it was an awkward situaition for both of us.
Current Job - Unix desktop, Windows laptop
Previous Job (HP) - Unix desktop, two windows laptops (two networks, each laptop was only allowed on one)
Previous Job (EDS) - Unix desktop, windows laptop
Previous Job - Unix desktops (Two SGI workstations!)
That takes me back to 1998 or so. I've pretty much always been on a Unix (like) workstation, with a Windows laptop for the odd cases that require it.
Even with EDS, who is very strongly partnered with Microsoft, I still had a Sun on my desk.
I had a bit of a problem when I ordered a server from them years ago (back in 2001 I think).
I got double charged for the server (but a quick call to discover took care of that). The hardware passed my burnin tests, but went flaky about 6-8 months after I set it up. I ended up just replacing the motherboard with one I had lying around, and things worked much better.
Still, the case was nice, and I didn't have any problems with the brackets.
Why can't the small retailer purchase their stock from Wal-mart?
Usually because there is a limit on how many of a single item can be purchased at a time. This lets them undercut other stores, while preventing the stores that are being undercut from buying and reselling the below cost goods.
Really? - that sucks. From all of the cheering abour MySQL supporting transactions, I had assumed that it actually supported transactions in a non-half-assed manner.
PostgreSQL has no problem rolling back table changes - I can open a transaction and create or drop tables; add, delete, or change the types of columns in tables, change rules, triggers, and stored procedures, and undo everything with a single ROLLBACK;.
It's really handy, because I can make a set of changes, and run some test queries to make sure everything works the way I expect it to, before I do the final COMMIT;.
With SAVEPOINT, I can even roll back the queries I did after making the DDL changes, and still commit the DDL change itself.
I guess I've got another reason to stick with it, and not give MySQL a shot.
So why didn't you just issue a ROLLBACK; and undo the delete, drop of the wrong table, drop of a column, etc. - whatever the mistake was.?
I don't see the need for a new option to warn people when they make major changes to the database, when the transaction system should be able to take care of it.
MySql has transactions now, right? Just get people into the habit of typing BEGIN; before they start to work, and they shouldn't get into trouble, an d no insultingly named options are needed.
How do you stop a collection agency from calling you?
The question I'd like the answer to is "How do you stop a collection agency from calling your cell phone over and over when you have no idea who the person they want to collect the debt from is."
Some woman has been giving out my cell phone number as her contact number for about the past year. I've talked to:
a number of collection agancies
a bunch of places selling magazines
One pissed off ex-boyfriend
finally, just today, a friendly man calling her back to schedule a second interview for a job.
I've developed a pretty fast method for getting rid of the collection agencies:
Calling them back, and politely stating that they have been calling my cell phone over and over to collect a debt from someone I've never heard of, and that my attorney says he needs their mailing address so he can make sure they never call me again.
But there has there be a faster way.
Since it's not my debt, I've considered just yelling "Go ahead and sue me you bastards - I'll see you in court!", but I have to wonder if that might just result in more calls.
Oh well. Hopefully the job interview guy keeps his promise to pass along the info that she's been using the wrong phone number, when he gives her the results of her "Phone Interview".
I've been thinking about the ethics since I first thought about doing it - until a minute or two before I made the post, that option would only show up when a special URL was used.
I had been gradually giving access to people I knew, and asking what they thought of it.
When I saw this story coming up on Slashdot, I figured it was as good of a time as any to expose it to a larger group of people, and see what people's opinions were.
I think that the main component which is least ethical is the initial collection and release of the dataset by the state of Michigan. Once the data has been released, I don't really see a problem with presenting it in another form.
As for correcting the misspelled sreeet names - I've generated lists of street names and number ranges for every zip code in the US. When trying to correct the spelling, my script only accepts a correction if the changes are minimal (missing street type, and words run together are the two main things it trys to fix) and the number falls within the range for the new street.
As for the clusters of dots - I am not sure; part of the reason I started mapping the addresses at which sex offenders were registered was to see if pressure from people not wanting them living near them would result in clusters of offenders living in clusters in areas which were less hostile to them.
If you or anyone else have any concerns or comments - the email address I have here is real; I'm trying to decide if I should leave this option up, make it only available on request, or just take it down entirely.
Yeah - I was thinking about setting it up so that the superfund site data, and the sex offender data were combined, and people could sign up to be notified when a new record for either dataset appeared near the address they gave.
The biggest suprise I've had is the ammount of incorrect data in the database. Only about 25% of the entries geocode on the first pass. I've had to do "best matching" to correct misspelled street names, I've seen birth years with obviously transposed digits, and some quite amusing obvious test entries.
In addition to the sex offender data, I also map the locations of domains with dns-loc
location records, sites registered with geourl.org, or my own Geographic Crawler experiment, sites on or considered for the Superfund NPL list, and any other data I can force into a format I can plot.
NAT with all ports open ( internet2.voicestream.com as the GPRS gateway)
A real IP with no ports blocked, or firewalling; incoming connections allowed ( internet3.voicestream.com as the GPRS gateway)
Right now I use the internet2 level. Being able to VPN out via my cell phone, as well as using Agile Messenger to keep in touch with people are well worth $20/month to me.
I tend to use about a gig a month of data transfer.
According to a little comment buried on page 47 of the Universal Binary Developers Info the Intel based Macs will not be using OpenFirmware.
Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware. Although many parts
of the IO registry are present and work as expected, information that is provided by Open Firmware
on a Macintosh using a PowerPC microprocessor (such as a complete device tree) is not available in
the IO registry on a Macintosh using an Intel microprocessor. You can obtain some of the information
from IODeviceTree by using the sysctlbyname or sysctl commands.
Personally, this is the most annoying thing to me about the entire transition. I Like OpenFirmware; and I'll really miss it if it is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a simple list of requirements:
I found two phones which matched what I was looking for.
One was an "Executive Model" where they removed the camera, added a shiny metal case, and added $600 to the price.
The other was a N-Gage.
And that's how I ended up with a phone that looks like a taco.
I'm glad they set that maximum - it would be unfair to the other prisoners in the cellblock, if they had to keep the person in the cell for a couple of years after they died.
Anyone know which party the "IF I EVER MEET YOU I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy is going to?
It could always be worse...
Walgreens has a pretty good price on Cebocap #3 - $46.29 for 100, and everyone knows the orange ones are the strongest!
He was talking about his book - you can see a video of his talk here.
You can see more talks by various authors here.
You might also want to check out the engineering talks that have been made public.
HP has a nice overview of building systems which can failover between widely distributed nodes called Designing Disaster Tolerant High Availability Clusters. It's a bit old, and is focused on ServiceGuard, but is still interesting.
At a previous job, about once a month I had to make a support call which was rather awkward for both myself and the person on the other end.
I was working onsite, doing night shift break/fix for a large manufacturing company, employed by Large IT Company #1.
After a couple of years, LITC #1 lost the contract for the datacenter I was working in to LITC #2, so I switched employers, keeping the same desk, hours, and job.
LITC #1 still managed user accounts, authentication, and other tasks.
Once a month, around midnight, all of my access would go away. When I called LITC #1's helpdesk to check on my login ID, they would be friendly, and we would chat a bit, until they pulled up my account info, at which point they would get very evasive and uncomfortable, and I would have to ask the question:
"Is my account disabled, and flagged 'DO NOT REACTIVATE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! NOTIFY SECURITY!'?"
Sometimes they would answer yes, sometimes they would just hang up, but all in all it was an awkward situaition for both of us.
Current Job - Unix desktop, Windows laptop
Previous Job (HP) - Unix desktop, two windows laptops (two networks, each laptop was only allowed on one)
Previous Job (EDS) - Unix desktop, windows laptop
Previous Job - Unix desktops (Two SGI workstations!)
That takes me back to 1998 or so. I've pretty much always been on a Unix (like) workstation, with a Windows laptop for the odd cases that require it.
Even with EDS, who is very strongly partnered with Microsoft, I still had a Sun on my desk.
You can turn on POP access for gmail, and it won't cost you anything.
The instructions are here.
The CDC has maps breaking down obesity by state.
The 2005 data is here.
Catchalls are huge spam traps. If you end up getting a dictionary attack, every address they try is set to 'valid'. ;)
Is this a bad thing? A few friends and I have found that there are uses for having a set of addresses which only get spam...
The copy I downloaded matched the sha1sum.
I've put a copy on my own server if you want to download it from me: enigma-suite-0.73.1.tar.gz.
I had a bit of a problem when I ordered a server from them years ago (back in 2001 I think).
I got double charged for the server (but a quick call to discover took care of that). The hardware passed my burnin tests, but went flaky about 6-8 months after I set it up. I ended up just replacing the motherboard with one I had lying around, and things worked much better.
Still, the case was nice, and I didn't have any problems with the brackets.
Usually because there is a limit on how many of a single item can be purchased at a time. This lets them undercut other stores, while preventing the stores that are being undercut from buying and reselling the below cost goods.
Really? - that sucks. From all of the cheering abour MySQL supporting transactions, I had assumed that it actually supported transactions in a non-half-assed manner.
PostgreSQL has no problem rolling back table changes - I can open a transaction and create or drop tables; add, delete, or change the types of columns in tables, change rules, triggers, and stored procedures, and undo everything with a single ROLLBACK;.
It's really handy, because I can make a set of changes, and run some test queries to make sure everything works the way I expect it to, before I do the final COMMIT;.
With SAVEPOINT, I can even roll back the queries I did after making the DDL changes, and still commit the DDL change itself.
I guess I've got another reason to stick with it, and not give MySQL a shot.
So why didn't you just issue a ROLLBACK; and undo the delete, drop of the wrong table, drop of a column, etc. - whatever the mistake was.?
I don't see the need for a new option to warn people when they make major changes to the database, when the transaction system should be able to take care of it.
MySql has transactions now, right? Just get people into the habit of typing BEGIN; before they start to work, and they shouldn't get into trouble, an d no insultingly named options are needed.
The question I'd like the answer to is "How do you stop a collection agency from calling your cell phone over and over when you have no idea who the person they want to collect the debt from is."
Some woman has been giving out my cell phone number as her contact number for about the past year.
I've talked to:
- a number of collection agancies
- a bunch of places selling magazines
- One pissed off ex-boyfriend
- finally, just today, a friendly man calling her back to schedule a second interview for a job.
I've developed a pretty fast method for getting rid of the collection agencies: But there has there be a faster way.Since it's not my debt, I've considered just yelling "Go ahead and sue me you bastards - I'll see you in court!", but I have to wonder if that might just result in more calls.
Oh well. Hopefully the job interview guy keeps his promise to pass along the info that she's been using the wrong phone number, when he gives her the results of her "Phone Interview".
I've switched the sex-offender dataset off for the public site.
I've been thinking about the ethics since I first thought about doing it - until a minute or two before I made the post, that option would only show up when a special URL was used.
I had been gradually giving access to people I knew, and asking what they thought of it.
When I saw this story coming up on Slashdot, I figured it was as good of a time as any to expose it to a larger group of people, and see what people's opinions were.
I think that the main component which is least ethical is the initial collection and release of the dataset by the state of Michigan. Once the data has been released, I don't really see a problem with presenting it in another form.
As for correcting the misspelled sreeet names - I've generated lists of street names and number ranges for every zip code in the US. When trying to correct the spelling, my script only accepts a correction if the changes are minimal (missing street type, and words run together are the two main things it trys to fix) and the number falls within the range for the new street.
As for the clusters of dots - I am not sure; part of the reason I started mapping the addresses at which sex offenders were registered was to see if pressure from people not wanting them living near them would result in clusters of offenders living in clusters in areas which were less hostile to them.
If you or anyone else have any concerns or comments - the email address I have here is real; I'm trying to decide if I should leave this option up, make it only available on request, or just take it down entirely.
Yeah - I was thinking about setting it up so that the superfund site data, and the sex offender data were combined, and people could sign up to be notified when a new record for either dataset appeared near the address they gave.
For a while now, I've been crawling the Michigan Sex Offender Registry, and plotting the locations on my own little mapping site.
For an example, look here.
The biggest suprise I've had is the ammount of incorrect data in the database. Only about 25% of the entries geocode on the first pass. I've had to do "best matching" to correct misspelled street names, I've seen birth years with obviously transposed digits, and some quite amusing obvious test entries.
In addition to the sex offender data, I also map the locations of domains with dns-loc location records, sites registered with geourl.org, or my own Geographic Crawler experiment, sites on or considered for the Superfund NPL list, and any other data I can force into a format I can plot.
- proxied web access only
- NAT with most ports blocked
- NAT with all ports open ( internet2.voicestream.com as the GPRS gateway)
- A real IP with no ports blocked, or firewalling; incoming connections allowed ( internet3.voicestream.com as the GPRS gateway)
Right now I use the internet2 level. Being able to VPN out via my cell phone, as well as using Agile Messenger to keep in touch with people are well worth $20/month to me.I tend to use about a gig a month of data transfer.
Personally, this is the most annoying thing to me about the entire transition. I Like OpenFirmware; and I'll really miss it if it is gone.